The Hedgehog (L’Hérisson)

A rather charming if manipulative French film from a few years back.  Based on a best seller, it is set in a block of flats in Paris in which Paloma, a rather precocious and misunderstood 11 year-old who decides to commit suicide within the year and to shoot a film about her family and the neighbours before she goes.  This plot line is rather forced, if someone typical of dramatic and misunderstood young girls.  And admittedly her parents are a pain in the neck.  What is far more interesting is the burgeoning relationship between the concierge (as she herself says, the archetype of a frumpy, grumpy old maid) played sublimely by Josiane Balasko and a Japanese widower Togo Igawa who comes to live in the block and is not only a breath of fresh air but also above all the petty class beliefs the rest of the block display.  This coming together of lonely misfits is very nicely done.  Great music from Gabriel Yared too and while you are aware that director Mona Achache is pulling the heart strings, the very competent acting and the loving nature of the film pulls you through.

★★★★

Velociraptor

Distinctly low budget Mexican film with its quirks but rather nicely done all the same.  It features two friends, one straight and one gay as they spend an afternoon wandering around a pre-apocalyptic city discussing their sex lives and in the process wondering about their own relationship.  Frank, honest and quietly revealing of our likes and fears this is a pleasant enough watch with Pablo Mezz and Carlos Hendrick Huber in the lead roles.  A little bit of a different film by Chucho Quintero.

★★+

Vino para Robar

Typical Argentine heist movie set in Mendoza with aged wine and invaluable gold masks the order of the day.  Despite a clear predictability in the proceedings, the movie picks up as it goes along with the leads: Daniel Hendler, Valeria Bertuccelli and Martin Piroyansky showing their skills in both comedy and action.  There was nothing new here from Ariel Winograd but it is relatively competent.

★★

Fair Play

A distinctly low key movie but not unimportant for that fact and perhaps the seriousness of its theme is lost on many today.  It’s the early 80s and Anna (Judit Bardos) is part of the national sports institute team in Czechoslovakia preparing for the Olympics.  To emulate the Germans and Russians the coaches introduce an anabolic steroid into the athlete’s preparation.  Anna is unhappy about taking it but the State are pressuring her.  What’s more her mother who was a pro tennis player and obliged to retire wants Anna to get the chance to go abroad and presumably defect.  She herself is translating material for a dissident and therefore under the watch of the secret service.  These restrictions and moral issues were part and parcel of living under Communism in those times and are perhaps forgotten by many today.  I found this to be a thoughtful and quite convincing look at one person’s experience of that time.  It is not the case of the East German labs and their masculine women athletes where drug taking became a production line.  Nevertheless, this was a sinister moment in the history of these countries and their relentless drive for success and this is well portrayed.  Andrea Sedlackova’s movie is perhaps lacking in great drama but it does an effective job with a great recreation of the period and fine photography.  Anna Geislerova as the mother is particularly noteworthy and while Bardos is competent, she is perhaps not so convincing as the daughter.  The characterisation of the coaches and government officials seems a bit heavy handed but5 are probably not so far from reality.  A different slant on life and a good production from the Czech Republic.

★★★ +

Jafar Panahi’s Taxi

The latest in this banned Iranian film maker’s snubs to the regime.  After making two more films since his ban inside homes he now takes to the streets in a taxi.  Ostensibly a sort of documentary, it was in fact scripted and played by amateur actors who play the passengers Panahi picks up en route: a teacher, a crook, a dying man and his hysterical wife, a pirate video supplier, two older superstitious women, a human rights lawyer and Panahi’s own niece who wants to be a film director.  Unorthodox and somewhat unpredictable, it is nevertheless a fascinating look inside modern Teheran and the challenges of life there.  In some ways it looks so Western but in others it is such a different culture to ours with the usual government restrictions and idiocy that make us scratch our heads.  Nothing brilliant but then the miracle is that it gets made and seen at all.  4 star for the chutzpah!

★★★★

Phoenix

This is an elegant and gripping recreation of post-war Berlin.  Nelly Lenz (the superb Nina Hoss) returns from Auschwitz to discover all her family have been killed and that she has inherited a lot of money.  Her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) wants her to go to Israel with her once she has completed facial reconstruction. But Nelly wants to recapture her past life and identity insisting that she look as close to her former self as possible.  She discovers her ex-husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) is still alive and working as a pianist.  He doesn’t recognise her but the similarities are sufficient for him to want to train her up as his ex-wife so that he can claim the inheritance.  She plays along with this game and the orchestrated return to Berlin.  In a cracking final scene she makes it known to him that she knows he betrayed her to the Nazis.

While there are some plot details that defy belief (like the facial reconstruction surgery of such quality for that time, and the husband’s inability to recognise Nelly from non-facial aspects of her appearance and behaviour), the film has a sureness about us that manages to convince us.  It moves quietly and relentlessly on to its denouement and we end up captivated.  Superb photography and set design, it may not be a masterpiece but it has many excellent features and a compelling mood.  On another level it has much to say about post-war Germany and reconciling the past with the present and with the own characters quest to find themselves or reinvent themselves.

★★★★ +

X and Y

A British movie based on a true story about a boy with Aspergers who goes to the International Maths Olympiad.  Until then he has had a sheltered life with mother (Sally Hawkins, great as always) following the death of his father in a car crash.  He has a maths tutor, played by Rafe Spall, who has multiple sclerosis and is a bit of an alcoholic trainwreck.  As the film goes from Britain to a training camp in Taiwan, our hero Nathan is forced to get more sociable with people and is befriended by a Taiwanese girl Zheng Mei who starts to lead him out of an emotionless world and into feeling things for the first time.  While not a great movie, the topic is handled with sensitivity though for my liking the script gets a little too self-consciously mathematic at times.  Asa Butterfield handles a tough lead role well.

★★★

Winter Sleep

I struggled with this one.  Cannes Gold Palm winner in 2014, this is at times a majestic movie with some excellent scenes and at times a soporific and weighty chamber piece.  Set in the Cappadocian caves,

it is typical of those works which feature a writer who is torn apart inside and somewhat bitter and disappointed with the world and his relationships and at the same time is a bit of a bastard.  The downside of this is the over textual nature of the films, one conversation alone runs well over twenty minutes of the three hours.  If you can hack all that and the slow pace that it implies, there are some beautifully set up scenes and convincing actingin play.  I particularly liked the wife, Nihal (Melisa Sozen) and Serhat Mustafa Kilic as Hamdi (the tenant’s brother).  Haluk Bilginer in the lead as Aydin is good but hardly charismatic.  What is stunning is Gokhan Tiryaki’s photography which highlights this bleakly beautiful land and the hard lives of the people there in winter.  Not Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s best work in my opinion, trying a little too hard to channel Bergman, Chekhov and others – undeniably much quality but also demanding of the viewer a lot of patience.

★★★★

The Kindergarten Teacher

Ultimately this is quite a disturbing film from Israel which is not only relatively innovative but also plants some quite big moral issues.  Nira (Sarit Larry) is a kindergarten teacher with grown up kids and a loving husband (Lior Raz, good).  She notices that one of her charges, a young five year boy called Yaov has a gift for poetry.  He seems to channel quite adult poems once or twice a week and so Nira and his nanny scramble to write down his clever words.  She approaches his father and his uncle to try to promote his ability but as they are not interested, she takes it upon herself to present him in public, which ends up in tears and with the boy’s solo dad forbidding her to see him and withdrawing him from the kindergarten.  Undeterred, she goes further to try to keep her bond with the boy.

Despite the somewhat dicey subject matter, this film really keeps us on her toes because director Nadav Lapid, plays it so naturally, keeps a degree of unpredictability, throws in some jokey moments like the nanny coming out of the surf singing, uses some fresh camerawork and has plenty to say about modern Israeli society.  Might not be brilliant but it makes you think.

★★★★

Effie Gray

One of the best features of this movie is the oppressive atmosphere it creates as we see Effie’s life in a loveless and unconsummated marriage in Victorian England.  Dakota Fanning is effective in the lead role as the young bride of John Ruskin (Greg Wise, sound in a hard role), one of the leading art critics of the time and something of a mummy’s boy.  Life with his horrendous family (Julie Walters shining as mother) is tempered by visits to Venice, where Claudia Cardinale reappears and Scotland where Effie’s platonic romance with a painter (Tom Sturridge) give her breathing room from the twisted Ruskins.  Emma Thompson who wrote this plays a sort of fairy godmother of the time, well as you would expect.  What is missing is the court case in which Effie seeks an annulment of the marriage and the social scandal around this.  This would have lifted the tension in the movie.  Even so, it is a well-crafted work, which is convincing enough as a recent look back at Victorian mores.

★★★+