The Teachers’ Lounge (2023)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Teachers’ Lounge (2023) – I. Çatak

One of those films that aims to put viewers in the middle of a moral quandary and then tightens the screws by ensuring that all possible viewpoints have some credibility. Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is a Polish teacher who is new to a German school, teaching sixth grade.  When a rash of thefts takes place, the school leadership takes a heavy-handed approach to discovering the culprit which involves pressuring class leaders to dob in their classmates and even frisking students. Carla clearly disapproves but when she is the target of a theft herself things quickly spiral out-of-control and she finds herself spurned by both students and teachers. Benesch is solid in the lead role as the slightly paranoid and unsure teacher (who is otherwise caring and conscientious toward her students).  Director Ilker Çatak manages the tension exceptionally well (and seems to want to say something about the difficulties of managing a multicultural classroom/society), but the film falters at the final gate, leaving many loose ends untied.  Perhaps that sort of open ending plays well for the art house crowd but letting the plot unspool for another twenty or so minutes may have provided a bit more satisfaction (as it is, the ending teeters on the edge of plausibility, at least for me). Nevertheless, for most of its runtime, The Teacher’s Lounge was extremely gripping.  

 

Marshland (2014)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

Marshland (2014) – A. Rodríguez

Spanish take on the serial killer genre with two cops, one young and idealistic and one older and cynical, hunting a killer of young girls in the rural south of the country. The time is 1980 and Franco has been dead for five years but his loyalists remain in this area. The younger cop has been relocated from Madrid for writing an outspoken pro-democracy letter to the newspaper. The older cop is rumored to have been part of Franco’s secret police. Together they must track down the killer of two teen sisters who may have been the subject of pornographic photographs. So, the content is dark and the film moves slowly, taking its time to linger on the landscape (wasteland or marshland). The clues add up, as do the victims (some from the past).  Those in positions of power may be implicated.  As the plot takes several twists and turns, we learn more about the two detectives and perhaps they come to understand or accept each other. But by the time we get to the end of the picture, a few plot holes still exist (or perhaps I missed some important details or did not quite grasp the cultural context). And, not unlike some classics of the neo-noir genre (e.g., Chinatown), even as the mystery appears solved, justice remains somewhere in the distance.

 

The Crimson Rivers (2000)

 ☆ ☆ ½

The Crimson Rivers (2000) – M. Kassovitz

A star-studded French serial killer thriller offered a lot of promise and started off strong and gritty, albeit with some clichéd characters for this genre.  Jean Reno plays the jaded police commissioner who does not play by the rules, brought in to investigate a gruesome murder in the French Alps.  In a separate plot strand, Vincent Cassel plays another investigator who ignores the rules and can be a bit of a hot-head, investigating the desecration of a girl’s tomb, presumably by some Nazi skinheads.  Naturally, the two investigations come together in a focus on a prestigious but secluded University in the mountains.  Members of the Faculty are picked off one-by-one, with the serial killer using one death to point out clues to the next.  Reno suspects alumnus Nadia Farès who has a chip on her shoulder against the university (but still works there, helping to divert avalanches from descending on the school).  She is also his presumed love interest.  With its strong cast – and direction by actor Matthieu Kassovitz (who was so great in the political spy series, The Bureau) – things hold together well, until suddenly they don’t.  Reputedly, Vincent Cassel complained that he could never understand the plot and this permanently damaged his relationship with Kassovitz.  Reno returned for a sequel and a couple of decades later a French TV series appeared.  However, I’m with Cassel – this does not add up.  

Three Strangers (1946)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

Three Strangers (1946) – J. Negulesco

With a John Huston/Howard Koch script that was initially going to be repurposed as a sequel to The Maltese Falcon (1941) (until Warner Brothers discovered that they did not own the rights to the characters), Three Strangers still emerged as the 8^th (out of 9) collaboration between Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet (who were so memorable in the earlier film). Having Bogie or Mary Astor appear would have elevated the proceedings but the result is nevertheless perfectly passable as noir-tinged drama. Geraldine Fitzgerald lures Lorre and Greenstreet to her London apartment where she convinces them to help her make a wish in front of her statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin, an opportunity that only happens at midnight on Chinese New Year and only if three strangers present agree upon the same wish.  They agree to wish that Lorre’s sweepstakes ticket is a winner and subsequently that they will bet any winnings together on the big horse race happening immediately after the lottery.  From there, they go back to their separate lives which turn out to be very compromised by poor choices (Fitzgerald plays an adulteress seeking to get back with her estranged husband; Lorre plays a drunk mixed up in a robbery gone wrong and charged with murder; Greenstreet plays a lawyer who has misused money from a trust he was overseeing).  All of them could benefit from winning but only Fitzgerald truly believes in Kwan Yin’s powers; she is also the most unsavory of the trio. The film (as directed by Jean Negulesco) flips back and forth between the three stories, ultimately bringing the three strangers back together at the end, to seal their fate. Of the three, Lorre provides the most sympathetic portrayal and the strongest acting, but the film is also aided and abetted by a number of (other) familiar character actors. That said, it lacks enough panache (or enough depth in each of the three stories) to really capitalize on all of the talent on hand.

 

Oppenheimer (2023)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Oppenheimer (2023) – C. Nolan

I had a very ambivalent response to Oppenheimer, both the man as presented (by Cillian Murphy) and the movie as a whole.  I suspect director Christopher Nolan intended the former response but perhaps not the latter. There is a lot to chew on here but the complicated flashback/flashforward structure (sometimes but not always signaled by a change from colour to B&W) doesn’t make things easier. Early in the film, it is difficult to grasp the numerous characters and the cursory but seemingly deep discussion of physics. This doesn’t necessarily become easier as the film unfolds and we meet Oppie’s allies (General Matt Damon) and antagonists (Edward Teller played by Benny Safdie).  Let’s break down my issues with the film.  First, like it or not, this is a bio-pic and Nolan doesn’t limit himself to the pivotal years of the Manhattan Project but includes formative events before and after the development of the A-bomb.  Fair enough. However, when the film shifts gears to mostly focus on Oppenheimer’s fight to keep his security clearance during the time of the McCarthy red scare along with the influence of Robert Downey Jr’s Lewis Strauss on that hearing (and Oppenheimer’s subsequent influence on Strauss’s hearing to become Commerce Secretary), the film begins to feel overlong and it loses some of its focus.  I recognize that these later scenes do allow Nolan to interrogate whether Oppenheimer felt regret for being so actively involved in an invention that was used to kill 100s of 1000s of innocent Japanese citizens, but as a vehicle for that opportunity to make this point, it feels rather indirect.  Which brings me to the main source of my ambivalence. I understand that Nolan needed to tell this story authentically and in context, so it isn’t surprising that he presents Oppenheimer as experiencing a felt moral imperative to build the bomb before Germany (or the Soviets?) did the same – but the lengthy applause after the atomic test at Los Alamos seems to go on just a bit too long.  Did Nolan do this on purpose to highlight the convergence of American patriotism and scientific satisfaction?  Watching the film with my Japanese spouse may have intensified my discomfort at this cheering for a weapon of mass destruction.  Later when Oppenheimer is announcing the “successful” dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Nolan does introduce some hints that this can’t be seen as positively as it is being recounted – Oppenheimer seems frantic, the American flag-waving audience seems to suddenly contain people who may be crying rather than laughing -- but it is all rather difficult to discern.  Is this a manifestation of Oppenheimer’s guilty conscience? To its credit, the film raises all the old defenses for dropping the bomb (it ended the war sooner and saved lives) and then raises the counter-arguments later (the Japanese were ready to surrender already, many more lives were lost in horrible ways).  Of course, this is a work of entertainment rather than something more serious and Nolan and his team manage to keep things moving at a very rapid pace for much of the film’s 170-minute run-time.  Brief visual interludes/special effects help to punctuate events and give the film visual variety. The recreation of the time and place feels apt, something one can expect from a big-budget Hollywood film.  But despite the presence of Florence Pugh and Emily Blunt as Oppenheimer’s love interests, the film fails the famous Bechdel test (as they do not talk to each other nor exist independently as characters beyond their relationships with Oppenheimer – plus Pugh spends most of her screentime nude). Whether all of the various plot threads are needed or not is something one could spend hours debating – and I guess that is one thing the film does have going for it: it provides the opportunity for discussion and debate about one of the most distressing contributions of science to modern life that has had lasting implications for geopolitics and life today and over the past 80 years.

 

EO (2022)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

EO (2022) – J. Skolimowski

This one ends up in the category of movies I wanted to like more. After all, it is an homage to Bresson’s great Au Hasard, Balthasar (1966) which was itself a great concept (Jesus-like donkey witnesses the weaknesses of humankind).  But as others have noted, whereas Bresson pays more attention to his human characters, director Jerzy Skolimowski (Deep End, 1970) gives us the donkey’s eye-view (sometimes psychedelically so).  Structured episodically, the film follows the donkey from setting to setting, from circus to stable to slaughterhouse, providing numerous opportunities to witness humankind’s cruelty to animals, treated as entertainment, beasts of burden, or food.  As such, the film is rather single-minded, unless the rare scraps of dialogue from the human characters (including, briefly Isabelle Huppert) can be mined for deeper themes (humans are also cruel to humans here). Naturally, EO suffers through all this – but viewers don’t have to, because Skolimowski and his team (Cinematographer Michal Dymek and Composer Pawel Mykietyn deserve special mention) make the film an enjoyable ride, full of a variety of audio and visual delights. If you let it wash over you, it is sure to be an impactful experience, but for those hoping to piece together a plot (beyond just the overall schematic), perhaps less so.

 

Hagazussa (2017)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

Hagazussa (2017) – L. Feigelfeld

I checked this out because it was recommended by the Folk Horror Revival facebook group (and a few other websites).  And, yes, it certainly is folk horror.  Where the film succeeds is in the creation of atmosphere, often strange, occasionally eerie, sometimes breathtaking (those mountain views).  The setting is the Austrian Alps in the 15^th century. The film has four chapters with the first (Shadows) showing our protagonist Albrun (Aleksandra Cwen) as a young girl (Celina Peter) with her dying mother (Claudia Martini).  The mother has been accused of being a witch by the other villagers.  It is hard to know how her daughter feels about this or what she believes. Fast forward a couple of decades and Albrun is living in the same isolated cabin alone but for a newborn baby (with uncertain paternity). The chapters unfold slowly (Horn, then Blood, then Fire) and this viewer was on edge, believing occult happenings were just around the corner. But instead, first-time director Lukas Feigelfeld treats us to Albrun’s gradual break with reality. A village woman makes friends with Albrun but then betrays her.  Albrun begins to hear her dead mother’s voice from the woods.  She eats what must be a magic mushroom and feels the effects (cue Stan Brakhage). Things get worse from there and we sometimes take Albrun’s distorted perspective but also see things from an omniscient vantage point, showing her to be disturbed, spooked rather than spooky. Awful and weird things do happen but the film’s slow pace and “debunking” attitude tend to undercut any real folk horror thrills.