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The Price of Sex - Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2012

The Price of Sex

Directed by: Mimi Chakarova

2011

A black screen. An exchange of voices. “What was the first word of English you learnt?” “It was: How much?”. This is how The Price of Sex begins, with a simple, pragmatic question which already unveils the horror of sex trafficking.

Director Mimi Chakarova starts the documentary on a personal note. We see videos from her childhood, in a small, yet lively village in Bulgaria: chickens and fields, small houses and hay wagons. Opulence is not present, but an active, tight community is portrayed. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, local industries closed and we learn that the village plunged into a limbo of unemployment and despair. The viewer finds himself in front of a crossroad. Down one path there is Chakarova’s own story: her family flight to America and her successful career as a photojournalist. Down the other, there is the story the documentary is going to tell, the terrible fate which many girls of Chakarova’s generation endured, in their own country, during the post-Soviet era: sex trafficking and deportation.

The Price of Sex is the outcome of Chakarova’s seven-years-long persistent reporting and stubborn investigation, combining footage and interviews with photojournalism. Departing from the stories of four Eastern European women, who survived and escaped their trafficking, the documentary digs into the global, undercover network of sex trafficking. What Chakarova builds is a real geography of sex trafficking. Following the women’s stories, she retraces their steps exposing the realities of the countries they left, namely Moldavia and Transnistria, and those of the places they were sold to as prostitutes: Dubai and Istanbul.

Instead of choosing shock as a tactic, the documentary exposes the case in historical, economic and global terms, appealing to the brains, rather than to the stomachs of its audience. What is exposed is the hopeless future many ex-Soviet countries were left to after 1989. At the origins of sex trafficking in Eastern Europe there is a fierce struggle for existence, in which people are not afraid to sell their neighbour in order to survive, bribed family are happy to stop asking questions, trafficked women are willing to traffic other women in order to halve their working hours.

The Price of Sex is not only worth praising for the alarming violation of human rights it unveils, it is also a remarkable piece of daring journalism. It is not without a certain suspense that we see Chakarova filming undercover, in a seedy nightclub in the red light district in Istanbul, dressed as a prostitute. And it is with a certain tension that we watch her interviewing a pimp and two policemen, regular clients to brothels. It is at this point that the two departing roads of the beginning of the documentary reunite again. While so many women have been broken, taken advantage of and humiliated, it is now a woman – who could have potentially shared the same fate – to confront the men who control the trafficking, to expose and put under accusation a system which is still flourishing.

One could perhaps blame the documentary for not including enough material about the policies or strategies which are or could be adopted by the international community in order to fight sex trafficking. Neither the question of legal vs. illegal prostitution is touched upon. Both aspects, however, are missing for a good reason. The Price of Sex chose to maintain just the right distance from both the personal and the political, so that both are addressed, but neither prevails. The cues of reflections are all there, it is our responsibility as citizens of an international community to choose our political stand on the question.

After seeing The Price of Sex, certain names of places will never sound the same. Prostitution itself will never look the same: behind what is often conceived as an ambiguous matter of morality, is unveiled a crude, unequivocal violation of human rights.

fiamma

For further details about the program of Human Rights Watch Film Festival click here.

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Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

12:51 PM | Labels: Drama

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Written by Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Ercan Kesal

with Muhammet Uzuner, Taner Birsel, Firat Tanis

2011

Keeping in mind that the title is just a translation, I suppressed my natural geeky impulse to assume this would be a latter-day tribute to Sergio Leone. I couldn’t help coming away thinking, however, that this hard-edged exercise in bathos bore far more comparison to those films than, say, Robert Rodriguez’s conscious effort to hitch a ride on their epic connotation. Leone used ‘The West’ and ‘America’ as complete, mythical entities peopled with their own archetypes and structured around their own meta-narratives. This is mirrored here in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s treatment of Anatolia, the region's socio-economic concerns, politics, and folklore running through it from start to finish. The landscape itself, chilly and dead, with the claustrophobic isolation that comes from the horizon only ever getting as far as the next hill, is a character unto itself, visually and thematically the place from which everything emerges. “Once upon a time” is no reference to any specific set of films, but one to storytelling in general: the scenario is saturated in tales being told, gossip being spread, and lies being spun.

After an inconclusive opening scene, in which we see rather than hear an anecdote, we are taken into a single long night and early morning to watch the unfolding of a police search, the final stage of a murder investigation. The two suspects, brothers, one a savage-looking villain, the other with the mind of a child, have apparently come to a mitigating deal with the police to reveal where they hid the body, a task complicated by an apparent inability to remember exactly where this was. Appearances of all sorts can be deceptive, as is proved throughout, and we are led to doubt the official circumstances of the crime. The film is full of stories, but the one driving events is conspicuously incomplete; a furtive mystery surrounds what actually happened on the night of the murder, our suspicions piqued but never confirmed via second-hand versions and minor incident. It may seem reductive to say a piece such as this, all dialogue and no action, is about procrastination, but that is what we see here: procrastination and deceit. The character of the doctor, who we at first take to be the film’s moral compass, initially seems to shine a light of common sense and honesty through the murk. You’ll have to make up your own mind at the end as to how successful he is.

The visual sense of the film is astonishing, if perhaps a little overworked for some tastes. The otherworldly appearance of the first two thirds, a nighttime landscape lit with headlights and lamp-glow, is as easy to gaze at as the screenplay is challenging, and works to create a semi-surreal dream that contrasts sharply with the insomniac daylight which events meander into. At the same time, its appearance sits oddly with the ultra-realist elements, and will either increase the movie's emotional impact or make for a uniquely superficial experience, depending on how willing you are to work for your entertainment. At 157 minutes, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia would be long if something that could be even charitably called a plot occurred, and it’s enigmatic to what many would call a fault; be prepared to only love it for its looks unless you’re ready to engage with some quite weighty themes on a purely subtextual level. Having said this, there’s something daring in the film’s introversion and the lack of concession to audience attention span, and if you’re ready to accept it for what it is you should find it a compelling and moving experience. An existential morality tale sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it’s hard not to apply it to the forlorn brutality we see here, where right and wrong seem to exist, and are cared for, but ultimately get washed over by the oppressive monotone of procedure, and the random cruelty of chance. The culmination of the night’s events is a small gesture of solidarity against that cruelty, but this is subsequently coloured by the reminder in the final image that solidarity has a lot in common with implication, and the concurrent suggestion of corruption both professional and spiritual. It ends visually before it does aurally, our final impression being the sounds of children playing mixed with the drip and clunk of an autopsy.
Tom

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Beloved - Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2012

7:51 AM | Labels: Comedy-Drama

Beloved

Directed by: Christophe Honoré

With: Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni, Ludivine Sagnier and Louis Garrel.

2012

Beloved is a strange exercise of lightness in with which the distractively tragic end is at odds.

The film begins with a bubbly, kaleidoscopic sequence at Roger Vivier’s in Paris. Shoes, high-heels and feminine feet seem already to announce – Freud is speaking – that this is going to be a movie about seduction and desire. And desire is what opens the plot. We see Madeleine (Ludivine Sagnier), at the end of her work day at Roger Vivier’s, stealing a pair of red shoes and being mistaken by a passerby for a prostitute. Positively surprised by the lucrative outcome of such a mistake, we see her turning the misunderstanding into a conscious choice, until she is approached one day by Jaromil (Radivoje Bukvic), a handsome young Czech doctor. Over the years – the plot begins in the 1960s and ends in the late 1990s – and across countries – Paris, Prague and London – we follow the love vicissitudes of Madeleine and Vera, her daughter. While Madeleine's second marriage doesn’t prevent her from reviving her passion and affair with Jaromil, Vera's (Chiara Mastroianni) sudden falling in love with Henderson (Paul Schneider) frustrates the faithful love her friend/lover Clement (Louis Garrel) is ready to offer her.

The result is a complex tableau which seems to decline, in all its scenes, Aragon’s verse “Il n’y a pas d’amour heureux” (There is no happy love). Even though the quick and breezy dialogues, together with Madeleine’s frivolous and coquettish character, maintain in the plot a certain humour and brio, in these story everyone loses, and even worse, everyone loses the person he/she loves. While for the adults – Madeleine and Jaromil – love always had the guise (or illusion?) of a game and freedom, for the young love is a grim destiny: Vera falls in love with Henderson who is gay, Clement loves Vera without being reciprocated, Henderson’s price to pay is HIV.

The songs, which punctuate the story, maintain the viewer always at a certain distance from the facts depicted, not allowing him to to dive too deeply into the tragic turn of events. They are also well tuned in with the nonchalance of certain scenes one could only hope were so ‘easy’ and unproblematic in real life. We see, for instance, Vera as a young woman, walking in the room and sitting on the bed where Madeleine, now sixty-something, is naked in bed with Jaromil, as if they were in a living room sipping tea (It is true that Catherine Deneuve – interpreting Madeleine – and Milos Forman – interpreting Jaromil – still form a glamorous pair on screen, but wonders if things would be really so natural in real life…). Later on we see Henderson’s boyfriend, tenderly looking at Henderson and Vera making love…

The most successful thing in the movie is probably the cast. Apart from the two legendary names of Catherine Deneuve and Milos Forman, Beloved reunites some very well known faces from a younger generation of French actors. The two screen couples form in their characters each other's alter egos. While Ludivine Sagnier and Radivoje Bukvic form a couple driven by coquetry, desire and lively frivolity, Chiara Mastroianni and Louis Garrel personify a duo full of bitter self-irony, who feel it has lost even before trying. Across the plot lapses of time and space this remarkably dynamic group of actors works in perfect synchrony.

The last image of the film brought me back to its beginnings, letting me evaluate the covered distance… it might well be that of Beloved, what will stay in my head for longer, is its songs, and not the story.

fiamma

For further details about Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2012 click here.

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The Kid With A Bike

10:03 AM | Labels: Drama

The Kid With A Bike

Directed by: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

With: Cécile De France, Thomas Doret and Jérémie Renier

2012

For most of the movie your heart will race as fast as the kid on his bike.

The Kid With A Bike is about an abandonment and about an encounter. The movie opens with Cyril’s breathless quest to find his dad and his bike. He cannot surrender to the fact that his dad cut all contacts with him and left him at a children’s home. His stubborn escape provokes his chance encounter with Samantha, who will eventually host him at weekends and help him track down his father. Speeding on his bike, Cyril goes from the bitter deception of his father’s rejection, to the alluring hope of being accepted by a local gangster to the final embrace of Samntha’s love and affection.

As expressed by the Directors Dardenne brothers, The Kid With A Bike is a modern, urban fairy tale in which an illusion is lost, pain is experienced and a final redemption is offered. Just as fairy tales play with the child’s emotions and fears, The Kid With A Bike successfully recreates the psychological world of a child: emotions are volatile, but overwhelming; good and evil are easily mistaken; parental love is as much desired as it is incomprehensible.

Even the bike is more than a simple attribute. It becomes the embodiment of Cyril’s temperament: restlessly searching, his desire for his dad endlessly spinning inside him. The Dardenne brothers rightly avoided pity and sentimentalism depicting a boy who is fiercely determined to find the love he needs. The bike is what allows Cyril to start his quest in town to find his dad, it is also what leads him to the gangster’s shed and finally it is how we see him spending time with Samantha on a sunny outing. In the last scene, it is on his bike that Cyril leaves the big screen...

The duo De France-Doret is a real electric match. They managed to give to their characters a subdued intensity which place them as equals in their relationship. What the pair brings to the front is the loyalty of friendship and the human respect which is at the base of this special adult/child relationship, in which both are in need for each other, but neither is dependent.

The Kid With A Bike is acutely directed. Although refusing any overtly dramatic approach, each scene pulses with emotions and tensions from its very inside. Two scenes, in particular, powerfully detach themselves from the rest of the movie for their intensity and gripping simplicity. The first one is the encounter scene between Cyril and Samantha: there could have not been a more human, unexpected and yet primordial image. The second is when Cyril plays with the water, while he waits for Samantha at the hair salon. At first sight a simple childish game, the running water which the child’s fingers try in vain to catch visually transcends the child’s feeling of powerlessness in front of the loss of his father.

The Kid With A Bike won’t let you rest, it will bring you back to the visceral, absolute emotions of childhood.

fiamma

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Trishna

6:17 PM | Labels: Drama

Trishna

Directed by: Michael Winterbottom

With: Freida Pinto, Riz Ahmed and Roshan Seth

2012

Trishna transports you in

India

with its colours, dresses, lights and landscapes. Whether it is an authentic India, though, is open to discussion…

Based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Trishna tells the story of a young girl who, from a rural village in Rajasthan, is offered a job in Jaipur by Jay, the son of a rich hotel owner, who falls in love with her. The couple have an affair, but Trishna, pushed by the strict moral laws of rural Rajasthan, is obliged to runaway and to abort the child she is inadvertantly carrying. Tracked down by Jay, she eventually agrees to move with him to Bombay, where the couple live a ‘modern’, carefree urban love story. When Jay is forced to come to Rajasthan, to take over his dad’s business, however, the couple’s fragile equilibrium brakes and the romantic adventure suddenly turns into exploitation, leading the characters towards tragedy.

By adapting a 19^th century Western moral novel to a fast changing society such as India’s, with a different religion, different social system and different conception of love, Michael Winterbottom embraced a challenge, if not a risk. The movie does little or nothing in order to justify the choice. One might wonder if the only purpose of the plot is that of adapting the novel to a new scenario. Deprived from any real insight into the moral laws of modern India, the viewer can’t but wonder if such a story would be possible at all there.

This ambiguous west-east relationship is also amplified by the fact that in the movie Jay is in reality a western character. He grew up in England, he does not speak Hindi, his tastes and habits are not far from those of a Londoner. Trishna, on the other hand, comes from rural India. Being astonishingly beautiful and the elder working daughter in a poor and numerous family, she represents India in all its potential and mysterious charm. What could have developed into a great encounter by two equally powerful, although different, conceptions of love deflated into a weird and superficial domination relationship between man and woman, rich and poor and, one is tempted to say, West and East.

But what probably remains most inhibiting for the plot to take heights, is Trishna herself. She has no depth: she says yes to everything she is proposed and she never speaks her mind. We will never know how she lives and understands her relationship with Jay, so much that her final gesture seems as much unexpected as inconsequential, taking away from the tragic end any moral depth or bitter lesson.

Through its decadent palaces, beautiful draperies and wonderful landscapes Trishna did bring me back to Rajasthan. Yet, it did not open my eyes to an Indian, authentic scenario, but only doubled my western outlook on it.

fiamma

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Michael

11:42 AM | Labels: Drama, Thriller

Michael

Directed by Markus Schleinzer
Written by Markus Schleinzer

with Michael Fuith, David Rauchenberger, Ursula Strauss

2011

Quietly unpredictable, and too restrained to be shocking, this Austrian drama plays its horrific scenario so deadpan it almost emerges as a black comedy. Reminiscent of more than one famous case of child abuse, Michael lays out a lifestyle of secrets and deception in the most clinical and emotionless way, and leaves you feeling dazed from tension. Played with a weird simmering dorkiness by Fuith, the outwardly dull bachelor Michael is in fact holding a young boy prisoner in the cellar of his home. The worst details of this existence are deliberately kept out of sight in favour of the emotional aspects of their home life, and the face Michael presents to the outside world. Efficient but nearly mute in his job at an insurance company, he only really communicates with his captive, whom he alternately plays with, cares for, and abuses.

The unswerving steadiness with which director Markus Schleinzer films each scene is well-judged; discomforting and addictive in equal measure, entirely because of its laconic nature. Meanwhile some long takes are so perfectly realised you can’t help but smile. This is cinema based on the visuals rather than the script; dialogue is kept simply a frame to arrange the actors, who are all utterly convincing even though most of the roles are miniscule. Apart from Michael the only character that isn’t an outside threat is his ten-year-old victim, but the paedophile compels despite giving almost nothing away as a person. He’s expressionless for at least ninety percent of the film, although we see snatches of a psychopathic sense of humour, amongst other things, in his relationship with the boy.

It’s only fair to say that Michaelbenefits a lot from its subject matter, and it’s also important to remember that the scenario is not an entirely fictional one. The truth is that as well produced as the movie is, the fact it fascinates has a lot to do with its real-life counterparts humming around the back of your mind as you watch. But this can’t detract from the thought the filmmakers put into presenting the man’s daily life, and the skill with which they exploit your prior knowledge. The last section is a masterpiece of dramatic irony, while the final blow is as under control as everything else: not exactly satisfying, but it’s difficult to say what else you need to see.

This film is provocative in the best way possible. Not once does it treat its dark subject matter flippantly, but at the same time the sheer black awkwardness of the situations Michael finds himself in, as if you are being dared to feel sorry for him, produces points where all you can do is find it funny. Maybe you think this inappropriate, but personally I feel the exact opposite: a film dealing with something like this needs to remember it’s a film, and needs to do more than mimic real-life horrors hoping to feed off people’s natural disgust. Humour, however black, is a way of maintaining this distance, and if I hadn’t wanted to laugh at points I honestly wouldn’t think this film was as good. As it is, if I wasn’t gritting my teeth, I was grinning.

Tom

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Patience (After Sebald)

5:37 AM | Labels: Documentary

Patience (After Sebald)

Directed by: Grant Gee

(2012)

Patience (After Sebald) made me curious enough to read the book, but I would not watch the documentary again.

The documentary starts with one of the most peculiar sequences I’ve ever seen on a big screen: a giant, moving Google Earth map. Patience (After Sebald) focuses on writer W.G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn. The book relates to a series of walks the author took in Suffolk, East Anglia. It recounts his encounters, the history of the places he went through and some historical and literary digressions. The documentary partly follows the steps of the walk, filming and tracing down the places Sebald walked through. It also, however, introduces Sebald’s friends, critics, scholars and admirers, building up - to a certain extent - a biographical and literary context to the novel.

The most striking feature of the documentary is its surprising, inventive and quite home-made editing. Images dissolve into one another, pages of the book are juxtaposed to images of landscapes, sometimes two images are superimposed one to the other, a new image opens in a widow on top of the other. I guess that to an audience familiar with the book this kind of freestyle editing might be of resonance with Sebald’s way of writing. To an audience less familiar with the book and author, however, this jumbled editing remains confusing. On this regard, the documentary would have benefitted from a clearer, progressive exposure of the book and context and a less experimental approach.

That said, Patience (After Sebald) does touch on certain aspects of the book that make you want to read The Rings of Saturn. In particular, the fact that the book as been interpreted as an oblique response to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The idea that places and events can transform into signs which respond or provide cues to how to think of modern days is also of interest. Finally, the trope the book exploits of the walk, as a melancholic activity in a world lacking tangible meaning, acquires a significantly nostalgic taste, reflecting on a way of travelling which we somehow lost.

You might need to have some patience to watch Grant Gee’s documentary. But you will also be introduced to an enticing work of literature, as experimental as the feature is.

fiamma

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If Not Us, Who?

2:59 AM | Labels: Biography-Drama

If Not Us, Who?

Directed by Andres Veiel

Written by Andres Veiel and Gerd Koenen

with August Diehl, Lena Lauzemis, Alexander Fehling

2011

The cultural trauma of Nazism and the Second World War has been repeatedly articulated in German cinema for decades. Andres Veiel’s debut feature is preoccupied with a generation striving to define itself in the wake of its immediate past, a context that frames a doomed, abusive romance between its two protagonists.

To start with, I have to say that in order to fully ‘get’ this film, you need to be better versed in German literature than I am, or at least have a better general knowledge of the whole 1968 thing. The leading character, Bernward Vesper (August Diehl), is the real-life author of a generation-defining book in German called The Journey, a book that I’d never heard of. Just to show I don’t consider my knowledge of literature to be definitive, I checked Wikipedia and neither the book nor Vesper himself have an English page to themselves (though they do in German – see, I’m thorough) and, sorry to be so shallow, but that’s a fairly decent acid test of public awareness. There is also frequent discussion of various German authors; many of whom I actually recognised, but who will mean a lot more in that country’s own complicated past than I can really relate to.

Having said that, my ignorance of German culture didn’t spoil the film for me, because all the literary dissemination is solidly grounded in the young characters’ attempts at coming to terms with the Germany of their parents’ generation. Bernward’s father, Will Vesper (who does have an English-language Wikipedia page), was also an author, and one responsible for helping to create the twentieth-century blood myths that Hitler’s Aryan ideal depended on. During the film’s first half we see Bernward attempting to fulfill his father’s last wish and have his work republished. This attempt at revisionism is soon abandoned as hopeless, and the younger Vesper’s desire to establish a new tradition for the postwar years takes over. The film is filled with people trying to create a better world around them, through producing their own reality, or through editing the past’s.

Although it revolves around romance, the film is by no means romantic in outlook; it is to its credit that none of the characters are idealised or placed on a pedestal as ‘the voice of a generation’ or any such stuff. At best they’re sympathetic, but mainly just confused or misguided. The Red Army Faction, of which one of the main characters, Gudrun Ensslin (Lena Lauzemis), was a founding member, are depicted as rather foolish, elitist, and given to spouting glib sound bites as opposed to any solid political debate. Veiel gives the one note of quiet heroism to a prison warden who accepts her small place in society and merely tries to improve things within her reach.

This is an intelligent film, but if you’re not familiar already I’d recommend reading a bit about Vesper and the Baader-Meinhof Group before you see it, as I’m sure you’d get far more out of it. I got a bit bored towards the end because I didn’t feel it was really taking me anywhere, and that I was just watching lives fall apart – it might have been different if I’d understood we were waiting on Vesper’s magnum opus. I guess my experience was what watching Nowhere Boy would be like if you didn’t know John Lennon formed The Beatles.

Tom

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The Price of Sex - Human Rights Watch Film Festival 2012

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Beloved - Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2012

The Kid With A Bike

Trishna

Michael

Patience (After Sebald)

If Not Us, Who?