A major computer crash has set this back
but here are notes on some new documentaries and dramas. Coming next my grading of screenings from the
Toronto film festival.
Honeyland (Macedonia
2019 https://honeyland.earth/)
This amazing piece of cinema verité
directed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov received three awards at
Sundance including the grand jury prize for world cinema documentary. The
central figure is a middle-aged woman Hatidze Muratova who carries on
traditional beekeeping practices while caring for her ailing elderly mother. She
sells her natural honey in the Macedonia capital of Skopje. But that way of
life is threatened by the encroachment of a nomadic family who also bring a
large herd of cattle. As Hatidze struggles to maintain the natural
balance the observant camera offers an astonishing witness to these encounters
and to her determination to carry on. A
Cold Case Hammarskjöld (Denmark/Norway.Sweden/Belgium
2019 https://www.facebook.com/ColdCaseHammarskjold )
Denmark’s Mads Brügger is an
arrestingly inventive documentarian who, Michael Moore style, inserts himself
into his films, but often adopting another persona. Among other awards he received a Sundance
directing award for this fascinating look into the suspicious circumstances surrounding
the death of Swedish UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. I saw this on September 18, 58 years to the
day since he was killed in a plane crash near Ndola in northern Rhodesia (now
Zambia) on September 18, 1961. In narrating his findings to several African
women transcribers, Brügger finds evidence that the crash was no accident and
that great powers wanted to be rid of the inconvenient Hammarskjöld. He also uncovers links to a shadowy South
African entity the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) and a
white supremacist plot to spread AIDS in Africa. Brügger’s dogged digging unearths
even more questions than it answers. A
Aquarela (UK/Germany/Denmark/US
2018 https://www.sonyclassics.com/aquarela/)
Russian documentarian Victor
Kossokovsky’s panoramas of ice, ocean, and other watery scenes offer some
wondrous cinematography aided by high frame-rate lensing. We begin on a
Siberian lake where vehicles are pulled from crashing through ice roads melting
weeks earlier than previous norms. Off
Greenland’s coast is the thunderous crack of massive icebergs calving and
images of the shapes of the bergs’ enormous mass below the surface. Sailing
vessels drift by, whereas on the high seas they are buffeted by enormous
waves. There are scenes of waterfalls,
of flooded landscapes, and what appears to be an underwater rescue. As powerful
as are these pictures, sometimes accompanied by a pounding or haunting score,
without any narration or identification of any locations there’s also no
narrative linking them. With our blue planet buffeted by accelerating climate
changes that seems a missed opportunity. B
Ad Astra (China/Brazil/US
2019 https://www.foxmovies.com/movies/ad-astra)
The Venice film festival secured the
premiere of this absorbing space epic (the title is Latin for “to the stars”)
directed by James Gray, an idiosyncratic filmmaker who is the subject of a
lengthy recent profile in the New Yorker.
At its centre is the testing of a son-father relationship. In an imagined
future of “hope and conflict” humans have colonized the moon (importing violent
conflicts to it) and are exploring the farther reaches of the solar
system. Brad Pitt plays the seemingly
unflappable astronaut Maj. Roy McBride whose vital signs and emotional state
are continuously monitored. His father
H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) was a famous astronaut who many years
earlier headed the “Lima project” to search for intelligent life and was presumed
lost in the vicinity of Neptune. In the
opening scenes we see Roy knocked from SpaceCom’s International Space Antennae as
earth is battered by lethal cosmic power surges that may be linked to the
project. Roy’s mission, via the moon and
a launch from an underground base on Mars, is to seek and eliminate the threat.
Some deadly lunar and space encounters later Roy goes rogue and comes face to
face with his father. As fantastical as
this scenario may appear, the human story gives it a compelling gravity. A-
The Goldfinch (US
2019 https://www.warnerbros.com/movies/goldfinch/)
Prominent actors, and a gala spot at the
Toronto film festival, cannot save this adaptation of the voluminous Pulitzer
prize-winning eponymous bestselling novel directed by John Crowley (Brooklyn). The
mother of a young boy Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley) is killed in a terrorist bombing
of a New York art museum. But Theo as
shocked survivor leaves the scene with the painting of a goldfinch by a 17th
century Dutch master. He comes into the
care of the wealthy family of Mrs. Babour (Nicole Kidman) and later becomes the
ward of an antiques dealer Hobie (Jeffrey Wright). When Theo’s dissolute father Larry, an
alcoholic gambler, (Luke Wilson) and a gal pal show up, Theo is taken off to
live in Las Vegas where he’s introduced to the drug scene by a delinquent Ukrainian
teen Boris (Finn Wolfhard). The painting,
thought lost, will get caught up in subsequent drug dealings. Back in New York
as a young man (now played blankly by Ansel Elgort) Theo reconnects with Boris
and increasingly agonizes over the events involved. But
after two and a half hours of melodramatic convolutions we may not care. C+
The Ground Beneath My Feet (Austria
2019 https://strandreleasing.com/films/ground-beneath-feet/)
In Austrian writer-director Marie
Kreutzer’s gripping drama, Lola (Valerie Pachner) is a fast-paced business
consultant who has the burden of being legal guardian to her older sister Conny
(Pia Herzegger) who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and has been
hospitalized after a suicide attempt.
Lola, part of a team that helps companies to “restructure” (usually
meaning downsizing workers), is also in a lesbian relationship with her
high-powered and driven boss Elise (Mavie Hörbiger). The respective strains take a mental and
emotional toll as Lola struggles to maintain a balance. B+
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