THE KEEPING ROOM (2014)

Daniel Barber's Civil War picture is a misanthropic piece of work in the most literal sense. Julia Hart's screenplay effectively declares war on men, uniting mistress and slave at the tail end of the war in resistance to rape and pillage by Union soldiers. Sisters Augusta (Britt Marling) and Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and a sole slave, Mad (Muna Otaru) are all that's left on the family farm as the Confederacy faces its reckoning. Like Scarlett O'Hara and her sisters, Augusta and Louise have to work in the fields alongside Mad in order to survive on humble crops. Louise is still spoiled enough to protest, asking why "the nigger" can't be left to do all the work. As Augusta explains, "It's like I said, we're all niggers now." You get the sense that she doesn't just mean herself and her sister, but says this in the spirit of the John Lennon/Yoko Ono song, "Woman is the Nigger of the World."

We're well past the legend of Sherman's March as a bloodless ravaging by this point in history. In its place, Keeping Room shows free-ranging Union foragers (led by Sam Worthington) committing random atrocities as they close in on our heroines' farm. Once they arrive, the film becomes something like a feminist version of Straw Dogs as the women fight off the blue bellies, though not before Louise, barely recovered from a raccoon bite, is raped. Add to this terror images like horses hauling a burning coach and its dead driver, or Augusta's discovery of a friend's pasty corpse, and Keeping Room seems to be a horror movie first and foremost.

The screenplay may insist too much that gender trumps race. It seems too good, if that's really the word, to be true that Mad forgives Augusta for shooting her returned lover in the back, mistaking him for another intruder. It's true enough that Mad was ready to shoot the same man in the back until he turned to reveal himself to her, but by this point in the film, long after Augusta and Mad had exchanged angry slaps, writer and director apparently have decided that race is no longer an issue. Instead, they have Mad recall the repeated rapes she suffered while still a girl in a mysterious plantation shed. On top of that, they have Augusta execute a wounded forager who had effectively surrendered, as if she was obliged to show him no mercy after killing the other man. In a grim parody of the end of Glory the dead forager and the dead freedman are dumped into a common grave, though Mad offers a dubious Augusta a spiritual assurance that the more innocent of the two is not really in the same place as the other.

In a final irony, as the main army advances on the farm, the only way the women can escape from the house of war is to become men by stripping the uniforms from the soldiers they've killed. You could argue that they've already surrendered much of their femininity, by the standards of their own time, by becoming killers, but the real message of this coda is more likely that there's no place for women in a world of men at war, so women must transform in one way or other in order to survive. It should be a happy ending since it looks like their plan will work, as long as they remain those few steps ahead of the soldiers swarming over the farm in the final shot, but at the same time it's an act of surrender -- just not the fall of the slave-plantation world we'd expect to celebrate. The Confederacy is dead, but injustice persists -- and the Confederacy's conquerors are perpetrating it. The Keeping Room may overstate its main point at times, but it's still an honestly unsettling movie about two civil wars: the one we see ending, and one that many say goes on today.

IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (Kraftidioten, 2014)

American movie fans nowadays will most likely recognize Stellan Skarsgaard as dear, dotty old Dr. Selvig from the Thor and Avengers movies. Closer to home, apparently, the 65 year old actor is a Scandinavian Liam Neeson, at least for this one film by his frequent collaborator, Hans Petter Moland. He'd have some credibility with home audiences in such a role, as he'd played the "Swedish James Bond" Carl Hamilton in a couple of movies back in the Nineties, among other heroic parts. But unlike the typical Neeson character in his post-Taken vehicles, or even Michael Caine's Harry Brown, Skarsgaard's aged vigilante in Kraftidioten -- that Google Translates from Norwegian to "Power Idiot," though I like the translated from Swedish option, "Power Jerk," better --  doesn't seem to have a background that would give him the very special skills required to wage a one-man war on crime. Instead, he's the Swedish snowplow driver and Man of the Year of a snowy Norwegian town whose son ends up as collateral damage during a bit of gangster discipline. The kid was left propped up on a park bench to look as if he'd overdosed, but Nils Dickmann knows that his boy wouldn't do drugs, and so deduces that he was murdered. When the boy's buddy, the gangsters' intended victim, tells him the true story, Nils goes on the warpath.

Since Kraftidioten is described as a black comedy, we probably shouldn't ask how Nils manages to get the jump on supposedly badass gangsters so often. We are, after all, dealing with idiots led by "The Count" (Pal Sverre Hagen), whose most formidable antagonist seems to be his ex-wife until a mystery man starts bumping off his flunkies. He counts as a "Count," presumably, because he's tall, thin and evil-looking, somewhere between a John Carradine Count and a Christopher Lee type. Understandably not suspecting a civilian vigilante, the Count convinces himself that the local Serbian mob (he keeps confusing them with Albanians) must be trying to muscle in on his territory, despite their agreement to share the local airport. Nils thus inadvertently starts a gang war.

Ironically, once Nils tries to think like a gangster, he begins to screw up. Realizing that he's unlikely to reach the top man in the organization, he goes to his brother, a onetime minor mobster nicknamed "Wingman," for advice on hiring a hitman. Once Nils pays him in full up front (Wingman advised only half), the hitman takes him for an easy mark and sells him out to the Count, only to be killed for offending the mob leader's sense of honor. Unfortunately, the hitman only knew his employer as "Dickmann," and the only person of that name the Count knows is Wingman. In short order, Nils has more to avenge, while the Serbs (led by the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz) go to war to avenge their own, wrongly blamed for Nils' rampage.This escalating conflict actually gives Nils some breathing space. He and the Serbs have the same idea of kidnapping the Count's son, but when a round of negotiation stalls the Serbs staking out the boy's school, Nils has an opening to snatch him. Conveniently also, once the Count finally figures out who's been plaguing him, he can't take proper revenge on Nils, or get his boy back, before the Serbs come charging in for a final bloody showdown....

Film directors love to stage violence in wintry landscapes, for they make the ideal ironically immaculate backdrop for the darkest dirtiest deeds. Kraftidioten will certainly remind American viewers of Fargo, but there are plenty of Japanese films, Sergio Corbucci's Great Silence, Tarantino's Hateful Eight and no doubt some Scandinavian movies that do the same things. Moland has an ace collaborator in Philip Ogaard, who really makes the most of the Norwegian locations. Together, director and cinematographer make Kraftidioten a constantly picturesque film with plenty of screencap opportunities. The way their picture really reminded me of a Japanese movie was the way they recorded characters' deaths, with an obituary title card for each victim and a rather crowded one after the final shootout. This gimmick, which presumably inspired the film's English-language title, put me in mind of Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor and Humanity, but for Moland the effect is meant to be more comically distancing than appalling. It's really not that comic a film, however, unless you agree that violence is innately funny. One of its comic climaxes comes when the stressed-out Count finally lashes out and KOs his ex with one punch. That may strike some people as politically incorrect, but I think the joke is that he knows no other way to deal with her, not that she's a bitch who got what was coming to her. However, I can't really make an excuse for the joke that ends the film, a poorly executed payoff to a gag that had been started and presumably forgotten a long time before. It just looked like a desperate attempt to end the film on a jokey grimdark note and put one more obit card on the screen. Overall, though, Kraftidioten is pretty entertaining, always fine to look at and sometimes genuinely funny as far as black crime comedies go, even as Skarsgaard plays his avenger utterly straight like a killer Keaton. Don't take it too seriously and you may well enjoy it.

NEXT TIME I'LL AIM AT THE HEART (La prochaine fois je viserai le coeur, 2014)

Cedric Anger's film is based on an actual crime spree in 1970s France perpetrated by a gendarme who took part in the investigation of his own crimes. The fictionalized movie murderer likes to kill with his car, either running women down or taking them on joyrides, shooting them and dumping them on the side of the road. The real-life killer lives today, having been deemed psychologically unfit to stand trial. La prochaine fois seems to challenge that verdict; at least it left me questioning it. Franck (Guillaume Canet) struggles with his impulse to kill, mortifying his flesh with barbed wire among other measures, but can't stop himself -- with one important exception. He falls in love with a woman named Sophie (Ann Girardot), or as near to love as he can get, only to learn that she's already married with no plans to leave her husband. He never kills or even attacks her. Maybe she's become too much of a distinct individual, or maybe his motives for killing have nothing to do with the anger he presumably feels toward Sophie. But you're left with the fact that he does not attack the one person he might have some reason to lash out at. For all that the film provokes empathy for the torment Franck puts himself through, even as you're repulsed by his crimes, his treatment of Sophie could convince you that the fictional killer, at least, had some capacity for self-control, at least, that makes him responsible for the crimes he did commit.

Canet was nominated for a Cesar award for his work as Franck and I'd say he deserved it. The film as a whole is pretty bleak, playing out in a blank landscape of empty roads and parking lots, with a sense of inevitable comeuppance for Franck compounding the dread you might feel every time he takes a woman for a drive. You could find yourself rooting for Franck. against your better instincts, to avoid capture during the film's big car chase, or cheering for him when he outwits the gendarme assigned with him to an all-night stakeout of his own getaway car. At the very least you feel his anxiety, his fear of getting caught as well as whatever he really feels about killing people. La prochaine fois is one of the more successful efforts I've seen lately at getting inside a serial killer's head without vicarious or voyeuristic intentions. It's a more modest and more convincing portrait of evil than many more sensational pictures.

SARAJEVO (Das Attentat: Sarajevo 1914, 2014)

The U.S. will soon observe the centennial of its entry into World War I. With that in mind, Netflix is currently streaming Andreas Prochaska's Austro-Czech TV film, which looks to be the JFK of World War I movies. It's about the investigation by Austrian authorities in Sarajevo, the capital of Austrian-ruled Bosnia, of the assassination there of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The Archduke and his wife were killed on the second try that day by Serbian nationalists. Holding the Kingdom of Serbia responsible for their action, Austria issued an ultimatum most observers feel was designed to be rejected so that the Hapsburg empire, backed by Germany, could invade Serbia. Historians are certain that rogue elements within the Serbian government, if not the government itself, supported the conspiracy, but the assassination, given its world-historical consequences, has been an overdue target for more creative conspiracy theorists. Why, they might ask, was the Archduke allowed back on the street after the first assassination attempt, a bombing, failed? Why did the second motorcade seem to stop right in front of Gavrilo Princip, the gunman who succeeded where the bomber failed? And why would any Serbians carry out a conspiracy that amounted to national suicide?

The assassin's creed: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Prochaska and writer Martin Ambrosch go for the solution that probably seems most obvious to the modern conspiracist. Since Austria's ultimatum seemed to show that they were spoiling for war, might they not have tried to create a pretext for war themselves? Franz Ferdinand was a controversial figure thought to desire greater rights for the empire's ethnic minorities; that would make him expendable, presumably, to some in the Hapsburg establishment. But according to Ambrosch the ultimate motive is more venal. Investors wanted to build a railroad linking Germany to the farther reaches of the Ottoman Empire, reaching from Berlin to Bagdad. To be feasible the road would have to go through Serbia. Better than if Serbia were subject to the German powers in Berlin and Vienna. Serbs had reasons of their own to lash out at Austria -- they resented the perceived subjugation of fellow Serbs through the Austrian annexation of Bosnia in 1908 -- but given how obvious it now seems that Austria would punish Serbia with war, the Serbs can only seem patsies furthering what looks like an Austrian or German agenda.

A mere functionary like Leo Pfeffer can be told what to think; he has less luck convincing others.

So it comes to seem to Leo Pfeffer (Florian Teichtmeister), the magistrate put in charge of the initial investigation. He comes under increasing pressure to produce a report blaming the Serbian government as soon as possible, as if a timetable had already been determined. But as Pfeffer sees the apparent implausibilities in the events as they played out, and as he falls in love with the daughter of a Serbian industrialist who has fallen under suspicion, he begins to stall for time to get at the truths that his superiors seem increasingly uninterested in learning. As he keeps raising questions, and keeps pressuring Princip and the other Serb prisoners to tell all they know, he is made more conscious of his outsider status as a Jew who's in love with a Serb. Pfeffer was a real person who isn't highly thought of by historians who see him as an underqualified provincial. Das Attentat imagines a more conscientious Pfeffer who's forced to sign the required indictment of Serbia -- his motive here is to secure his lover's release from prison -- while continuing his own dogged quest for the truth to universal indifference. The filmmakers can change the historical Pfeffer, but their more heroic Pfeffer still can't change history. Teichtmeister gives a good slow-burn performance that permits some sympathetic suspension of disbelief as you hope he'll find something that might stop the war in its tracks. Inevitably Das Attentat must take the form of tragedy, and that tone seems appropriate to the tragic truth of the Great War, even if the filmmakers' historiography is unsound.

ALLENDE (Allende en su laberinto, 2014) and THE BATTLE OF CHILE (1975-9)

 

Santiago, Chile: September 11, 1973 

 

La Moneda, the Chilean presidential residence in Santiago, is an Alamo of the Latin American left. President Salvador Allende made his last stand there against a military coup on September 11, 1973, as chronicled in Patricio Guzman's documentary and dramatized in Miguel Littin's 2014 movie. Guzman and Littin are near contemporaries, born a year apart, who both went into exile after the coup d'etat. Both are biased in Allende's favor, though neither The Battle of Chile nor Allende in his Labyrinth -- the latter borrows its title from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel about the death of Simon Bolivar -- is a hagiography of the socialist martyr. The fictional Allende played by Daniel Munoz seems testy and stubborn and prone to speaking of himself in the third person ("Allende does not surrender!") in his determination to be a martyr, while the real president documented by Guzman seems suicidally naive in his determination to carry out a socialist revolution against massive resistance without resort to force. Either way, there's pathos in the image of an aging academic in his sweater donning a combat helmet and firing a machine gun in futile resistance but epic courage.

Allende was the rare Marxist to win power by election, and wanted to prove that socialism could be achieved by peaceful means. Guzman's three-part documentary (I've only seen the two parts aired on TCM last week) is subtitled "the struggle of an unarmed people" and from all appearances the deck was stacked against Allende and his movement. Allende did not win a majority of the popular vote in 1970 -- he led the three-candidate field with approximately 36% -- and was chosen by the country's senate. But his fate was sealed almost from the start by the fact that his Popular Unity coalition never won control of the Chilean legislature. Conservatives and relative moderates could block many of his initiatives, but in turn they never had enough votes to impeach Allende. As Guzman stresses at every opportunity, the U.S. (under Nixon and Kissinger) opposed Allende from the beginning and provided both moral and material support to both the legal and the military opposition. The coup that toppled Allende was the second attempt of 1973, following a small but lethal uprising by a rogue unit that June. The first part of Guzman's documentary closes with ultimately dramatic footage of these soldiers firing directly at a cameraman as that brave man films his own murder. The anti-Allende majority in the legislature refused to declare a state of emergency after the coup, denying Allende the power to purge the military and other institutions, while many in Chile felt that Allende himself had far overstepped his constitutional bounds. The latter viewpoint is not taken seriously by Guzman and isn't addressed at all by Littin, and watching these films only launched me into a labyrinth of history without guiding me to the end.

The Littin film focuses exclusively on Allende's last day and presumes knowledge that only Chileans or specialist historians outside that country will possess. So I recorded the Battle episodes to get more context, and while Battle of Chile is a powerful piece of documentary propaganda it begged as many questions, if not more, as it answered. While I can't believe that a military coup or Allende's death -- the consensus is that the president killed himself as troops stormed the palace -- were justified, constitutional objections to his measures or his alleged refusal to abide by high-court rulings against him can't just be dismissed as the dishonest carping of conservative or bourgeois "mummies." Nor can I dismiss workers who went on strike in 1973 as stooges for the "mummies" as readily as Guzman does, no matter what damage they did to the Chilean economy and Allende's position. Guzman seems satisfied that Allende was always within the constitution because he was the duly elected president, and he refers to Allende's supporters as "constitutionalists," but Battle refuses to engage constitutional questions objectively. You could believe from Guzman, if not from Allende himself, that a constitutional election only provided a pretext for an extra-constitutional transformation of society. Allende deserves a fuller treatment of his character -- and may have gotten it in a 2004 documentary -- then either film gives him. Littin doesn't give us much sense of what he stood for other than occasional remarks about "comrades" and "workers." The main thing I got from Littin's film was that Allende chose death over exile to deny the coup plotters and the eventual dictatorship -- Augusto Pinochet was military chief of staff at this time and Littin shows Allende repeatedly asking where Pinochet is until he learns that the supposedly loyal general is leading the coup -- any pretense of legitimacy via a peaceful handover of power. In that sense Allende lost the battle of La Moneda but won the battle of history, at least on film. But while Battle is a fascinating film that also seems eerily prophetic of the polarization of the 21st century U.S. in its man-on-the-street interviews and clips from Crossfire-style TV shows, and Allende can't help but be dramatic, my real recommendation is that you find some reputable, nonpartisan book for the real story.

THE PRESIDENT (2014)

Mohsen Makhmalbaf is one of a great generation of Iranian directors, some of whom have found filmmaking difficult in the Islamic Republic, which predictably has failed to recognize that its filmmakers are its best ambassadors to the world. Makhmalbaf has been an expatriate for years now, and 2014 found him in the Republic of Georgia filming The President, an international co-production and a fable aspiring to global relevance. Often brilliant, it flounders at the very end, uncertain both of how to end its story and of what moral to draw from it.

The President of an unidentified nation where the people speak Georgian (Misha Gomiashvili) is, in fact, a dictator whose spoiled, diabetic grandson (Dachi Orvelashvili) addresses him as "Your Majesty." The President is raising the boy because his own son, the boy's father, was killed by terrorists some time ago. To distract the boy from his unhealthy desire for ice cream, the President shows him the kind of power he'll inherit. With one phone call, he can have all the lights in his capital city turned off, then turned back on. He lets the boy try. The lights go out, then come back on. Cool! He orders them out again, but this time they stay out. The President reclaims the phone and gives the order, but he's left in the dark, except for the feeble glow of explosions throughout the city.

 

 

I don't know what color it is, or whether it's spring or some other season, but we have ourselves a revolution. The President evacuates the rest of his family as he prepares to fight, but his grandson refuses to leave. He wants to stay in the palace with his playmate and dance partner Maria. The situation deteriorates rapidly in a bravura sequence that belies any notion that the Iranian filmmakers are dull. The President's limo is chased through the streets by mobs as his loyalists gradually desert him, until its finally just him and the boy against an angry nation.

While the boy is terribly spoiled and utterly unprepared for the ordeal to come, the old man is a cunning, ruthless survivor who quickly cops a disguise by robbing a poor barber at gunpoint. Picking up a guitar elsewhere, he passes himself off as a minstrel, the boy becoming like an organ grinder's monkey. The old man becomes a master of hiding in plain sight, even pulling off a gag as old as the movies by disguising himself as a scarecrow in a field with his back to a revolutionary militia desperately seeking a million-dollar bounty. For a while it looks like the story is going to be about the old man's changing relationship with the boy, who must now call him "Grandpa" instead of "Your Majesty" for safety's sake, and who must learn to be practical and at least minimally tough, though he doesn't really seem to have it in him. Interestingly, the boy gets flashbacks but the old man doesn't.

 

 

While the old man and the boy arguably do become more like a real family, The President grows more concerned with the title character's long-delayed awakening of empathy for ordinary people. It soon becomes obvious that the revolutionaries are hardly better than the old regime. That should be no surprise, since most of the personnel are the same. In one horrific scene, guards at a military checkpoint rob a bunch of carpooling refugees, including the incognito fugitives, then turn their attentions to a bridal party. The commanding officer claims the droit de seigneur, while the bride, disgusted by the complete failure of family and friends to defend her, asks to be honor-killed, and is obliged. Later, briefly infiltrating a town, the old man looks up a prostitute he once loved -- he explains to the boy that she's his Maria -- only to be spurned because he never answered a multitude of letters she sent him imploring him for aid or mercy. He answers, with plausibility and complete honesty as far as we can tell, that he never saw any of the letters. During his odyssey -- he hopes to reach the coast, where loyalists are to pick him up in a boat -- he discovers many things he never imagined or considered. In a way, it's as much a learning experience for him as it is for the boy.

 

Later still, he falls in with some escaped (or liberated) political prisoners, many of whom can't walk because beating their bare feet was routine torture in the President's prisons. The old man comes alarmingly close to growing Christlike -- the ever-growing price on his head has already made him a parody of a folkloric outlaw hero -- as he washes their bloody, infected feet and carries one of his own victims on his back. It becomes his turn to forgive, albeit quietly, when he learns that one of the prisoners was involved in the conspiracy that killed his son and daughter-and-law. He fantasizes sacrificing his safety to take revenge on the man, but the fact is that a forgiving attitude is a practical survival skill in our protagonist's situation. So he delivers the man to his home, where his beloved is waiting -- except she didn't wait, so the man kills himself with a pitchfork to the throat. The burden the old man took upon himself was a futile one.

Finally, despite the scarecrow ruse, the old man and the boy are caught, pulled from a hidey-hole on the beach. Makhmalbaf clearly has the fates of Saddam and Khadafi in mind as a mob drags the President around, trying to make up its collective mind on how to kill him while one of the political prisoners desperately tries to distract the boy from the horror that seems inevitable. Another former prisoner makes a passionate speech against the planned lynching, making the predictable liberal point about the mob being no better than the man they'd punish. The old President is stoic, or resigned, throughout, waiting patiently as Makhmalbaf struggles to figure out what to do with him. We're left with the suggestion that the appropriate punishment is simply to make him dance for democracy, but we see the boy dance once more instead, as he has loved to do. This seems flat and unsatisfactory, but ask yourself what would have been more satisfying and you may find it hard to answer. The President has painted itself into a corner, or more literally it has forced itself to the water's edge with no option of retreat. There's no ultimate sense of a lesson learned, nor much of a political moral. Until that final flop it's a film well worth seeing, vividly envisioned by the director and cinematographer Konstantin Mindia Esadze, and commandingly performed by Gomiashvili. And if Makhmalbaf doesn't come up with a good answer for what to do with his President and tyrants like him, it's not as if the rest of us have come up with anything better.

BLACK SOULS (Anime nere, 2014)

Francesco Munzi's crime film dominated last year's David di Donatello awards, Italy's equivalent of the Academy Awards. Munzi won Best Director and shared in the Best Screenplay award for an adaptation of a novel by Gioacchino Criaco. Black Souls is a stark picture that challenges the "family" myth of organized crime in unsettling ways, mainly by moving family drama to the forefront. In short, it's the story of a competition for influence over a young man between his father and his uncle. The father, Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane) is actually the eldest brother of the family, while Luigi (Marco Leonardi) is the youngest. Theirs is a crime family, but Luciano has kept out of the business to raise goats, leaving middle son Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta) to run the business end of the family while Luigi acts as legman for drug deals and enforcer, and acts even more like an overgrown kid, and like an older brother to Luciano's boy Leo (Giuseppe Fumo). While Luciano has aged into a stubborn isolato, Leo emerges from adolescence eager to "command respect" in a way his father doesn't. When Leo gets involved in a petty local beef Luciano wants to shut him down, but Luigi only encourages him. You get the dreadful feeling that Luciano doesn't have a chance with his kid. Leo isn't the most emotive of rebels; rather, it looks like something's already dead in the lad's contemptuously poker-faced expression that Luciano can't bring to life.

Tragedy ensues as the local conflict escalates. When Luigi is killed, Leo rejects all warnings from his father and resolves to avenge his uncle. The naive punk promptly gets himself set up to be whacked in turn. You see where this is headed, right? Now Luciano is going to assert himself and take out his family's enemies. He thought he was out for life, but now he's dragged in. Perhaps he will prove more ruthless than Luigi or Rocco. Well, sort of and sort of. Following the pictures will be spoilers for the end of the film.

 

(l-r) Fabrizio Ferracane as Leo, Marco Leonardi is Luigi, Giuseppe Fumo as Leo

 

 

Anime Nere's ending is a genuine shocker. Luciano does go on the warpath, but he takes his wrath out on Rocco and other family members, those he presumably blames for his so taking the wrong path. At its climax Munzi's film veers violently from the cliches of the crime genre and upends whatever notion we may have had of Luciano as an honorable loner. The ending puts his isolation, his jealousy of his brothers' influence over Luigi, and even his distance from organized crime in a different light, or a darker shade. More than a jealous patriarch, he appears as an anti-social, self-righteous if not plain selfish man, someone who never sought to command respect because he never gave a damn what anyone thought of him. The image of his abandoned flock of goats at his doorstep after he leaves for his final showdown with his family is perhaps too on-the-nose in its symbolism, but it's definitely telling. It's a cunning, nearly cruel swerve by the filmmakers and the original author, since we're conditioned to think of the lonely man who holds himself aloof from organized crime as a hero, even when it means keeping aloof from his own family. But the family aspect of it all should have tipped us off that something more (or less) than a morality play was playing out here. That the ending shocks while ringing true is a tribute to the actors (none of whom scored a David, by the way) and Munzi's psychological craftsmanship. I haven't seen any of Black Souls' competitors for those awards, but at first glance it looks like those it won were well deserved.

TOKYO TRIBE (2014)

This manga-inspired hip-hop martial-arts musical looks like Sion Sono's tribute to Walter Hill, the auteur of The Warriors and Streets of Fire. In a vaguely fantastic Japan gangs control much of Tokyo in an uneasy equilibrium constantly threatened by the most belligerent, decadent and just plain insane gang led by Buppa (Riki Takeuchi) and his vassals -- or are they his sons? Mera (Ryohei Suzuki) is a buff narcissist obsessed with eliminating any man who might have a larger penis than his. Nkoi (Yosuke Kubozuka) is more of a degenerate, dedicated to decorating his quarters with living human furniture. Buppa himself acts more like a hornier homage to Al Pacino's Big Boy Caprice from Dick Tracy than anything Walter Hill ever dreamed up. Buppa loves his blowjobs but is equally entertained, it seems, by jacking off a black dildo. He's more or less the godfather hereabouts, but even he answers to a mysterious high priest who communicates via hologram that his intended virgin sacrifice -- his own daughter, it turns out -- has run away. It turns out that Buppa's crew had her (Nana Seino) in their clutches not long before without knowing it, and knowing her intended fate explains why she had dared Mera to "rape away" while she was in his power. Anyway, she and her street-urchin sidekick, both karate experts, break out, and her escape proves the spark to all out war among the Tokyo tribes. Buppa literally has a gang called Waru he can summon to fight his battles, but while they make a menacing show early on they fold quickly under a combined assault of the other tribes -- all more or less good guys and far less entertaining than the bad guys -- who then besiege Buppa's fortress to end his reign of terror....

 

 

Tokyo Tribe aspires to epic sleaziness and often hits the mark. The tone is set early when a rookie female cop naively attempts to bust Mera for dealing drugs on a rainy night. The showdown ends with extended scenes of Mera groping the rookie's exposed boobs as she moans in a manner not entirely intended by Sion Sono to inspire empathy with her plight. This is a director whose main concern during the fight scenes seems to be that we get a clear shot of the heroine's white panties whenever she throws a kick. Sion Sono is well known to cult movie buffs as one of Japan's top cinematic provocateurs, and in that capacity he doesn't disappoint. For all I know, his conception of a Japanese gangsta rap movie may be a provocation unto itself. I can't judge the quality of the rapping, of course, because I don't know Japanese and I don't really know hip-hop, but there's an audacity to the mere attempt that impressed me.

 

 

 

As a hip-hop movie, Tokyo Tribe tries to have things both ways, clearly relishing the power fantasies represented by the bad guys but preaching at the end against the lust for power. The problem with its late attempt at moralizing is the usual one with pop action films, which is that the villains are so much more entertaining than the heroes, whose desire to just have fun just isn't as much fun. More imagination -- on film if not in the original manga -- has gone into Buppa and his entourage, down to a female minion who acts as his herald and praise-singer in human-beatbox fashion, only to make a quick-change into an iconic yellow tracksuit during the final battle. "Kill Bill, eh?" her opponent asks. "No, I'm Bruce!" she replies before cracking his skull with her nunchakus and giving with Mr. Lee's characteristic caterwauling. For all this, you can see Sion Sono growing bored with his toys. While you expect epic defeats or deaths for all the main bad guys, Nkoi, as if bored himself, simply turns on a secret death machine, a giant fan that sucks most of the villains into its blades and turns them into CGI splashes. Buppa himself dies (as does "Bruce") in this ignominious fashion, leaving Mera the last villain standing for a climactic fight with a quite less charismatic (but, as we learn in an epilogue, much better endowed) hero. At least Buppa got in some decent gatling-gun action before his abrupt exit. It seems fair to sum up Tokyo Tribe as a mess, but it's sometimes a gorgeous, hot mess and more entertaining overall than not. It's definitely a singular Japanese movie experience; at least it's hard to believe there could be two of these.