Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #227: Strings (2004)

 

In a mythical fantasy realm of marionettes, young Hal (the voice of a then-unknown James McAvoy in the English-language version) is the son of a recently murdered ruler who leaves his comfortable home to set out on a journey to find his father's killer and avenge his death, but inevitably in the process he comes to discover the secret truth behind the longstanding feud between the two clans. Then, of course, war breaks out between them and Hal must step up and lead his people in Arthurian fashion.

Yes, that is all the narrative of Strings. It's deliberately derivative (the characters' awareness of their being marionettes notwithstanding), but that's not the point. The characters all being puppets is, and co-writer/director Anders Ronnow Klarlund deserves praise for hatching and applying that concept to it. But I'm afraid for me, like a piece of chewing gum, that concept's novelty lost its flavour quite soon, and the super-conventional plot, insipid dialogue and lack of humour only compounded my indifference once that happened. Maybe I'm simply too old for it, but I was bored for the bulk of this Danish saga. It's nowhere near as entertaining or thrilling as Norway's The Ash Lad: In the Hall of the Mountain King, which was stuffed with charm, wit, energy and an awareness of its archaicness. 

Strings does have good visual design and musical style, but for me that could not mask the storytelling shortcomings and misguided self-perception underneath. Its characters are somehow less wooden than the film containing them.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #226: Climax (2018).

 

It's winter 1996. An abandoned building in Paris. A group of young dance students have just finished a rehearsal and choose to throw an after-party to celebrate. The party begins harmlessly and predictably enough, until it's learned the sangria they're all drinking has been spiked with a particularly strong kind of LSD. Then, once the drug takes over, the night takes a turn for the horrifying. For everybody.

And that's literally all the plot there is in writer-director (and co-editor) Gaspar Noe's Climax. Noe conceived the premise but then simply told his entire cast and crew to do and say whatever the fuck they wanted to. The result is a film that even Baz Luhrmann would call trippy and stylised, with non-stop choreography and numerous extended takes including one that lasts 45 minutes. Plus, as you'd expect, it becomes relentlessly sexual and violent. Filmed in just 15 days and based loosely on a real-life drink-spiking incident involving a French dance troupe in 1996, I didn't know whether to reward myself or call myself a sicko once I managed to finish this movie. It is beyond any doubt one of the most relentless works, of any kind, I have ever seen. Either way, I doubt anybody could shake it once they saw it. 7/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #225: Incendies (2010).

 

Before he took Hollywood by storm, Canada's Denis Villeneuve made his international breakthrough with this war thriller nominated for the 2010 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. Incendies follows Canadian twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) Marwan, who have just lost their Arab mother Nawal (Lubna Azabal). An emigrant, Nawal fled her (unspecified) native Middle Eastern country in the 1970s because of a civil war. Her will refers to not keeping a promise and her being denied a proper grave unless the twins locate their mysterious brother, whom they've never met, and their father, who they thought was deceased. After then travelling to Nawal's home country, Jeanne discovers almost everything about her mother's past except the identities of her and Simon's brother and father; for this she eventually convinces the caring but more pessimistic Simon to help her.

This is a slow-burning but ultimately resonant, thought-provoking and educational film about cultural conflict, violence and above all, family. Villeneuve and his co-writer Valerie Beaugrand-Champagne, adapting Wajdi Mouawad's play which itself drew inspiration from the story of Lebanese revolutionary Souha Bechara and ones from the 1975 Lebanese Civil War, plot and visualise this unfortunately still all-too timely and topical narrative in a wisely, effectively methodical and patient manner, interspersing the twins' combined story very seamlessly with their mother's (in flashback) so the increasing parallels between them are as clear and powerful as necessary. Gaudette and especially Désormeaux-Poulin give strong central performances as the equal guides through this quest for parental truth.

Also, Gregoire Hetzel delivers a pounding musical score, and Andre Turpin and Monique Dardonne's cinematography and editing respectively are fully appropriate and effective, particularly in the battle scenes. Incendies is a challenging watch because of its (initially) slow pacing as I said, but it once it gains in momentum, that momentum never fades. 8/10.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #224: The Kindergarten Teacher (2018).

 

Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a Staten Island kindergarten teacher, is dedicated in her job but unhappy in the rest of her life. At home she's in a loving but uneventful marriage to Grant (Michael Chernus), and their two teenage children, Josh and Lainie (Sam Jules and Daisy Tahan) are increasingly tired of her. But then while attending a weekly poetry class, Lisa hears one of her students, six-year-old Jimmy, reciting a poem which surprises and impresses her. Then she chooses to read it to her poetry classmates and teacher Simon (Gael Garcia Bernal), who mistakenly praise her for her "talent." Now inspired, after learning more about Jimmy's own unstable home life, Lisa sets out to nurture and promote his gift, taking increasingly unreasonable and unethical steps to do so.

This is a film I'm finding myself appreciating more, the more I contemplate it. Remaking a 2014 Israeli film, writer-director Sara Colangelo turns what could've otherwise been just another schoolteacher movie into a haunting and daring but restrained experience. It also works so well because it offers a brutally honest look at modern education, particularly regarding the gender-based double standards and preconceived notions therein, and Colangelo employs a rather cold but refined visual language to do so with. And what may be her strongest turn yet, Maggie Gyllenhaal is brilliantly understated.

It has a few pacing issues and Garcia could've played his part in his sleep, but those two shortcomings notwithstanding, The Kindergarten Teacher earns an 8/10 grade from me.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #223: A Monster in Paris (2011).

 

It's 1910. Emile (Sebastien Desjours) is a shy film projectionist who loves cinema and especially his stunning colleague Maud (Ludivine Sagnier). He works with Raoul (Gad Elmaleh), a delivery driver and inventor on bad terms with Lucille (Vanessa Paradis), his childhood friend and now a cabaret singer whose aunt Carlotta (Julie Ferrier) wishes to marry off to local police commissioner and mayoral candidate Victor Maynott (Francois Cluzot). One evening Ralph brings Emile to the Paris Botanic Gardens to deliver something but in the process they stumble upon a closed greenhouse where Raoul accidentally awakens a peculiar monster and once it inevitably escapes, they elect to track it down. Now, once Lucille also becomes entangled in this fiasco, they realise the monster might be more harmless than it appears and so now they have to set out to retrieve it before it falls into the corrupt Maynott's hands.

This effort by French animator and director Bibo Bergeron, based loosely on Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera, is quite narratively thin, but what it lacks in plot originality it compensates for in energy, fun and visual beauty. It's appropriately loaded with action and visual effects and it's also willing to affectionately poke fun at our rather bumbling, impulsive heroes. The animation itself has an unusual quasi-stop-motion, quasi-CGI vibe which is nonetheless cohesive and it's populated with characters who are all voiced with charisma and collective chemistry. 

Again the narrative is sometimes cliched, and I would've liked a more prominent score, but while A Monster in Paris isn't an animation gem, it's nonetheless an enjoyable way to relax for 90 minutes.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #222: April and the Extraordinary World (2015).

 

The year is 1941, but you'd never suspect that because here, France is trapped in an alternate nineteenth century. In 1870, Emperor Napoleon III oversaw a scientific and military experiment to create an army of super-soldiers to wage war, but he then dies in an explosion staged to destroy the disappointing results. His successor then struck a deal to avert war with Prussia, securing the throne for the House of Bonaparte. Then, over the next six decades, many renowned scientists vanished and France's environment went to hell. During one ill-fated experiment then, young April barely escapes with her talking pet cat Darwin (the voice of Phillipe Katerine) after her parents are seemingly killed. Eleven more years after that, a now-adult April (the voice of Marion Cotillard) herself has become a scientist and with the help of Darwin and sympathetic criminal Julius (the voice of Marc-Andre Grondin), she sets out to finally discover her parents' fate.

April and the Extraordinary World is what a threesome between steampunk, a Marie Curie biopic and The Adventures of Tintin would create. As bizarre as that combination sounds, the result is absolutely beguiling. Directors Christian Desmares and Franck Enkinci, with co-writer Benjamin Legrand, seem to have had a fully in-sync meeting of the minds while concocting this most imaginatively original narrative, and Desmares and Enkinci (with their animators' help) unfold that narrative very enthusiastically while very lucidly working the technical aspects around it for a genuinely absorbing whole. The result is not particularly emotional but nor is it meant to be; this story is really more of a mystery than a drama, which nonetheless increases the film's uniqueness. However, its familial themes are still wisely kept at the forefront even while we're encouraged to follow the breadcrumbs April's fact-finding missing leaves for her and us.

Additionally, the visuals are dazzlingly detailed and rendered, Valentin Hadjadj provides a richly classical French score, it's crisply edited and the voice cast all evidently enjoyed themselves. April and the Extraordinary World took me along with its protagonist into that Extraordinary World.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #221: Look at Me (2018).

 

Lotfi (Nidhal Saadi) is a forty-something Tunisian immigrant in France, carving a living out as a small-time thug. He has a home appliance store and a stunning French girlfriend, but he can't run from his past when he learns his wife (Sawssen Maalej) has had a stroke back home. Now he reluctantly returns to Tunisia where he's forced to look after his severely autistic nine-year-old son Youssef (Idyrss Kharroubi), a non-verbally and occasionally violent child Lotfi abandoned when he was two. As Lotfi's wife slowly recovers and continues juggling his professional matters. Lotfi now has to strike a bond with the son he couldn't handle before.

This family drama, a Tunisian-French-Qatari co-production, truly shook me to the core, yet simultaneously enchanted me aesthetically. So much so, in fact, that it gave me an insight into how challenging I must have been for my parents as an ASD child (although I can objectively say I was much higher functioning than Youssef is) and as an extension of that insight, it even evoked specific memories of them (particularly my dad, obviously) reading to me and whatnot as a boy. I was legitimately that moved and mentally stimulated as I watched this film. Writer-director Nejib Belkadhi fleshes this potentially very manipulative narrative out with admirable patience and restraint, and I commend him for daring to depict autism and its effect on familial relationships in such a brutally frank but empathetic and objective manner.

And what great help he has from his cast in doing that, particularly the two leads. Saadi shrewdly peels the layers gradually off his initially easygoing but selfish character to reveal Lotfi's haunted and guilty interior, helping us to then understand why he abandoned his post seven years earlier; Youssef's meltdowns and eccentricities were simply too much for him and he still struggles to get around them. Saadi expresses all this love buried under deep confusion and frustration with enormous grace and confidence. And Youssef is as demanding a role as they come for child actors, but Kharroubi (who to my knowledge is neurotypical) matches him scene for scene, presenting a misunderstood child who clearly longs to express and defend himself verbally but can only do so physically. Together, they're dynamite.

Look at Me is occasionally a challenging watch, and obviously not a barrel of laughs. But it's unquestionably one of the best family dramas, and autism movies, I've ever seen. It will drain you, but I promise in a completely eye-opening, cathartic way.