Though horrific in intent, this French film about a battalion of Kurdish women fighting against the Islamic State in Iraqi Kurdistan avoids scenes of overt violence and goes rather light on the gore. It’s both a relief and a cop-out, since what’s left of Eva Husson’s movie is mostly suffering for the sake of suffering.
The commander of the battalion is Bahar (Golshifteh Farahani), a former lawyer from a fairly well-to-do Yazidi family with a husband and a young son. Their village is invaded by IS troops, who summarily execute all the men, including Bahar’s husband, commandeer the children for military mobilization, and imprison the women as sex slaves. Husson structures Girls of the Sun as a chronicle of a specific mission to take back a Kurdish town from IS insterpersed with flashbacks showing how Bahar was militarized. As a kind of Greek chorus, we have the French journalist Mathilde (Emmanuelle Bercot), who, with her borderline PTSD and eyepatch is obviously meant to remind us of Marie Colvin, who was killed covering Homs, which Mathilde has just left when she is embedded in Bahar’s battalion. The two women bond over their equivalent losses (Mathilde’s journalist husband was killed in Libya) but mostly they stew in their own fear and uncertainty. It’s an oddly inert film. Even the battle scenes feel like interruptions rather than means of showing these women’s determination to avenge their loved ones and affirm their faith. It’s not really a problem that the IS soldiers are portrayed as soulless monsters—they barely register as human beings—but the women who serve under Bahar are difficult to distinguish from one another; that is, until one shockingly runs to her death on purpose in order to take out a bunker.
Obviously, Husson does not want to exploit these women’s experiences for shocks and visceral thrills, but she doesn’t have a lot to work with except Bahar’s determination to find her son, who is presumably fighting for the IS now. That should be compelling enough a reason to stay involved with the film, but even that aspect seems outside Husson’s concern. In trying to let these women tell their own tale, she loses the story.
In Kurdish, French and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Cine Swich Ginza (03-3561-0707).
Girls of the Sun home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2018 Maneki Films-Wild Bunch-ARches Films-Gapbusters-20 Steps Productions-RTBF (Television belge)
Whether couched in prose or celluloid, literary biographies are a dodgy enterprise, but prose at least has the luxury of length for people who are probably pre-disposed to sitting for long periods of time reading a book. Danny Strong’s rather precise film about the development of J.D. Salinger (Nicholas Hoult) into one of the most iconic American novelists of the 20th century isn’t really that long, but it feels over-stuffed with details that could have been conveyed in different, more economical ways. It’s likely that most people with any interest in Salinger know that he was a difficult artist, that editors had their hands full with a writer who knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish even if that vision didn’t jibe with conventional publishing wisdom at the time. However, they may not have known about his PTSD as a result of his service in WWII, his crush on Eugene O’Neill’s daughter, Oona (Zoey Deutch), or his brief but seminal interest in Buddhism, and while Strong was right to explain these matters, he treats them as milestones on Salinger’s road to success and self-exile without distinguishing them in terms of relative impact.
The cautious tone and austere aesthetic of Nanako Hirose’s debut feature was what most likely got it placed in the New Currents section of the most recent Busan International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere. New Currents is the only section of the festival with a dedicated competition, and it’s limited to films that are the first or second feature of their respective directors. They are also limited to Asian films, and over the years a certain type of film has ended up in the section, and they tend to look and sound a lot like His Lost Name. They also tend to be more interesting or, at least, more exciting. The fact that this was the lone Japanese entrant in the category says more about Japanese indie films than it does about new Asian directors.
As a gambit to legitimize the reboot of a franchise that should have been put to rest years ago, this sequel to the potently effective Creed works surprisingly well, but probably for the wrong reasons. Though it continues the story of fighter Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, the early nemesis and then BFF of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), who has made his own name as a professional boxer thanks to the ministrations of Rocky, it flatters moviegoers with long memories, since it basically revisits the original Rocky series’ most gaga installment, Rocky IV, in which Apollo Creed was killed in the ring by the Soviet-engineered bruiser Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), who then had to fight Rocky in what everybody understood was a revenge match. In Creed II, Adonis, who has recently won the heavyweight title, is pretty much forced to fight Drago’s son, Viktor (Florian Munteau), to defend that title.
Film noir is defined as much by atmosphere as by any other visual or narrative attribute. The first film by director Dong Yue, a noted cinematographer, is drenched in heavy weather per the title. Ostensibly a murder mystery, The Looming Storm tries to say many things about its milieu—a factory town that’s slowly dying—and how it affects people who have perhaps had their hopes elevated too high.
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There’s nothing like a cleverly made documentary to bring up the obvious and somehow make you believe you’re hearing it for the first time. The general purport of David Batty’s nostalgic romp through 1960s Swinging London is that the milieu announced the triumph of the working class over the gentility that dominated British culture up until that point. As their mouthpiece, Batty and screenwriter Dick Clement and Ian L Frenais use Michael Caine, who’s more than game to make the case that he and his Cockney-inflected cohort changed England for the better and forever. No one who has owned a pulse for the past fifty years is going to argue with that, and while the film’s visual design and pacing makes for lively discourse, the narrative rushes through so many sub-themes—pirate radio, sexual liberation, revolutionary fashion photography—in its brief 85 minutes that you wonder why they just didn’t make a TV series out of it. Actually, maybe they did, given how ubiquitous feel-good 60s nostalgia is at the moment…for the third or fourth time.
The album as a delivery device for music has been dying for more than a decade now, or, at least, that’s what the pundits say. What struck me more than anything about the way new music was presented this past year is how the album form was adapted to the way streaming has changed our mode of listening. This is only partially due to technological changes. The idea of the album as a unified work of art that developed in the late 60s changed organically over the years as the sheer volume of available music has grown exponentially. Two of the “albums” on my list would, under old rules, be categorized as EPs, but were nonetheless presented to the public as albums in the sense that they were designed to be heard in one sitting. The fact that they’re brief could be taken as a sop to the shorter attention spans brought about by online lifestyles, but I’d like to think they turned out the way they did because of a particular vision.
I lost my last paying gig as a movie reviewer this year, which means I now watch movies for free, in every sense of the term. I still get invited to press screenings, and attend one or two a week, but writing about them has become more or less a hobby, though publicists and distributors seem to pay attention when I post the reviews on this blog. What’s that worth, I’m not sure, other than the notion that they’ll keep me on their mailing lists. Maybe they’re just being polite. God knows, I feel sort of silly if I tweet links to movie reviews. I have no idea who’s reading them, and haven’t really checked to see how many people are.
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