Festival: Around the World in 14 Films 2018 (part 3)

Short reviews of selected films from this year’s festival

By Sascha Krieger

Manbiki kazoku / Shoplifters (Japan / Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda) – Cannes Film Festival

Celebrated Japanese film-maker Hirokazu Kore-eda has made himself a name for tender, subtle, highly observant and quiet family stories, a seismograph for the most essential of social units. Shoplifters, the surprise but wholly deserving winner of the Golden Palm at this year’s Cannes film festival, is no exception. except that the family is highly exceptional. Firstly, it engages in rather unusual behaviour: in a the opening scene, what seems to be a father-son duo expertly and quite poetically steals from a supermarket before they lift a lonely little girl on their way home. Subsequently, it is gradually revealed that the family ties are not exactly what they seem. When something goes wrong and finally the agents of a hitherto almost completely absent outside world enter, efficient and benevolent society does a thorough job in unravelling a family unit that is all their members have, leading to a haunting series of quietly moving final scenes, images mostly, hovering uncertainly between faint hope and shattering desolation.

Image: © 2018 FUJI TELEVISION NETWORK/GAGA CORPORATION/AOI Pro. Inc. All rights reserved.

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Festival: Around the World in 14 Films 2018 (part 2)

Short reviews of selected films from this year’s festival

By Sascha Krieger

The Favourite (UK, Ireland, United States / Director: Yorgos Lanthimos) – Venice Film Festival

Yorgos Lanthimos, the creator of bitter, biting, often very cold allegories on the perversion of (post)modern humanity, has made a costume drama. Two hours later, the most conservative, rule-ridden, comfort-zone-seeking genre will never be the same. The celebrated and much hated Greek film maker tackles it with the force of a hurricane, leaving no stone unturned. On the surface, everything is fine: the sets are as elaborate and injected with a great love of detail as are the costume, the atmosphere of the claustrophobic powder and wig-heavy indoor society that is Baroque England so expertly covered one can almost smell the sweet stench of decay. The story is fictional, some of the characters are not. It takes place in the court of Queen Anne, the forgotten queen between the first Elizabeth and the only Victoria. In the film, she builds around herself a circle of female friends and confidantes: first the resolute, tactically relentless uber-politician Lady Sarah (with biting force: Rachel Weisz), later the fallen former Aristocrate and now servant (though not for long) Abigail (quickly turning from innocent to witty to coldly scheming: Emma Stone). Together they fight the patriarchy by mirroring it: they’re tougher, more ruthless, less scrupulous and a lot more radical than their male counterparts. So much so that ultimately they turn against each other in one of the more epic and brutal battle of wits, minds and bodies you’ve ever seen in film.

Image: © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox

Festival: Around the World in 14 Films 2018 (part 1)

Short reviews of selected films from this year’s festival

By Sascha Krieger

Se rokh / Three Faces (Iran / Director: Jafar Panahi) – Cannes Film Festival

In 2010, Jafar Panahi was banned from making films for 20 years. Three Faces is the fourth film he’s made since. This time, after being caught in a taxi or his own house, he has a little more room: he haunts his home region, the villages his family came from, a safer place for him than Tehran. Not a freer one though, as his film shows. The beginning is stark: a horizontal cell phone video shot by a girl apparently committing suicide. „This is not a film“, his first post-ban effort was called, „we’re not making a film“, Panahi keeps saying during this one – the beginning makes this statement, too, loud and clear. There is a documentary feel to this film, a sense of uncertainty representative of Panahi’s situation, of the female protagonists of the film – who all bear their real names – and the society depicted. It is a patriarchal one, full of often absurd rules such as the elaborate honking ritual to ensure safe passage on a narrow mountain road when it would be so much easier to just make it wider. Panahi depicts such episodes with glee, with a sly humour and a lightness of touch that astonishes.

Image: © Jafar Panahi Film Production