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German-Israeli co-productions have emerged as an almost distinct subset of middlebrow art house cinema. Invariably, all the movies in this category deal either directly (Plan A) or indirectly (The Cakemaker) with the two countries’ fraught relationship owing to history, but they also use this dynamic to explore fairly problematic issues in the world at large. This 2019 film initially comes across as daring in this regard since it takes on the Israeli-Palestinian question, an issue the Germans would, understandably, approach delicately. Though perceived Israeli oppression of their Palestinian minority would likely alarm conscientious Germans who know from their own history what oppression of a minority can lead to, the fact is that the state of Israel rose from the ashes of the Holocaust, which was caused by the German nation. 

Crescendo couches its presentation of this problem in a fictional act of restitution: a German-lead orchestra made up of both Israeli and Palestinian musicians. The almost flip motto of the international project—Make music not war—would seem to signal a somewhat cynical attitude toward such endeavors on the part of the filmmakers, and, at least in the beginning, the project seems to be more of a PR gesture than a concerted effort to bring people together. However, director Dror Zahavi favors melodrama over seriousness of purpose, a contradiction that is best represented by the German conductor chosen to lead the ensemble, Eduard Sporck (Peter Simonischek), whose first utterance is that his country should be forgiven for its past sins. In any case, he is strictly a man of the arts, and will not tolerate any political hanky-panky on his watch. Such a character is central to Zahavi’s canny dramatic strategy: Depict all the various ways that people attempt to come to grips with international strife as a means of showing how institutions need to address person-to-person matters first.

It’s a cliche born out by the tense subplots that keep the movie interesting. The Germans audition musicians in both Israel and the occupied territories, with Zahavi focusing on  several players with markedly different backgrounds. There’s the Palestinian clarenetist who learned his instrument playing weddings and has never seen a French horn in his life falling in love with an Israeli who plays that instrument. Then there’s the proud, German-educated Israeli master violinist who bristles at the notion that he will have to compete with a proud female Palestinian violinist who he assumes has never studied as hard as he did. The maestro thus has to amend his normal working methodology against his will to account for these tensions, and he’s not always successful. Zahavi makes Sporck out to be a borderline asshole, which provides room for his own hackneyed redemption, but there’s an overdetermined quality to the dramatic arc as suicide bombings happen in the background and internecine conflicts wax and wane within the orchestra, which ends up relocating to Italy once the auditions end. One tends to wonder if the choice of program—Dvorak’s “New World”—is itself a cynical joke, but Crescendo is nothing if not forthrightly earnest, which is why it’s such a frustrating movie overall. 

In English, German, Hebrew, Arabic and Italian. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

Crescendo home page in Japanese

photo (c) CCC Filmkunst GmbH

Writer-director Tiller Russell’s highly dramatized recreation of the rise and fall of the darknet website Silkroad.com takes a novel approach to the classic protagonist-antagonist dynamic in that the two main characters are really antagonists. In fact, it’s safe to call both Ross Ulbricht (Nick Robinson), the 20-something cyber genius libertarian creator of the website, and Rick Bowden (Jason Clarke), the seriously limited DEA agent who tries to bring Ulbricht down, assholes, since they tend to treat loved ones and confidantes like shit and decide early on that they’re special enough to be above the law in their respective ways.

Ulbricht’s idea is pretty simple, and immensely profitable in 2013. Create a space on the alternative web where people can buy and sell anything they want, though what makes him insanely rich is drugs, which can be delivered anywhere, including postal boxes, and remain undetected since the payment is in cyber-currency. The idea as presented, however, doesn’t interest Ulbricht because of the money he can make, but rather due to the fact that it completely sidesteps the authorities, which is kind of his life’s work. Ulbricht’s adventures in cyberspace are conveyed in parallel with Bowden’s saga, which starts with his release from a psychiatric facility in Baltimore where he was treated for addiction. He’s welcomed back into the agency but given a desk job in cybercrimes, an area he not only knows nothing about, but for which he has no affinity since he barely knows how to send a fax. 

What unites the two men is their obsessiveness, and while Russell does a fair job of showing how their parallel trajectories eventually come together, while charting those trajectories he needs to maintain a kind of dramatic tension that’s difficult to do when the crimes in question are taking place in the ether. So he gooses the story with, on Bowden’s part, a sub-tale about his estranged daughter’s difficulties in getting into a good school (which require more money than he makes); and on Ulbricht’s part, the notion that SilkRoad.com is growing beyond his control. For sure, the latter story is more interesting and the reason the movie was made in the first place, but for some reason Russell privileges Bowden’s, and the movie sputters as a result. As a movie about wannabe alpha males pissing all over themselves, Silk Road delivers a certain edgy Schadenfreude, but if you want to learn about the actual affair, you’ll have to read a book. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shibuya Human Trust Cinema (03-5468-5551).

Silk Road home page in Japanese

photo (c) Silk Road Movie, LLC

After reading the synopsis for the American film CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) but prior to seeing it, I felt as if I’d seen this movie before, and, as a matter of fact, it is based on a 2015 French film called La famille Belier. However, when I looked through my files and then online to check out my suspicions I realized I hadn’t seen the original (which, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem to have received distribution in Japan or, for that matter, in any English-speaking countries). Nevertheless, the  high concept hook of the story—the only hearing member of a family of deaf people decides to pursue her love of singing—seems so readymade for a certain species of domestic drama that I’m sure variations on the theme are rampant. It’s the way the international movie industry works.

The American film takes place in Gloucester, a fishing town on the Massachusetts coast. Our hero, Ruby (Emilia Jones), works with her father, Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant), on the family’s fishing boat. Ruby is the only member who can hear and speak, and thus is stuck with the job of interpreting for her family with the world of the hearing. She has a rough time of it, mainly because her parents have fully manifested the kind of Yankee bullheadedness ascendant in this part of the country, and they not only make great demands on the buyers and distributors they deal with, but have developed a kind of passe working-class attitude that embarrasses Ruby. (Farting and having loud sex are the questionable shorthand the film uses to convey this particular predicament.) For the most part, the familial relationships depicted have a natural appeal that the writer-director, Sian Heder, handles with care and imagination, but the movie is about much more; perhaps too much more.

Ruby loves to sing, and in early scenes on the boat we hear her humming and giving full voice to some familiar R&B lines, which her family can’t hear. So when she decides to join the high school chorus club as an extracurricular activity, her mother looks at her askance: Are you doing this just because your parents are deaf? It’s not an unreasonable question, and one the viewer has likely already asked themself. More problematic is how Ruby proves herself to not only be up to the challenge, but on top of it. At first, her self-consciousness gets in the way, but then the feisty, arrogantly confident, Motown-obsessed choirmaster (Eugenio Derbez), sensing something “unique,” essentially bullies Ruby into revealing her native talents, which the viewer may or may not buy since there is no prior indication that she’s had any musical or vocal training at all. 

The rest of the movie writes itself, and by stressing Ruby’s musical triumphs—a public performance in which she shines, an audition for the Berklee School of Music—over her conflicts with her family, which need her to participate in their troubled business, the movie produces a conflict that is so automatic it could have been concocted by AI. Nevertheless, the family scenes maintain a healthy naturalism even in their sentimentality, thanks mainly to Kotsur, whose expressive range is formidable. Frank is by far the film’s most complicated character, a proud man who knows his deafness makes him a mark but is determined not to be taken advantage of. This pugnaciousness extends to his role as paterfamilias, and Heder has the good judgment to led him carry the movie, or, at least, carry it during those scenes where he’s on screen. The rest, which dabbles in first-love cliches and the inevitable heartbreak of leaving one’s home, is pretty trite.

In English and ASL. Opens Jan. 21 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060).

CODA home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Vendome Pictures LLC, Pathe Films

Ostensibly a romantic comedy about android love, this subversively heartbreaking German feature, written (with Jan Schomburg, based on a published short story) and directed by Maria Schrader, makes too much sense for a tale that, while remaining stubbornly cerebral to the end, is entirely speculative. It also remains consistently funny until its mid-point, when the ramifications of creating happiness inorganically overwhelms the lighter aspects of the plot. The opening scene is a corker: Archaeologist Alma (Maren Eggert) goes to a singles bar where she is formally introduced to Tom (Dan Stevens), a handsome, agreeable man whose flawless German has a slight British accent. He seems to already know Alma, though they’ve never met, and Alma becomes suspicious, not of his intentions but rather of his very being and starts plying him with ridiculously difficult mathematical problems that he solves with fluent ease. However, when he asks Alma to dance he starts repeating himself aimlessly: a glitch, because Tom is an android.

Alma knew this from the beginning and only agreed to meet Tom as a condition for receiving funding for her program to investigate cunieforms in the U.S. Her supervisor at the museum where she works, Roger (Failou Seck), is working on the android program that Tom is the product of, and needs a single woman to test Tom’s romantic capabilities. The requirement is that Alma spend the next three weeks with Tom. Only then will she get the money for her research. The setup is patently ludicrous, but within the context of the android-boyfriend dynamic, it opens up all sorts of possibilities that Schrader exploits to the max. The rub is that Alma is not that young and her romantic history is mostly taken up by one man, a fellow archaeologist named Julian, with whom she broke up only recently and who is now about to marry someone else. Later, it is revealed that Alma and Julian’s relationship was fraught with tragedy, which affected Alma much more than Julian. Tom’s programming and, by extension, his algorithms are specifically attuned to Alma’s biography and psychological profile, circumstances that form the basis for much of the comedy. The genius of this conception is that Tom’s AI immediately adjusts to changes in Alma’s mood and outlook, and he corrects himself in order to adapt to what he “thinks” pleases her, but, of course, Alma, understanding always that he is a “robot” (a term that seems to offend Tom), also understands these adjustments. (As a side note, Stevens’ German dialogue sounds post-dubbed, though it also sounds like his actual voice, and this slightly meta detail adds greatly to Tom’s credibility as a sympathetic machine.)

But halfway through, the emotional weight of Alma’s personal tribulations overwhelms her steely, anlytical resolve. Compounding her inner rage at Julian’s smooth ability to move on, she has to address her father’s encroaching dementia and a serious functional matter that may upend her research, which, after all, is the whole reason for her agreeing to be with Tom, who “comprehends” exactly what is going on but cannot approach these problems organically. Ironically, this inability to “cope” makes him more endearing to Alma, who eventually looks upon him not only as the kind of friend she needs (based, perhaps, on a childhood friend also named Tom that may have been imaginary) but also a sex partner. 

Thoughout the film, even as it turns melancholy and slightly predictable, Schrader maintains a strictly utilitarian structure that never shortchanges the characters, no matter how peripheral they are to the story. Even when the nameless woman in charge of facilitating the android project turns out to be an android herself, she retains her individuality as a character. It’s just that she’s not a human being any more, and for some reason, you don’t feel there’s anything strange about that. 

In German and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264).

I’m Your Man home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Letterbox Filmproduktion, Sudwestrundfunk