Matty

A film about a footballer, but not about football, just as Raging Bull, which Heleno at the very least resembles in the drastic physical transformation of its protagonist, was not a film about boxing. Heleno's belief that the game stands and falls solely with his performance leads to his loss of control over the game and over his own life. Whereas in the opening part of the film he lets women have the upper hand over him in the sexual act, he compensates for his subsequent gambling mistakes by violently subjugating his mistress and verbally assaulting his wife, actions that serve only as small band-aids for his wounded ego. He can no longer achieve lasting happiness after his self-destructive lifestyle causes him to lose focus (and thus also the ability to win). Viewers who are unfamiliar with Heleno’s talent will be put at a disadvantage, as the film depicts the protagonist as a deplorable person from the opening minutes. But what happened before he became a loser? What has he lost? From what height has he fallen? We are given no other choice than to believe he once ranked among the geniuses of football. The gentle narrative pace, which is aided by long shots and minimal formalistic excesses (only a few bird’s-eye views) as well as the small number of characters and alternating settings, corresponds to the slow breakdown of a body afflicted with syphilis. The film’s visual style changes depending on Heleno’s state of mind and physical appearance. The refinement of the scenes from smoky nightclubs contrasts with the raw image from the latter part of Heleno’s life, when the film is reminiscent of Cinema Novo social dramas steeped in neorealism. However, the filmmakers were not interested in the social context, instead making a character study without a social, political, metaphysical or any other dimension that would have diluted the concentrated nature of the narrative, but could have conversely helped to grasp the far-reaching cause of Heleno’s helplessness (and that of men in general). As it stands, Heleno is merely a vivid portrayal of a story that can be forgotten because its presentation lacks timeless qualities. 65%

A heist movie from which someone stole the logic. The quintet (!) of screenwriters tried to outsmart viewers, but the gentlemen wound up outsmarting themselves. The necessary extent of viewers’ incredulity that better films about scams consciously work with has been exceeded many times over in Now You See Me. Not even the illusionists can be believed, as they act in conflict with the initial presentation of their characters after a jump in time (we don’t learn much more about them during the rest of the film),  nor can their tricks, because they are mostly conjured up with CGI, which breaks the bond between their feats and reality. The magic shows are basically just an excuse for drawn-out and poorly edited action scenes. The weak final justification for the meaning of each of the performances is just another of the countless attempts at misdirection, specifically the effort to evoke the impression that each of the shows was something more than an autonomous attraction. Perhaps this is part of a well-thought-out whole governed by rules that don’t change on the fly and whose individual parts are not connected using a confounding number of coincidences and assumptions that a particular person will only react to a particular situation in one particular way and not another. The final twist robs the film of any remaining shreds of logical coherence. No, I didn’t seriously expect such an ending, because it lacked any logic in relation to the preceding 100 minutes. Instead of the feeling that I had been cleverly outsmarted (the wow effect), there was bitter laughter at someone’s ability to sacrifice all of the story’s believability and meaningfulness to the God of Surprise (the WTF effect). Every narrative device serves to deceive viewers to such an extent that we are constantly aware of the film’s falsity, so its conjuring tricks just don’t work. The Prestige was based on a quite similar principle (we will reveal the rules of the game to you and then we will outfox you anyway), but in that film, the trick was underpinned by the preceding two hours of action. In Nolan’s film, the twist wasn’t conjured up out of screenwriting cluelessness just before the end only so that film could somehow be concluded. In Now You See Me, it is – starting with the way it’s stated in the film’s title – too obvious that we are the intended marks. Something like that might work in Copperfield’s live show, but in a live-action feature film, it ultimately causes the film to retroactively lose meaning because it comes off as just an illusion. The actors also do a utilitarian job. Most of them were cast solely to raise the film’s level of prestige and to serve the same decorative and distracting purpose that one of the characters attributes to a magician’s attractive assistant. Louis Leterrier himself is just such an assistant, but he’s an assistant without a magician. He diligently diverts our attention so that in the end he can artlessly concede in the end that the main content of his performance was the actual act of distracting us. Appendix: The most ridiculous thing is the attempt to shoehorn criticism of unjust social conditions (an apparent echo of Occupy Wall Street) into Now You See Me, a film that defends scam artists and punishes those who bring attention to the scam. 40%

Rain, eternal night, a has-been cop, a city bathed in turquoise. Welcome to neo-noir. The division of the narrative into cop and criminal storylines is reminiscent of Heat, compared to which, however, Creevy’s film is less complex and psychologically much more superficial. Based on the provided information, the characters could be described in a single sentence at most (the quick removal of the only significant female character who doesn’t use her body to play relationship games that slow the story down, but solely for her work – writing notes – is regrettable). The characters could be described on the basis of the information provided in one sentence at most (the quick dismissal of the only significant female character, who uses her body not to play frustrating relationship games, but purely for work - to write notes, is a pity). Welcome to the Punch wagers more on a gloomy atmosphere. The web of corruption that the director attempts to weave during the film’s ninety minutes is not the most solid. The individual powers (police, politics, media) clash only a few times rather than always being in a clinch. The attempt to define the characters through the mood of the setting and to see connections between things quickly becomes prevalent after the transition from words to actions. The essential elements are handled through chases and shootouts, in which the impression of action is achieved predominantly through editing and sound. The dull straightforwardness of the video-game-like “light-hearted” action scenes and the surreal escape abilities of Mark Strong (who could break down walls with his glare) clash with the greater realism of the rest of the story. The varying degree of realism is not convincingly justified by the content of the narrative. The relativisation of the line between good and evil suffers from the same lack of justification. It seems deliberate, without a better connection to the characters’ actions and motivations. Ultimately, the film’s most positive aspect is its use of London’s noir potential. However, the fact that movies by South Korean filmmakers (Ajeossi, Dalkomhan insaeng) are the most reliable sources of ambivalent feelings in a crime package was not in any way refuted by Welcome to the Punch. Appendix: The Punch in the title has a similar metaphorical meaning in the film as Chinatown in Polanski’s film. 65%

A film told in non-present time. With the passage of fifty years after mind-game films (reconstructing the workings of certain thought processes with a varying degree of abstraction) became a common part of the mainstream, it is still fascinating to watch and hear how Resnais and Duras, influenced by Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Griffith’s Intolerance fulfilled the producer’s request for a documentary about the atomic bomb. ___ In terms of content, the documentary-style prologue remains the most comprehensible part of this five-act film. It shows the direct, physical effects of the tragedy rather than the psychological consequences, which belong to the rest of the film – an essay on remembrance and forgetting, on personal and national traumas. One tragedy comes alive under the influence of another. The objective and subjective points of view overlap and become intertwined, similarly as in the opening shot of two bodies merging in an abstract painting (her Nevers, his Hiroshima – and vice versa).  Here it is absolutely true that the form is the content. ___ The fluid transitioning between the past and the present, without the traditional visual “quotation marks” (e.g. a close-up of a face, the blurring of the image) leaves us in a state of uncertainty as to whether we are seeing flashbacks, imaginings or only the director’s illustration of the protagonist’s memories (i.e. a phenomenon that is not motived by the actual act of remembering). The transitions are initiated either at the level of personal experience or through the film’s form – sound, image and feeling. We do not know how what we see can be believed, just as in life we cannot rely on affective memory, which is constantly burdened by our knowledge of the past. The present recalls the past; the past helps to understand the present. Thanks to the dialectic relationship between the two timeframes, the film moves both forward and backward in parallel, in two directions and in two worlds at the same time. Memories emerge and suddenly vanish, the past merges with the present. People and places lose their identity, literally forgetting themselves. ___ The impression of an uninterrupted flow of images is enhanced by the lyrical off-camera commentary (which Duras used even more assiduously in her directorial debut, India Song) with lines repeated by the hypnotic voice of Emmanuelle Riva in the manner of a mantra, and Resnais’s stylistic trademark – long “disembodied” camera movements like those that he used in the documentaries Night and Fog and All the World’s Memory. ___ Hiroshima Mon Amour is not a unique film experience despite its incomprehensibility, but because of it, and though it bears some hallmarks of an overly intellectualised  demonstration of what can be done with film (and to viewers), it also poses questions that pertain to every human being. When and where is our place in time? 80%

The anti-Amélie, ungraspable in the manner of the New Wave. Agnès Varda was not a passionate cinephile like the directors from the Cahiers du Cinéma circle. Educated in the arts and humanities, she was less fascinated by cinema than by photography and painting (the paintings of Hans Baldung Grien were a major inspiration for the film’s visual aspect). This is perhaps also a reason that her second feature-length film stands out due to its distinctive grasp of traditional narrative forms (Varda likened her creative process to writing books, calling it “cinécriture”). These forms are neither amplified nor deliberately violated. Instead of adopting or disparaging others’ film language, the director came up with her own way of conveying information to us. Despite her creative grounding in documentary work, this does not involve intuitive directing in the vein of Jean Rouch. Cléo from 5 to 7 has a carefully thought-out concept whose seeming disruption with some unexpected digressions serves the narrative rhythm. ___ The false information about the duration of the protagonist’s odyssey (cinq à sept was an earlier synecdochic term for a visit to a by-the-hour hotel) serves to play a narrative game with two interpretations of time: subjective time and objectively passing time (which is regularly pointed out to us by the clock in the mise-en-scéne). This temporal duality is justified by Varda’s lifelong interest in the relationship between the subjectivity of the individual and the objectivity of the environment, which together shape our identity. She always endeavoured to identify both individual and broader social issues, or rather the common ground between them. ___ With respect to the disregard for standard dramatic structure (exposition, complication, development, climax), the segmentation of the film into thirteen chapters is understandable, as it helps to maintain the brisk pace of the narrative. Three longer intertextual interludes – a radio news report (which also serves to contextualise events in the manner of a documentary), a song and the short slapstick Les fiancés du pont Mac Donald (which is by far the most cinephilic sequence of the film, thanks to the small roles played by Godard, whose beautiful eyes were allegedly the reason that Varda came up with the short, Karina and Brialy) – similarly serve as punctuation marks. The song also bridges the “passive” first half and “active” second haf of the film. ___ Until the singing of the sad song “Sans toi” (written by Michel Legrand), during which the protagonist realises the emptiness of her life and her position as a victim, into which she has been pushed in part by those around her, Cléo is merely an object with a beautiful surface and nothing inside, watched by others and – thanks to the ubiquitous mirrors – contentedly watching herself (a display window full of hats brightens her up the most). The voice, including the inner commentary, belongs to others, as does the centre of the shot, which Cléo only complements with her charm, but she never dominates it. In the second half of the film, she changes from dazzling white to sombre black, takes off her doll-like wig and puts on dark glasses, which enable her to voyeuristically watch others without being watched herself (hiding her eyes makes it impossible for others to ascertain her identity). Later, after removing her glasses, she doesn’t only accept the gaze of others, but also returns it. The camera finally takes her point of view and allows her to see others as objects (the visit to a sculptor’s studio). ___ Cléo starts to stand up for herself. She begins to use her voice and control the fear that has paralysed her. The previous presentiment of death is displaced by a maternal motif (mothers with infants, children on a playground), the idea of life. To put it in feminist terms, the protagonist takes control of her own representation in the second half of the film. She stops giving in to melodramatic passivity and changes the way that she sees herself (while others still see her in the same way, as indicated by the soldier giving her a daisy, a symbol of admiration for feminine beauty). The joyless message at the end of this urban road-movie is ultimately not so devastating due not only to the unspectacular form of its delivery, but mainly due to the paradigm shift. After circling Paris (her route more or less forms a ring), Cléo is no longer an actor in a tragedy to which she can only resign herself. She has found within herself the strength to fight and to take control over which genre her life will belong to. But as the nature of her illness admonishes, this will decidedly not involve full control. 90%

Eric Rohmer’s first and, for the next eight years, only feature-length film is a fatalistic morality tale about false wealth, false friends and the true pride of a lion. For one night, Pierre is transformed into a king who observes the beauty of Paris at night from the window of his apartment, but he is soon forced by fate (we are made aware of a higher power by, for example, topographical shots of the city) to descend into the streets, among his subjects, and to live for the present moment out of necessity, not just in extravagance. He goes from the centre of society’s interest to its fringes. He begins a multi-week martyrdom as a homeless man, during which he not only (literally) touches bottom, but also steps out of the circle of mundanity (he is finally going somewhere), discovers his limits (materialised in stone, which the French also call “pierre”) and real, i.e. unselfish friendship. But can such a proud man really change? ___ Rohmer doesn’t answer that question; he only asks and observes. He doesn’t require our sympathy. More than the protagonist, he is interested in the idea, which he slowly conveys and for the sake of which he is not reluctant to leave Pierre to his fate at any time and to give space to one of the supporting characters. The naturalistic observation of everyday events bears the imprint of the neorealism and ethnographic techniques of Jean Rouch, who had a direct influence on Rohmer. The camera follows the protagonist from a distance and often from a single position, without changing angles, as if there was no time or possibility to stage the given situation. ___ The transformation of the protagonist’s priorities and his state of mind is brought to our attention through an inconspicuous change in the filming of the setting, which fits in with the docufictional concept throughout the film. Food, which becomes a necessity for Pierre, is increasingly present in the shots. The camera gradually becomes less avoidant of other sides of Paris (secluded streets, a predominance of night scenes, numerous shadows). As in Rohmer’s later films, the setting expands the protagonist’s inner world and faithfully reflects his current psychological state. For the desperate American, Paris is both a prison and a final refuge. The ending is equally ambivalent, turning the previous impression of a spiralling drama upside down. But is the final twist a return to Pierre’s own essence or a turning away from it? Answer according to your own sign. 80%

This brisk B-movie is elevated particularly by Sinatra’s unfeeling killing machine (which breaks down only at the moment when it is prevented from killing). The subliminal message that protection of the homeland has priority over protection of the person is surprisingly not so different from the propaganda of the Communists, who were the number-one threat to the United States at the time (Baron’s leftist orientation is only implied and neither confirmed nor refuted). The film somewhat more consistently attempts to convince us that the foundation of a safe home, and homeland, is a firearm, which every conscientious citizen, even if a pacifist by conviction, should keep hidden (and loaded, just to be sure) in a drawer. This militant viewpoint is moderated at least by the overly simple warning about the difference between a toy Colt for children and a real gun, which emphatically is not recommended to be handled like a toy. In the end, however, the whole family shoots together anyway. 65%

Due to the trajectory of the franchise and its concept of a team of criminals as a family, placing the high-octane action in a melodramatic context was probably inevitable. Melodramatic conventions are the reason why the film ends on the second attempt, why it has problems with rhythm and why the characters conform to psychological formulas at the level of three-year-olds. The film’s family theme prevents it from getting out of first gear, as every big action scene is followed by blather about important values, which is only a substitute for a more sophisticated plot. The only one who manages to reflect the obvious melodrama is the main villain, who, of all the film’s characters, is the most capable of rational thought. In the context of a film driven by illogic and sentiment, he represents an anomaly that must be eliminated. ___ The film’s obvious objective and the approximate way of achieving it are introduced shortly after the nostalgic opening credits (which logically and primarily accentuate the “team” level of the previous films), and only after it is achieved does the dully straightforward narrative formula undergo a slight modification: Toretto’s crew comes up with a way to get Shaw. But Shaw is smarter and avoids capture; as he does so, several expensive cars explode and a few anonymous civilians die. So Toretto’s crew comes up with another plan, during the execution of which more expensive cars explode and more anonymous civilians die. Instead of the gradual development of motifs and well-thought-out provision of information, the cards are rashly laid out on the table and the crew rushes pell-mell toward their objective (not even the two small “female” story surprises, one cheap, the other stupid, manage to in any way alter the course of events). The film is even more narratively “disintegrated” than Fast Five, but it doesn’t allow us to watch it undisturbed in a relaxing “standby” mode –  enjoyment of the attractions is disrupted by the frequent dialogue, which is always serious about everything. A crucial problem of the film consists in the action scenes themselves, as they are fragmented by numerous unnecessary cuts and peppered with obvious digital tricks (the only car chase in Jack Reacher is directed far more clearly than any given chase in this film). __ Whereas the women in the film are dangerous, treacherous, defenceless, recovering from amnesia or just there to look good, the men were assigned the roles of invaluable protectors, capable lovers and excellent drivers. Fast & Furious 6 is just one big guyish pose, a film that too obviously displays its confidence in itself and the values that it promotes: if you have enough money, physical strength or weapons (or, ideally, a combination thereof), you can afford to go up against practically anyone. But you mustn’t put your family in danger. The relativisation of the villain and protagonist roles by means of self-reflexively pointing out the similarities between the teams facing each other (and whose members will fight each other more or less according to how Roman pairs them off) is ultimately just another false gesture with which Lin tries to conceal the fact that this time he bet more on big muscles, empty slogans and bombastic rhetoric than this 130-minute genre flick can bear. I don’t deny that it’s still a pleasure, but it’s much more of the guilty variety after Fast Five, whose testosterone-fuelled bombast was still generally acceptable. 70%

A remarriage comedy with an unusually conspicuous ephebophilic subtext. Instead of tap dancing, this time the wonderfully versatile Ginger Rogers has to switch between different roles depending on what the situation and the particular man requires (first the conductor, then the cadets, Ray Milland throughout). The initial promise of emancipatory entertainment about a woman who rejects her assigned role is soon fulfilled. If we ignore the unintentional perversity of the main situation (and the intertextual joke with Veronica Lake), the story does not leave the neutral realm of milquetoast witty banter. Due to the numerous risks of slipping into a primitive farce based on changing identities through changing costumes, it is still an extremely tasteful way of showing the multiplicity of roles that American women had to play in the interwar period. In a different era, when society didn’t need women – coarsely written – so much, such a respectful and – with gritted teeth – “feminine” film probably would not have been made. 75%

The more problematic the film, the more you expect a standard adaptation of a classic book. The world of New York high society simultaneously disgusts and attracts Nick. He is aware of his ambivalent position as a person both on the inside and on the outside, a person who simultaneously wants and doesn’t want to be part of the story being told, and he is not only able to reflect that position, but he has to reflect it in his own interest. The narrator’s deeply personal relationship to “his” story and to the characters is emphasised by the fact that for Nick, retrospectively reconstructing who Gatsby actually was is a form of psychotherapy (similarly to the way that the search for the meaning of the word “rosebud” was an attempt to find the truth in Citizen Kane). Given the obvious hints that Nick is Fitzgerald’s alter-ego, writing (or rather retelling) as a form of therapy becomes one of the key motifs of the film. Also, the storyline involving the relationship between Nick and Gatsby (which strikingly lends itself to a queer reading) is ultimately the most authentic aspect of the film and, together with the therapeutic level of the narrative, rationalises the film’s double ending. ___ Like the narrator, Luhrmann sympathises with the characters, yet he places them in the surreal Technicolor world of major studio films, thus turning them into mere abstract ideas. In this rendering, Gatsby is merely the essence of the American mentality (the tenacious, self-destructive effort to achieve a particular ideal) and DiCaprio plays him accordingly. ___ Highlighting the narrative framework in comparison with the book (in which Nick simply tells the story, and why and to whom he is telling it are not important) is not a gratuitous attempt to bring a bit of tabloid subtext into the story – it rhythmises the narrative (“stepping out” of the story occurs at regular intervals) and influences its style. At the beginning, Nick speaks rapidly, as he is fascinated by all of the new stimuli and feels the need to quickly express all of his impressions. The cuts are abrupt and unexpected, and the shots are so short that it is difficult to find one’s bearings in them (it almost seems that there is a separate shot for every sentence). The camera never stops moving and, more so than later in the film, Luhrmann uses lap dissolves to create the impression that one shot blends into the next. The images sparkle, dazzling us with intense colours and CGI effects. We later become aware of the significance of the Sirk-like excessive work with colours, when it becomes clear why Myrtle was characterised in red and Gatsby in blue, or why it is important to know what colour Gatsby’s car is. The soundtrack is just as boisterous as the visual component of the narrative. ___ The choice of songs is the most striking (or rather loudest) link between today and the period in which the narrative is set. The soundtrack’s producers succeeded in selecting songs that can be imagined as contemporary alternatives to the music that was popular in the Roaring Twenties, though there is again a certain exaggeration (the shot of a car full of black people is accompanied by gritty gangsta rap). With its genre diversity, the soundtrack serves as an effective way to map the changes in mood that the film undergoes. ___ The film settles into a calmer, more classic style only after Nick’s story stabilises and focuses on Jay Gatsby as a man who personifies the limits of the American desire for success. The shots are longer, the narrator’s vocabulary is more colourful (which is also connected to the fact that Nick starts typing instead of speaking) and the lighting of the scenes is more natural. Together with the slowing of the film’s pace, the primary sources of inspiration also change. Whereas the noisy and flamboyant first third takes inspiration from the musicals of Busby Berkeley (and, I would venture to say, from the extravagant French epic productions of Marcel L’Herbier and other poetic realists), the film gradually progresses through excursions into gangster, adventure and war movie to a combination of social drama (The Crowd) and melodrama. Due to the doubling of the romantic storyline, however, it is rather an ironic commentary on the genre of melodrama (a sign that Luhrmann was not entirely serious is the pool shot in the film’s climax, which makes reference to the opening minutes of one of Hollywood’s most biting satires). ___ Because of the lifeless characters and excessive care taken to ensure that viewers understand exactly what is happening in the story, The Great Gatsby is an emotionally apathetic and laughably simple film. However, it is not a nonconceptual patchwork for lovers of pretty, shiny objects and expensive champagne (of one particular brand), though it does at first deceptively seem to be just that, even more so than Luhrmann’s earlier attempts to make the past present. 80%