Posted by: jedimoonshyne | January 3, 2010

Review : The King is Alive

The King is Alive | Kristian Levring, 2000

In his piece written for the Chicago Sun-Times, film critic Roger Ebert compares Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive to such memorable tales as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. While not quite as innocent or savage as the former, nor as political or thrilling as the latter, The King is Alive indeed takes on and gives new life to this idea of a group of people, stranded, who are forced to come together in order to survive. The site of our group’s struggle is not upon an endless blue ocean, however, but in the middle of the desert: the Namibian desert, to be precise, in an abandoned diamond mining town known as Kolmanskop. Left to the desert winds in 1956 after crippling post-war decline, Kolmanskop has recently taken the curious status of a tourist location and had already been featured in one or two motion pictures before being used here. The King is Alive was the fourth Dogme 95 film – the fourth of the four founding filmmakers – and the first shot outside Denmark. Unlike these earlier Dogme efforts that were an all-Danish affair, The King is Alive boasts an international cast made up of American, British and French actors, who together play a coach-load of squabbling tourists that are forced to cross the desert rather than fly over it. Of course, the coach doesn’t quite make it to its desired location and the group must come to terms with the fact that they not only are stranded in a godforsaken place but that nobody knows where they are – including themselves. Marooned and bickering, the group are encouraged by an Englishman named Henry (David Bradley, who later found some fame playing Argus Filch in the Harry Potter series) to stage a rough version of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

An important theme that can be found throughout the Dogme movement is this idea of different people being put in the same place and then made to interact. The King is Alive presents a slightly more theatrical – even Shakespearean – version of this, but an important one nonetheless, where our characters share a common and unenviable position. Unlike the dysfunctional family meltdown found in Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (Dogme #1) and the confused faction-bondage of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Dogme #2) this is disintegration on a different scale. All the characters are in the same boat, but will they come together for warmth or throw each other out of it? The only other passenger in this boat, or abandoned town, is an old African who watches the group impassively from under his crinkled brow. The man, who seems to spend his days sitting still enough to become part of the scenery itself, is a conscious and important addition by Levring. Not only does the group’s ignoring of this man help illustrate the self-absorbed nature of today’s society (perhaps, if he was considered for a moment, he could lead them to safety) we also later come to resemble him as impartial onlookers, silently judging these newcomers as their newfound companionship is so violently tested. Ultimately the group’s callow new bonds are eroded, just like the ancient desert sand upon which they walk, talk, and copulate. While The King is Alive doesn’t quite come to represent Shakespeare’s tragedy (as I was led to believe beforehand), there are certainly some parallels to be found among the characters and their relationships. It is more an homage of sorts, and one that stands on its own as an important addition to the Dogme movement.

Our Rating:

Posted by: jedimoonshyne | January 2, 2010

Review : Kira’s Reason

Kira’s Reason: A Love Story | Ole Christian Madsen, 2001

Drawing a handful of comparisons to Lars von Trier’s majestic Breaking the Waves when it was released in late 2001, Kira’s Reason (En kærlighedshistorie) is Ole Christian Madsen’s third full length feature and the twenty-first title produced under the Dogme 95 banner. Madsen has since gone on to national and international acclaim, thanks largely to his most recent film, Flame & Citron, which, with a budget of over $10 million, is a far cry from the earlier television work in his native Denmark. The star of Kira’s Reason: A Love Story (to use its full title) is Stine Stengade, who plays the film’s titular and mentally ill protagonist. Kira is a wide-eyed outsider; a rapt child trapped in an adult’s body who wants nothing more than to find happiness again, despite being unable to care for herself, let alone her two beautiful blonde boys. At the beginning of the film we witness her happy homecoming after some time spent under observation in a mental hospital, and while this initially seems like a warm moment it soon becomes clear that Kira is far from “fixed”. Even in the course of this opening sequence her manner passes through several different shades of emotional instability; her painted grin and over-exuberant happiness quickly giving way to an unhesitant questioning of her husband’s loyalty. The husband, Mads (played by Lars Mikkelsen) seems entirely unmoved by it all, obviously used to – even attached to – Kira’s violent mood swings that make normal family life so unlivable. Stengade, who was seen more recently playing the temptress in Madsen’s Flame & Citron, is definitely the shining light that makes Kira so interesting. Her performance here is pitch-perfect.

This idea of innocent, somehow mentally impaired characters being cornered by a mistrusting society is a common theme to be found in the Dogme movement: both Åke Sandgren’s Truly Human (Dogme #18) and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s Mifune’s Last Song (Dogme #3) include characters of this nature. Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (Dogme #2) takes the idea of society’s reaction to the inappropriate behaviour of such people to new and more crass levels, and just as with The Idiots it is the public swimming pool that is used as the stage. Here, in one of the film’s more memorable scenes, Kira takes her children for a swim in an obvious attempt to capture the normalcy of the past. She jumps into the kid’s pool and immediately begins an over-enthusiastic bout of splashing and screaming, unaware of the frightened children and increasingly angry parents that look on. The sequence, as you can imagine, ends badly for all involved – especially a particularly brutish Danish lifeguard who feels the full force of Kira’s unrestraint. As previously mentioned, the film does owe a lot to Breaking the Waves – particularly in the traits shared by each female protagonist – and also, more recently, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, which is a portrait of a woman on the edge rather than a woman being chased by her own demons. The difference being that neither of these aforementioned films dwell upon the reason, or rather, the cause of these demons. Kira’s Reason, as the title hints and admittedly at the very end, not only attempts to explain the character’s problems but also offers up some kind of resolution. It is a move that, in its triteness, undoes much of the good work achieved up to that point.

Our Rating:

Posted by: jedimoonshyne | December 7, 2009

Review : Can Go Through Skin

Can Go Through Skin | Esther Rots, 2009

Just the idea of discovering a stranger in our own homes is a terror that most people cannot bear to imagine. What happens, then, when this fear becomes reality, and we are confronted not only by an uninvited guest, but  someone who also wishes to do us harm? Esther Rots’ Can Go Through Skin, which centers on a young woman who is assaulted while taking a bath, home alone,  maintains that the physical scars from such an encounter should be the least of our worries. The woman, Marieke, has just broken up with her boyfriend and is looking to drown her sorrows in copious amounts of red wine, but soon enough she is outside on the street, naked and trembling, after having been rescued by a quick-thinking friend after a man enters her home and attempts to drown her in her own bath. Unable to face life as she once knew it, Marieke seeks out a shell into which she can retract, impulsively settling on a dilapidated farm-house in Amsterdam’s surrounding countryside as a place in which she can be alone with her demons. From here, we are taken on a jarring trip of Marieke’s mental state – with director Rots using different methods (with varying success) to portray her character’s psychological instability and unsteady recuperation. Every flaking surface of Marieke’s crumbling new abode is meticulously covered by Rots’ camera, heightening the already stifling sense of claustrophobia that the film’s jangly background score does rather well to create. This claustrophobia eventually gives way to paranoia, as inward struggling gives way to voiced concerns, and as the film’s music becomes even more abstract so as to reflect Marieke’s fractured self. Soon, however, the house begins to take shape, and the camera retreats a little to show us wider shots of rural Holland. The seasons change, blowing away the overhanging greyness, and somewhere, a piano tinkles into life, as Marieke finally begins to understand and overcome her grief.

The use of water is an important part of the Can Go Through Skin’s symbolism – symbolism that runs through the film like veins, sometimes overwhelmingly so.  Marieke’s horror story both opens and closes with her being held under water, against her will, as everything we see slows down: it is a neat bookend from the director that, rather than convince us that the healing process has been a success, only tell us that Marieke may never truly be “cured”. This recovery process, however successful it may be, is actually put in motion by another interesting plot point: that of a Marieke’s drain, which is put out of use by her new neighbour John, meaning that she can’t shower as often as she’d like. Do these water-less months represent a period of healing for Marieke, or do they merely delay her or even prevent her from washing this trauma from her mind? There’s also something vaguely Dardenne-esque about Can Go Through Skin: it resembles the 1999 film Rosetta both in the way it is shot and in the use of a particularly strong-minded female protagonist, though lacks the same feeling of despair. There are, however, one or two moments when the unflinching realism of Can Go Through Skin is given up in favour of fantasy or imagination – these scenes range from the well-realised to the slightly bewildering, but go some distance in showing us exactly what is driving Marieke. It’s also refreshing to find a film that isn’t afraid dwell on the life-changing influence of the Internet in such a situation, as well as its importance in today’s society. When in solitude, Marieke uses chat rooms as a way to contact the outside world, though, rather than help this seems merely to add fuel to the fire of revenge that still burns inside her. Can Go Through Skin is a comprehensive documenting of one woman’s struggle, complete with what is perhaps the finest performance from a female I’ve seen all year, and is even more impressive when considering the relative inexperience of the person who made it.

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