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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