The Kindergarten Teacher (orig. Haganenet) [2014]

MPAA (UR would be R)  Fr. Dennis (3 Stars)

IMDb listing

MUBI (D. Kasman) review


The Kindergarten Teacher (orig. Haganenet) [2014] (written and directed by Nadav Lapid) may begin as an unassuming, diminutive ("indie style") Israeli film.  But don't let that fool you.  By the end, the film certainly "packs a punch."  (The film played recently at the 2014 (50th Annual) Chicago International Film Festival).

The film's about ... a kindergarten teacher, Nira (played by Sarit Larry), 40 something, married to a kindly, unassuming engineer (played by Lior Raz).  Together they have two grown children, a daughter who's living with her boyfriend in the States and a son who's currently serving in the Israeli Army.  While both husband and wife would seem to be fundamentally gentle people, there's a sense that both are going through an "empty nest" adjustment: the kids are basically grown, what now?

Well, besides her continuing work with little kids as said kindergarten teacher, Nira's joined a poetry writer's club, filled with people both her age (and younger...) who basically give each other mutual support in their writing efforts (but don't become too good, 'cause then one or another in the group will become jealous and try to bring you back down a peg or two ;-).  (Seriously, I enjoyed "writers' club" scenes in this film very, very much, reminding me very much of similar scenes in the much higher budget (and IMHO excellent) Hollywood film Wonder Boys [2000] which was also about "emerging" and otherwise "struggling writers.")

Now Nira has no particular ambitions of "making it" as a poet.  It's just something that has come to interest her, something that she explains to another had been lacking in her far more spartan upbringing (Israel of the 1950s-60s was something of a modern day Sparta...), and well, probably something that "got her out of the house" so that she wouldn't have to deal as much with her husband, who, now that the kids were largely gone, she'd have to probably talk to more than she'd want to, in this new and uncertain point in their lives ...

Okay, enter A FIVE YEAR OLD, Yoav Pollak (played by Avi Schnaidman) a child, whose behavior FROM A DETACHED DISTANCE could suggest that he was at least mildly Autistic (he'd kinda go into a trance every so often, beginning to walk back-and-forth or somewhat rapidly in a circle), and, AGAIN while ONLY FIVE, was becoming a child of divorce (his mother had left his workaholic restauranteur father for, again, "an American").  And Nira becomes fixated on him, FIVE YEAR OLD, Yoav.

True, when Yoav would go into the above described trance, he'd, quite amazingly, come to articulate what appeared to be _remarkably good_ "free form poetry" ... BUT ... HE'S FIVE YEARS OLD.  Honestly, it doesn't appear that he understands what he's doing (AND AT FIVE ... I'm sorry, from a distance, it seems so obvious ... HOW COULD HE?)

But poor Nira, who as introduced above, is also having some "empty nest" issues, becomes convinced that he's some sort of a Mozart-like genius and progressively becomes MORE AND MORE INVOLVED IN THIS POOR KID'S LIFE ... to the point that (without MUCH OF A SPOILER) it can't possibly end well.

In any case, the film becomes a fascinating, and actually quite gentle / compassion-seeking presentation of HOW A TEACHER (WHO OBVIOUSLY SHOULD KNOW BETTER) could get (YUCK...) "involved" with a minor in a way that's OBVIOUSLY INAPPROPRIATE / HARMFUL TO THE CHILD ... but, well, she was going through some "unresolved" (yet comprehensible, IF CAUGHT IN TIME) issues of her own.

In anycase, it all made for another quite brave and certainly thought / (perhaps) discussion provoking film.  Good job CIFF, Good job!



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My Old Lady [2014]

MPAA (PG-13)  RE.com (3 Stars)  AVClub (C+)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
ChicagoTribune/Variety (A. Barker) review
RE.com (G. Kenny) review
AVClub (M. D'Angelo) review


My Old Lady [2014] (written and directed by Israel Horovitz based on his own stage play of the same name) tells a scathing if at times funny story (as is often the case in life, the alternative is to cry...) of multi-layered family dysfunction.  The layers get revealed as the story plays-out, so it's a challenge to write about this film without revealing (spoiling) too much.

The film begins with 50-something New Yorker Matthias Gold (played by Kevin Kline) somewhat happily strolling down the streets of Paris eventually ending at a building in a quite nice residential section of town.  He knocks.  No one answers.  So he chooses to enter (with some force) anyway.  That seems strange, but we soon find-out why he was behaving this way.  Apparently, he inherited the building.

However, inside the building, he finds to _his_ surprise a tenant, Mathilde Girard (played by Maggie Smith), 92 years-old, who by having sold the building to Matthias' father _at a discount_ decades ago by a truly odd but fascinating convention of French real estate law called a viager, must be allowed to live-out her days in the home until she dies.  Indeed, as part of the viager deal, she was entitled to a monthly stipend paid by the owner to boot. 

Seeing Mathilde there in the building and hearing, from her, what her presence meant to him (and to his plans), leaves Matthias quite crest-fallen / crushed.  Why?  He had been something of a loser most of his life, a failed writer with three failed marriages "one for each unpublished book" that he had written.  He told Mathilde that all he inherited from his quite wealthy but aloof father was "a couple of French language books" and _this building_, that the rest of his father's fortune went to some obscure "French charity."  So he told Mathilde that he had hoped to sell the building, quite fast, converting its value into cash, and leave.  Now her presence put a wrench in what had been a rather simple plan.

Mathilde doesn't help matters for either of them (though she knows that she can't be thrown out, and indeed, as long as Matthias "owns" the place, HE actually will have to pay her as she continues to live there) by telling Matthias, that she's known "of him" from his father (the previous owner), and that she's frankly surprised to find "someone who's accomplished _so little_ in life _by his age_ (as he)."  


At that, Matthias, who's hated his father for his self-centeredness and philandering for most of his life (Matthias' father had left him and his mother in an awful state when he was young), decides that he's going to find a way to sell the home, even if at a necessary (again viager) discount to just get rid of it and get on with his life.

But things get even more complicated when Matthias discovers that Mathilde has a daughter, Chloé Girard (played by Kristin Scott Thomas) about Matthias' age living with her as well.  Now Matthias would owe nothing to Chloé as the viager contract was made between Mathilde and the owner of the building.  However, Chloé who ALSO hasn't amounted to much in life knew well that she'd be out on the street WITH NOTHING as soon as Mathilde died.  Her presence made Matthias' plan to just sell the place and get out seem even uglier.

Now why would Matthias' father bequeath to Matthias (who after all hated him) _this house_ with so many complications with it (and then, so little else...)?   Well that's of course the rest of the story, and it's a pretty good one. 

And the film does make for a great discussion piece for "Adult families" where there's been _a lot_ of intergenerational resentment and pain.


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Fury [2014]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (L)  ChicagoTribune (2 1/2 Stars)  RE.com (2 Stars)  AVClub (C+)  Fr. Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
ChicagoTribune (M. Phillips) review
RE.com (P. Sobczynski) review
AVClub (I. Vishnevetsky ) review

Perhaps the most important thing for the Viewer to appreciate coming into a WW II "war movie" like Fury [2014] (written and directed by David Ayer) is to understand that "war movies" are often _not_ intended to be documentaries or even "sweeping historical dramas" in the sense of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869) or Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936).  Instead, they are often intended to be "morality tales" (and or "lack of morality tales") and/or allegories with much more in common with Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick (1851) than either of the two above mentioned "historical epics."

 So it is with the current film, in which Ayer borrows heavily conceptually from his previous police drama Training Day [2001].  That film too, though very much acclaimed (earning actor Denzel Washington an Oscar and his costar Ethan Hawke an Oscar nomination) and set in a very concrete time and place -- the Los Angeles Police Department of the current day -- DID NOT SEEK (AT ALL) to be tied to any particular reported-upon event in history.  Instead, Training Day [2001], again, like Melvile's Moby Dick (1851) was above all an allegory / morality tale.  And so it is then with the current film, Fury [2014], about a American tank crew, set nominally "in Germany during the closing stages of World War II" ...     

The story of Fury [2014] like that of Training Day [2001] is most fundamentally the story of a mentor/master, the tank's commander Don 'Wardaddy' Collier (played by Brad Pitt) seeking to quickly teach "green as can be" Norman Ellison (played by Logan Lerman) how to fight (and not get the rest of them killed.

Norman was sent to Don (and the rest of his crew) as their replacement "assistant tank driver" after the previous one was killed in the previous day's / night's action.  Don had been proud that he's kept his crew -- Boyd 'Bible' Swan (played by Shia LaBeauf), Trini 'Gordo' Garcia (played by Michael Peña) and Grady 'Coon-Ass' Travis (played by Jon Bernthal) -- alive until this point.  The obvious "greenness" of Norman scared them all. 

The understandable need to _quickly_ bring the "I was trained to be in the typing pool" Norman up-to-speed drives the film ... and drives much of the (IMHO legitimate) criticism of the film: 

There's an unforgettably searing scene in which Don -- who's just watched Norman NOT shoot at a German soldier carrying a panzerfraust (a rocket propelled anti-tank weapon) resulting in the deaths of four Americans in the tank in front of them -- pulling out a German prisoner of war from those captured at the end of that exchange AND ORDERING NORMAN TO SHOOT HIM RIGHT THEN AND THERE with his side arm.  (To prove to him and his crew that he's capable of killing Germans ...). 

Would THAT be a War Crime?  (Yes).  A historically accurate situation?  (Honestly, who knows?  But it's one which IMMEDIATELY OFFENDS the sensibilities of perhaps MILLIONS of viewers WHO KNOW THAT THE GERMAN SS ROUTINELY SHOT HUNDREDS, EVEN THOUSANDS CIVILIANS ALL ACROSS EUROPE (France, Italy, Poland, Greece, the Czech Republic, the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union) IN REPRISAL FOR PARTISAN ATTACKS and here this scene arguably draws a "moral equivalence" to those Mass Slaughters by the SS).  BUT AT THE BUDDY-MORALITY-TALE LEVEL OF THE FILM, can one understand?  (Probably yes as well).

There's a later scene in which the Americans take a German town, and Wardaddy Don takes Norman up into an apartment where they find two young women (played with appropriate levels of terror and apprehension by Anamaria Marinca and Alicia von Rittberg) and offers the younger one to the "virginal/newbie" Norman.  Was this AGAIN an awful scene?  (Yes).  Was it again a War Crime?  (Today, certainly yes).  Does it offend?  (Again, yes, especially when one realizes while this almost certainly happened on the Western front as well, THE SOVIET ARMY SYSTEMATICALLY RAPED MILLIONS OF GERMAN WOMEN THAT THEY ENCOUNTERED IN THE CLOSING STAGES OF THE WAR AND IN ITS IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH).   But was it realistic and even "instructive" in the story?  (Again, probably grudgingly yes).

So what then to make a film like this, which is nominally "historical" but is certainly above all SITUATIONAL?  I suppose it is a film that presents a situation to the viewer and asks: What would you do?

But I would submit that a fair question could be asked: Could the film-maker have chosen a "better" historical situation in which to set the film that would not produce the immediate reaction of "wait a minute, the SS shot all kinds of prisoners ALL THE TIME and here you're depicting an American doing so under very contrived, plot-driven circumstances?" or "WAIT A MINUTE, the SOVIET ARMY SYSTEMATICALLY THE GERMAN WOMEN THEY MET and here you're portraying American soldiers doing so again under very contrived, plot-driven circumstances?"  Would it not have served the story better if the film had been set during the Korean or Vietnam Conflicts or even "in the Pacific" during WW II?  In those conflicts / theaters, the actions depicted by American soldiers would have arguably (and unfortunately) would have depicted reality far more closely than here.

It's something to think about.  And in any case, I found this to be a very difficult film to watch.


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St. Vincent [2014]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (L)  ChicagoTribune (3 Stars)  RE.com (3 Stars)  AVClub (C+)  Fr. Dennis (2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
ChicagoTribune (M. Phillips) review
RE.com (B. Talerico) review
AVClub (J. Hessenger) review


St. Vincent [2014] (written and directed by Theodore Melfi) is a film that I honestly wish I could like more, but I don't.  Okay, the characters, a bit exaggerated, are certainly well drawn.  As a Catholic priest who's spent years telling folks that the only ones who could do justice to life at a Rectory would be the folks who wrote for the sitcom Barney Miller [1974-82] [IMDb], I think I can say that I've encountered every single character portrayed in the film.  And yes, that _would_ include Naomi Watts' pregnant Russian hooker Daka, "not often" mind you, but at vibrant parish, one runs into everyone.

I'll go further.  My favorite character in the film is certainly Chris Dowd's Brother Geraghty, a beleaguered 5th-6th grade religion teacher at St. Patrick's Catholic School (somewhere in Brooklyn) trying desperately hard to be relevant to a diverse class where even most of the Catholics (only about 1/2 of the students) are not practicing.  He jokes that "I don't know" appears to be "the fastest growing religion of our time" ;-).   He's the one who gives his students the assignment to write about "a saint of our times," which inspires a sweet 10 year old named Oliver (played by Jaeden Lieberher) to write an essay about his grouchy neighbor Vincent (played otherwise to an Oscar nomination worthy level by Bill Murray) who's the only person his divorcing mother Maggie (played again magnificently _and mostly straight_ by Melissa McArthry) could rapidly find to serve as his after-school babysitter.

So if I liked the characters and I liked both the writing and acting in general (I do believe that pretty much EVERYBODY came with their A-game to this film), why didn't I much like the final product?  Basically, I can't help but think that the film really "dumbs down" the concept of a Saint, making it essentially meaningless, and yes, I do have a problem with that.

And yes, I'd freely admit that a fair number of the Saints on the Church's calendar could be called "Company Men" who're on the list because they defended to various degrees of sacrifice "the Institution."  And I'd appreciate that some people may have a problem with this.  (Yet what group or institution would not want to celebrate its heroes?)  I'd also admit that some of those on the Church's calendar "had their issues," often with various prejudices.  Interestingly enough St. John Chrysostom (aka over the centuries as "The Golden Tongue...") was _also_ something of a world-class grouch (besides being a very important bishop), and has been accused in modern times of being anti-Semitic (the Church's defense of him has been basically "Well, you don't understand, look at his Sermons, he was like that with basically everybody ... again they didn't call him "The Golden Tongue" for nothing ...)  But pretty much ALL of the people who are on the Church's calendar are there because they encouraged others to be(come) better people of faith and better (yes, kinder more loving) people in general.

I just don't see that in Bill Murray's Vincent, and I'd honestly think that his Vincent would agree with me.  He was a grouch.  He did do some admirable things, including (largely hidden from view of others) taking care of his Alzheimer's stricken wife.  But he'd almost certainly be among the first to understand that he wasn't exactly an example to follow.  And if not for a 10 year-old kid bestowing Sainthood on him at a lovely school assembly, he'd probably consider the whole thing "a crock..." ;-) ... though Vincent did have the kindness / sense to accept the compliment / honor from his sincere and well meaning 10 year old neighbor. 

But are we so "self-esteem starved" (or far worse, so _narcisistic_ today) that we need to pluck people down from heaven and pull ourselves up to their level to make ourselves feel "better" about ourselves?
Don't get me wrong, I've buried plenty of lovely people over the years, as well as people who were "complex", by no means "completely evil," but also not folks to exactly "write home about."

Now it turns out, of course, that this film is coming out in the United States at exactly around the time of All Saints' (Nov 1) / All Souls' (Nov 2) Days.  For non-Catholics, that's where Halloween (All Hallows' Eve - Oct 31) comes from.

Over the years, I've come to appreciate the value of All Souls' Day when we remember our faithful departed.  It's not a bad tradition to remember those loved ones who went before us, who again, were certainly not "completely evil" but also, if we're honest about it, were not exactly perfect.  In the Catholic Church, those who die "in a state of grace" but still with imperfections go a place called Purgatory where those imperfections are slowly erased and they are able then to join those in Heaven.  Why this Doctrine about a "middle place" between Heaven and Hell?  When out of both Honesty and Mercy.  Most of us truly _do not_ achieve perfection in this world.  And yet it would seem cruel, even to us, to send "the imperfect" but certainly not "hopeless" to Hell.  And if we ourselves can not bring ourselves to send the merely imperfect to Hell, why would God?  Thus Purgatory ... where we're given basically "however long it takes ..." (if perhaps "under some pressure" ...) to iron out those imperfections prior to entering truly perfect into heaven.  (It's honestly a very sensible doctrine ;-)

In any case, Bill Murray's Vincent as portrayed was certainly _not_ a Saint (yet).  But like so many of us, he still had potential.  So happy All Saints / All Souls Days folks!

But also please let's also not lazily "dumb down" the concepts of Perfection, Sainthood and Heaven.


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August Winds (orig. Ventos de Agosto) [2014]

MPAA (UR would be R)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing
AdoroCinema.com listing*


August Winds (orig. Ventos de Agosto) [2014] [IMDb] [AC.br]* (directed and cowritten by Gabriel Mascaro [IMDb] [AC.br]* along with Rachel Ellis [IMDb] [AC.br]*) is a evocative / thought-provoking "snapshot of life" / more "fatalistic" than either "existentialist" or "personalist" film about a young Afro-Brazilian couple, Shirley (played by Dandara de Morais [IMDb] [AC.br]*) and Jeison (played by Geová Manoel dos Santos [IMDb] [AC.br]*), living in a small hamlet along the Atlantic Coast somewhere in North Eastern Brazil [en.wikip] [pt.wikip].* The film played recently at the 2014 (50th Annual) Chicago International Film Festival.

Shirley had returned to the village from "the city" (presumably either São Paulo [en.wikip] [pt.wikip]* or more probably Salvador [en.wikip] [pt.wikip]*) to take care of her grandmother.  As such, she does have at least _some_ (a little) "stuff" -- an iPod-like music player which she does enjoy using as she sunbathes or otherwise rests during the heat of the day.

Jeison presumably has never really left the village.  As such, he's adept at the skill-set needed to live-out, more or less happily, one's life in this hamlet where the ONLY force that really changes ANYTHING is Nature -- those annual "August Winds" that bring in a storm or two which do produce some temporary chaos ("change") and move around the coastal sand-bars a bit.  Otherwise EVERY DAY is basically the same and actually NOT ALTOGETHER BAD as IT'S SUNNY MOST OF THE TIME ;-).

Life for Jeison involves working at a local coconut plantation (climbing palm trees to harvest said coconuts and later processing them using simple tools that really haven't changed since PERHAPS the Portuguese first arrived bringing with them the cast-iron needed to make a good machete), fishing, and _snorkling_ to explore a bit (the snorkle and fins are Jeison's ONLY arguably "superfluous" possessions) and perhaps pick-up an occasional octopus from the ocean floor to vary the diet a bit to "impress" Shirley, his girlfriend.  The two make love on the bed of a coconut truck (a cinematically evocative image certainly, but I can't imagine it's all that comfortable ... ;-), on the beach and amidst the palm trees.  Arguably there hasn't been a place this nice this side of Eden.

But then ... life is, in fact, a lived as if "inside a freeze frame" and it requires Jeison pulling-out of the water a human skull (kinda like in Shakespeare's Hamlet) for both Jeison and Shirley to "wake up" for a while and begin to reflect a bit.  After taking the skull to a older man in the village, wondering if he could identify who it once belonged to (the skull had two gold teeth, which the two thought could identify him), the old man (1) does, in fact, identify the man as someone who had lived in the village and died some 50-60 years ago, and (2) he waxes eloquent about life in the village telling the two: "We who live in a village like this aren't destined for either Heaven or Hell.  Instead, like this man, we're destined to be claimed by the sea."

Indeed, he does have a point.  Those August storms do, in their own time, change the coastlines.  And the village cemetery, presumably once "built in a safe place," now finds itself precariously on the beach from where sometime in the future those buried there, will, like the man who died 50-60 years before (and perhaps was even buried there), be swept back into the sea.

So Change DOES take place in the village, RELENTLESSLY, if VERY, VERY SLOWLY, and this comes to MILDLY disturb Jeison (if not Shirley, who does at times find life in the village to be "boring").  The rest of the gentle if also reflective film "meanders" from there...

I just found the film a remarkable capture of a way of life that is fascinatingly peaceful / timeless.  And it corresponds well to _some_ of the insights of our Servite Friars living and working out in Acre in the Amazon region of Brazil. 


* Reasonably good (sense) translations of non-English webpages can be found by viewing them through Google's Chrome browser.

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The Book of Life [2014]

MPAA (PG)  CNS/USCCB (A-II)  ChicagoTribune (3 1/2 Stars)  RE.com (3 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (B-)  Fr. Dennis (3/1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. McAleer) review
ChicagoTribune (R. Moore) review
RE.com (S. Wloszczyna) review
AVClub (K. Rife) review

The Book of Life [2014] (produced by Guillermo del Toro, directed and cowritten by Jorge Gutiérrez along with Douglas Langsdale) is a lovely, authentic, and hence _brilliantly colored_ children-oriented film celebrating the Mexican annual commemoration of "The Day of the Dead" [en.wikip] [es.wikip]* (Nov. 2nd, All Souls Day in the Catholic Church).

Non-Hispanics, and even non-Mexican Hispanics, not familiar with the Mexican celebration of this day may be absolutely stunned at the exuberance and richness of the art surrounding the celebration of this day, certainly conflating indigenous pre-Colombian traditions with those that arrived with Catholic Spain to Mexico.  Still, before getting on too high of a horse, non-Hispanic "Anglo" Americans ought to remember that traditions surrounding the Anglo-American celebration of All-Hallows-Eve (Halloween, Oct 31, the evening before the Church celebration of the All Saints Day) also involve conflations of Christian and pre-Christian elements arriving from previous Celtic and Germanic mythologies and world views (those ghouls and goblins of Halloween do come from somewhere ...).

The Book of Life [2014] also reminds viewers that traditions like the Mexican take on "The Day of the Dead" [en.wikip] [es.wikip]* can enliven the lives of otherwise "bored" / "alienated" young people who with "earbuds" on, listening to music on their iPods may be convinced that they've seen / experienced "all there is" even as they forget all connections to their past.

So it is, the film begins with a group of typically bored, "gum chewing," "eyes rolling" school kids on a field trip get dropped-off at the end of the day at a "museum."  Indeed, when they arrive, a crotchety security guard tries to get them to get back on the bus, because "it's late."  However, a young vivacious tour guide comes out to meet them and tells them to come along.  Eyes roll, but the kids follow.  And soon the kids find themselves in a brilliantly colored room that's part of the museum's "Day of the Dead" exhibit.  The kids look around, and _are_ surprised, both by the color _and_ by all the statuettes resembling regular "townspeople" (including some dressed as Catholic priests and nuns) doing "regular townspeople-like" things but all being, well, skeletons.  "What is with all that?"  asks one of the bored, gum-chewing students.

The tour guide then explains that this is the Museum's "The Day of the Dead" [en.wikip] [es.wikip]* exhibit and that the "The Day of the Dead" [en.wikip] [es.wikip]* is a Mexican tradition of remembering our dearly beloved relatives who've gone before us.  Indeed, she explains that there are "two worlds" in which Dead can enter when they die, the HAPPY, COLORFUL "Land of the Remembered" and the SAD, GLOOMY "Land of the Forgotten."  By remembering their dearly beloved relatives on All Souls Day / The Day of the Dead, Mexicans keep these relatives in the HAPPY, COLORFUL "Land of the Remembered." ...

The rest of the movie then unspools from there ... including the introduction by the tour guide to the previously bored but now intrigued students (as well as Viewers) to such characters Mexican stories / folklore as Santa Muerte (voiced in the film by Kate de Castillo) who the tour guide explains is the "Ruler" of the "Land of the Remembered" and Xibalba (voiced in the film by Ron Perlman) who rules over the gloomy "Land of the Forgotten."

The Cosmology of the story, of course, is not entirely Christian.  But it presented, above all, as a story and teaches the very salutary lesson of Remembering _nicely_ (and indeed Praying For) those who've gone before us, and that NO ONE is really Dead, so long as his/her memory remains in someone's Heart.

The whole practice of praying for the Dead in the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church, especially on All Souls Day (as well as on the anniversary of the loved one's death) has a similar purpose of maintaining connection with those who've gone before us with the promise that if we honor those who've gone before us, then there will be others who'll honor us after we ourselves are gone.  Hence Death need be as Scary as perhaps it otherwise would be.  It's ... part of Life.

Again, this is quite a lovely film and after so many recent American children's oriented films [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] that have made "people of color" or "with funny accents" the "bad guys," it's nice to see a film that celebrates the diversity present in our various neighbors rather than teach kids to fear it.


* Reasonably good (sense) translations of non-English webpages can be found by viewing them through Google's Chrome browser.

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Black Coal, Thin Ice (orig. Bai ri yan huo) [2014]

MPAA (UR would be R)  Fr. Dennis (1 Star)

IMDb listing
AsianWiki listing

CameraObscura (T. Grégoire) review*
Cinetastic.de (F. Schmidke) review*
kino-zeit.de (J. Kurz) review*
Variety (S. Foundas) review


Black Coal, Thin Ice (orig. Bai ri yan huo) [2014] [IMDb] [AW] (written and directed by Diao Yinan [IMDb] [AW]) is a Chinese "Noir" film that has been making the rounds (and winning awards) in the Festival Circuit and played recently here at the 2014 (50th Annual) Chicago International Film Festival.

The story involves a hard-nosed police detective Zhang Zili (played by Liao Fan [IMDb] [AW]) from an industrial town somewhere in northern China.  One day, in nominally 1999, workers at various plants across the Province are shocked to find human body parts amidst the coal being delivered to them on that day.  Officials soon find that the body parts all belong to a single person, identified by means of an ID found in the pocket of a piece of clothing still clinging to one of the body parts found.  It's of a random worker, again working in one of the factories, in the Province. 

The worker's wife, Wu Zhizhen (played by Gwei Lun-Mei [IMDb] [AW]), a lowly worker in a laundry in one of the Provincial towns is informed of her husband's gruesome death.  But who could have done it?  Police, including Zhang Zili, assume that the murder was the result of some sort of an extortion attempt on the part of the local mob.  But when they the police try to arrest "the usual suspects," a shootout ensues resulting in not only the "suspects" being killed but also a number of police officers attempting the arrest, including one of Zhang's best friends.

Fast forward to 2006.  Blaming himself for the deaths of his colleagues and best friend, Zhang's long since left the police department and become a notorious drunk in town.  However, he comes to hear from a former colleague from the force that there have been two other murders over the past several years, including a recent one, which strangely enough, seem to have been romantically linked to lowly laundress Wu Zhizhen.  What's going on?  Is she some sort of a "black widow" / "femme fatale"?  Of course it's complicated.  Much ensues ...

I generally liked the film, though I do have to say that I DID NOT LIKE the film's principal protagonist Zhang Zili.  I realize that the film was trying to portray him as a "tough guy."  And I do realize that Humphrey Bogart's "Sam Spade" was not exactly "PC" (I remember a film in which Humphrey Bogart's character did not call Lauren Bacall's character BY HER NAME throughout the entire film ... instead calling her "Honey" and "Peaches" and so forth).   However in the current film, Zhang appears to sexually assault at least two women, including the lowly if perhaps morally conflicted Wu Zhizhen.  I just couldn't get past that. 

I always enjoy the application of the "Film Noir" formula to different contexts, but I certainly do believe that the "tough guy detective" need not sexually assault the women in the story to prove his "toughness" no matter what cultural context the film comes from.


* Reasonably good (sense) translations of non-English webpages can be found by viewing them through Google's Chrome browser.

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