Leave No Traces (Jan P. Matsuszynski, 2021)

 

Jan P. Matsuszynski’s Leave No Traces doesn’t make for the most comfortable viewing at a time of enforced deportations based on unfounded allegations and disregard for due process and constitutional rights; over more than two and a half hours, it patiently and (appropriately) drainingly explores a Polish legal system of astounding self-righteous malevolence, capable of drawing on seemingly unlimited resources for the sake of self-preservation. It focuses on the real-life case of Grzegorz Przemyk, an 18-year-old student who was detained by police in 1983 for trivial reasons and hideously beaten by them, dying of his internal injuries within a few days; given all the evidence, including a friend’s eye-witness testimony, the focus of investigation ought to be clear, but it comes more naturally to the authorities to slander, deflect and lie, most poignantly here in the character of an innocent paramedic who transported the already doomed Przemyk to hospital, targeted as a more acceptable scapegoat and placed under impossible pressure to make a false confession. The activity isn’t confined to the shadowy depths: when the country’s chief prosecutor (one of the few people in the film with an apparent ethical compass) comments that the whole thing would have been long forgotten if not for the near-crazed focus on protecting the identified officers, the next scene contains a radio news announcement that he’s been removed from his post. But the film, pointedly, excludes any examination of the offenders’ state of mind, of whether they feel guilt or remorse, this being irrelevant to the workings of the system. The viewer feels increasingly drained, furious, afraid, and hemmed in: early on, the BBC’s reporting, and considerations relating to an upcoming Papal visit, provide some momentum toward objectivity and transparency, but these eventually fall out of the picture, the process following no logic or morality but its own, even the sanest and most determined witness barely able to withstand the onslaught.

Ararat (Atom Egoyan, 2002)

 

Atom Egoyan’s Ararat is fairly typical of the director’s post-peak works: meticulously controlled, preoccupied with weighty themes, its structural intricacy spanning the public and the intimate; and, sadly, almost completely lacking in impact. The film concerns itself with the 1915 Armenian genocide, both as a valid subject for modern-day film-making (Charles Aznavour plays a director making a film called Ararat) and as a continuing source of preoccupation and trauma, both directly (Egoyan lumberingly contrives a reason for a customs officer to be discussing the history at length with a suspected drug smuggler) and by generational and cultural proximity (that same suspect’s father, an Armenian activist, was shot dead while attempting to kill a Turkish diplomat). The film’s thicket of interconnections (for example, the custom’s officer’s son is in a relationship with an actor in the movie, on which the suspect also works as a production assistant), seemingly intended to establish a sense of layered complexity, mostly feels over-determined and airless: the film lacks any hint of spontaneity or true discovery, its artifices and inventions at odds with any possibility of more than superficial empathy. It does evoke a nagging suspicion (or maybe it’s just a faintly benevolent hope) that Egoyan is playing a particularly sophisticated game (for example, why should we believe that a flashback seemingly showing the truth about a past death is any more reliable than the material we see being shot in a studio), that the earnestness and speechifying are parodic, mocking the whole notion that commercial cinema could possibly make a meaningful contribution to historical memory and understanding. But the weight of evidence indicates that the film is indeed as turgidly self-important as one experiences it as being. The actors are at best dull and poorly utilized (Marie-Josee Croze is one of the few centres of energy), and at worst (Elias Koteas is a prime offender) barely watchable.

Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1981)

 

The 1981 Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man is probably no one’s favourite Bernardo Bertolucci movie, feeling throughout more confined and murky and just plain small than his greatest works, even as it sporadically evokes them. And yet, the film rewards contemplation and re-viewing; its central enigma coming to seem more genuinely tragic (even if it does generate an almost strenuously happy ending, to the degree that the character’s voice over can’t even try to grapple with it), assessed both personally and politically. Ugo Tognazzi plays Spaggiari, the owner of a rural cheese factory with financial problems whose son Giovanni is kidnapped, the requested ransom threatening to take down the business, if not Spaggiari’s entire bourgeois-styled life; when it appears Giovanni is dead, Spaggiari evolves a plan of seeming to pay over the money he’s raised from here and there, while keeping it to plough back into the business. Spaggiari’s titular “ridiculousness” is partly a matter of background, of not being born among the elite, and partly of temperament, of overestimating his capacity for control and action (there’s a strong element of predestination in how he happens to be on the roof, with a new pair of binoculars, just in time to witness the kidnapping, and as noted the film’s final note is one of bewildered resignation). In turn, the viewer is likely to feel almost as unmoored: the two employees who agree to help Spaggiari in his scheme clearly know more than he’s aware of (and at one point the police search his house for unspecified reasons going beyond the kidnapping), and the film entertains competing notions (such as that of turning the factory into a workers’ collective) that seem easy to sloganize than implement. But as always, Bertolucci crafts a fascinatingly textured surface, constantly punctured by eruptions of eccentricity, of strange but humanizing detail, of sheer filmmaking panache.

Stars at Noon (Claire Denis, 2022)

 

Any brief account of Claire Denis’ grievously overlooked Stars at Noon must surely start with Margaret Qualley’s blistering lead performance as Trish, a remarkable creation of shifting registers and moods, capable of going in seconds from calculating and conniving to wildly spontaneous and eccentric, drinking to excess at all times of day and conveying utter sexual self-determination, which encompasses regularly using her body to make money. More officially though she’s a journalist, stuck in sweltering, volatile Nicaragua without resources or even a passport, her main object being to get over the border to Costa Rica, connecting with Joe Alwyn’s Daniel, a somewhat mysterious Englishman who has a gun in his bag but is less attuned than her to local complexities and players; the connection between the two has a classic romantic contour and physical combustibility, while infused with Denis’ immense customary vivacity, her bottomless capacity to render what’s coming next entirely unpredictable, without sacrificing an overall sense of control or coherence. The achievement is all the more remarkable for the utter lack of spoon-feeding, even the most basic information emerging only in sometimes offhand spurts, and all the dots by no means completely joined, which here seems entirely true to the depiction of individuals caught up (as we all are, in generally less cinematic manner) in events the totality of which they can only glimpse. But the film pulsates with a genuine sense of threat, again embodied in Trish’s almost wantonly vulnerability-defying behaviour; it feels deeply and worrying suspenseful even when mostly defined by torpor and inaction. And as always, Denis ventilates even the briefest encounters with glancing references to past encounters, with laden looks and remarks or shards of eccentricity; in her brilliant, generous hands, a mundane exchange in a dingy setting generates more excitement than the high-stakes encounters of lesser films,