HORSES OF GOD (2012)

After the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. people were quick to argue that the attackers in no way represented the downtrodden, as if to preempt anyone thinking of saying they must have had some sincere personal grievance, grounded in poverty, in order to do what they did. Not quite two years later a wave of suicide bombings swept Casablanca, the legendary city in the Kingdom of Morocco. Adapting a novel based on those attacks, French director Nabil Ayouch tells us that these terrorists were the downtrodden, products of progressive impoverishment in the no-hope environment of a metastasizing shantytown. With every jump of time in his story he shows us dauntingly how the shantytown has grown. His protagonists are virtual dead end kids and his story is something like the original Dead End Kids of 1930s Hollywood getting recruited into the German-American Bund or the Ku Klux Klan with Pat O'Brien egging them on and no one to show them the error of their ways.

Our main focus is on a trio of shantytown kids who age from boys to men: Hamid, the bicycle-chain swinging leader of the band, his younger brother Tarek, nicknamed "Yachine" after a famous Soviet soccer goalie, and Tarek's weakling buddy Nabil. In ancient kid-gang fashion they and the rest of their team are chased back to their own neighborhood by the other team, the skins to their shirts, after a game falls apart. From the beginning Nabil and Tarek are accused of being gay for each other -- in a horrific scene a drunken Hamid actually rapes Nabil as Tarek and their other pals watch stupefied --  and a certain panic about masculinity amid a greater physical intimacy than men share in the west informs the decisions they make as young men. They work as mechanics for a boorish garage owner while Hamid, who'd become a drug dealer, stews in stir for throwing a rock through a cop's car window on a dare. Hamid returns from prison apparently reformed, but now he's too neat looking and there's something sinister about his new seeming serenity. It soon becomes apparent that he's been "radicalized," to use the current buzzword, but to Ayouch it looks more like plain old brainwashing by a cult.

 

The evolution (or devolution?) of Hamid (Abdelilah Rachid)

Still, while Hamid has grown a little aloof from his family -- including an alcoholic dad, a trashy mom and another brother who's a little crazy about his radio -- he and his new buddies come in handy when Tarek and Nabil need to cover up Tarek's killing of their boss for having out-of-nowhere started fondling Nabil. Tarek feels obliged to these devout dudes, who are also kind of cool for knowing karate, but he also finds their disciplined activity filling a void in his life. His promises to become a life of action rather than mere being, action becoming more important than life, even if he does still pine a little for Ghislaine, the pretty girl from the embroidery school. Suddenly he seems even more radicalized than Hamid, and Hamid notices this to his dismay. 

 

What elevates Horses of God above a simple expose on the making of terrorists is Hamid's wavering development. It's a surprising twist if you were expecting Tarek, the good brother and our point-of-view character, to observe and/or oppose Hamid's radicalization. As Hamid, Abdelilah Rachid undergoes multiple transformations, from thug to true believer to something more ambivalent. It's not so much that he comes to doubt jihad as that he can't stand to see Tarek traveling this path. It's as if some older-brother protectiveness overrides his radicalization. For all we know he could die readily himself, but eventually he can't bear even to think about Tarek martyring himself. At the brink of doom he tries to dissuade Tarek from carrying out a bombing of a niteclub, only to have Tarek at long last step out of older brother's shadow by shoving him to the ground. The dynamics of their whole sad family make Horses something more than a political film. Because the characters are convincingly human, the stakes seem more real for the audience, especially as we see harmless-seeming people denounced for sin and apostasy and targeted for death for no good strategic reason.

The film closes on a despairingly Bruegelian note as a consummating explosion is seen only from a tremendous distance -- from one of the soccer fields where Hamid and Tarek played as boys, where the next generation of shantytown boys watches with short-lived fascination, little suspecting what the filmmakers suspect is their own dark destiny. The subject matter alone makes Horses of God necessary viewing in our time, but fortunately there's more than necessity to justify seeing it.

THE HORDE (Orda, 2012)

The era of the "Tatar Yoke" in the Middle Ages was Russia's Holocaust. So you might think after watching Andrei Proshkin's historical epic, in which more than once we see scenes very similar to the selections at the gates of Auschwitz. Tatars -- superficially Islamized Mongols -- bring captive Russians to their city. The captives are asked if they have any skills. Those who do are taken away to slavery. Those too honest or too stupid to answer are summarily killed for their captors' amusement. Perhaps a better comparison would be with the era of Hebrew bondage in Egypt. The Horde tells of a sort of prophet who must work miracles to save his people from the caprices of a despot. Proshkin's film is an aspiring national epic of suffering redeemed by divine favor, or of a people's suffering redeemed by an individual's suffering.

Yury Arabov's screenplay is based on a quasi-historical event. After becoming ruler of the Golden Horde (or "tsar of tsars" in the English subtitles) by killing his older brother, Khan Janibek (Innokenty Dakayarov) desperately seeks the approval of his imperious mother Taidula (Roza Hairullina), who literally shares his throne. He grows more desperate when his mom suddenly goes blind. He calls on healers from all his domains, and beyond, to restore her sight, and he's quite unforgiving when they fail. We've already seen that Janibek is fascinated by the magic, or the idea of magic, but he's disgusted when the tricks behind illusions are revealed, kicking the crap out of one too obvous charlatan.

 

Where shamans, fakirs, etc. have failed, what about the Christian God? Catholic friars were in the throne room on the night Janibek took power (and apparently thwarted an invasion of France), but he looks closer to home, to Orthodox Muscovy, where it is said that the Metropolitan Alexei (Maxim Sukhanov) has the power to heal. The khan summons the priest to his capital with a simple deal: heal Taidula or Moscow will be razed to the ground. With one companion and a two-Tatar escort, Alexei -- who like many miraculous healers fears the sin of pride if not the very power within him -- reluctantly crosses the steppes to Janibek's court. Things start well when he crosses a gauntlet of fire without batting an eye, but he has no more success with Taidula (with whom he has a tantalizingly vague history) than the others. Something about Alexei's humility impresses Janibek just the same -- but not too much. He orders the metropolitan spared so he can return, on foot and in rags, to Moscow, in order to see it burn. He assigns a seemingly faithful retainer, Timehr (Fedot Lvov), to make sure no harm comes to the old man until the day of doom.

 

Alexei's failure has destroyed his self-esteem if not his faith. He can't bear to return to Moscow, instead joining a slave caravan back to the khan's city, where he survives the selection process only through official intervention. The metropolitan is put to work tending a fiery brick furnace while Janibek waits for him to break. To speed the process, he sets a quota of his co-workers to be chosen at random and killed each day. Alexei offers his life in someone else's place, and when his offer is rebuffed the full horror of the situation sinks in. He allows his clothes to catch fire, but his fellows beat the flames down and put him out in the rain in an impressive POV tracking shot. Left to die or live, Alexei raves in agony, still begging God to take his life instead of anyone else's.

What follows is anticlimactic only because The Horde has seemed to be a religious epic, yet ultimately denies us the presumed epiphany of a payoff. Alexei survives the night and wakes to find Janibek prostrating himself before him. Taidula has regained her sight and the khan has given Alexei the credit. The epiphanic payoff I was expecting was our view of the moment when Taidula is truly healed, but Proshkin and Arabov may have withheld it deliberately. Because the moment of recovery isn't shown to us in miraculous trappings, but is only reported to us (as it would have been in Greek tragedy) we can speculate that Taidula's trouble cleared up naturally, and that Alexei had nothing to do with it, whatever Janibek believes. In effect, the moment is a triumph of Janibek's faith in Alexei, but the tragic irony, from a Christian perspective, is that the healing saves Taidula and saves Moscow, but it doesn't save Janibek. He allows that Alexei has worked a wonder, or a miracle if you will, but that doesn't lead him to God/Jesus as a Christian would hope. Instead, in his last moments on screen he's still childishly fascinated by any purported wonder, enthusing over an Indian Rope Trick and playing with a new toy while his fate is being settled. You don't have to be religious to get the point and appreciate it as you would the premises of any fantasy film.

The Horde is an ambitious picture with impressive production values, and it justifies your time even if it seems to skid to an end fairly abruptly. The acting is solid, with Sukhanov and Dakayarov sharing top honors as a more complex variation on the Moses-Rameses act. A prize winner at the Moscow Film Festival, it's a fascinating window into Russia's self-image as an often-martyred yet divinely favored nation.

DAY OF THE SIEGE (2012)

In the U.S. Renzo Martinelli's would-be epic has the title of a generic war film. That probably infuriated a director who opened the film with a quote from 20th century French historian (and victim of the Nazis) Marc Bloch: "Misunderstanding of the present grows fatally from ignorance of the past." In Martinelli's home country, Day of the Siege is known as 11 Settembre 1683. On that day, the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks was broken by an attack by a Polish army led by King Jan Sobieski. Martinelli's Italo-Polish production credits this rescue of Christendom from the last great Islamic military assault to date to the Polish king (played by director Jerzy Skolimowski) and an Italian friar, Marco d'Aviano (F. Murray Abraham), who was the spiritual adviser to the Emperor of Austria. The Poles, presumably having less of an agenda, or more likely seeing an existential threat coming from a different direction, call this movie The Battle of Vienna. For Martinelli and his writers, however, the immediate agenda is Islamophobic, though their hackneyed commitment to the conventions of historical drama, and perhaps a degree of good taste, make the film less of a hatefest than it could have been.

In 1683 Islam was on the march again, the Turks' ultimate goal being to turn St. Peter's in Rome into a mosque. The Sultan entrusts his grand vizier Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso) to take the Hapsburg capital. Friar Marco, first seen in Venice almost reluctantly healing the blind, goes to Vienna to stiffen Austrian resolve and convince the haughty Hapsburgs to accept the aid of the Poles and their upstart King, whom the Austrians see as a social inferior. With the Poles finally on board Sobieski insures ultimate Christian victory by defying Kara Mustafa's expectation and dragging artillery up a steep mountain to a commanding position from which he can soften up the Turkish position before scattering it with the cavalry charge of his dreaded winged hussars.

 

Above: a Muslim's nightmare vision of a Christian army.

Below: the badass reality of the winged hussars

Martinelli -- last noticed here as the auteur of the boxing biopic Carnera: The Walking Mountain -- felt it necessary to add human interest to this epic subject. He does this in two ways. First, his writers invent a sort of relationship between Friar Marco and Kara Mustafa in order to justify a meeting between his two main characters. When they were young men, Kara Mustafa while visiting Venice saved Marco's life from a falling piece of ship's cargo. As the Ottoman army nears Vienna and the two men become aware of each other's role, each grows curious to meet the other, but their fictional showdown is necessarily anticlimactic since it can't change the course of history. Meanwhile, a subplot focuses on an interfaith couple in a village Marco visits. The husband is a Muslim, the wife a Christian mute. As news of the Turkish invasion spreads, the villagers want to lynch Abul (Greek actor Yorgo Voyagis), but Marco intervenes to save him. He is repaid by Abul's flight to the Turkish lines, where he advises Kara Mustafa about the holy man on the Christian side. Later, after the invaders sack the village, Abul's wife is taken prisoner. He ignores her squawking, grunting pleas for rescue and allows her to be herded into a stockade with other women, presumably to be used for sex or sold as slaves, but he returns at night to arrange for her release. Later still, he appears at the gate of Vienna to urge the Austrians to save their bodies and souls by surrendering, converting to Islam or paying the tax required of People of the Book. Abul's story ends when, with the Turkish army in retreat, he covers Kara Mustafa's escape by putting on the vizier's armor and charging the Polish cavalry single-handedly. His pregnant wife is left weeping over his bullet-riddled corpse. This little story ends tragically, it seems, solely because Abul is a Muslim and Muslims can't change their stripes. Martinelli seems to want it both ways, catering to liberals by having Marco save Abul from a lynching, yet pandering to Islamophobia by showing that Abul couldn't be trusted after all. That's a provocatively mixed message to send to audiences in Europe, where anxiety about Muslims in their midst is much greater than it is in the U.S.

For what it's worth, the screenwriters take the position that Muslims worship a different God than Christians. This would be news to Muslims, who believe themselves the most authentic acolytes of the God of Abraham; their idea is that Islam is the default religion of that God from which Jews, despite Moses, and Christians, despite Jesus, have deviated in dangerous if not damning ways. Many Christians believe, however, that if Islam can't imagine God having a son, or if it insufficiently emphasizes loving fatherhood as a defining divine attribute, then Allah may as well be a fictional character Muhammad invented. That point aside, the script tries to score more points against Islam by having Friar Marco argue that "the one true God" does not demand submission -- which literally defines Islam -- but wants men to be free. That in turn would be news to countless people who've lived in Christian countries under the dominance of various Christian churches, but to be fair that's another story for other films. For now it's enough to note that despite some sketchy efforts to humanize the important Muslim characters (Kara Mustafa is shown as a doting father, for instance), Day of the Siege is indisputably an Islamophobic film, though not grotesquely so. You can't argue that any film showing Christians fighting Muslims is Islamophobic because I'll throw Kingdom of Heaven at you to stop that argument. What makes Day Islamophobic is its constant implication that permanent peace with Islam is impossible. There's no other way to interpret the Marc Bloch epigraph, while Kara Mustafa in the story warns Friar Marco that defeating Islam before Vienna would only be "trimming the Prophet's beard," i.e. a temporary setback. Don't get me wrong; there's plenty to object to about Islam, and more still about Islamism, but Day of the Siege strays into "all Muslims are a threat" territory, where we shouldn't really want or need to go no matter what our beefs are with specific Muslim goons today.

The film's Islamophobia could be redeemed if it inspired some epic action, but Martinelli's reach exceeds the grasp of his international budget. He can compose some impressive images on a relatively intimate scale, but the battle scenes upon which the film presumably depends constantly betray limitations on budget, technology and imagination. Martinelli has to rely on CGI reinforcements to supplement his extras. Worse, he resorts to CGI explosions and musketry along with repetitive, too-familiar shots of stuntmen flinging themselves from explosions. It may be unfair to bring up Kingdom of Heaven again, but that underrated picture has perhaps the best portrayal of siege warfare ever, while the battle scenes in Day of the Siege are actually some of the dullest parts of the film. Bad acting also undermines the picture. It was reportedly shot in English, but that appears to have left everyone (who wasn't dubbed afterward, that is) except Abraham at a disadvantage. Predictably enough, he alone brings any passion or power to his role, and if anything he might have shot for over-the-top more often. Only he comes close to the intensity the whole show needed badly, and that Martinelli may have felt while shooting it but doesn't really show on screen. The Siege of Vienna should be the stuff of thrilling cinema, but for that to happen someone will have to attack the subject again another time. Marc Bloch's advice might come in handy then.

Takeshi Kitano's OUTRAGE BEYOND (2012)

Maybe I was wrong all along, but before I watched the sequel to Takeshi Kitano's Outrage, my impression was that the original film had shown us Kitano's character, the yakuza "Champ" Otomo, getting fatally shanked in prison by a rival he had wronged earlier in the picture. But Outrage was just too popular, I guess, and its popularity demanded a sequel. There were other characters you could follow from the first film, but it wouldn't make sense to have Kitano return as writer and director and not have his on-camera alter ego Beat Takeshi return as Otomo. So sure, he got stabbed, but he got better. We didn't see him actually die. We didn't see him autopsied or cremated. So sure, it could have happened exactly this way. But keeping Otomo alive is just the beginning of Kitano's betrayal of his earlier work.

The virtue of Outrage, at least as I saw it, was in its uncompromising pessimism. It gave you a rooting interest in the ever-manipulated, ever-exploited Champ and kept you hoping that he'd turn the tables on everyone. In 2010, however, Kitano refused the audience that satisfaction. Otomo was caught in an inexorable trap that illustrated the hopelessness of life for most yakuza. In 2012, Outrage Beyond -- look it up on Netflix as Beyond Outrage, but it's the other way around on screen --was the Rocky II of yakuza films. It's a Stallonian sequel that asks the question, "Do we get to win this time?" and answers, "Hell, yeah!"

 

Fumiyo Kohinata (right in both pictures) plays dangerous games with yakuza in Outrage Beyond.

 

Kitano keeps himself hidden for the first half-hour or so while reintroducing the other survivors from Outrage. The treacherous winners from the first film are getting a little too arrogant for the police, who put pressure on corrupt detective Kataoka (Fumiyo Kohinata) to keep them in line. The wily manipulator is burdened with a gung-ho, straight-arrow partner (Yutaka Matsushige) who hates yakuza and questions Kataoka's loyalties. Kataoka, whom we know to be on the take, insists that he thinks of crushing the yakuza all the time, and the scary thing about him is that we don't really doubt this. While not a man of brutal violence like his yakuza interlocutors, Kataoka is arguably the most evil character in either film. He cold-bloodedly plays different families and firms against each other -- actually, he may take pleasure in the way he eggs yakuza into destroying each other. We learn that he's kept Otomo's survival a secret, saving his old pal to unleash when he can do the most damage.

Actually, however, Champ has counted his blessings and, once paroled, simply wants out of the old life. He seems exhausted, or not yet fully recovered from his injury, not even interested in sex after all his time in stir. He considers taking a conventional job or moving to South Korea, but just when he thinks he's out, Kataoka drags him back in. Meanwhile, in perhaps the most unlikely twist of the sequel, Otomo ends up befriending Kimura (Hideo Nakano), the man he disfigured in the first film, who then stabbed him in prison. Kimura got out some time ago and runs a batting cage with two young punks as his so-called soldiers. He's the one person in the picture that Otomo is willing to forgive. Champ figures he had it coming for slashing Kimura's face when he had tried to apologize for an offense, and by now Kimura is willing to let bygones be bygones. Meanwhile, Kataoka struggles to stir up a gang war, inviting malcontent yakuza to get help from out of town and raising fears of Otomo to force a series of provocations that finally draws Champ into the fray. It takes a bullet in his side and the murder of Kimura's proteges -- shown as bullying jerks in their first appearance, we're meant to pity them eventually -- to revert Otomo into the killing machine Kataoka had hoped to see. Wounded in an elevator, Champ seems to mock the implausibility of his endurance, asking: "Why do they always aim at my belly?" He is a resilient cuss, and once he's up and running again Outrage Beyond becomes a relentless killfest.

Otomo and Kimura hook up with a big outside outfit to fight their old antagonists -- they see an opportunity to expand and deplore the current boss's treacherous route to power -- and the rout is on. Suddenly the bad guys are beset by seemingly limitless resources, while Champ rediscovers his knack for creative torture. The highlight death scene this time is the comeuppance dealt to one of Otomo's treacherous underlings from the first film. After pissing himself (it's always a demerit for a director to show this), the man is tied securely to a sofa chair and set up in Kimura's batting cage as the pitching machine is loaded with baseballs. Nothing else is quite as flamboyant, and the killing actually becomes monotonous after a while.

Once he's started, however reluctantly, Otomo never seems to know when to quit. Almost inevitably, he and Kimura are marked for elimination, and after Kimura is eliminated, it looks like Kitano is setting up a Wild Bunch style climax as Champ arrives at a funeral full of his enemies and an almost gleeful Kataoka puts a gun in his hand. It doesn't quite turn out that way, as Kitano instead closes with a scene that may well have made audiences applaud. If so, that would only reaffirm the extent to which Outrage Beyond is a kind of sell-out for the sake of audience gratification -- and it can't be a good sign that Kitano reportedly has been negotiating to make a third Outrage movie. That is outrageous in its own right. To be fair, Outrage Beyond is an entertaining movie on its own terms. But it entertains in a way that cheapens its predecessor, in my view at least, and that's a shame.

Banality of Evil, Part II: Springtime for Suharto

In late 1965 a power struggle between the Indonesian army and Communist supporters of President Sukarno resulted in the killing of six generals. In reprisal, the army and its supporters carried out what might be called an anti-Communist genocide, killing hundreds of thousands of people. In some places, apparently, the purge became a porgrom against the country's Chinese minority; elsewhere it elminated anyone thought a threat to military supremacy. In many cases the killings were carried out by the premans. As the people in Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary The Act of Killing state repeatedly, the word preman derives from "free man." It dates back to Dutch rule over the archipelago, when a vrijman, initially, was a trader operating independently from the Dutch East India Company. It still carries the connotation of an independent operator, working at the edge or on the other side of the law. In modern Indonesia, the term encompasses large quasi-fascistic paramilitary organizations and petty street hustlers. Oppenheimer invariably translates preman as "gangster," but since we hear the actual word gangster used in the Bahasa language on at least one occasion we may wonder whether the director's translation is exact.

The premans are the subject of Oppenheimer's much-acclaimed movie, a film bearing the stamp of approval of executive producers Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, modern masters of the documentary form, and more people named "Anonymous" in the crew than you're likely ever to see in another film. Many people played a role in putting the film together, including more than can safely take credit, but inevitably we see the influence of the two celebrity auteurs, that of Morris in the frank confessions of atrocities by their perpetrators, that of Herzog in the gratuitously weird dramatizations the perpetrators are encouraged to perform. The film's peculiar conceit is that some of the surviving killers from 1965, still widely regarded as heroes in their country, were invited to reenact their deeds in the styles of their favorite movies. Deeply influenced by Hollywood cinema, they envision themselves as noirish tough guys or in kitschy musical numbers. If Herzog and Morris loom over the film as guiding spirits, Oppenheimer's finished product sometimes suggests Shoah as produced by Bialystock and Bloom.

The film's own Bialystock and Bloom, or its Franz Liebkind and Roger DeBris, are Anwar Congo, apparently one of the most famous preman killers of the era, and his protege Herman Koto. Dark-skinned and grey-haired, the grandfatherly Congo might be Nelson Mandela's evil twin; Koto is a present-day preman and the film's most ludicrous figure. The pettiest of criminals, he enjoys dressing up to the point of wearing drag in the picture's already-iconic production numbers. During the filming Koto runs for political office. While relishing the shakedown opportunities within his grasp he proves an incompetent campaigner, incapable of remembering his lines and unable to provide the presents that otherwise apathetic potential voters expect. He's more in his element in the sadistic movie-movie world Oppenheimer creates for him, while other prominent premans worry that Koto and Congo may reveal too much. They fear that too frank a portrayal of the purge will undermine their standing in history by showing that they, not the Communists, were the cruel ones.

It's a weakness of the film that it offers no context for the premans' assertion that Indonesia's Communists were cruel; there's no mention of the killing of the generals, for instance. My point isn't to justify the purge, since the crimes against actual or purported Communists far outweigh those few killings, but to note how little Oppenheimer really says about Indonesian history and how much he seems to take for granted about it. I worry that he wants us to see the premans as equivalent to American right-wingers, given their anti-Communism and their proud "free men" identity, though they give little evidence of ideological motivation. The biggest gripe against Communists expressed in the picture is that local governments taken over by the PKI reduced the number of Hollywood movies that could be shown in theaters, thus reducing the take for preman ticket scalpers. The perception that the premans aren't motivated by ideological fanaticism probably explains why The Act of Killing has been described as an illustration of the "banality of evil." But Anwar Congo is no Adolf Eichmann. He readily takes responsibility, if not credit, for mass murder. He says "we had to do it" at one point, but I don't think he means that he was just obeying orders. For Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil was rooted in oppressive institutions' empowerment of mediocrities like Eichmann who remained little more than instruments of an institutional murderous impulse. The premans have more agency than Arendt seemed to grant to Eichmann, while Oppenheimer seems more concerned with their banality as personalities than with the banality of institutionalized evil. At its worst, The Act of Killing seems to be about the kitsch or camp of evil, Herzog-style, and it's hard to tell whether the director wants us to be horrified more by Congo's crimes or by his apparent bad taste -- whether he means viewers to judge Congo by their horror or their laughter.

Until the final reel I was ready to dismiss The Act of Killing as a profoundly overrated piece of condescending, vaguely racist camp from a Herzog-wannabe. Its message seemed to be, "What benighted savages these Hollywood (or Bollywood?)-addled Indonesians are, playing soldier and gangster after killing multitudes." Then something remarkable happened. For Oppenheimer, the problem of evil in Indonesia had been that no one, or nearly no one, acknowledged that what had happened was evil. The kitschy reenactments seemed to illustrate the perpetrators' unrepentant attitude toward their deeds. But in the course of the playacting Anwar Congo takes on the role of a victim of the crimes he actually committed. Early, we'd seen him demonstrate the neat way to kill a man by strangling him with a wire. Later, he submits to the same treatment. It's only a movie -- in fact, it's only a movie within a movie -- but imagining himself on the receiving end he has a sort of epiphany of empathy, if your definition of epiphany includes a loud bout of the dry heaves. Congo had already imagined himself haunted by nightmare demons, but also as receiving absolution from the ghosts of his victims, one of whom is shown in a production number thanking Congo for saving his soul by killing him. Congo wants the film to vindicate him, but for one moment, at least, it breaks him. Against the odds, Oppenheimer's strategy worked -- if it had been his strategy, after all, to force a moral awakening on his subjects. The play was the thing to catch the conscience, if not of the king, then of his knight. No real or lasting repentance resulted, I suspect, but Congo's moment of remorse and revulsion will live as long as the footage does, and it's what the world outside Indonesia will remember him for. Small solace for his victims and their survivors, certainly, but at least it suggests that history will take their side.

Banality of Evil, Part I

The philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term "banality of evil" to account for Adolf Eichmann, the fugitive Nazi bureaucrat captured in Argentina and brought to Israel for a trial Arendt covered for the New Yorker magazine. Veteran director Margarethe von Trotta had the gutsy notion that Arendt's formulation of the concept and the anger it provoked were the stuff of cinematic drama, though the association of the concept with the Holocaust probably made the notion seem bankably gutsy. Von Trotta is an elder stateswoman of German cinema, a survivor of the New German Cinema movement that flourished in the 1970s. But Hannah Arendt (2012) may remind film buffs of another German director: William Dieterle, the biopic specialist for Warner Bros. in the 1930s. Arendt is just the latest of von Trotta's biopics, her previous subjects including the martyred Communist Rosa Luxemburg and the medieval abbess Hildegard von Bingen. This latest biopic comes closest to the Dieterle-Warners model: a brilliant underdog comes up with some innovative and controversial idea and must defend it with a big speech against skeptics and haters.

Why is the "banality of evil" idea so controversial? The answer seems to be that most people misunderstood it. Arendt, born and educated in Germany, was fluent enough in English (the film is practically bilingual and star Barbara Sukowa is impressive in both languages) that her meaning should not have been mistaken. She described the banality of evil, but people reacted as if she had denied the existence of evil. Arendt felt challenged to account for the evil deeds of Eichmann, a figure who seemed not just unthreatening but utterly average in his defendant's cage during the trial in Jerusalem. Von Trotta jarringly but wisely decides that there would be no substitute for the real Eichmann if she hoped to make this point; instead of casting an actor to play him, she shows us black and white news footage of the real man while Arendt observes in color. Eichmann in Jerusalem was a sniffly, smirky, stupid figure, and Arendt is surprised by the absence in him of any of the qualities usually identified with evil. Yet he was responsible for the transportation of multitudes to the death camps. What did Arendt, Jewish herself, expect? A raving Hitler-type, foaming at the mouth at the thought of Jews? Eichmann seemed nothing of the sort. Hearing his testimony, Arendt grew convinced that Eichmann had not been motivated primarily by anti-semitism or any personal malevolance.

The "banality" of evil is the absence of malice, seflish ambition, etc. Instead, Arendt deduced, Eichmann was an institutional creature conditioned to do his job without questioning it. This sort of institutional conditioning seemed to make the greatest evils possible in the 20th century. More offensive yet than Arendt's "defense" of Eichmann was her suggestion that a similar sort of institutional mentality, a deference to authority, left the Jews of Occupied Europe too ready to comply with authorities dedicated to their destruction. Had they been less orderly, she argued, fewer may have died. So in her critics' eyes not only was she defending Eichmann (by refusing, supposedly, to label him "evil") but she was blaming Jews for being complicit in their own destruction. For this, she is shunned by many of her academic and social peers until she makes a stand with the big speech in her classroom.

The great fault of Eichmann and anyone else who succumbs to the banality of evil, Arendt decides, is a failure to think. In turn, in von Trotta's film, she is attacked by people who respond emotionally or in partisan fashion to history rather than think objectively about it. In the film, this goes to the extreme of a carload of Mossad agents menacing our heroine and warning her against publishing her book in Israel. For von Trotta, the problem seems to be that people want to particularize evil in a way that minimizes their own susceptibility to it. The Holocaust, for instance, must be seen exclusively as a war against the Jews that can be accounted for entirely with reference to anti-semitism, instead of as something that could have happened to any group of people under the right institutional circumstances. The film's Arendt speaks for the broader, less comforting viewpoint, though von Trotta leaves room for viewers to speculate that behind Arendt's interest in Eichmann is a need to account for the Nazi sympathies of her onetime mentor and lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who likewise shows no sign of archetypal evil. Overall, Heidegger is a minor figure in the film compared to the Americans and Israelis who lash out at Arendt. They come across as no different than the hidebound traditionalists and reactionaries who plagued Dieterle's heroes back in the golden age of Hollywood, and the cliched presentation of their opposition, the ironically unthinking presumption of von Trotta that their opposition is essentially unthinking, makes the picture seem hackneyed at times. It doesn't help that von Trotta wants to use Arendt's real-life American BFF Mary McCarthy (Janet McTeer) -- an intellectual in her own right but not in Arendt's league as a thinker -- as a kind of Eve Arden type snarky sidekick who ends up looking silly attending parties where almost everyone but her speaks German. Arendt's American exile is part of the story -- note how the German poster above shows the Chrysler Building to symbolize the U.S., while the film itself announces its title against a shot of the Manhattan skyline, as if to emphasize a deceptive distance from which the heroine observes recent history. It's as if von Trotta is conscious of having made a more "American" film than usual. Hannah Arendt too often seems too old fashioned in a Hollywood way for a director identified with a "New" (albeit now old) school of filmmaking. Despite that, Sukowa carries the film on her back heroically with what may be one of the best bilingual performances ever, and for the most part von Trotta does justice to Arendt's enduring ability to provoke thought. Because of her intellectual ambition, I'm willing to be indulgent toward von Trotta's dramatic flaws. More films should be this ambitious -- and relevant.

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Eichmann's trial took place in the same year as Hollywood's big fictional prosecution of Nazis, Stanley Kramer's Judgment at Nuremberg. Germany's own Maximilian Schell (Austria's, actually)won the Oscar for Best Actor portraying the defense attorney for the film's judicial war criminals, and I've coincidentally heard the news of Schell's death at age 83 while I wrote this review. Schell had been the earliest surviving Best Actor winner, a status now inherited by Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field, 1963), and is the first of the famously long-lived Class of 1961 to pass on. Schell's acting career (in English, at least) never lived up to that early promise, and his best-known film after Nuremberg is probably Marlene, the Dietrich interview-documentary he directed about twenty years later. Still, he was an international star of a sort for half a century and his death is worth noting here.

 

 

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In Banality of Evil, Part II we'll look at an Oscar-nominated documentary that attempts to give the concept a new meaning that even Hannah Arendt might have to strain to recognize, while begging the question whether the true banality of evil is in the eye of the beholder. Stay tuned.

A HIJACKING (Kapringen, 2012)

Somali pirates are a great movie subject because, well, they're pirates. In the past two years global moviegoers have seen two distinct portrayals of their depredations. Americans are more familiar with Paul Greengrass's Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips, but Danish writer-director Tobias Lindholm (whose previous film was the prison flick R.) got to the topic first. Greengrass is admired for his semidocumentary style, but Lindholm's movie has more of a documentary look if only because his film, compared to a Hollywood project, shares most documentaries' budgetary constraints. Also, Greengrass is as much an action specialist as a stylist, and Kapringen is nothing like an action movie; it's intimate rather than spectacular. The two films can share the general subject because of the stark difference in each director's approach.

In Captain Phillips the pirates' boarding of the Maersk Alabama is arguably the year's most thrilling action sequence; in Kapringen the pirates' boarding of the MV Rozen is presented as a fait accompli. Captain Phillips aspires to short-term suspense as the captain and the pirates play a cat-and-mouse game during what feels like a very brief takeover of the Alabama, while the real subject of Kapringen is the slow-motion terror of tedium in captivity. In Phillips the pirate leader tries to entice the captain into compliance with the promise of quick negotiations, a quick payday for the pirates and a quick release for the captive crew, but Kapringen suggests that such a promise is false, or at least overly optimistic. The pirates in Phillips simply want to do business, and Kapringen shows us what that means. The pirates make a ransom demand ($15,000,000) and the ship's owners, only occasionally listening to the advice of their hired negotiation specialist, try to talk the number down beneath a mere million. The final figure of $3,800,000 is reached after months of captivity for the Rozen crew. We endure this mostly from the viewpoint of the ship's Danish cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek), who has a wife and kid at home looking for answers from the employers who fancy themselves hardball negotiators, who can tell the family that Mikkel is OK after a nightmare negotiation out of Ron Howard's Ransom, with the CEO's "Don't fuck with me!" raving answered with the sound of gunshots on the ship. The potential heartlessness of the people who have to pay ransoms is a subject Captain Phillips, for all its other virtues and its stated concern with the rat race forced on everybody, seems happy to avoid.

But Kapringen isn't primarily a jeremiad against corporations. Lindholm is as much interested in the exhausted camaraderie, somewhat sort of Stockholm Syndrome, that develops between captives and pirates, and in the cycles of frustration and plain boredom that sometimes drive casual cruelty. At one moment pirates may point rifles at the back of Mikkel's head; in another they'll join in a chorus of "Happy Birthday to You" in honor of Mikkel's daughter.

The results are nearly as suspenseful as in Captain Phillips, each picture earning its suspense in different ways. Because of the duration of the Rozen's ordeal, Kapringen is more horrific in a suffocatingly intimate way, while Mikkel's realistic helplessness raises the stakes (and our frustration with the suits) during the negotiation scenes. Lindholm's low-key direction can't compete with Greengrass's spectacular intensity in pure-cinema terms, but Kapringen and Captain Phillips prove to be quite complementary movies that could co-exist nicely as a double feature without either seeming redundant. Piracy off the Horn of Africa is a subject that may yet be far from exhausted.

Johnnie To's DRUG WAR (2012)

After exploring the realms of high and low finance in Life Without Principle, Hong Kong crime-film specialist Johnnie To returned to familiar territory last year (he has since made another film), but on the relatively unfamiliar territory of mainland China. Once upon a time it would have been hard to imagine a film from the People's Republic acknowledging the existence of drug dealers within its borders, yet here we are. And I found it interesting that To made his hero, Captain Zhang of the narcotics squad (Sun Honglei) the image of an American cowboy in the opening scene. The symbolism is highly and fluidly suggestive; is To saying something about his character, or about China, or about movies?

After going undercover Zhang breaks up a meth-smuggling operation, capturing a bus full of human mules stuffed full of drugs. Also taken in after crashing his car in the middle of town is Timmy Choi (Louis Koo), who proves to be (or claims to be) an important middleman in the drug trade and the boss of the Deaf Brothers -- literally a hearing-impaired gang who communicate through sign language and grunting, presumably the better to avoid surveillance. To avoid China's death penalty, Choi cooperates with Zhang, introducing the cop into his circle of crime. Zhang passes for a moneyman nicknamed Haha for his crazed laughter. After intercepting the real Haha and taking him out of circulation, Zhang, with Choi as chaperon, meets with representatives of mastermind "Uncle Billy." As a show of good faith, "Haha" has to snort two lines of coke; his hosts won't take no for an answer. Zhang mans up and keeps up his somewhat ridiculous act, but the drug men are barely out the door when our hero collapses in an overdosed fit. As the other cops threaten Choi, as if he's to blame for their boss's predicament, he yells out advice to save Zhang's life and prove anew his own good will.

There's something about the cold way Choi initially regards Zhang's distress that makes you wonder about his ultimate motives. Louis Koo's poker-faced performance dominates the picture despite Sun Honglei's broad role-playing, and Choi's facial bandages keep your attention focused on the actor throughout. Whatever Choi's motives have been along the way, when the shit hits the fan in the film's climactic rolling gunfight he means to be the last man standing. To's skill at developing slow-burning suspense pays off with a furious marathon battle that may remind crime fans of the epic street combat in Michael Mann's Heat. Choi comes tantalizingly close to his goal as cops and criminals inexorably eliminate each other, with no little help from Choi himself. It may be a concession to China's more authoritarian values, however, that the movie ultimately takes on a "Crime Does Not Pay" quality emphasizing China's inexorable justice.

At the climactic moment, however, movie buffs may be again reminded of America and American film, as Choi is beaten in a manner straight out of Erich von Stroheim's legendary silent film Greed. I haven't seen enough Johnnie To movies to know whether this sort of thing is typical of him or if Drug War's hints of Hollywood are some reflection on the People's Republic or what the mainland wants in a crime movie. Ultimately there's little reason to look for anything subversive here, since Drug War, if not as sociologically ambitious as Life Without Principle, is a potent pulp cinema directed with suspenseful style. Its main ambition is to entertain and by communist or capitalist standards it largely succeeds.

HOLY MOTORS (2012)

A man has strange adventures while riding through the city in a stretch limousine. Sound familiar? The French director Leos Carax claims no inspiration from Don DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis, but Carax's Holy Motors succeeds where David Cronenberg's adaptation of Cosmopolis failed in creating a cinematically alien world in which the literary language of an artistic novel might seem natural rather than stiff or affected. Since Holy Motors is mostly in French, I can't tell if Carax's dialogue is stiff the way Cronenberg's was, and to be fair literary dialogue isn't one of Carax's priorities. Some of Holy Motors' episodes are silent, and one is an outright homage to silent comedy. But Carax uses sight and sound (including music prominently) to create mood and atmosphere in a way Cronenberg, admittedly handicapped by very dry source material, couldn't manage. The two films will be linked  for a long time -- they finished one and two, Carax over Cronenberg, in Cahiers du Cinema's Best of 2012 survey -- but they're arguably fundamental opposites. Cosmopolis is introverted; the world comes to Robert Pattinson's limo while he ventures out only occasionally. Holy Motors is extroverted; Oscar (Denis Lavant) isn't on a joyride in search of a haircut but on a schedule, his driver Celine (Edith Scob) ferrying him to several "appointments" over the course of a trying day. Cosmopolis is a mordant commentary on the way we live now that probably couldn't help looking simplistically pretentious (the poor man just wants to feel something!) on film. Holy Motors quickly reveals itself as a wild fantasy that somehow still rings true in uncanny ways. In the simplest terms, Cosmopolis is a mostly failed effort (Cahiers notwithstanding) to turn a work of literary into film, while Holy Motors is a pure work of cinematic art.

 

Holy Motors provides limo services with amenities.

Below, Denis Lavant takes advantage of the bar

while Edith Scob keeps her eyes on the road.

More importantly, Cosmopolis is a statement while Holy Motors is a dream. It's the latest reassertion of the "dream logic" that defines much of European cinema, whether "art" or "genre." Some observers may amuse themselves wondering whose dream the film is. For a while during the film, you might take it for something bigger, more fantastical than a mere dream. I could see people speculating that Oscar is some sort of angel, as are the other people driven through Paris in the white limos based at the Holy Motors garage revealed at the end of the picture. His appointments aren't the usual meetings or chores. Oscar himself is a makeup artist, working up his transformations in the limo, turning himself into a begging bag lady, a dying old man, a dad with a teenage daughter, and a barefoot wildman character Levant has played for Carax before. Oscar could well be Andy Serkis, reporting to a film studio to shoot a motion-capture fight scene, followed by a sinuous dance with a tall, limber actress (see the poster), simulating the coupling of CGI monsters.

As the wild man Oscar is Chaplinesque and Chaneyesque at once, invading a fashion photoshoot in a cemetery (scored to Akira Ikufube's Godzilla theme!) and dragging Eva Mendes to the sewer, where he eats her money and her wig and transforms her haute couture costume into a burka before arranging her and himself into a pieta pose.

But there are strong hints of a more troubled inner life, especially a mournful encounter with a similarly-"employed" woman (Kylie Minogue) who sings "Who Were We?" (perhaps the best movie song of the year) and whose "appointment" includes jumping off a building. Oscar smokes and drinks more insistently as the day winds down, while Celine gently urges him to eat. And some things happen to him that just can't happen. As a gangster, Oscar assassinates a man, then makes the victim up to look like himself, albeit in his current mustachioed guise. Then the victim stabs Oscar in the neck and escapes as our hero bleeds out. But it's still Oscar, presumably, who attempts another assassination (a banker this time) only to get shot to hell ("Aim for the crotch!" he urges) before Celine retrieves him with apologies to bystanders for the mistake. And he's fine, apart from the coughing, smoking and drinking, by the time for the next appointment. It makes sense if he's some kind of supernatural creature, or if all these incidents are just the dreams of one night.

Once Celine delivers Oscar to his own home for his last appointment of the night you may be satisfied that it was all dreams. But Carax isn't interested in any conceptual closure. In the last few minutes he hits us with more surprises, some of which may infuriate viewers and all of which warn us that the dream isn't over, and may never end. The only one I'll spoil, since it's an almost predictable sop to movie buffs, is the moment when Edith Scob symbolically resumes her established place in movie history -- which itself might have been a signal (the character yielding to the actress) that the dream is over, except for what comes after. By the time it's over you may decide that Carax doesn't know when to quit -- the film certainly does end with a WTF moment -- but Holy Motors is the sort of film that shouldn't know when to quit. Restraint is no more a priority than coherence. The movie isn't a puzzle to solve; there needn't be an answer to what we're seeing to justify the spectacle. Holy Motors thrives on suggestion, on evocation rather than assertion. If it's narrative or nothing for you, this may be worse than nothing. But cinema is almost always spectacle, and often the image is the subconscious of the word. Carax's movie is almost exclusively subconscious, but it's also one of the funnier, more poignant and most inventive pictures I've seen from 2012, and one of that year's best films. It was Carax's first feature film in 13 years -- a fact that makes you wish he could get more busy like Terrence Malick or Manoel de Oliveira. Carax is only 52 but he's got a lot of catching up to do.