Malarkey

I can’t help it, I didn’t feel sowell after watching Prague Cans. In case of The Can, I had a few laughs and at the end told myself that it was quite a good comedy. This movie, however, cannot be considered a comedy, unless you accept the very dark humor, typical for the Sklep Theater. It features a perpetually drunk mother, a father who has half the bigwigs of Prague eating out of his hand and a girl who sells her body for cash. Three classic motifs that make a normal person’s stomach sick. Add in the gloomy rap music by Vladimir 518 and a story that has hardly any plot, which however isn’t really a problem in a movie like this. Anyhow, the actors Mádl and Kraus are the best thing in this flick. I would like to see Kraus in more movies.

I have never seen a movie from Macedonia. That’s why I was quite looking forward to this piece. In its three short stories, the movie depicted everyday lives of three different people, expertly combining them into a single framing story. If you are able to imagine the Balkans in its harshest form, brace yourself for Before the Rain. Nevertheless, even bracing yourself might not be enough.

I have never heard of this problem in East Timor, which made the movie all the more interesting for me. I’m basically glad that Balibo was made, because no one else would be able to tell it in exactly this way. It’s incredibly accurate, sometimes overly documentary. Which, on the other hand, is a bit detrimental. Anyway, that’s why the film shows everything that these people had to go through at the time. And it was definitely not pleasant.

Quite a rough and for many people probably incomprehensible portrait of one war photographer. In this case, a female photographer. When the film decides whether the photographer chooses her job or family, guess what her choice is. I personally found it too impersonal and sometimes boring. The beginning and end of the film, however, have quite a high information value. I wouldn’t hesitate to cut out the middle.

A biopic done exactly in a way a classic biopic should look like. Cécile De Franca delivered a solid performance. The director guided us through Jeanine’s life well, but I guess that I do not intend to ever return to it.

A very honest story about how nothing is easy in France at all. In the multitude of nationalities, ethnicities and religions, there are simply some people who are unable to accept even the most basic truths in life. And that’s why there is a special unit that is trying to help such people. And the fact that everything is quite realistic and at the same time based on real events turns this film into an even greater experience. In the first half hour, I wasn’t too fond of these characters, but after two hours they found their way into my heart. That made the ending all the more shocking.

It’s not exactly hilarious, because this story is an incredibly honest testimony about a life of a Portuguese family in the middle of France. At first I may have had difficulties with getting inside the story, but over the course of the movie I became very fond of the Portuguese family. The ending then is a beautiful conclusion of a story of a family that had to go through many trials, as valuable as any other such story of any other family living in an apartment block in Paris or anywhere else in Europe. Exactly because of this pleasant ordinariness, however, it deserves attention.

I was surprised how the French in this film managed to turn a completely insignificant story into an incredibly solid action flick. Actually, it’s not entirely about the action as such... although that’s important too. What is more important is the story in between, about the relationship of the two cops who make a great team. Vincent Lindon and Gilles Lellouche immediately became actors to whom I will pay close attention when they reappear somewhere. But as a whole, I first wanted to rate this with solid five stars, but then I realized I was too hyped up by the ending. So I knocked one star off to be more objective, because it’s actually quite a small-scale affair. The action scenes are subtle yet intense. The story is quite simple, but the movie has a lot of charm. Mea Culpa is a movie I won’t forget that easily.

The summary made this movie seem interesting. In reality, you see Turks fighting the Romani people and often it is unclear who is who. The result is a movie chock-full of Balkan temper, which I had a hard time swallowing. For example take Céline Sallette’s character – an investigator who spends the whole movie walking around as if she owned the place, while I was thinking that she should mind her own business. Because if she doesn’t, she shouldn’t be surprised that things get messy. I must say that in certain places, the film seemed quite violent and aggressive to me… too much so. Both the Romani and Turks and the music contributed to this impression. The setting could have been quite interesting, but people kept starting to dance or move weirdly at random, which threw me totally for a loop and I was waiting for this madness to end.

So I decided to visit the French Film Festival in Prague and chose a film that in places quite explicitly showed two stories of two young college girls from Paris. But it wasn’t as brutal as it might have seemed at first glance. Małgorzata Szumowska has chosen a subtle approach in terms of shots, so I was sometimes saying to myself that had the camera moved a few millimeters to the side, this film would have become a soft porn flick… or just a porn flick. On the other hand, I expected a more interesting story. For example, I didn’t understand the character portrayed by Juliette Binoche at all. I understand that she is an artist, just like a lot of French people. But her family or some of her behavior was completely out of it. And the ending seemed to fade into nothing. Why was the family there at all? And in the end, I also realized that she didn’t even finish writing her article in the film... even though she pours so much effort into it during an hour and a half of the running time.