JFL

Electra is an intense audio-visual experience. The viewer can only stare in amazement at the absolutely maniacally exacting stop-motion animation and pixilation through which Daria Kashcheeva displays devastating symbolist imagery on the screen. She creates metaphors of emotions, traumas and feelings connected to themes of gender imperatives, desperate attempts to fit into them, and with a vision of the fleeting appeal of giving up one’s own identity.

The pure wow effect of a head-on collision with something unprecedented and revolutionary, which dominated the experience of Into the Spider-Verse, naturally couldn’t happen again. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the second animated Spider-Man movie is an absorbing audio-visual explosion that still manages to conjure up the same delightfully goofy expression of wonder and fascination on the faces of viewers. Whereas live-action comic-book movies are running out of steam and losing the audience’s interest, the second Spider-Verse is hyper-dynamic, not only in the way it depicts movement and action within individual shots and whole sequences, but also in terms of narrative and the expression of emotion. It has a lengthy runtime, but in spite of that it remains an impressive piece of work given everything that the film manages to convey in the course of it. And not just in terms of peripeteias and dialogue, but also in the breadth of the titular Spider-Verse. The medium of animation itself plays an essential role in this. Whereas the animation in the previous film was breathtaking mainly from the perspective of expressive physical movement, this time it takes on a narratively illustrative and emotionally impressive role. In particular, viewers are aided in finding their bearings across the various parallel worlds and their inhabitants not only the stylisation of the drawing, but also by the animated interpretation, from the technical execution to the rendering of the stylistic specifics in time and space (from sketch-like elements and action lines, through the handling of movement and poses, to the scale and use of typographic VFX). The animation also makes it possible to express and convey emotions in a condensed and very effective way – again from body language and expressive stylisation of facial expressions (unlike in live-action comic-book movies, the animated Spider-Man is not in any way limited by his mask) to the work done with the colour palette of the given scene and the proportional deformation of the characters. In addition to that, we also have a sophisticated meta-treatise on the conflict between personal will and a rigid canon, which unsurprisingly can be extended from the central story to the iconoclastic position of the animated Spider-Verse movies, which are brimming with creativity in comparison with the live-action Marvel films conformably occupying the space within the usual and automatically accepted boundaries of pseudo-realism and clichés. But that is rather the icing on this perfectly thought out and phenomenally rendered cake. The animated Spider-Man catapults us into a new dimension of blockbuster entertainment and it will be interesting to see if its live-action fellow travellers will hang their heads in shame alongside the animated competition that has already come into being.

While the annotations provided by the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival dangles allusions to the greats of the format – namely Dupieux, Andersson and Lynch – in front of the eyes of viewers, the director sees himself as being unique with an iconoclastic concept on a singular wave of perception. But both of these ideas remain wishful thinking when brought face to face with a film that so successfully lulls viewers to sleep instead of being unsettling and giving them the desired jolt. Unlike the greats of somnambulist cinema, with Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Alain Resnais at the fore, and in contrast to those filmmakers referred to in the annotations, the images that Mihailescu presents to viewers remain desperately lifeless and devoid of inner tension and thus peculiarly remain only unfulfilled promises.

Just as Antonio Lukich dealt with his relationship with his mother in his previous film, this time he comes to terms with his father. Despite the personal elements, however, this is not an autobiographical treatise, but rather a universal tragicomic, absurdist road movie in which the preparation for the journey plays a more essential role than the journey itself. It may seem that the whole narrative is disjointed and incoherent, but where some see incoherence, others see the bitter absurdity of everyday life, full of burdens placed on them from above in the manner of Job and by those around them in the manner of Kafka, but also by themselves due to their own stupidity and self-centredness. Lukich shows all of the above as tragedy and comedy in equal measure. The specific peripeteias not only tell the story of the twins, but also illustrate the paradoxes of Eastern European history in general terms, not only the major historical paradoxes, but primarily the minor personal ones. As a result, Lukich’s coming to terms with the myth of his own father mirrors the whole region’s need to face its own past – not necessarily to get all of the answers from it, but simply to confront it, because only then is it possible to finally move on.

It’s frequently obvious that this film was made as a semi-amateur enthusiast project by a group of queer people during the coronavirus pandemic, but that in no way detracts from its likability and heart turned up to eleven. It is easy to be distracted from the occasional creative cluelessness with respect to how to move on from the accumulated peripeteias in some sort of constructive way by the spectacularly unbridled enthusiasm of those involved, the iconoclastic approach to everything conformingly sacred and the clichés of superhero movies. The phenomenal confrontation between the Captain and his Nemesis in front of the hot-dog stand easily overshadows the previous highlights of the genre, with Nolan’s clash between Batman and the Joker at the fore.

To the North can be described as a slow-burn moral thriller, but that gives us only a superficial idea of what it is really about. The film itself works purposefully with the contrast of the outside and the inside. It presents us with seemingly clearly arranged situations and literally polarises the characters and key peripeteias as good and bad. As the runtime elapses, however, the narrative doesn’t just leave the viewer to experience the tension, paranoia and claustrophobia with the characters trapped in a cargo ship. At the same time, it also shows the existing points of view as being ambivalent and puts forth an intimate drama of good intentions and unforeseen consequences. Mainly, however, it chips away at the original poles of good and evil until only the exposed personalities of the individual characters remain, with their own moral hell stemming from their opposing personal life stories, motivations and responsibilities. As a result, To the North is about boundaries, though not so much the geopolitical boundaries that so greatly influence people’s actions, but mainly the interpersonal ones on which everything ultimately falls apart. Considering that this is a feature debut, Mihai Mincan’s film turns out to be an unprecedented, well-crafted and brilliantly thought-out work. Everything from the consistently slow pace to the ghostly ambient soundtrack serves to draw viewers in and gently prepare them for the merciless disintegration in the climax. ____ Huge thanks are owed to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival for including this magnificent film in its programme. At the same time, no thanks at all are owed to the festival for the effort that one has to exert in order to escape the pandemonium of the boisterous crowd so that the catharsis one gets from To the North can die away somewhere in the peace and quiet of the night.

Total fetishization of the film form and, on the big screen, an unsurprisingly satisfying delight for cinephiles.

Let’s leave aside all the talk about Koreeda returning to form. The main thing is that the foundation of his new film, Monster, is a brilliant screenplay by Yuji Sakamoto, which comprises the solid backbone of this maximally impressive work. Though the narrative is built on the often used concept of various perspectives on the same events, through its precise construction it not only demonstrates the effectiveness of this narrative concept, but primarily uses it to achieve an absolutely absorbing and devastating result. It carefully builds up specific expectations and assumptions in the viewer, which it then gradually and repeatedly breaks down, thus concurrently mirroring one of its central themes. Monster deals with the monsters of everyday life, which are us. What makes us such monsters is not outright malice, but our capacity to resort to hasty conclusions that we arrogantly draw based on fragments of situations without trying to see the whole picture first. In Koreeda’s grasp, this foundation takes on a disarming form, as he avoids showiness and instead approaches the whole narrative about the fragility of pain with  subtle immediacy. ___ When seen at the Cannes Film Festival, Monster became for me the embodiment of that Holy Grail of cinematic experiences of the kind that one hopes to find at festivals, even though that rarely happens anymore. Koreeda first thoroughly disarmed me with his treatise on bullying and pain, and then absolutely crushed me in the climax, to such an extent that I had the desire to get away from the frantic bustle of the festival and just wander the streets alone in the night and let the film's emotions and ideas reverberate within me.

Rivette is actually not that riveting. I’m not someone who would complain about a long runtime or make one of those know-it-all statements about how X number of minutes should have been cut out of a film. But I see no justification for the tremendous length of Mad Love. The viewer sees all of the theses that Rivette intended to convey with the film (emotional drama set against the backdrop of classical drama, an artist talking about feelings that he is not capable of experiencing, the rehearsing of a play as a rehearsal of behavioural patterns, etc.) relatively early on and then suffers through their needlessly drawn-out execution. Unless the aim was to build distance between the viewer and the central protagonist, in which case every minute actually has meaning. On the other hand, the same purpose is served by the superb means of presenting it in the pretentious way of wearing glasses. Mad Love is precisely representative of the archetype of the stiff, self-regarding New Wave blathering that Jean Eustache so brilliantly subverted and disparaged in his almost equally long but bitingly funny and unaffectedly lively masterpiece The Mother and the Whore.

This gets one less star because of the kicking of the bear cubs and because of the precisely crafted trailer, which created the impression that this poorly directed exercise in futility might actually be good. Some films are bad not in an entertaining way, but simply in an uninteresting and soul-crushing way.