Reviews

Director Ruben Ostland has followed up his 2014 Golden Globe nominee Force Majeure with Cannes Palme d'Or winner The Square. The film is both a satire of the cultural elite of Stockholm and a sad commentary about the separation between individuals both within circles and between circles. The lead character, Christian (Claes Bang), is the curator of a museum of modern art that seeks to draw attention and donors through avant-garde exhibits and over-the-edge social media campaigns. The film follows Christian through a few weeks of his life when one of the hot new exhibits is "The Square", an actual square in the museum courtyard that is meant to be "a sanctuary of trust and caring." But rather than show trust and caring, the movie The Square raises a number of troubling questions: How thin is the veneer of civilization? Can political correctness substitute for empathy? Is art whatever a curator chooses to put in an art museum? And enveloping these questions is the separation of the circle of Stockholm's cultural elites from the City's homeless and immigrant population, as well as the separation of individuals within the City's cultural elite. One set piece in particular portrays the inability of the Stockholm's elite to communicate on a human level: It is Christian's meeting with Anne (Elisabeth Moss), a publicist, the day after a night of sex—and a bizarre argument over what to do with a used condom. In this scene Christian is totally unable to say the needed words about what had happened between them. (Anne, an American, comes across as much more able to relate to others than any of the Swedes in the movie.) Another memorable scene is the one in which a banquet for museum donors is interrupted when the performer (Terry Notary), playing an ape, goes out of control. The diners, who are initially frozen by their need for decorum, or perhaps by their need to display political correctness, ultimately go ape themselves. Perhaps not a total surprise since the same donor diners had earlier stampeded their way to a luncheon in a lighter scene. There are many sub-plots in the film—some satirizing interactions within Stockholm's upper class, others between classes— perhaps leaving some viewers displeased by the way the film jumps without warning from one set piece to another. Others may dislike long stretches of art-film inactivity in many of the episodes—something that explains why the movie lasts for 2 hours and 22 minutes. Nevertheless, The Square does capture the alienation of modern society, and does it with plenty of dark humor.

As already stated by several reviewers, anyone looking for an action thriller with a suspenseful chase scene, gunfight and clear gotcha surprise ending will be disappointed by The American. Instead, it is an exploration of the mind of an assassin played by George Clooney. The movie is set in sun-drenched mountain villages of the Abruzzo region of Italy and the scenes are further brightened by the appearances of Thekla Reuten and Violante Placido. But the focus of the movie is on Clooney as he deals with the dark demons in his mind. We know from the opening scene in Sweden that he has already become too closely involved with one woman, played by Irina Bjorkland, and is responsible for her death. He wants desperately to get out of the assassin business, but agrees to take one final assignment, oddly as weapons craftsman and supplier to a fellow assassin played by Thekla Reuten. But the plot is secondary. It is the mood that director Anton Corbijn sets that makes this movie. Clooney spends most of his time alone with his guilt and his fears. He is paranoid that anyone may be out to kill him--and some really are.

Although his job requires that he avoid making friends, he does make two--predictably with a prostitute and a priest. Both relationships have meaning. His lengthy sex scene with Violante Placido, a star in Italy where she has appeared on the cover of Playboy, will no doubt help to keep box office sales going long after potential audiences have learned that this is not your typical action thriller. But during the lovemaking scene the camera is mostly on Violante's face. When Clooney later says that she doesn't have to pretend; that he comes to her to take pleasure not to give pleasure, we know that he is lying; that he has in fact again broken a cardinal rule of his profession by falling for her. He is a man with too much capacity for feeling to survive in his profession.

His relationship with the priest is also telling. When the priest offers him an opportunity to confess, he is silent. Clooney chooses to remain in bondage to sin, even as he remains in bondage to his mysterious employer. And yet while passing up an opportunity to free himself from his demons, Clooney helps the priest to open up about a sin of his own, again showing that Clooney feels too deeply for a man in his profession.

And if we take the film as allegory, the ending is inevitable.

The Reader tries to tackle questions as broad as What is truth? What is justice? And, more narrowly, who should be singled out to pay for a nation's collective guilt? But the key question confronting law student Michael Berg (David Kross) is respect for Hanna Schmitz' (Kate Winslet) privacy versus the truth needed for justice.

The film, directed by Stephen Daldry and based on a work of fiction Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink, touched on stereotypical elements of the German psyche such as an excessive need for order and approval by superiors and helped to explain why good Germans became Hitler's willing executioners. Reader is a very good movie thanks in part to the acting of Winslet and Kross (younger Michael). This is nothing against the acting of Ralph Fiennes (older Michael), but the defining scenes of the movie involved the younger rather than the older Michael. At times the film moved slowly as Daldry kept the camera on Winslet or Fiennes as if to give us time to try to decipher what secrets were in their minds. Would the film have been better in German with sub-titles? Perhaps, but I think Winslet and Fiennes made convincing enough Germans.

One scene is reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, but under the freer standards of 2008 versus 1968 the film goes on to show the culmination of their encounter. Is this a good thing or not? Perhaps The Graduate's bedroom scene suggested the contrast between jaded experience and unsure enthusiasm better than The Reader showed it in living color. The Reader also presents a reflection of a theme from Sophie's Choice (a great book, but a not-so-great movie) from the point of view of the prison guard rather than the prisoner.

Another sub-plot deals with the reason six low-level female camp guards were tried for war crimes 21 years after the war's end. A survivor of the camps had published a book singling out these six. Such a book could have been a source of renewed anti-Semitism as Germans asked why the survivor is reopening old wounds by going after women who were only following orders. But Daldry brings this sub-plot to a meaningful close. In a difficult encounter that takes place in New York in 1995, Fiennes and the survivor (Rose Mather, played by Lena Olin) try to come to grips with forgiveness, absolution and responsibility.

At the end of the movie, we are left with two questions: Was Hanna Schmitz an unfeeling monster who felt no remorse for her part in the murder of 300 human beings, and who used (and statutorily raped) 15-year old Michael Berg for her own pleasure? Or did Kate Winslet convince us that Hanna was a victim: a naïve young woman who believed she was only doing her duty for the Fatherland and engaging in a harmless, mutually pleasurable relationship with Michael Berg? And what about Michael Berg? Was he always destined to be an amoral attorney who never acknowledged the guilt of his parent's generation, including the guilt of Hanna? Or was he the victim—never able to enter into full relationships with others because of his youthful affair with Hanna?

It has been said that in America sex is an obsession, while in Europe it is a fact. If the characters in Sang-Soo Hong's Woman on the Beach are representative, it is also an obsession in Korea.

In the film, the male lead, film director Jung-Rae Kim, has affairs with two women, Moon-Sook and Sun-Hee, during a spring weekend at a seafront resort. Late in the film, when the two women meet for lunch, they ask each other about their deepest fears. One says it is obsession; for the other it is betrayal. These two themes, embedded within the overriding question of whether life is truly better in the new affluent Korea, dominate the 2 hours and 7 minute version of the movie that was shown at the Philadelphia Film Festival.

According to IMDb the American version is only 1 hour and 40 minutes, and indeed, for American tastes, much could have been shortened. For example, the scene in which one of Moon-Sook sees Director Kim with the other woman, Sun-Hee, through the resort's picture window that overlooks the sea. She gets into her car parked beneath the window, starts the engine, and for an interminable minute, we watch the car sitting there with the engine running. Finally she turns off the engine and walks away. Powerful stuff? Well, not for this American moviegoer.

Indeed Director Hong beats the viewer over the head with symbolism to make sure no one misses his points. A white dog abandoned by the side of the road represents the betrayal that all the key players show toward one another. A bicyclist left choking on the dust of a passing car is just one reminder that the new Korea is not always better than the old. But when it comes to showing obsessions, Hong outdoes himself. In one scene, Director Kim draws a triangle on a napkin to graphically display the three images of his former wife's affair with a friend that obsess him. Only now he has something new to obsess over, for Moon-Sook admits she had two or three sexual encounters with foreigners when she lived in Germany. Were their dicks bigger than mine, he wonders. New dots on the napkin to obsess over! Ah, he must have new affairs to create new images in his mind so that he can replace the old triangles of obsession with new dots that create a more hopeful shape. Why doesn't he just see a therapist, we ask.

Hong is a talented director and the film gives Western audiences a feel for Korean obsessions and angsts. For that it's worth seeing, but after sitting through 127 minutes of beachfront betrayal and recriminations by people who are not really that likable—kind of the Korean equivalent of the self-obsessed New Yorkers in Squid and the Whale, I'm not quite ready to see Hong's earlier works, such as The Day a Pig Fell into the Well.

"Voces inocentes" is the powerful, tightly-directed--yet difficult-to-watch--story of a group of pre-teenage children caught in the madness of El Salvador's civil war. It is difficult to watch because it opens with a scene of the children being led to a killing field by army troops. As the movie bounces back and forth between happy scenes of children playing and the staccato bursts of machine gun fire, the audience senses that things will end badly.

This is clearly a political film, but director Luis Mandoki appears to have two conflicting messages that he wants to send. Through most of the movie, he is a cheerleader for the FMLN, the El Salvadoran rebel movement. He paints the guerrillas, especially Uncle Beto, in a sympathetic light and makes one of the songs of the movement "Casas del Cartones" (cardboard houses) into the movie's unofficial theme song. But in the climactic gun battle between soldiers and guerrillas, the action of twelve-year old hero Chava sends the message that the revolution too is madness. Perhaps it is a good thing that Mandoki leaves us to decide whether admiration for the guerrillas' ends is enough to balance our abhorrence of their means--for they too bring the innocent into the battle.

The biggest shortcoming of the film is the Hollywood ending. Without giving it away, let me just say it would have been more powerful to end the movie with the opening scene and let the audience draw its own conclusion as to what happens next. But Mandoki, who has directed box office successes such as "Message in a Bottle" and is able to hire the best available talent for filming, clearly wants "Voces Inocentes" to be a box office success. For that reason he has both added the Hollywood ending and cast the photogenic Carlos Padilla as Chava and Chilean beauty Leonor Varela as Chava's mother. These two look about as much like Central American peasants as J Lo and Jesse McCartney--although I must admit they played their parts convincingly.

While Mandoki should be commended for making a serious movie that shows the horrors of using children in warfare, this was a politically safe movie to make. The El Salvadoran civil war is over and we can now all agree that the government's forced enlistment of twelve-year olds was a bad thing. Mandoki could have made a more relevant political statement by making a similar film about a civil war that is going on today--the one in Colombia.