2018 PSIFF – Day Five
“Thelma” from Norway – Shy Thelma leaves her religious family in a small town on the west coast of Norway to attend university in Oslo. Thelma’s attraction to an alluring female student develops simultaneously with mysterious seizures—symptoms of an inexplicable, often dangerous, supernatural ability Thelma taps into subject matter that will have a very familiar ring with horror fans, zeroing in on an intense, sensitive young girl from a fundamentalist religious background, who gradually recognizes that she is both blessed and cursed with awesome telekinetic powers. At times a tad too subtle, “Thelma” is nonetheless an unnervingly effective slow-burn, and those with the patience for Trier’s patient accumulation of detail will find it pays off in unexpected ways.Nonetheless, “Thelma” leaves you with plenty to chew on. The yin-yang interplay between Thelma and Anja early in their relationship suggests that under less complicated circumstances they would make a perfect couple, and the more perfect for each other they seem, the more sinister the film’s later revelations become.
Wajib – A charming an
d intimate roadmovie about community, Palestinian (Christian) identity, and what connects us to home. Wajib stars real-life father and son Mohammad and Saleh Bakri as family members with vastly differing viewpoints. An urban road movie set and shot among the Arab community in Nazareth, Wajib (“duty”) is a nicely low-key comedy-drama of fangled family and community ties from Palestinian writer-director Annemarie Jacir. Built foursquare around the charm and skill of co-leads Mohammad and Saleh Bakri, father and son onscreen and off. We spend most of the film at the wheel of a well-worn Volvo estate car as grouchy, sixty something teacher Abu. Accompanied by his son Abu Shadi, an architect who lives in Italy, Abu drives around the streets of Nazareth following the local tradition of hand-delivering invitations to the imminent wedding of his daughter Umal (Maria Zreik).
This simple setup provides the framework for an episodic tour of the area as father and son visit an array of relatives and friends, reaffirming long-standing bonds of family and community along the way. There are various frictions now and then, and one climactic dad-son blow-up, but nothing too drastic — indeed, the biggest drama unfolds offscreen. This relates to uncertainties about never-seen Abu’s ex-wife, now a resident in the U.S., and whether the frail health of her current husband will allow her to travel for her daughter’s big day. The shock waves of her “scandalous” departure from the family and the area some years before, we observe, continue to reverberate among those left behind.
A large gallery of supporting players have relatively fleeting screen time in a picture which profitably retains a narrow focus on the relationship between the complacently old-school Shadi and his widely traveled, progressive-minded offspring. Shot in dunnish, dusty, digital shades by Antoine Heberle and clocking in at a trim 97 minutes, Wajib gives an unfussily illuminating snapshot of modern-day Nazareth, where a majority Arab population — most seen here are Christian — has found ways to get along under the fiddly, capricious restrictions of the Israeli state. It’s a “small” film which attempts to break no new ground either formally or content-wise, but works just fine within its chosen limitations as a solid dual showcase for Bakri pere and fils.
“The Confession” from Georgia – The team behind the Oscar®-nominated arthouse hit Tangerines (PSIFF 2015) reunites for this Georgian-village-set dramedy. When form
er filmmaker Giorgi starts a new life as an Orthodox priest, his first assignment takes him to a remote mountain village and an encounter with a femme fatale.Priest Giorg, a former student of film directing, is sent to a parish in a remote mountain village, together with his assistant Valiko. Giorgi feels the need to gather the community around the church, and his first promotional move is to screen films for the villagers. They take an old storage house, put up a screen and a projector, and start showing classics – the first being Some Like It Hot. The villagers love it, and one of them mentions that their local music teacher Lili looks a lot like Marilyn Monroe.
Indeed she does, as Giorgi and particularly Valiko note as they meet her for the first time. Soon, Lili starts helping out in the church after the regular sacristan’s husband dies, and the priest starts feeling an attraction unbecoming of his position. This will, along with a subplot concerning a student of Lili’s, lead to a rather dark and unexpected incident.
The Confession is a conventional, almost old-fashioned film. For the most part, it is also positive and good-hearted in its representation of village life, and that of the role of a priest and the church – it is rare today to see religion presented in movies as a positive thing. Giorgi sees his purpose in the village, which has no cinema or internet, as an educational one – a role that the church carried out for centuries, and it is clearly still needed in more remote regions. The cinematography nicely displays the gorgeous natural surroundings, and several close-ups of Giorgi and Lili are quite effective.
There is, however, a structural problem. When the key dramatic device and the crucial plot element is set in motion, and the audience expects a third act, the film just ends. Not that a third act is necessary for any film, but this particular one was building towards it through a very traditional narrative and emotional dynamics. Therefore, as it ends, it may leave some with a feeling of anticlimactic incompleteness. Just as much as I was curious about Nazareth above, it was nice to see a slice of rural Georgia
