PSIFF 2018 – Days Six and Seven

“The Cousins“, from Israel, wherein Israeli filmmaker Naftali intends to get repairs done around the house and satisfy his left-wing principles by hiring a Palestinian handyman, but the renovations don’t proceed as planned.  The film uses the old saying in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Jews and Arabs are both descended from Abraham, giving them shared genetic roots. That belief supplies the title of The Cousin, Israeli actor-writer-director Tzahi Grad’s message-driven seriocomedy about good intentions that get severely tested when a crime is committed and fingers point automatically to a Palestinian laborer.  Naftali, a local media presence in an Israeli village, whose belief in more open dialogue between Jews and Arabs is the foundation of a reality TV project he’s pitching. Needing renovations done on a crumbling studio on the grounds of his family home, he arranges to hire a Palestinian Muslim recommended by his gardener. The worker who climbs aboard his car at the designated pickup point is not the man with whom Naftali spoke, but claims to be his equally skilled brother, Fahed. While he’s mildly suspicious about the switch, Naftali takes him back to begin the job anyway.

They stop at a construction supply yard to pick up materials, and Fahed supposedly returns there later that morning for tools they forgot. At some point during this time, a teenage girl is assaulted at the site, and while no one even seems to know the details of the offense, everyone is quick to assume the Arab stranger in their midst was responsible. That includes the cops; they waste no time arresting Fahed, who sidelines as a rapper with a possible anti-Israel strain in his music. Convinced the young man is innocent, Naftali pays his bail and returns home with him, making his prickly wife Yael (Osnat Fishman) increasingly nervous.

The spiraling hysteria of fear, panic and hostility, both in the community and within Naftali’s own family, contains comic elements, though the potential gravity of the predicament for Fahed is never in doubt. That comes across strongly in the almost feral terror that registers in Dakka’s eyes as a motley vigilante group closes in, pursuing him once he bolts. The actor gives the film’s most compelling performance, keeping us guessing about Fahed’s innocence almost right up to the end, when Naftali puts himself in danger, stepping in to defuse a volatile situation.

If the fart humor of the early scenes seems a strange way of introducing the self-styled lead character in a film about intolerance, that gross touch suggests an appealing everyman humility on the writer-director’s part, which helps keep Naftali’s blundering heroics relatable. Grad casts his own kids as Naftali’s children, adding to the personal feel of a movie that’s somewhat inelegant in its chaotic developments but sincere in its urging to break the cycle of kneejerk distrust, incomprehension and gut-level fear.

In “The House by the Sea” from the beautiful Mediterranean  coast of France near Marseille the veteran director Robert Guédiguian’s family drama, where three adult children gather at the family home near Marseille when their father is immobilized by a stroke.Their town holds unhappy memories, as it was here that her own little daughter Blanche accidentally drowned while under her father’s care. In Dad’s villa, which has a big curving terrace overlooking the little cove, she reunites with her two brothers, the dutiful Armand , who’d stayed in the village trying to keep their father’s modest restaurant business afloat, and the the sardonic Joseph who has recently been forced into early retirement and arrives on the verge of a breakup with his much younger girlfriend, Bérangère.

The chemistry between the three main actors is effortlessly familial.  The film unfolds in the present tense, with generous time allotted to each of the siblings’ personal stocktaking. Added into the mix are new love interests, for Angèle in the form of young fisherman Benjamin, and for Bérangère in the shape of Yvan, the son of Martin and Suzanne , the aged couple who are Maurice’s only remaining neighbors, and whose dignified but tragic fate provides the film with its most deeply affecting sequence.

Perhaps none of those extraneous moments would seem like time inefficiently spent, though, if it weren’t for Guédiguian’s most puzzling authorial choice: to leave so late the introduction of the story’s most dramatic new element — the discovery of three migrant children, two boys and a girl like the siblings themselves, hiding out in the scrubby woods above the village. This worldview-challenging and priority-changing development is rich with dramatic potential, and thematically on point (they came from the sea that took Blanche away; they are the promise of renewal when so much is dying back). And so its 11th-hour appearance feels like an opportunity missed at best, and at worst like the refugee crisis is being used as narrative spice for the later-life-crises of a comparatively well-to-do white French family.

As Variety points out” The inherently picturesque location provides some postcard-ready vistas, but mostly Pierre Milon’s camerawork is unfussy to the point of unremarkable. But then Guédiguian is more of a classical storyteller than a formal stylist and for the most part that serves the film well, investing us its affectionate, fully inhabited portrayals and its wide-view vision of life’s cyclical nature with minimal distraction. It makes “The House by the Sea,” for all its mildness, a gently defiant affirmation that the ebb will always be followed by the flow.”

“Streaker” from England, a new type of sports hero is born when a high school teacher trains and recruits streakers for illegal sports betting. This warm-hearted.

fast-paced romp offers excellent scripting and direction and, er, revealing performances from a seasoned cast. Not too much to say here.  A teacher is charged to manage sport field renovation by his school, but he also wants to build a small museum important to him, he doesn’t get enough to do both, and he overhears a conversation about a fixed football game, so he bets everything on a sure game and off course he loses and is in deep trouble.  He gets an idea about betting on streakers – how long can they stay on the field.  He is convinced by a streakert that this is a sport requiring training and timing he builds his team of streakers, while forming a romantic relationship with a policewoman assigned to catch him. A welcome break from a more serious movie – most enjoyable.

From Luxembourg, where they speak Luxembourgish, “Gutland” (that’s Gootland to you), wherein a mysterious, weathered German with a duffel bag full of money wanders into a quaint Luxembourg village and strikes up a peculiar romance with the mayor’s daughter, his entire reality is turned upside-down in this haunting neo-noir debut.  The first hint that something is not quite right with this idyllic little town is conveyed by Narayan Van Maele’s cinematography: a luscious, misty, mysterious landscape where wheat fields are blue and green instead of yellow. The needy look in Jens’ eyes when he approaches the curt farmers for work fails to move them, and he ends up drinking alone that night at the crowded town beer hall, intending to move on in the morning. The fact that he speaks German and not Luxembourgish, and that all the merrymakers seem to be in lederhosen except him, further sets him apart as an outsider.

That’s when he is approached, in the friendliest possible way, by Lucy, the mayor’s sunny daughter. After a brief chat, she soon takes him home with her for a quickie. Jens can’t help but notice her young son is watching TV and her parents sleeping in the next room. It’s all a bit odd and uncomfortable.  The next morning, however, he discovers it’s a new world out there. Mayor Jos, her father, gives him a ride and gets him a job as a farmhand at a decent wage, plus a camper to sleep in. Suddenly he’s in with the in crowd. In fact, everyone seems overly friendly. He’s just warned not to mess with married women — the one taboo in Eden. Of course, this edict will come back to haunt him when a drunken hausfrau comes on to him in the men’s room.

Strange things begin to happen. He finds a stack of homemade porn photos in his camper in which the faces have been obliterated. Could these be local women, like the one at a group dinner who unselfconsciously shows off her new silicone implants? And what about the beautiful Lucy, who seems to be all sunlight and joy, splashing naked in the river with her friends? (Jens can’t bring himself to strip and join them.) Her affection for him seems like a gift from heaven, and Krieps does have an angelic lightness about her. But one night, when he follows a girl who looks like Lucy down a dark street, she’s swallowed by the dark.

Then there’s the matter of an abandoned house belonging to a certain gentleman named Georges, another outsider who was never sufficiently embedded among the townsfolk and who disappeared abruptly, leaving dinner on the table. Meanwhile, the evidence is piling up that Jens is not such a simple, honest soul, either.

Van Maele leaves a lot of clues in plain sight, but after an hour the story is still far from coming together. It’s not even clear if it’s going to veer into fantasy-horror, as it well could have done. As the atmosphere continues to densen, two shocker scenes push it into rural thrillerdom. In the first, angry farmers teach two little boys a lesson about playing with firecrackers in the hayloft that should put them off matches forever. The other scene is the scariest run through a cornfield since Cary Grant outraced a plane in North by Northwest. Again, it starts as a community lesson in good behavior. Jens is sent into an endless forest of corn to find a dead animal that could break the mammoth hay baler, and finds himself in mortal danger.

On an entirely different key from what has gone before, the wickedly ironic ending redeems quite a bit of protracted ambiguity and narrative circling around.  A solid NOIR.

“The Line” from Slovakia/Ukraine – is an entertaining, fast-paced crime thriller set in the lawless borderlands of the Slovak Republic and Ukraine prior to Slovakia’s accession to the European Union in 2007. Stories abound about criminal clans and a mob kingpin’s struggle to balance nuclear family with The Family. The film’s title refers not only to changing physical boundaries — when Slovakia becomes part of the Schengen Area, its frontier with Ukraine ostensibly will be the most secure of the EU’s external borders and fall under multiple levels of scrutiny — but also to the moral lines that the chief Slovak protagonist, Adam, feels he must not cross in his efforts to keep his home and business lives separate. As the story begins, buff, imposing Adam, the head of a small cigarette-smuggling empire, faces challenges on both fronts. His sexy eldest daughter Lucia (Kristiná Konátová) insists on marrying Ivor,  the gentle, semi-clueless nephew of Adam’s trusted lieutenant Jona, a Ukrainian, against Adam’s wishes. Meanwhile, some of Adam’s gang have been co-opted by their cross-border supplier, the ruthless Ukrainian gangster Krull, to smuggle narcotics, a cargo Adam steadfastly refuses to transport.

The local police chief, foresees the eventual end to his turn-a-blind-eye payoffs and starts to pit Krull and Adam against one another to up the ante. And when a big operation goes wrong during Lucia and Ivor’s raucous engagement party, Adam’s mother Anna shows what she’s made of. Stir in a truckload of illegal Afghan immigrants running through the forested “green border” during an unexpected police raid, a gypsy family with an eye for opportunity, a ravine where bodies are suspended in the watery depths and a strategically located quarry, and you begin to get an idea of the film’s kinetic, hyper-real style. In the end, the problem for me was that I didn’t care enough about any character, except a bit about Adam – but characters were not sufficiently developed.

“Killing Jesus” a brilliant biographical debut from a 30+ something Columbian director. When university student Paula witnesses her father’s assassination, the inept, uncaring police force drives her to seek justice on her own.   Laura Mora, the writer and director, own father, like her heroine’s, was shot dead by a hitman — whom, like her heroine, she later met. But far from being a straight-up good vs. bad revenge drama, Mora has wisely reserved her anger not for the killers, but for the kind of society that turns people into killers. Thus simmering wi

th controlled bitterness, Jesus has an intensity and rawness that more than make up for its flaws. At the start, Paula (Natasha Jaramillo, like most of the rest of the cast a non-pro) is a carefree arts student, full of laughter, attending student meetings, snapping photos, smoking too much dope and protesting against the system. In this, she’s following in the footsteps of her father Jose Maria (Camilo Escobar), a teacher/lawyer who exhorts his students to “never stop asking questions.” This is a dangerous strategy in a Medellin where people can be killed for saying the wrong thing in public, and indeed practically every time the radio or TV is on, someone is talking about socio-economic difficulties in Colombia.

One afternoon while he’s driving Paula home, in an explosively filmed scene Jose Maria is shot dead from the back of a motorbike; Paula glimpses the face of the sicario as he makes his escape. Together with her brother Santiago (Juan Pablo Trujillo), Paula dutifully recounts all this to the police. But right down to the fact that the cops have stolen Jose Maria’s watch, it’s pretty clear that they’ll be no help at all. All gaiety gone, Paula is now an embittered, driven figure. Across the crowded floor of a nightclub, she spots her father’s killer, Jesus (Giovanny Rodriguez, in a performance that takes “brooding” to a whole new level) and makes the decision to enact her revenge. But getting hold of the gun to do so is no easy matter unless you have the cash, and the middle part of the film charts Paula’s sometimes awkward attempts to enter Jesus’ world while getting hold of the murder weapon.

What’s not lacking from Killing Jesus is in-your-face naturalism, delivered via urgent, sometimes shaky hand-held camera. Mora uses non-professional actors and is careful to fill her frames with the “authentic” Medellin of the backstreets, where the gangs live in uneasy fear of one another, where Latino rap and salsa are ever-present, where machismo is rife and where, cliches apart, life really does seem to be too cheap. Jesus does achieve a kind of delirious intensity in its wonderful portrayal of Medellin’s surreal street chaos.Mora ekes a little poetry out of all the violence. Some of Jesus’ strongest scenes feature memorable slow-motion shots of street kids on motorbikes and bicycles, as though in recognition that they, too, are victims, in search of a little romantic release. And one scene toward the end, featuring Lita and Jesus in an imagined embrace against a backdrop of backstreet squalor, with flickering neon lights behind them, is perhaps the film’s strongest, yet quietest, moment — the one where Paula realizes that even her father’s killer might be worthy of some kind of redemption. For a director who has herself suffered her heroine’s parental loss, to be capable of expressing such empathy via a cinema screen is a notable achievement — definitely worth seeing.