What to Do in Case of Fire

Times change, alas, and with the times, so change the people we know. That's inevitable, I guess. When we're kids, despite the problems caused by our overactive hormones and the depths of the blues when things go wrong, we have the greatest highs when we're doing what we enjoy. We enjoy most what we do with our good friends, and who thinks of the consequences of destructive acts at that age? In Gregory Schnitzler's "What To Do in Case of Fire?" ("Was tun, wenn brennet" in the more succinct German title) paced almost throughout its 101 minutes like a bullet train going from Tokyo to Kyoto four men and two women in various walks of life in Berlin get together after a fifteen-year absence, just like the folks in John Sayles's "Return of the Secaucus Seven" (which was about a weekend reunion of good friends who shared the 60s radical college life and have since gone in different directions). The difference is that while their coming together is a source of both ecstasy and fear, their meeting is a forced one, made necessary because they stand to be charged and arrested with a crime resulting from an action they performed ten years previously.
With the energy that made Tom Tykwer's 1998 German feature "Run Lola Run" a favorite of a larger audience than the usual art house crowd, director Schnitzler takes us to the Berlin of the current year with feverish flashbacks to that city in 1987. He opens with some clips of a home movie showing young anarchists fighting with the police, a scene reminiscent of the late 1960s in the United States when radicalized college students substituted street-fighting for panty-raids. While the Americans, in groups like Students for a Democratic Society, were presumably out to change the U.S. government, specifically to get us out of the Vietnam involvement, the German anarchists of the eighties were said to be interested in making this a better world but what comes across is that they were desperate just to survive at a time that the job situation was tight, they had no money, and they simply did not want to live the bourgeois lives of their parents. Time has a way of changing people's minds, though: as the expression goes, "When I was sixteen, my father knew nothing. I'm surprised at how much he's learned in the last ten years."
But not all the people of an anarchist bunch called Group 36 became embourgeoisfied. Tim (Til Schweiger), Hotte (Martin Feifel), Maik (Sebastian Bloomberg), Nele (Nadja Uhl), Terror (Matthias Matschke) and Flo (Doris Schretzmayer) were all anarchists during the Berlin eighties, living as squatters in abandoned buildings and being regularly pursued by police who wanted to evict them and perhaps send these squatters to work camps. A decade or so later, only the handsome and charismatic Tim and the now wheelchair-bound Hotte remain true to their beliefs, still living as squatters while evading attempts by their landlord to get them evicted. Their friends joined regular society; one as a public prosecutor, another as the prosperous owner of an ad agency, one woman as a single mother of two, another woman engaged to an upcoming yup. The routine of their lives changed when a bomb they planted in an abandoned mansion in 1987 exploded not at the time they planted it but fifteen years later (something like the lost nuclear weapon in "The Sum of All Fears") almost killing a real estate agent and a German undersecretary of state. Since there is no statute of limitations for attempted murder, the gang is pursued principally by a Javert-style, old-fashioned, determined cop, Manowksy (Klaus Kowitsch). The incriminating evidence? The amateur tape made by the anarchists as they planted the bomb now captured by the police and housed in the storage room of a fortress-like station for evidence. The goal of the newly united Group 36? To recover the film and destroy it.
The script, written by Stefan Dahnert and Anne Wild, is directed with such frenetic energy that director Schnitzler evokes the fury, the high spirits, the camaraderie of these anarchists for us in the audience. Schnitzler also succeeds in showing us what we have lost, even if we were not in the forefront of some political cause with our buddies years back. In return for our relative prosperity, we've lost our souls, this film appears to say. Laughter, genuine in youth's age, is now forced. Pleasure, such as that taken by Flo at her engagement party , is anything but spontaneous. We not only root for the gang of six to get away with their fifteen-year-old impulsive act: we root for Flo to throw over her bourgeois fianc‚ in favor of the virile Tim. We hope even that the bull of a cop, Manowsky who believes in the old-time rules of no press and zing-'em-with- warrants even if 350 such orders had to be ground out would be converted to the side of the anarchists.
German movies are no longer the heavy, humorless albeit wonderfully made--sagas of, say, a Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose "Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven" is also about exploitation and the impact of an industrialized society on the individual. Fassbinder's film is cynical, and the murder by a factory worker of the title character's husband is deadly serious. "What To Do in Case of Fire" is really marginal in its political statement, but more of an action-packed, funny, highly spirited buddy movie. What to do in case of fire? Let it burn, of course.

Tamara Drewe

It's fairly simple: Where there's peace and quiet, you need a fog-horn scandal. Where there's a social camaraderie, one needs moral gravity. Where there are secrets and lies, there has to be an epiphany, a breaking-point, most importantly, a conflict. Ewedown, an idyllic little English countryside village where writers retreat to seek inspiration, peace and quiet might seem like the perfect cup of coffee served with an unswilled dollop of cream, fresh enough for a little bit of chocolate sauce to turn it into a flavour pot. The sauce comes in the form of Tamara Drewe, a swell-looking urban beauty fresh from a very successful nosejob, who has come back to the house where she grew up, in order to try and sell it off. Apparently, the younger Tamara happened to be a shy village girl, conscious of her pug-nosed appearance, while still garnering some sympathizing love both from a childhood friend, Andy and an older, adulterer-extraordinaire, Nicholas, a famous suspense author in his own right who is now managing the writer's retreat along with his wife Beth (Tamsin Greig), a long-time sufferer of her husband's devious ways.

Into this little community, fits Glen McCreavy, an insecure american who is waiting for a breakthrough in his writing career, at a pretty late point in his life. Glen is accomodated as a guest in Nicholas' retreat, which in itself seems more than capable of providing enough insipiration to start writing.

So into this pastoral oasis of calm drops in our eponymous Miss Drewe, all urbanised and devoid of shyness, charged with sexual aura, poised to short-circuit any feeling of innocence in this village. To complicate things, there are two local school girls, Jodie and Casey, that hang around in the bus stop shelter. They are the eyes and the ears of the town. They know more for their young years than most of the older folks. Jodie and Casey will ultimately create such havoc in the lives of the older people, no one would suspect by looking at their innocent demeanor. Their sole aim lies in getting to meet (maybe even bed) the local rock band’s drummer, Ben Sergeant. And when Ben gets involved with Tamara in a passionate affair, he is unwittingly drawn into the village, igniting the hopes if the girls and setting forth a snowballing chain of events, which soon ends up with pretty dire consequences. The final scene is dramatic and violent and a rather rough justice is done – not all of the characters lives happily ever after. Indeed arguably none of them emerges unscathed from the story. The film is part romp, part morality tale and part mild social commentary. The story is an amoral one – certainly by the conventional mores that well-bred country folk might like to assert they follow. But such pomposity and hypocrisy is rather nicely pricked – just like Thomas Hardy once did with his slightly shocking tale of nineteenth century double standards.

Director Stephen Frears has been making interesting cinematic choices for over twenty years and is well versed in comedy, so is well at home setting the tone, flitting between frothy and bawdy, but there was more to the source material than that and thankfully Frears isn't afraid to explore some of these darker areas as well, bringing a more genuine sense of emotion in the process. While not quite as dark as the original story, there's enough here to give serious balance, and the result is a rather rewarding concoction that might leave you smiling or pondering, but should certainly leave you satisfied.
There was superb characterisation by a first rate cast in a subversive story that played with the stock characters that stories in English villages always have and made some real points about what is happening in these communities and about peoples lives and how selfish actions and jokey 'messing' can have big consequences in other people's lives.

There are some issues affecting rural England, like rich city flock buying houses and making villages too expensive to live in and boredom for young people: but it is hardly a political piece.

Blue Valentine

“Let’s do this. Let’s be a family.” They exchanged their vows with more than just their eyes when they promised themselves a life filled with love. Neither could have been more earnest and sincere than the other, nor could they be more emotionally bonded together at that moment than what they had shared until then. And this tender moment being a result of an abortion they decided to cancel abruptly, deciding to have the child, would make you touch your heart and say ‘how sweet’. Thus they declared that their mutual love had a lot more meaning to it than just sex and simple-minded affection: a future, and a very promising one both for themselves and their unborn child.
Dean (Gosling) and Cindy (Williams) present to you a contemporary modern-day couple from two significant points of their lives, set six years apart, with such a drastic contrast in their character arcs, you can’t help but wonder (and wait for an explanation as to) what could’ve happened in between. In one, we see them nearly middle-aged, with a beautiful little daughter, a quiet home in Pennsylvania, employed and settled well as a ‘perfect family’. In another, we see them six years younger, madly in love, playing with their newfound-bliss with the eagerness and happiness a child could show in a new toy. As the older couple, we slowly discover an alarming distance between the two, a gap that rapidly dawns into light, showing a vapid void that yawns right at the heart of the family, sucking them in, pulling all their efforts into making their family, just that: a family. They dote on their daughter and vent out pent-up emotions that are more about their insecurities, than reasons apparent, even at the slightest chance, like when they get at the opening of the film, as their family dog is found dead. Cutting back across the years, they’ve just met in an old-age home. He’s a laborer in a packing company, and she’s still a student. They fall in love as quickly and as casually as the aged people in the old-age home wither and die. And very soon, we see that they’re quite perfect for each other. She loves his goofy ways, his romantic witticism, and his grand gestures of love. He is in love, simply struck by her beauty, and a staunch romantic, swearing by his love-at-first-sight theory. The two disproportionate parallels are somehow brought into greater clarity when we realize that there really could be no defining point when a relationship could turn for the worse. Little things that make you find a balance within a family might never really be what your partner would have wanted in a marriage at all. They might be as trivial as say.. not putting on a seat-belt when your partner insists, or when talking about a former boyfriend that you met in a liquor store after years, your goofy attitude continuing Into the realms of your parenthood, why even the way you asses your self-worth could make you appear different in the eyes of the person you had loved. In effect, you as a viewer end up filling in the details of the marriage that isn’t apparent, with reminisces of your own life. There’s a difference between considering marriage as the purpose of your life, and viewing it as a passing phase. You can sketch the perfect circle only with a compass-hole in the middle. Dean expected his marriage to be the circle, an end. Cindy on the other hand believed more in the hole that enables the drawing, a means to the end.
They say marriage is not exactly easy, while at the same time bringing in the one factor that would complete your life: companionship. Judging by what the younger Dean and Cindy thought of each other, you could lay down their thoughts, in poetry on a Valentine’s Day I Love You card, except that as an audience for this film, you’d be surprised to see them lost in each other, blinded by puppy-love, before you inter-cut to the future, or from a different perspective, the “future” inter-cutting to the present. Rather than view the two extremes of a relationship from a conjugal point-of-view, trying to link the two, I’d like to see them both as hypotheses of one another. Everything that we see, transpiring between the older couple, in beautiful detail, has an inverse effect on what they share, while they are six years younger. If either one of the timelines could be construed as a ‘what could happen’, or a ‘what could’ve happened’ scenario, then Blue Valentine could probably be an easier film to watch, than what the director wants it to be. I’m not demeaning what he had in mind, but from what I can infer, Derek Cianfrance himself is uncertain about what could’ve transpired between his two brilliantly crafted characters.
With a soundtrack that tugs at your tear-glands, and subliminally beautiful cinematography (even the kinky-“future” honeymoon suite looks fascinatingly imposing and real), Cianfrance brings out the best acting talents that 2010 had to offer. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are both adoringly quirky, while at the same time, puzzlingly detached in beautifully edited time-spans, interwoven tightly, yet not confusingly. It’s easy to make your actors swap between ages 24 and 84, while it’s not that simple when you need to show the difference between 24 and 34. Both these leads portray such stark contrasts in mental maturity, which is impossible to create with special effects and makeup. And to think that half the dialogues in this film were a result of spontaneous improvisation by the actors themselves could not be a surprise, considering the amount of work put in by the director, in preparing his carefully chosen actors for their roles in the script, passing through five dozen drafts and well over twelve years.
To think that this film would make you more wary of relationships is an understatement, yet still an exaggeration. It’s your point-of-view that matters in the end, giving you a biased outlook if you’re a generally sexist person, making you sympathize and take sides with the characters; knowingly acknowledge emotional conflicts and validate them with empathy if you’re in a committed relationship; as someone ‘in search of love’, make you a more wiser human being who has witnessed the worst part of a doomed marriage, or as it affected me, have your heart ripped out and broken into pieces.

By Fazil, for Passionforcinema.com
To read the original article, click here

Looking For Eric

 How could football philosophy morph itself into alleviating the travails of an ageing postman's life, and influence him to asses and take control of a seriously messed-up household and set straight things for once and for good in his life? The answer, to Eric Bishop lies only in one name: Eric Cantona. The king of Manchester football. Eric, the champion from France who infused pride into the most famous football team in the world. Football and relationships work alike, in Cantona's line of vision. And when it does, even a well of despair could sound like fun.

I'm neither an avid follower of league football, nor am I familiar with this football legend known fanatically as simply "Eric". But the innumerable scenes of spectacular goals (and when I say spectacular, I mean REALLY spectacular) certainly would remove all doubts that this simple, honest man is one of football’s greatest legends. Eric Cantona acts himself in the movie with the same gust, passion and arrogance he spews on field while he is at his footballing best.

Eric, our non-footballing protagonist (Steve Evets) is an emotionally withdrawn person. He is a local post-man in Manchester, living with his rebellious step-sons who prefer to remain ensconced in their own, crime-filled, drugged out world. They bring home stuff nicked from somewhere, probably even confiscated by the local crime-boss. Their indifferent attitude towards Eric leave him emotionally dead and withdrawn, so much that even his friends in the post-office despair at his eroded nature, and try various methods to bring some humor into his life. One of them is a hilarious self-hypnosis session they hold when Eric invites them home. He still loves Lily, a beautiful woman he left thirty years ago, as soon as he found that he was a father, when his own father drove him crazy with fear, making him doubt his own parental responsibilities. He prefers to be withdrawn from his wife, even if she's willing for forgive and forget what he's done, and behave like matured people, at least for the sake of their daughter and granddaughter. How is he going to piece all of this together and turn all of this into bringing some happiness into his life?

The answer appears to him one evening as he is smoking weed that he nicks from under the floorboards of his son's bedroom. Eric Cantona comes into his life, as a filament of his imagination. They talk and talk, talk leads to more talk.. And slowly, Eric becomes his life-coach. It might sound contrived that a person can advise himself through something that he himself hallucinates, but what Ken Loach implies here is its not Eric's philosophy which brings him that rush of blood to the head. It's the raw spirit of football which works wonders. Football is the one thing that people passionately hold onto, during these times of political indifferences and cultural difference-of-opinions. For a film about a legendary and iconic footballer it doesn't ram football down the throats of the non-fans. What the film does do is bring up just how important football is for many people, the way it can unite and connect them in a way that has otherwise disappeared in Britain.

Ken Loach brings to you another little gem from the absurdities of the ordinary. He was rewarded with his ninth Golden Palm nomination during the Cannes Film Festival, 2009

Lantana

 "Lantana" does not embody a story like most movies; it isn't about anything in particular. It's a movie about characters. Not larger-than-life heroes, but characters who succumb to temptation, cheat on their wives, doubt their spouses, make mistakes and suffer consequences. In other words, "Lantana" is about real people. Normal, imperfect people like all of us. Not that everyone behaves like the characters here, but few films capture transgression with such compassion and sympathy.
Jane (Rachel Blake) is the 'separated' adulterer and probably the stupidest character of this ensemble cast. For someone as middle aged as she is, she's almost embarrassingly inexperienced about men (who knows why she's 'separated'). She has the "one-night-stand that happened twice" with the married man because she appears to think that the man's wife is to blame.
Hahahahahaha! Unfortunately she also doesn't know how to keep female friends-certainly not in her current glow of "anything is possible" (yep, gross stupidity is very possible for her). The second powerhouse actor of Lantana (2001) is the fabulous Kerry Armstrong as Leon's wife Sonja. She still burns with the desire to be a passionate, capable, sexy wife, who is also raising two boys while holding down a job and trying to inject sensuality and fun back into her morose, resentful, uncommunicative, robotic (depressed) husband. She even suspects, as most wives sense, that he is having an affair, just from the abnormal way he reacts to everything. So she cracks open her emotional hope chest to a psychiatrist, Dr Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey).
To our surprise, the psychiatrist herself is on shaky ground. (Never envy anyone else. Chances are, they have their own insoluble problems, no matter who they are. Your problems are yours to keep, they are your own badges of courage. Talking them through is probably the only education or improvement we can hope for: learn from others -YES. Covet their lives? -NO.)
Dr Somers also, for some reason, chooses to waste her entirely non-evident education quizzing her husband about his very sensible attitude to the amount of sex they now have. OK, so they have drawn apart because of their differing personal reactions to the death of their teenage daughter-that much is at least believable. But how can a psychiatrist be so clearly at stage 0 with her own husband? If anything, married people know too much and import too much peripheral baggage with every nuance, every tilt of the head, every tone of voice, etc. They don't have almost teenage conversations like "Do you ever worry that we don't make love very often?" "-No. I mean I don't think about it that much." "Why not?"(in a tone of complete inability to imagine how that might be). "-I love you. Whether we make love three times a week or once a month doesn't really change that ... is this a test?" "No! I was just wondering what you were thinking..." Really? Even after he gave you the answer, you were still only just "wondering"? Pfft, and this woman is supposed to be a shrink! Do any married women out there think this was an intelligent conversation befitting ANY married couple, let alone when one of them is a psychiatrist?!?!
I gotta believe that this conversation really belonged to the other married couple, Paula (Daniela Farinacci) & Nik (Vince "the curls get the girls" Colosimo, from The Wog Boy (1999)), who are at least suitably young.
The psychiatrist and her husband John (Geoffrey Rush) recover their married maturity in the restaurant and in front of the bookshop window that displays her book about Eleanor, their deceased daughter. I don't even mind that they fight the following morning, after having some more of that much-sought-after sex (see? It wasn't worth it. That's called 'perfunctory'), and that their pall of disenchantment/alienation is not lifted. She does seem to be losing her grip in other ways. The ease with which she lets her gay adulterous patient rattle her confidence in herself is very indicative of her mental desperation. Of course her husband was correct that she should refer that pesky patient on, but she stupidly persists because she resents his dismissive tone, and because she paranoiacally imagines the gay patient to be having an affair with her own husband(!!), when all he is is just an immature, arrogant, shallow, offensive bastard. Patrick Phelan, Mr "sex unencumbered by need" (Peter Phelps), just plays her because he senses that she disapproves of his ethics (not his gayness), which, being shallow and arrogant, he doesn't want to give up. Patrick, mate, BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR. YOU MAY GET IT.
Claudia (Leah Purcell, Leon's female cop partner) is the most together person (because her life remains fairly uncomplicated'-anyone see a lesson in that?). She gives Leon the best advice of his life. It comes as a rhetorical question: "Why are you trying so hard to screw; your life up? You don't know how lucky you are to have the marriage you've got. And you're whizzing all over it." Too true.
What is rewarding is that each and every story arc gets an insightful resolution. Ironically, because of the murder mystery, life goes on. Almost every adult character gets a revelation of their likely future, to show some lessons to the audience. Patrick Phelan gets to suffer in his jocks (quoting Michael Caton from The Castle (1997) here). I don't mind "blowing" the ending to his arc: he gets to stare in envy in the rain at some "ENcumbered need" (there is no such thing as truly unencumbered sex, unless you are non compos mentis-zonked out of your skull at the time; and even then it's doubtful).
Just remember what John confessed, when you see Leon and Sonja dancing, that after you have been caught out in an affair, you are never quite trusted again. Something DOES get broken (watch Sonja's face). It's astonishing to me that people keep walking blindly into that. For what? "Sex unencumbered by need", perhaps? Well, how many affairs turn out that way?