Category: 2007

Cristian Mungiu | 1hr 53min

The word ‘abortion’ is not spoken until thirty-five minutes into 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, but even with all the awkward side-stepping around the point, Cristian Mungiu still forms a clear, excruciating picture of the harrowing ordeal at hand. In fact, it is more often through those details purposefully kept out of view that this story progresses, and the formal justification of this withholding, minimalist style is powerful. Living in 1987 Communist Romania, university students Otilia and Găbița would be threatened with lengthy prison sentences if their plans to terminate an unwanted pregnancy were to get out, and so it is precisely in their covert conduct that we can surmise their unspoken motives and profound discomfort. Leading the peak of the Romanian New Wave, Mungiu turns his government’s historic oppression into a pervasive, unseen antagonist, haunting the claustrophobic silences of this naturalistic thriller with cold, passive cruelty.

Though it is Găbița who is pregnant, Mungiu wisely sticks us in the perspective of her friend, Otilia, tasking her with finding an illegal abortionist, booking a hotel room for the procedure, and eventually disposing of the foetus. Anamaria Marinca consequently does most of the speaking in this cast, and yet it is her silent, expressive acting which is her most impressive ability, kept at a distance in medium and wide shots. Duration is one of Mungiu’s greatest tools here, both in the confined time span of 24 hours that instil the film with pressing urgency, and in uncomfortably long takes which let us feel those minutes tangibly slip by. Slotted in between the abortion-centric scenes, Otilia finds the low-stakes mundanity of everyday life creeping in, and as she sits at a crowded table where her boyfriend’s mother is celebrating her birthday, Mungiu hangs on her face for close to eight minutes. Tedious conversation, hands, and dishes move all around her, she is briefly chided by a guest for smoking, and in her anxious, detached expression we can see that this is the last place she wants to be after everything that has just gone down.

Otilia often finds herself centred in Mungiu’s compositions all throughout the film, as earlier in the hotel room where the surly abortionist, Mr Bebe, informs, warns, and patronises the two women, she is staged between him and Găbița like the mediator in this transaction. Of course, her role goes far beyond that though. She is also a confidant, an advisor, and an agent acting on her friend’s behalf when she is too nervous. There is no word to explain the role Otilia is forced to play though when it comes to light that they do not have the money for the whole procedure, as Mr Bebe darkly reveals the price that must be paid to go through with it.

“I’ll go in the bathroom. When I come out, you give me your answer. If it’s yes, tell me who goes first. If it’s no, I get up and go.”

Sex is currency in this seedy underworld, and for this particular transaction to go ahead, both women must contribute. Mungiu’s camera stays in the bathroom throughout this sequence, first with Găbița as she turns on the tap to block out the noise and fearfully waits for her turn, and then with Otilia as she enters and immediately starts scrubbing herself clean.

Even in these drably realistic settings, there is a precision to Mungiu’s staging, as immediately following the abortion he sits his camera at the head of the bed where Mr Bebe and Otilia continue to dominate the image, while all that is visible of Găbița are her legs poking into the frame. When we get the reverse shot as well, she is still shoved right down to its bottom-centre, leading our eyes first to Otilia as the largest presence, and secondly to the dreary still life painting hanging above the bed – a meagre flourish of beauty in this bleak hotel room. As if forcing Găbița to the edges of her own story, Otilia’s guilty resentment spills outwards into these visuals, angrily directed at her friend’s lack of independence that has partially offloaded her trauma onto others. After all they have gone through, perhaps it is this tragic wedge driven between them which will affect their relationship most deeply.

It is a rigorous, unforgiving aesthetic which Mungiu commits to, comparable to Michael Haneke’s films in the chilling severity of its long, distant takes, though far more embracing of handheld camerawork to build an almost Hitchcockian suspense through tracking shots. As we walk with Otilia through the streets, we both get a fright as children playing nearby kick a ball against a car. When it’s time to bring this slow-burn tension to an end and pull back the curtains on the horror, he doesn’t hold back there either, lingering on the image of the expelled foetus and sucking all remaining mystery out of the daunting procedure.

At times like these, we desperately hang onto the few answers Mungiu gives us, trying to use those to fill the void of questions he has purposefully avoided addressing. Who is the father of Găbița’s unborn baby? What were the circumstances of the pregnancy, and the decision to abort? Who exactly is Romana, the woman who recommended Mr Bebe? With as bare bones an attitude to storytelling as Mungiu displays here, such details are extraneous and don’t figure into the kind of unconditional empathy he evokes for these two women. It is rather in the smothering silences, distant camerawork, and careful staging that we feel the Communist state’s stranglehold over its citizens’ intimate lives, and where this cinematic cornerstone of social realism holds us in its own tight, uncompromising grip.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is not currently available to stream in Australia.

Joe Wright | 2hr 3min

Perspective is a tricky, volatile thing in Atonement, fuelled by the whims of an individual’s fickle biases, yet wielding the power to manifest as reality and change the course of entire lives. Some are inherently more valuable than others too, especially given that the word of a young girl speaking to a subject as weighty as sexual assault is inherently treated with more gravity than the man she is accusing. Perhaps rightfully so, though it is hard to ignore how their disparate class backgrounds might have something to do with the ease with which the blame is pinned on him. Joe Wright studies the eyes of 13-year-old Briony Tallis in extreme close-up, catching the piercing blue of her irises and her sharp, perceptive squint, but these are also the vessel through which he interprets the apparent guilt of Robbie Turner, the son of her family’s housekeeper, thereby setting in motion a cascade of heartbreaking misfortunes.

Beyond Briony’s subjective experiences though, there is another story closer to the truth which clears up our confusion. Robbie’s interactions with her older sister, Cecilia, aren’t nearly as scandalous as they appear when we are given the full context of their romance, and throughout the first half of the film Wright delights in nimbly shifting between his and Briony’s points-of-view. Almost as if a reset button is being hit, multiple scenes play out twice over in succession, constantly challenging our own beliefs about whether Cecilia’s dip into the fountain was as erotic as it looked from a distance, or whether the shocking sight of her and Robbie splayed out across a bookshelf was actually rape. It is a stroke of formal genius from Wright to structure his narrative in this way, alternating between misunderstandings and reality, so that by the time Briony witnesses the brutal crime committed against her cousin, Lola, we can simultaneously understand how justified she feels in her accusation, and how completely wrong she is.

Saoirse Ronan is a revelation here at the young age of 12, delivering a performance that stands among the strongest any child has put to film, even while only taking up half the full screentime. It makes for an interesting comparison when we leap years into the future and see Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave take over the role, as even though we can see the mounting guilt on their faces, neither come close to capturing the heartbreak of Ronan’s bitter immaturity. As she faces up to the adults in the room and asserts her false conviction, we can see the wheels spinning fabrications in her mind, quickly turning “I know it was him” into “I saw him with my own eyes.”

Aside from being an innocent child and the daughter of wealthy parents, perhaps it is also Briony’s knack for storytelling which earns her the trust of others, allowing her to exert influence over their minds. As a child, she writes plays on her typewriter, and Dario Marianelli’s urgent rhythmic score of strings and piano skilfully works its percussive keys in like a constant reminder of her ability to produce destructive propaganda as easily as she can create imaginative fairy tales. Often paired with this persistent tapping is some surprisingly sharp editing too, breaking up Wright’s long, elegant takes with cuts that feel like abrupt disturbances inside Briony’s confused mind.

For the most part though, Atonement’s visuals are a brilliantly virtuosic display of the floating camerawork and lavish production design that Wright debuted two years earlier in Pride and Prejudice, crafting some delicate compositions out of pre-war British period décor. On sunny days before everything goes to hell, reflections gently ripple in ponds and pastel wallpapers form backdrops to Briony’s innocence, languishing in the excitement of her crush on Robbie. The four-year leap into the future does not dispense with this exquisite beauty, but the colours are just that little bit darker and more melancholy, situating us in the hospitals and battlegrounds of World War II. Robbie’s early release from prison comes with the caveat that he joins the British army, and although the two sisters have taken up nursing in London, there is a wedge driven between them which cannot be reconciled.

Though the narrative urgency falls away a little at this point with dreams and flashbacks taking over, Wright’s visual style continues in vivid expressions of longing and regret, poured out most evocatively in the five-and-a-half minute long take navigating the beach of Dunkirk where Robbie finds himself stranded. As a symbol in European history, this famous event represents great hope, though as we run over a hill and the masses of soldiers come into view, all we can feel is the sort of despair one faces at the end of the world when all options are exhausted. Eventually, this shot detaches from Robbie and continues to explore the bleak setting on its own, watching men camp, sing hymns, put down horses, and play on rides left over from some nearby fair. A Ferris wheel looms far away against a golden sky at magic hour, but with smoke filling the air, there is no joy to be found here. The only film that captures this moment in history with as much sorrowful beauty is Dunkirk itself, but even that opts for an entirely different kind of artistic magnificence with its exacting montages and epic IMAX photography.

Meanwhile, the incriminating tapping of Briony’s typewriter continues to underscore her storyline in the harsh, sterile wards of St Thomas’ Hospital, where nurses walk down green hallways in symmetrical formations and tend to wounded soldiers. Reflecting on the shame of her false allegation, her flair for lying takes a more redemptive turn when one patient with a head injury mistakes her for his wife, and while on his deathbed, finds comfort in her presence. Even into her old age it remains her defining character trait, with Wright eventually pulling out a double twist – she has been the narrator of this story, and as a result, her trademark fabrications are riddled throughout it.

In an ideal world, Robbie and Cecilia would be reunited after the war, and Briony would come forward with the truth to clear his name. They might still hold her in contempt and even go on to sever ties with her completely, but simply putting things right would be enough to set her mind at ease. Like all those who believed her the first time around, we are completely fooled into thinking that her version of events is the truth, without considering her ulterior motives – in this case, the desire to create her own fantasy redemption. Robbie’s death at Dunkirk on the last day of evacuation and Cecilia’s drowning in the London Blitz may still be on her conscience, but there is certainly at least some poetry in her using the same gift which denied them full, happy lives to immortalise them in history as committed lovers beating all odds. Whether that’s enough for genuine atonement is the provocative question that Briony may never find an answer for, and in Wright’s bold, ever-shifting structure, we too find it eerily winding its way all through this formal puzzle of lies, truths, and alternate perspectives.

Atonement is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.

David Fincher | 2hr 37min

While political cartoonist Robert Graysmith spends years digging into the details of the Zodiac murders across the west coast of 1960s and 70s America, we find David Fincher using Graysmith himself to conduct his own intensive examination of human obsession. How curious it is that the author of these accounts upon which this film is based becomes Fincher’s subject of scrutiny, his characteristic nuances and flaws often foregrounded over his book’s thrilling subject matter. While this true crime procedural moves at a steady, purposeful pace through all two and a half hours of its run time, leaving us to piece together loose tiles of an enigmatic puzzle with no fixed resolution, Graysmith is the real source of fascination at its centre, enslaved by his own compulsive desire for truth even as the world around him loses interest.

This fastidiousness is a trait echoed across both character and director, as Fincher similarly fixates on the details of the Zodiac killer investigation as a means to understand the mentality of Graysmith. The ambidexterity of one key suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, is hammered home as a potentially significant piece of evidence, as is his Zodiac branded wristwatch, and even when many of these details amount to little more than circumstantial, Fincher continues to remain glued to each new revelation. Just as Graysmith remains patient and willing to accept that such obsessiveness may not herald the answers or justice he desires, so too does Fincher revel in the journey of speculation and discovery, drawing narrative comparisons with All the President’s Men in his paranoid, fussy handling of this historical journalistic investigation.

Patience and deep concentration are qualities built into the very fabric of this narrative, carrying us along in Graysmith’s compulsive drive while keeping us at enough of a remove to recognise how these same traits are echoed in the criminal he is so doggedly pursuing. Each time we hear the Zodiac killer speak, it is from a different voice so as to throw us off any distinct identity, though his personality emerges clearly in his eerie letters and phone calls speaking of a haunted, troubled mind, plagued by urges he cannot escape. Remarkable form in characterisation is thus drawn between hero and villain, two men who fall victim to their own psychological impulses, and at least one of whom loses everything because of it. Though Graysmith’s passion may have attracted his future wife on their first date, it also becomes the cause for the disintegration of their marriage. While his associates are driven to exhaustion and substance abuse over the investigation, he remains persistently focused. Over the years his apartment turns into a cluttered study of boxes and papers, and Fincher sends a haggard Jake Gyllenhaal running through rainy streets at night in desperation, tying Graysmith’s physicality and environment to his own restless, obstinate mentality.

Such visual prowess continues to reveal itself in Fincher’s magnificent depth of field all throughout Zodiac, keeping every detail of this mustard-yellow period setting in crisp, sharp focus. Within the San Francisco Chronicle newsroom, slightly lowered camera angles turn the rows of yellow fluorescent lights into distinctive backgrounds against which the mysteries of the Zodiac letters unfold, while the journalists themselves are blocked across layers of the frame. Fincher’s trademark yellow lighting makes an especially atmospheric impact here in its bright, clean radiance through corporate interiors, while shady homes, streets, and restaurants are dimly illuminated with soft amber glows, allowing an uncanny darkness to overtake scenes of paranoia and doubt.

Calling Fincher a master of crafting tension may imply parallels to Alfred Hitchcock’s own sadistic fascinations, and yet there is something a little more ethereal about the suspense present here in Zodiac. Without an identifiable figure to pin these crimes to, Fincher’s evil is far more impressionistic than it is tangible, emerging just as much through his dingy, uncertain atmosphere is it does through its narrative. Such obscurity is made all the more frustrating by the pinpoint precision with which he attacks his plotting, cinematography, and characterisation, leaving us to question the productivity of such relentless obsession over impossible mysteries – and whether turning that intense focus inwards to our own humanity might bear a more fruitful life.

Zodiac is available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Google Play.