THE TIME THAT REMAINS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - In light of the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel, it's as good a time as any to take a look at Elia Suleiman's personal epic journey throughout the history of Israel from 1948 until 2009. Blending humour, tragedy, unconventional narrative and cinematic poetry, Suleiman creates one of the great new films of this millennium. It inspires tears, laughter and thought. One hopes it will inspire change.

The Time That Remains (2009)
Dir. Elia Suleiman
Starring: Elia Suleiman, Saleh Bakri, Samar Qudha Tamus, Shafika Bajiali

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I was initially unable to put my finger on it, but I knew there was something quite perfect about Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains.

It became abundantly clear during an extraordinary scene where a group of Palestinian children are sitting in a dark classroom within the confines of an Israeli-colonized Arab School as their wide-eyes are utterly transfixed upon the flickering images emanating from a rickety 16mm projector. The pieces of time dancing before them, projected onto a tiny screen, yet retaining a scope bigger than life itself are none other than the sprawling spectacle of the Stanley Kubrick-directed epic Spartacus – Hollywood’s ultimate big-screen allegory of Zionism.

It is this scene that precisely defines the perfection of Suleiman’s great film for a number of reasons. First of all, the scene flawlessly demonstrates the differences in cinematic approaches to the issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Spartacus is, of course allegorical and an epic tale of subjugation presented with all that money can buy. The Time That Remains is also an epic, but with comparatively meagre resources. It focuses, not on spectacle, but on the smaller, more confined details of humanity in the realm of subjugation; an epic and indeed episodic examination of big ideas, bigger conflicts and the biggest need for peace betwixt both entities.

Secondly, the scene demonstrates the perfection of Suleiman’s delicate, poetic and quiet approach to the subject, in direct contrast to the violent, spectacular bombast of Kubrick’s picture which, in fairness to Kubrick is an exquisitely directed gun-for-hire job and not the personal, poetic, from-the-heart and primarily autobiographical approach that Suleiman takes. That said, Suleiman shares with Kubrick that magnificent stylistic approach to the tableau – finding just the right composition and holding on it.

Thirdly, the scene expresses the notion that all cinema, no matter what side of the political fence it sits on, is rooted firmly in some form or another of a perspective that is almost always propagandistic in nature. The Time That Remains takes a side and sticks to it in a black and white manner with an occasional splash of grey in order to present its tale of subjugation with an equal mixture of sadness and humour.

Set against the backdrop of the city of Nazareth, the film charts the life of a simple, loving Palestinian family during the formation of Israel from 1948 to the present day and is delivered to us in a number of different time periods. Based on his father’s diaries and his own recollections, Suleiman presents the lives of his family, friends and neighbourhood and examines the absurdity and injustice of people being forced to live as strangers in their own land. In fact, the Palestinians who choose to remain in Nazareth instead of being exiled are categorized by their oppressors – not as Palestinians, but as Israeli-Arabs.

Suleiman presents all of this with a strange mixture of humour and tragedy. In one scene – which is as beautiful as it is bizarre – the same group of children described above are seen proudly singing a rousing, pro-Israeli song in Hebrew on a national holiday while a group of adults look on proudly. In yet another, a group of young Palestinian men sit outside a café in the blazing sun and watch with a poker-faced bemusement as a soldier runs back and forth, occasionally asking which way he should go to the battlefield and when told which way to go, he argues that it must be the wrong way – especially since the sounds of battle seem to be coming from every which way.

Another great scene blending the deepest black humour and tragedy involves Israeli soldiers decked out in Arab gear and marching along the street when a Palestinian woman congratulates them on their victory. She receives a bullet to the head for her salutations in a shocking, deadpan, horrific and mordantly funny manner – recalling that famous moment in (of all movies) Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones casually blows away the sword-wielding turban-adorned bad guy. Suleiman is clearly recapturing the "spirit" of Spielberg's colonial-tinged fantasy, forcing us to laugh and almost just as quickly, forcing us to confront our laughter.

Since Suleiman’s film spans several different periods and doesn’t follow (on the surface) the traditional and comfortable storytelling checkpoints, it’s not an easy movie to describe in terms of plot, but in a nutshell – it is a story that begins with resistance to subjugation, moves through to acceptance of subjugation and ends up in a seemingly ambiguous place of “Where am I?”

While the movie feels unconventional, Suleiman does indeed adhere to the principles of basic storytelling with a three act (or, if you will, three movement) structure, but cleverly masks it to create the feeling that with the passage of time, not much changes. In spite of this, he reminds us that things DO change, but the changes are incremental, subtle and so tiny that one is confronted with the horrifying reality that full-on change could take an eternity, if at all..

The primary reason for this overwhelming sense of the unconventional is that Suleiman establishes a rhythm and structure early on in the film and adheres to it passionately – one that involves the repetition of certain actions and situations – the funniest being one in which the family’s neighbour, a mad old gent, unsuccessfully and repeatedly attempts to immolate himself, dousing himself with kerosene and lighting his match improperly, and upon subsequent tries is continually talked out of it by Suleiman’s father.

As a character in the film, we also follow Suleiman who, in the early portions casts some extraordinary look-alikes to play himself in childhood, adolescence and early adulthood before taking over the role proper in the latter sections of the film. Suleiman and his surrogates continue his silent Keaton-like poker face from earlier films to especially powerful effect in this new picture.

Many have commented on Suleiman’s debt to the likes of Keaton, Harry Langdon and Jacques Tati and while I will not quarrel with this, I also feel strongly that he infuses his work and performance with the same sublime qualities so prevalent in the best work of Chaplin. The Time That Remains has several moments that come close to matching the incredible emotional wallop of Chaplin’s final smile at the end of City Lights.

It is, I think Suleiman's mastery of all the elements needed to create one indelible and sublime sequence after another that makes watching this film such a breathless and awe-inspiring experience. The Time That Remains is most probably a masterpiece.

Time, and in particular, that which remains, will, as always, be the ultimate judge.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

THE TIME THAT REMAINS AND OTHER FILMS BY ELIA SULEIMAN ARE AVAILABLE ON DVD AND BLU-RAY. FEEL FREE TO ORDER BY CLICKING DIRECTLY ON THE LINKS BELOW AND, IN SO DOING, CONTRIBUTE TO THE ONGOING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER.

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THE ASCENT and WINGS - Reviewed By Greg Klymkiw - Susan Sontag called Larisa Shepitko's harrowing anti-war film THE ASCENT "the most affecting film about the horror of war I know." Shepitko focused on suffering, slaughter and senseless strife and did so in a stunning allegorical portrait of Christ and Judas during the German occupation of Belarus. The movie was miraculously rendered under Communist oppression in the Soviet Union. With WINGS, Shepitko delivered a powerful, romantic look at Russia's fighting women of the Second World War in a post-war world. Shepitko's eye, like a mad pit bull's jaws, always clenched furiously on its quarry and never, ever let it go.

This is a perfect time to take another look at two films about war by the late Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko (a protege of Dovzhenko and the wife of acclaimed director Elem Klimov). Ukraine has been at war with Russia since the Maidan revolution in Kyiv just over one year ago which ousted the Putin-backed gangster-President Yanukovitch. Since that time, Russia illegally annexed Crimea and organized an army of terrorists to take control of two provinces in Eastern Ukraine. In recent days, Tatars and Ukrainians in Crimea have suffered massive discrimination and even death, all Tatar and Ukrainian books in a historical Crimean library have been chucked into the streets and publicly burned, Putin is rallying his nation to publicly protest Ukraine's freedom and just yesterday, during peaceful rallies in Ukraine to celebrate freedom from Russia, Moscow-backed terrorists exploded a bomb in Ukraine's second-largest city Kharkiv which killed and wounded many innocent people. The farcical and cowardly EU-backed-and-negotiated truce might only instigate the break out of a large-scale war. Here are my reviews of The Ascent (Christian allegory set in WWII) and Wings (examination of post-war female soldiers) by Larisa Shepitko.

The Ascent (1977) *****
dir. Larisa Shepitko
Starring: Boris Plotnikov, Vladimir Gostyukhin, Sergei Yokovlev, Anatoli Solonitsin

Review By Greg Klymkiw

"Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man? (Probably yes.) . . . No photograph, or portfolio of photographs, can unfold, go further, and further still, as does The Ascent (1977), by the Ukrainian director Larisa Shepitko, the most affecting film about the horror of war I know." - Susan Sontag, "Looking at War: Photography’s view of devastation and death", The New Yorker

Survival and sacrifice are at the forefront of Larisa Shepitko’s harrowing World War II drama The Ascent – only fitting since the film, at once simple, at the next complex, is ultimately an allegorical portrait of Christ and Judas in a world turned topsy-turvy by the senseless strife and slaughter during the German invasion and occupation of Belarus. That notion of faith, extracted as it is from the New Testament and applied to such issues as love and betrayal of country are completely at home within the context and backdrop so vividly and evocatively portrayed.

For the Ukrainian-born Shepitko, herself a student of Master Ukrainian filmmaker Olexander Dovzhenko, it is clear why this story resonated with her and why she applied such staggering Dovzhenkian compositions to the picture. Coming from Ukraine, a country and culture that had been under the yoke of occupation and suppression almost from its very beginnings and having been mentored by a brilliant filmmaker who himself had been repressed and censored by Joseph Stalin, the mixture of frank political material coupled with a story and central relationship derived from the opiate of the masses, is illustrative of Shepitko’s artistic bravery at such a relatively early stage of her career in the repressive Soviet regime that frowned upon anything that deviated from the State disavowal of all things based in faith.

The story is a simple one. It is also both tragic and compelling. Ultimately, however, it is the simple narrative backbone that allows Shepitko to inspire an audience’s engagement in the proceedings as well as opportunities for contemplation and reflection both during and after seeing the film.

Following a rag-tag band of partisans through the snowy steppes and forest of Belarus, we are introduced to our pair of mismatched protagonists, the hardened, practical Rybak (Vladimir Gostukhin) and the physically weak, but thoughtful Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) as they volunteer to journey through the bitter cold of the dangerous, Nazi-infested region to find food for the tired and starving freedom fighters. The journey begins to take, almost from the beginning, a series of increasingly disastrous and dangerous detours as Sotnikov becomes sicker with bronchitis and a bullet wound while Rybak becomes so intent upon survival that he begins to question all the sacrifices he is enduring. They both find themselves face-to-face with having to make the ultimate sacrifice for each other, those around them and most importantly, home and country.

Given that most of us are more than aware of the relationship between Jesus and Judas, it is also a testament to Shepitko’s cinematic storytelling prowess that we are still gripped by the proceedings in spite of having a good inkling of where the story will go. In fact, it is the inevitability of where things are headed that keeps us glued to the screen – we keep hoping against hope that the inevitable will be circumvented and, of course, Shepitko plays the portent with harrowing assuredness and style.

Interestingly, The Ascent is not dissimilar to another great Soviet war picture, Grigori Chukrai’s Ballad of a Soldier. On the surface, both pictures deal with soldiers who have a specific goal, but on their journey they face a series of obstacles and detours that painfully keep them from reaching their ultimate destination. The difference, however, is that Chukrai’s film (also full of lush, gorgeously composed exteriors in the Dovzhenkian mold) involves detours routed firmly in sacrifice wherein the central character is kept from visiting his destitute mother because he is continually sidetracked by being duty-bound to helping other people with their own challenges. In The Ascent, it is both betrayal and survival that provide the obstacles. This basic difference highlights why one picture feels romantic and the other is overwhelmingly tragic.

That said, The Ascent is equally powerful and perhaps even more so since the will to survive – at any cost – becomes so poignant. Sacrifice, which involves principles rather than that of the plight of individuals, takes The Ascent into (ironically) political territory that mirrors the struggles of everyone living within the Soviet system. As an audience we are forced to confront a system of repression (Soviet-ruled Belarus) that is also being occupied and repressed by a foreign aggressor (Germany). The enemy is sadly, from within and outside so that our characters are surrounded – almost in futility. The domestic collaborators with the Nazis are at once evil and altogether human. We understand the need to collaborate while condemning it at the same time.

Living in a system of repression like Belarus and under the yoke of a madman like Stalin, the Nazis provide a way out of the madness – an alternative to Stalin. Two of the supporting characters in this narrative are perfectly emblematic of this. One is a village elder (Sergei Yakovlev) who is a reluctant collaborator while the other is a local Nazi interrogator (Anatoli Solonytsin), a cold, practical bureaucrat. The former is a man who seeks safety in collaboration for his family and friends, while the latter is a pure opportunist – someone who is just as happy serving the dictator du jour (Hitler) as he would be engaging in a Stalinist purge. These dichotomous personalities brilliantly mirror Rybak and Sotnikov – especially since their journeys and the inevitable outcomes are so similar: suggesting, of course, that notions of sacrifice and betrayal, collaboration and resistance, good and evil are almost always grey areas in war, and in particular, within repressive regimes.

What is not a grey area in The Ascent is suffering – represented not only by the physical pain and death of violence, but by the land itself. Here is where Shepitko’s kino-eye is especially evocative. The bitter cold and the endless, bone-chilling whiteness of snow overwhelm all the exterior shots. One of the more intensely powerful moments involves Rybak dragging a sick and wounded Sotnikov through the snow – for what seems like forever – as Nazi bullets fly at them. Shepitko’s camera is like a mad pit bull’s jaws clenching at its quarry – it seems to never let go of these two men as they painstakingly make their way through the snow.

Throughout the film we see the actors enduring literal physical hardships. Seeing The Ascent again, I was reminded of the genius of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a movie that has suffered unnecessarily over the years due to the hype surrounding the mad German (and ethnically Slavic) director’s decision to force his own cast and crew to drag a riverboat through the jungle and over a mountain. When writing at an earlier juncture about Shepitko’s Krylya/Wings I was also reminded of Herzog – in that case, it was the documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly. Visually, Herzog and Shepitko are very different. Herzog’s visuals in drama and documentary, while stunning, have the immediacy of cinema vérité while Shepitko is rooted in the classical, sumptuously composed imagery her mentor Dovzhenko was known for. What Shepitko and Herzog share, however, is an unflinching search for truth in image, and in particular, the use of truth in image in the telling of stories cinematically.

Speaking of sharing, it is also worth noting that some of the finest war films of all time were made under the Soviet system – many of which put the best American examples of this genre to shame. That said, Ukrainians appear to have directed the very best Soviet war films. Olexander Dovzhenko (Arsenal, Schors and his WWII documentaries), Sergei Bondarchuk (Destiny of a Man, War and Peace), Grigori Chukrai (Ballad of a Soldier, Cold Skies, The 41st) and Shepitko have powerfully and evocatively portrayed the horrors and even glories of war and share Ukrainian ethnicity. Perhaps it is coincidence, or perhaps it is worthy of further study. In any event, it is certainly worth noting. It is also worth reiterating that all the abovementioned filmmakers come from a country that has always been dominated and repressed by other powers. With The Ascent, it is finally survival and sacrifice that drives the picture and makes it a film that is haunting, unforgettable and tragic.

Ukrainians, it seems, and others who have lived under repressive regimes, have always known something about survival, sacrifice and war.

Wings (1966) dir. Larisa Shepitko
Starring: Maya Bulgakova

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

The romance of war has seldom been so heartbreaking than in the hands of the great Ukrainian-born director Larisa Shepitko who made this first feature after a few short films and studying under the watchful eye of fellow countryman and master film artist Oleksander Dovzhenko. What’s especially bittersweet is that Wings is set in a post-war Soviet world where the lead character Nadezhna (Maya Bulgakova) struggles to settle into a life of seeming normalcy and, compared to her career as a fighter pilot, complacency. Now in her fortieth year, she works as a schoolmistress and goes about her daily tasks with professionalism and commitment on the surface, but always yearning and dreaming of the days when she soared above the normal world – touching Heaven, surrounded by the billowy clouds and racing through the air, dipping and swooping like a bird of prey.

Shepitko, part of that breed of Soviet filmmaker that rejected the occasionally overwrought montage-heavy storytelling of the likes of Eisenstein, tells her delicate tale with the same kind of editorial restraint common to her generation. Favouring gorgeously composed tableaus and a stately pace, Shepitko aims her lens at the realism of Nadezhna’s life, but with such a keen eye that the commonplace becomes extraordinary.

And what is it about the “normal” that nags at Shepitko’s central character?

The bottom line is this: The girl just wants to fly high. But alas, it is not to be – Nadezhna’s place in servitude to the Soviet ideal is now in the shaping of minds – youthful minds that live in a peaceful world that cannot even begin to comprehend the horrors of war. Nor are her students (and most others – adults AND children) equipped to fathom the mad, youthful rush accompanying Nadezhna’s idealism which led her into the cockpit of a bomber and into the arms of a fellow high-flyer, a dashing young man who eventually dies in a fireball before her very eyes – an image that haunts her constantly.

Shepitko expertly juxtaposes the romance and tragedy of Nadezhna’s life during the war with a series of poetic flashbacks that always help move the story forward when the drabness of her current existence reaches its nadir. One of the more moving sequences has our protagonist watching as a group of schoolchildren in the local museum are shown a display devoted to her heroism during the war. With the love of her life long dead and a schlubish museum director vying for her attentions – Nadezhna’s own life has become a literal and figurative museum piece.

Her daughter Tanya, a ravishing beauty, has married a much older man and Nadezhna can only think of her long-lost lover and how this prissy egghead who cohabits with her progeny can only pale in comparison. While Tanya has married for love, Nadezhna’s lover died for love – not necessarily for romantic love, but for the romantic ideals and love of flying that he shared with her.

With such a pedigree, can anyone ever be good enough for Nadezhna’s daughter?

While Wings shares much in common with Dovzhenko and Grigori Chukrai (Ballad of a Soldier), this is, unlike the work of her male colleagues, a relatively contemporary film by a woman and about a woman, which builds towards a conclusion as soaring and heartbreaking as the one that ends Nadezhna’s story. Werner Herzog’s astounding 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly still can evoke tears when one recalls the final images as the title subject has a dream come true. A similar and extraordinary sequence occurs at the end of Wings and delivers the kind of impact that only movies can bring when a dream comes true.

In both cases the wish fulfillment is endowed with both elation and heartache.

Shepitko firmly roots her character in a past that seems so far away and yet, truth and redemption are found in the reclamation of that past – albeit a reclamation that embraces the present and includes an acceptance of the future.

Shepitko only made three features following this debut. Her life was tragically cut short in a car accident while on a location scout for what would have been her fifth feature.

Like Nadezhna’s dashing flyboy lover, Shepitko died while doing what she knew and loved best.

Great art and life are never that far apart, are they?

Wings and The Ascent are available in one set on Criterion's Eclipse DVD label

In Canada - BUY LARISA SHEPITKO movies HERE!

In USA and the rest of the WORLD - BUY LARISA SHEPITKO movies HERE!

COUNTDOWN #2 TO NYMPHOMANIAC by LARS von TRIER (opening March 21, 2014 at TIFF Bell Lightbox via Mongrel Media). Today's countdown is a review of the Criterion Collection's Outstanding 2-Disc DVD of EUROPA (aka ZENTROPA) - Review By Greg Klymkiw

2 Films Floating under a Blanket of Zeitgeist.
2 Films Featuring Hypnotized Characters.
1990: Guy Maddin Hypnotizes His Actors
1991: Lars von Trier Hypnotizes the Audience

Narrator/Hypnotist: 

You will now listen to my voice.

My voice will help you and guide you

still deeper into Europa.

Every time you hear my voice,

with every word and every number,

you will enter into a still deeper layer,

open, relaxed and receptive.

I shall now count from one to ten…

On the mental count of ten,

you will be in Europa.

Europa aka Zentropa (1991)
dir. Lars von Trier *****
Starring: Jean-Marc Barr, Barbara Sukowa, Udo Kier, Eddie Constantine, Ernst-Hugo Järegård, Max von Sydow

Review By Greg Klymkiw

In 1990, Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin was directing his tragedy of the Great War Archangel which told a tale of lovers afflicted with severe mustard gas apoplexy who forget, at any given moment, who precisely they are in love with.

To ensure his actors were always in a trance, he secured, with my deft finagling (in the spirit of full disclosure I was the film's producer) the services of a renowned hypnotist (who, due to a binding non-disclosure policy cannot be named) to place Maddin's on-camera charges in a state of waking and walking sleep during the entire shoot of the film. Complete and utter submission was the goal.

This, of course, is the goal of all great artists - to subjugate. Submission and repression, when handled aggressively

Mad Orthodox Monk: (Chants ominously in Ukrainian Church Slavonic).
Dr. O'Ebbing: How do we know she is fully hypnotized?
Mad Orthodox Monk: I will ask her a question.
(To Veronkha) What is the most terrible thing that you have done?
Veronkha: I poked my baby brother's eye out and said it was an accident.
Mad Orthodox Monk: I think she's ready.

in all aspects of the filmmaking process create narrative, emotional, dramatic, psychological and stylistic psychoses of the most powerful kind. They roil just below the surface until nothing can stop the eventual explosion of shrapnel-like elements that pierce the mind, body and soul with all the pathological force of deep, unrelenting mental illness - a sickness so twisted and bent out of shape it becomes invisible except on a subconscious level. The very act of watching the film is not unlike staring into the deepest pits of one's soul, to gaze into a mirror that reflects a dream of Hell that will never end. In light of this, Archangel was, as a film, drenched in black and white, occasionally colour tinted, replete with post-dubbed dialogue (also performed under hypnosis), a cornucopia of in-camera special effects including double (and triple) exposures, matte paintings, rear and front screen projection, as well as optical shots.

At the same time, across the pond from the Dominion of Canada, one Lars von Trier was making Europa (renamed Zentropa for its initial North American release) which, like Maddin's film, was set in a strange never-never land of historical revisionism (though in post-WWII Germany as opposed to Maddin's WWI/Russian Revolution cusp period). It too was in black and white (though with dollops of full-blown colour rather than colour tinting) and was, like Maddin's film, bursting at the seams with wild in-camera and optical effects.

Where they differed, and yet existed in the same zeitgeist, was this: Maddin hypnotized his actors whilst von Trier rendered a movie that literally hypnotized the audience. The results were identical. Much like any living subject of hypnotism, audience-members who opened themselves willingly to both cinematic experiences were, in fact, under the power of suggestion.

Upon first seeing Europa back in the 90s, I was initially coaxed into the alternately pleasurable and disturbing states of waking and walking sleep and as such, became so obsessed with Lars von Trier's vision that I fought hard on subsequent viewings to deflect the hypnotic power in order to fully experience his dazzling, sumptuous genius in all its glory. Twenty years after my initial exposure to his great film, I am not only happy to report that it holds up magnificently, but has deepened for me to such dizzying degrees that I am convinced it is one of the most stunning works of cinematic art I have ever seen.

Maddin and von Trier's films must be seen on a big screen and, when possible, projected in glorious 35mm. This is especially important given the special quality in-camera and optical effects have over the much colder digital approach to rendering screen magic today. It is, finally, the warmth of cinema in the format of its birth that allows us to be enveloped in fluffy white blankets of forgetfulness (in Maddinesque parlance) and the sheer joyful terror of being forced into a unique, trance-like state of both yearning and forgetfulness that is, indeed, TRUE magic. Luckily, both Maddin and von Trier are available in the next best thing - their home consumption via visionary companies like the Criterion Collection and Zeitgeist Films.

Europa begins with the hypnotic tones of a voiceover belonging to Max von Sydow (The Exorcist himself and longtime Ingmar Bergman star), whilst we slowly cascade over train tracks engulfed in darkness, save for the soft light beaming gently over the centre of the frame. Lars von Trier plunges us into the black tunnel that is Germany just after World War II. Leopold Kessler (Jean-Marc Barr), an American of German descent has come to his expatriate father's homeland and taken a job as a railway employee under the tutelage of his persnickety, alcoholic Uncle (Ernst-Hugo Järegård). He meets and falls in love with a fetching film-noir-like femme fatale, Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa) who is the daughter of the German rail magnate Max Hartmann (Jørgen Reenberg). He is taken into the family with open arms. Max, in particular, is drawn to the notion of Germany becoming more international and is impressed with Kessler's desire to bring his North American, yet German-influenced know-how to the reconstruction of the country.

This is in vast contrast to the American armed forces occupying the Fatherland. The American commander mysteriously presiding over all matters of a reconstructive variety is Colonel Harris (played by the brilliant, gravel-voiced American expatriate tough guy actor Eddie Constantine, he of Lemmy Caution fame in numerous French movies like Alphaville). Harris knows all too well that Max used his train company Zentropa to transport Jews to concentration camps, but he also realizes that a vast majority of Germany's populace had been, to varying degrees, complicit in the activities of the Nazi regime. He seeks to protect Max since he believes this guilt-ridden rail baron is ultimately important to the American goal of reconstruction. Harris is also embroiled in a secret fight against a mysterious group of German partisan terrorists called Werewolf and while the young American Kessler trains on the railways and romances Katharina, his services are secured to delve into and expose the forces of evil.

Europa is both important and original on numerous fronts. In terms of theme and content, it is one of the most indelible screen portraits of post-World War II Germany ever committed to celluloid. Delivering a narrative which, I think, more than ably points a finger at America's complicity in the evils of Nazi Germany, especially in terms of making it clear how many Americans owned munitions factories IN Germany and did business with the Nazis under the radar. The overwhelming sense that we are in a nightmare world where an occupying force bullies the occupied, yet represents the corporate interests of the occupier is precisely what Lars Von Trier exposes. For all the lip service paid to the needs of assisting Germany with reconstruction, he presents a portrait of American military goons exercising the same sort of encroachment upon basic civil liberties as the Gestapo. While he does not veer away from Germany's rightful guilt in supporting one of the most foul regimes in all of recorded history, his film is not afraid to point a finger at America's military regime and its fascistic defence of America interests - in particular, the corporate interests - using reconstruction as a thin veil over basic greed. Unrestricted sovereignty was not ultimately granted to Germany until reunification in 1990 - a point not lost on von Trier. Both the narrative and mise-en-scène etch a chilling portrait of occupation - juxtaposing the German adherence to bureaucracy with the American adherence to back-door dealing and how both are equally flawed, but also at odds with each other within the context of the political situation.

Mixed into this heady brew of conflicting ideals, von Trier never neglects the thematic elements of complicity, betrayal and redemption. The Americans - in particular, the character of Colonel Harris - are complicit only in their exploitation of the situation while on the German side, complicity is a heavy cross that all the other characters must bear. Betrayal runs rampant throughout the narrative, though von Trier wisely explores this theme within the tropes of film noir elements and melodrama. I place an accent on "wisely" here because at the time the film was made, Germany was on the cusp of reunification and the issues he deals with had repercussions on a world wide scale, but by placing them within this stylized framework, he created a work that is not ephemeral in its power, but is, indeed, truly universal. In this sense, Europa feels less a film of its time, but rather, a film for all times. For example, while I feel the best works of American cinema in the 70s more than adequately capture the overwhelming paranoia of the period WITHOUT feeling dated, these are films directly from the periods of history and culture they represent.

Making a film in any contemporary context and looking back upon a period of history with contemporary eyes, requires an emphasis upon recreating the past world with indelible historical accuracy on as many levels as possible. However, when placing works dealing with historical issues and made during different historical periods - especially a film about the beginnings of occupation in Germany made at a time of German reunification - framing its narrative and themes in an almost post-modern aesthetic allows the artist a context to create a work that's truly visionary. This, is what Lars von Trier accomplishes. Reading reviews from the time of Europa's original release, one sees how even the best of the best acknowledge von Trier's visual gifts, but dismiss and/or outright ignore his narrative and political savvy. This, of course, did not keep the film from finding an audience at the time, but what's phenomenal to me is just how ahead of its time the film actually was, and in a sense, still is. Certainly viewing the film in the context of the current situation we face in terms of the economy, terrorism, the corporate imperialism of America, the domination of the New World Order and the horrendously obvious notion that war is ultimately all about money, Europa is without question a film for our times and, no doubt, will be so in the future as well.

The idea in certain circles, a confederacy of dunces to my way of thinking, that there's something wrong with melodrama is both myopic and elitist. There is, to be sure, good melodrama and bad melodrama, but it is a worthy genre and one that can work quite perfectly when presenting important historical and political themes. I suspect that von Trier and Maddin might well be cinema's leaders in understanding the importance of utilizing melodrama within stories dealing with political, historical and/or humanist subjects. Neither are afraid of filling their work with retro melodramatic devices and doing so, not with tongue in cheek, but playing them straight. When this approach sings ever-so sweetly, it is the humour - both natural and satirical - that comes to the fore - sans the empty spoof-like manner which is the domain of the holier-than-thou, the better-than-that and all the other head-nodding-eye-winking purveyors of mediocrity.

Europa is deliciously blessed with both the crazed big emotions of Douglas Sirk and the humanity of Carl Dreyer. Most amazingly, there are several moments of suspense that even owe their existence to the feverish qualities of D.W. Griffith - notably, several sequences involving the arming of a bomb and the subsequent attempt to disarm the bomb. Von Trier throws in everything including the kitchen sink to extend our dread and anticipation. Our desire for relief to said tension hits stratospheric heights. In addition to the visual flourishes reminiscent of another age, the score is sumptuously derived from a variety of original and pre-recorded pieces - most notably and pointedly from Bernard Herrmann's haunting music from Hitchcock's dreamy expressionistic thriller Vertigo. The stylized performances - aided further with the use of hollow dubbing - are a marvel and in particular, Jean-Marc Barr as the addled protagonist delivers what surely must be one of the bravest performances I've ever seen. He runs the gamut of emotion, but often in a controlled and intentionally stiff manner. He allows himself to be the puppet of Lars von Trier and as such, takes the thankless, but often surprising and engaging task of representing our (we, the audience) point of view. He is our way in to this world and for an actor to expose himself and yield so uncompromisingly to a filmmaker's vision is brilliantly, stunningly, delightfully foolhardy and ultimately, what makes his performance and the film itself so great.

This is razzle-dazzle filmmaking at its best. The bonus is plenty of food for thought and the cherry on the sundae is the occasional laughs and tears von Trier elicits from us. Some have charged that von Trier's approach is, in this, and other films, cold. All I can say to this, ladies and gentlemen, is thus: "I give you - once again - the aforementioned confederacy of dunces."

One of the more extraordinary achievements of Europa is the narration. It works two-fold. First, it is a hypnotic device - literal hypnotism and I'd argue that anyone open to the picture on a first viewing will, indeed, succumb. Secondly, it's a wonderful use of the great, though rare literary tradition of a second person point of view. In contemporary American literature this was popularized by Jay McInerney in his brilliant 1984 debut novel Bright Lights Big City. The book announces its bold style and brash approach in these extraordinary opening sentences:

"You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy."

The idea of a detached voice speaking directly to its central character in order to relay the narrative was, even in the 80s, not a new approach, but it was one that thrust the pelvis of its literary conceit in the faces of readers all over the world and frankly, proved to be an ideal way of telling the story of a young man in the midst of a cocaine-addled phase of his life. As von Trier's central character Kessler is plunged into a similarly opaque world, we constantly hear Max Von Sydow's "you-are-getting-sleepy"-styled hypnotic offscreen orders to both the character and viewer. In 80s New York, it's coke-fuelled headlong dives into nightclubs. In Post-World War II Germany, its the strange, dreamy, addled world of occupation.

Certainly William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! is replete with both second person point of view and narrative techniques and is, in a sense, very close to the territory von Trier explores in Europa. Where Faulkner's novel is rooted in myth, one in which its central character is representative of the myth of the deep South and resulting in his ultimate, almost inevitable demise, von Trier's Europa seems similarly rooted in myth - in particular that of the Greek goddess of Europa who is seduced by a horny, old Zeus. That Europa herself, in mythic terms, was from a long, noble lineage is also a fascinating element in von Trier's film. We have Kessler, for example, seduced by his German roots and his American need to "do good" (or, one might even suggest the deeper American need to "meddle") and his attraction to the female heir to the Hartmann's rail empire.

In Faulkner's words:

"You cannot know yet whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you are believing."

Beat by beat, shot by shot - this is Europa. Images we will never forget rush by - Kessler dashing in silhouette in front of a huge illuminated clock, a scarlet ocean of blood rushing from under a door, a harrowing walk through mysterious cars on the Zentropa train full of caged Holocaust victims, corpses of "werewolf" partisans hanging from knotted ropes round their snapped necks, exquisitely composed Josef von Sterberg-like shots of Barbara Sukowa resembling Marlene Dietrich come-to-life, the desperate flailing of a drowning man as he seeks life and instead finds redemption and finally, the most gorgeous of all - a midnight Christmas mass in a bombed-out cathedral as puffs of snow gently fall upon the devout.

We cannot know yet what we see is what we're looking at, or what we're believing.

Amen.

"Europa" is available on a wonderful 2-Disc DVD that features a restored high-def digital transfer, a commentary featuring director Lars von Trier and producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen (in Danish, with English subtitles), "The Making of Europa” (1991), a documentary detailing the storyboarding to production, "Trier’s Element", a 1991 documentary featuring an interview with von Trier, and footage from the set and Europa’s Cannes premiere and press conference, "Anecdotes from Europa" a 2005 short documentary featuring interviews with film historian Peter Schepelern, actor Jean-Marc Barr, producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, assistant director Tómas Gislason, co-writer Niels Vørsel, and prop master Peter Grant, 2005 interviews with cinematographer Henning Bendtsen, composer Joachim Holbek, costume designer Manon Rasmussen, film-school teacher Mogens Rukov, editor/director Tómas Gislason, producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, art director Peter Grant, actor Michael Simpson, production manager Per Arman, actor Ole Ernst, A conversation with Lars von Trier from 2005, in which the director speaks about the “Europa” trilogy, "Europa—The Faecal Location" (2005), a short film by Gislason, a highly improved English subtitle translation, and an essay by critic Howard Hampton.

SPRING BREAKERS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Babes in Bikinis, Babes with Guns, Babes with James Franco.

Babes in Bikinis. Babes with Guns. Babes with James Franco is lots of fun! Look at this shit! This is MY shit! These are my motherfucking GUNS! These are my NUNCHUCKS! All of MY shit! It's the AMERICAN Dream! MY dream!!!

Spring Breakers (2012) ****
Dir. Harmony Korine
Starring: James Franco, Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, Rachel Korine, Gucci Mane

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
Ted Hughes, from his poem "Hawk Roosting"

Violence permeates every frame of Harmony (Gummo, Julien Donkey-Boy) Korine's savagely beautiful Spring Breakers and the overall effect of his film places us in an almost hypnotic state where sex, celebration, friendship and love - the very foundations of humanity - give way to acts of barbarism. Savagery and civilization are, by strict definition, polar opposites and yet one gets an overwhelming sense from the world Korine creates, that civilization without savagery is not possible and that furthermore, they're essentially one and the same.

There is, finally, little to distinguish us from animals. We are animals. Rational thought is what supposedly separates us, but the tone of Spring Breakers is haunting and almost elegiac. Though there is a slender narrative to carry us along, the film is ultimately a poetic, visceral and visually stunning representation of creatures driven by instinct and any actions which move beyond that - hence demonstrating some shred of individuality - are either swallowed up, overwhelmed or left behind as the pack mentality of human existence is what finally drives every action.

The movie follows four young women - Faith (Selena Gomez), Candy (Vanessa Hudgens), Brit (Ashley Benson) and Cotty (Rachel Korine). They live in a grey, bleak, suffocating and stupefyingly insular dormitory in a tiny, nondescript college town. When we first meet them, they're consumed with the need to join the thousands upon thousands of students celebrating during Spring Break, the annual hedonistic ritual of ingesting libations, hallucinogens, having sex and engaging in all manner of naughty fun as they party hearty under the blazing Florida sun. Alas, they're short of money which, leads them to finance their vacation in ways none of them imagined ever doing. Or did they? It seems that below the layers of their supple, nubile flesh, they have dreams of escape, experience and searching for lives worth living - even if the living involves criminal activity - or at the extremities of their meagre existence, the threat of death to others or, for that matter, themselves.

They seek to defile and be defiled.

Enter: Alien (James Franco). He pulls the girls out of a sticky wicket and they, in turn, stick to him like flypaper. He's a raunchy half-time rapper who's built his own crime dynasty after leaving the fold of his mentor and former best friend, Gangsta Archie (Gucci Mane). It's a bitter rivalry, but there's time enough for old scores to be settled - Alien has debauchery on his mind. Luckily, for him, some - though not all of our young protagonists - are more than up to the challenge of mutually agreeable debasement.

A long night gets longer.

There will be blood and it will spill.

This is the fuckin' American dream. This is my fuckin' dream, y'all! All this sheeyit! Look at my sheeyit! I got... I got SHORTS! Every fuckin' color. I got designer T-shirts! I got gold bullets. Motherfuckin' VAM-pires. I got Escape! Calvin Klein Escape! Mix it up with Calvin Klein Be. Smell nice? I SMELL NICE! That ain't a fuckin' bed; that's a fuckin' art piece. My fuckin' spaceship! U.S.S. Enterprise on this shit. I go to different planets on this motherfucker! Look at my shit. Look at my shit! I got my blue Kool-Aid. I got my fuckin' NUN-CHUCKS. I got shurikens; I got different flavors. Look at that shit, I got sais. I got blades! Look at my sheeyit! This ain't nuttin', I got ROOMS of this shit! I got my dark tannin' oil... lay out by the pool, put on my dark tanning oil...I got machine guns... Look at this motherfucker here! Look at this motherfucker! Huh? Huh? A fucking army up in this shit!

From beginning to end, Korine paints a dreamy portrait of angst, ennui and celebration. The celebratory aspects of the film are captured with seemingly unending slow-motion shots of gorgeous and decidedly anonymous young men and women splashed with sunlight on sandy beaches parading their youth, sexuality and good cheer in various stages of undress - lithe, hard bodies with tanned flesh and splotches of colour that appear almost fluorescent.

There's a strange disconnect, though. Who are these college kids exposing themselves to - each other or the camera (which often feels like an observational character unto itself) or both? Are we experiencing a dream? If so, whose? Are these flash-forwards and/or what our heroines hope/imagine what spring break will be like? After all, they are indeed on these same beaches after scratching up enough bus fare to get to Florida. It's also where they admiringly spy the rapping Alien and he, in turn, locks his greedy eyes upon the girls.

Beneath the smiles and good cheer, the same listlessness Korine focuses upon during the early college dorm sequences seems almost to be the root of the celebratory activities. Everyone appears to be having fun because they're supposed to be having fun. Certainly, this is the feeling when Korine's camera prowls about Gangsta Archie's strip club at night - the dapples of sun are replaced with coloured footlights, stage lights, even fluorescent lights and the colours, while vibrant, seem muted through haze and grain.

Whether he's behind the wheel of his car as he cruises the streets or leaping crazily and boastfully within his beach-side home filled with cash, drugs and a huge arsenal of weapons or on a pier during a peaceful and overwhelmingly radiant sunset, James Franco betrays, ever-so subtly and brilliantly, flashes of genuine regret, dollops of blankness and occasional sparkles in his eyes that seem forced. His work in this film is, almost not surprisingly, astonishing. Whether Alien reveals pieces of his sad back story to the girls or when he goes face to face with his old friend and now rival Archie - we see bravado, to be sure, but we also strongly sense that he's donning a mask. When the film inevitably rushes into the literal explosions of violence that the movie's undercurrents hint at, both Korine and Franco are a director and actor at the very peak of their formidable gifts and power as film artists.

Korine's portrait of youth in a hedonistic environment feels less like a narrative since its genuine dramatic beats feel few and far between. Instead they progressively and increasingly seem like buoys on the water of a fluid-like work of visual poetry, thanks especially due to the stunning work of cinematographer Benoît Debie (Irreversible, The Runaways, Get The Gringo). There's aural poetry also, since Korine slathers his film with the evocative Cliff Martinez-Skrillex score which not so much drives, but permeates the entire film almost non-stop.

SELENA GOMEZ as Faith: "I'm tired of seeing the same thing. Everybody's so miserable here because they see the same things everyday, they wake up in the same bed, same houses, same depressing streetlights, one gas station, grass, it's not even green, it's brown. Everything is the same and everyone is just sad. I really don't want to end up like them. I just want to get out of here. There's more than just spring break. This is our chance to see something different."

Korine is also blessed with a first-rate cast. In addition to the aforementioned and mesmerizing James (can-this-guy-ever-do-wrong?) Franco, Spring Breakers must live and die by the quartet of young women whose story the film ultimately tells and they acquit themselves admirably. The wonderful teen pop singers and former Disney TV moppets Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens (Wizards of Waverly Place and High School Musical respectively) both offer bravura work in roles on opposite ends of the film's centre of morality and their work here is genuinely revelatory. Ashley Benson and Korine's real-life wife Rachel contribute solid work also.

Korine's writing and his direction of the actors yields, for me, his strongest work to date. In particular the film features several expressive monologues rendered by Alien and the girls - usually in the form of exclamatory rants (on Alien's part) and extremely sorrowful speeches by the girls as they leave voicemail messages for their respective family members' via pay phones and/or verbally convey during dialogue scenes where one voice dominates - expressing the hope to return to the simpler lives they've eschewed for ephemeral thrills.

There's a lot of fun and cool shit on the film's attractive surface, but below the flesh of its forbidden fruits, are the layers that run deep, embodying lives with little promise save for the guarantee of misspent youthful activity which might well be metamorphosized into that of those like Alien - men and women who get older, not wiser, and keep clutching to the straws of a party they never want to see end.

But end, it does. When it comes, one can only wonder who was, in this sad, empty world ever really standing tall enough to be left standing at all.

"Spring Breakers" played the Toronto International Film Festival 2012 and a theatrical release that included TIFF's Bell Lightbox. It's now available on an expertly transferred Blu-Ray and DVD combo pack with a solid selection of extras via VVS Films. The movie is a keeper and definitely worth owning. 

IVAN'S CHILDHOOD - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Perhaps the greatest film about war and childhood ever made, Andrei Tarkovsky's first feature film is indelibly presented on Blu-Ray via the visionary Criterion Collection

Ivan's Childhood (1962) *****
Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Nikolai Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Yevgeni Zharikov, Stepan Krylov, Valentina Malyavina, Irina Tarkovskaya

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Before the war Ivan would walk down the stream
Where there grew a willow, no one knew whose.

No one knew why it loomed over the stream;
No one knew this was Ivan’s willow tree.

In his canopied raincoat, killed in combat,
Ivan came back to his willow’s shade.

Ivan’s willow,
Ivan’s willow,
Like a white boat, it floats downstream.

-"Ivan's Willow" by Arseny Tarkovsky, father of Andrei Tarkovsky

According to a recent study published March 13, 2013 by the non-profit organization Save The Children, the ongoing Syrian conflict (now entering its third year) "has led to the collapse of childhood".

Though there are many situations that can lead to such a "collapse", war has invariably proven to be the most powerful assault upon a time in all lives wherein innocence should prevail.

The report, entitled "Childhood Under Fire", details how societal breakdown during this war is yielding strife in terms of malnutrition, sanitation, lack of medical supplies, no schooling, improper access to heat, shelter, clothing and, not surprisingly, constant physical assaults upon children resulting in both physical and psychological trauma and death.

Most sickening are the huge statistics revealing separation from family (including being orphaned), experiencing and/or knowing about the death of friends and loved ones and in many cases being recruited as pawns or active participants in the conflict.

This, of course, is one of just many conflicts happening worldwide - currently, recently or impending. Idiotically, all such conflicts are rooted in religious/cultural fundamentalism, economics or both. We all need to know it has to stop, but there is this overwhelming sense of being individually or even collectively helpless in the face of war and this becomes even more acute amongst our children - so much so that it instils an even more sorrowful response in them - the need to join the conflict if it can't be beaten.

Ivan's Childhood, the first feature by the acclaimed Soviet director Ivan Tarkovsky, is perhaps the greatest film about war and childhood ever made. Forming an almost Holy Trinity of international cinema devoted to the "collapse of childhood" during wartime (specifically, World War II), it joins two other great films that focus on this theme: René Clément's 1952 masterwork from France, Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits) and Steven Spielberg's 1987 adaptation of J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun.

Clement's is set on a farm wherein a recent war orphan and the boy who befriends her, seek solace from the horrors of war by building a secret graveyard for animals and stealing crosses from the local church cemetery to mark the resting places of all the creatures that have expired in the area (including the girl's little white dog).

Spielberg with the clarity of distance and imagination, delivers a near epic exploration of a young British lad's descent into madness when separated from his parents after the takeover of Shanghai by Japanese forces and subsequently falls in with a pair of unscrupulous American war profiteers.

All three films view the horrors of war through the eyes of children, but it is Tarkovsky who plunges into the deep waters of dream, memory and poetry - all of it tempered with a realism that veers from the muck and grime of warfare to backdrops tinged with bursts of expressionism. In Ivan's Childhood, the title character works prodigiously in the field of battleground espionage - driven by his hatred for Germany, an enemy responsible for the loss of his beloved parents to Nazi bullets - whilst amassing several lifetimes of experience on the fields of battle. He's not only good at his job, but because he's tiny, quiet and can slip into enemy territory unnoticed, he's become invaluable to the Russian battalion he serves.

The job becomes increasingly dangerous and his commanding officers become so wracked with guilt over using a child that they wish to ship him away to safe haven and enrol him in military school. This notion of being packed off does not sit well with Ivan. Yes, he is a child, but his sense of childhood has long since collapsed and he is - first and foremost - a soldier. His experience and prowess is equal to that of his colleagues - in some instances, he proves to have moved into a realm of soldiering that might even exceed that of many of the men in the battalion.

What little is left of Ivan's childhood is what remains in his dreams.

It's probably safe to say that no country suffered the horror of WWII more devastatingly than the Soviet Union. Nearly 3,000,000 children were orphaned in Russia and Ukraine. Doing the math on that in terms of the loss of immediate family, then tossing in extended family for good measure, represents a mere fraction of the loss of human life. That said, the sheer brute power and resiliency of the nations born from the ancient Kyivan Rus eventually made mincemeat of the Germans on the Russian front.

Russians and Ukrainians paid dearly, however, and the biggest losses were suffered by the millions of orphans who lived through the utter depravity of war. Tarkovsky was wise beyond his years when he made this film as a relatively young man. Using dreamscapes to counter the sheer terror of death and destruction allows the audience (and yes, even Ivan himself) the ability to experience - if only during sleep - what childhood innocence must be like.



There are moments in this film that are imbued with a heartbreaking beauty - both in reality and dream. None will forget the sheer romance of a young soldier and the woman he loves straddling a trench in a clutch of passion whilst surrounded by Russia's glorious birch trees. And in what is perhaps the film's most memorable dream sequence (and one that is probably one of the most indelible in screen history) involves a ride in the back of an apple cart in the rain. Tarkovsky creates such magic here that we soar like the children laughing in the piles of glistening apples.

Even then, though, all is never too sun-dappled since the dreams have the ability to morph into pure nightmare. And it is finally the nightmare of war that becomes the reality children have always had to face and that whatever respite dreams can offer are fleeting - especially when the dreams of childhood are ultimately death dreams.

The Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of "Ivan's Childhood" is a monumental must-own item. The film has never looked nor sounded so exquisite as it does here. There are a number of fine extra features including: an unparalleled Hi-Def restoration and my special favourite, an uncompressed monaural soundtrack. There are several worthy interviews with the likes of Tarkovsky specialist Vida T. Johnson, cinematographer Vadim Yusov and Ivan actor himself, Nikolai Burlyaev. The added booklet is lovely and features essays by Dina Iordanova and Tarkovsky himself.

To Download the PDF of the devastating Save The Children report entitled CHILDHOOD UNDER FIRE, click HERE

KRIVINA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Great New Canadian Feature Film Begins Its Theatrical Run in Canada at Toronto's Royal Theatre before rolling out in a platform release across Canada. Powerful anti-war dream film has direct stylistic connection to the earliest days of English Canadian cinema.

KRIVINA debuts theatrically at Toronto's Royal Cinema January 25 - 31, 2012 with showtimes daily. Q&A sessions with Cast and Crew Members after EVERY show.  For further information and to buy tickets in advance, please visit the Royal's website HERE.

PLEASE NOTE: I have added text to this review (which first appeared during TIFF 2012) that elaborates on KRIVINA's place within the history of Canadian Cinema, specifically in comparison to the dawn of English Canada's feature film industry in the 60s and 70s when our filmmakers delved into the angst-ridden lives of solitary Canadian Men. This cinematic Canadian obsession directly paralleled a similar movement in American cinema during the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls period and now, over 30 years later, Drljaca's great film explores similar territory, but in a completely new context.

Krivina (2012) **** dir. Igor Drljaca
Starring: Goran Slavkovic, Jasmin Geljo, Edis Livnjak, Minela Jasar, Jelena Mijatovic, Petar Mijatovic

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Not a single shot is fired in director Igor Drljaca's stunning feature debut Krivina, but the horror of war - its legacy of pain, its futility and its evil hang like a cloud over every frame of this powerful cinematic evocation of memory and loss. The film's hypnotic rhythm plunges us into the inner landscape of lives irrevocably touched by man's inhumanity to man - a diaspora of suffering that shall never escape the fog of war. They might not be dead, but they might as well be, and in a sense, so should we all.

Miro (Slavkovic) lives in the New World. That is to say he's an immigrant to Canada. Having left the former Yugoslavia when Civil War broke out, he's moved from city to city, job to job and home to home. Hearing that his childhood friend Dado might be alive, Miro leaves the grey, lifeless Toronto - a city of cement and darkened office tower windows, a city so cold, so strangely inhospitable that a reconnection with his homeland, his past and finally his memories of a time when his own country was at peace is what grips him to embark upon an odyssey like no other. Though he searches for Dado, he is essentially searching for himself. War and flight have chipped away at his soul until almost nothing is left within.

Perhaps he will find peace. Until he does, Miro's not unlike another screen character most of us know - a man haunted by war and living in an environment that, in its own way, is as inhospitable as the one he left behind. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, he is "God's lonely man" and most of all, one who almost defines the words screenwriter Paul Schrader placed in the mind of the Taxi Driver: "Loneliness has followed me my whole life." Miro's odyssey of despair, however, will not be relieved by a hail of bullets - that would be far too easy, too American, if you will. If the pain is to be relieved at all, it will be through his past - perhaps and hopefully a past unfettered by the pain of war. Maybe, just maybe, he'll be able to look into the eyes of his old friend and find a mirror of what life was like before it was, for all intents and purposes, destroyed.

It is of more than passing interest, at least to me, that my initial observation of Miro and the manner in which his character parallels that of Travis Bickle is one that's as rooted in the past as it is in the present (and ultimately, with little hope for the future). The late 60s and 70s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls period of American cinema spawned an incredible body of work that might best be typified as existential male angst and thematically, Drljaca's film settles comfortably in this thorny nest of despair. What's even more interesting is that Drljaca's film, in a historical context, feels like a natural extension of Canadian Cinema during the aforementioned period of angst.

American men, coming of age in their late 20s and early 30s, almost in a state of arrested development were typified in the cinema as man-boys infused with roiling turmoil and loneliness - with an inability to move forward. America had suffered through the Vietnam War, the Kent State Massacre, Altamont, a variety of anti-government riots and protests, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of JFK, RFK, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.

One or two of these events would have been enough to jangle the nerves and stain the soul, but America's youth had been pummelled mercilessly with one horrific event after another wherein questioning their country (and its values, or lack thereof) extended to the pain of questioning themselves and their own place in this world. It's frankly no wonder the American cinema of this period is like a perpetual rendering of anguish, a veritable cinematic daisy chain of Edvard Munch's The Scream.

Canada was a slightly different story. We came out of the Expo 67 celebrations that infused us with a sense of nationhood and promise, yet roiling deep beneath the surface was the inequity and racism towards French Canadians in Quebec, the eventual FLQ Crisis where Prime Minister Trudeau instituted the War Measures Act (with Montreal jails and prisons serving as a Gitmo long before Gitmo). Racism and Anglo-Puritan-fuelled ethnocentric hatred towards anything not tied to the ruling powers of the Commonwealth was alive and well in the seemingly pure Canada. In fact, it was so muted, so subtle, it might have been equally (if not more) insidious than that plaguing America.

Canada was also not immune to the aforementioned strife within the United States. In fact, many of the nation's future great thinkers, academics and artists were young Americans who sought asylum in Canada from the draft in the USA. A good half of my own post-secondary teachers were astounding, exciting and brilliant young men from America who left their country behind because of the draft - better to be Canadian than walking around as an eventual pile of meat to be stuffed into a body bag for no good reason.

On an even more personal level, I had two extremely special expat Americans in my life who touched not only me, but a multitude of other Canadians. Movingly, both of them seem(ed) more "Canadian" than "Canadians" and their impact upon indigenous Canadian culture is unparalleled. (One being a great screenwriter and English professor, the other being dear departed film distributor and educator.)

Still, there was always something more benign about the Canadian experience during this time and this was certainly reflected in our national cinema. Whereas the existential male angst of American cinema was ultimately rooted in extreme overt violence (Taxi Driver, The Gambler, Fingers, etc.), the Canadian cinema of the same period delved into a similar existential male angst where violence was always deep below the surface.

A handful of examples include such Canadian film classics as: Zale Dalen's Skip Tracer, wherein a solitary psychopathic debt collector "legally" drives one of his "clients" via constant verbal harassment to commit a multiple homicide-suicide; or the fresh-faced young hockey player from small-town Ontario in George McCowan's hit film Face Off, who sublimated his desire for celebrity at all costs by turning to thuggish goon behaviour on the ice and driving away those who would give him love off the ice and; most tellingly and brilliantly, Peter Pearson's Paperback Hero wherein a small, isolated prairie town ne'er do well, played by 2001: A Space Odyssey's Keir Dullea, struts about in a studly manner, fucking any fuckable woman available to him and sporting a gun, cowboy hat and the borrowed Gunsmoke monicker of "Marshall Dillon" (with not-so-surprising tragic results, especially given the constant refrain of Gordon Lightfoot on the soundtrack singing "If You Could Read My Mind").

These are but three films of at least 30-40 titles that represent the beginnings of cinema in English Canada where despair is always present and violence burbles and bubbles deep in the soul and psyche of the angst-ridden Canadian male characters. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of this fascinating genre - there's still works by Don Shebib (Goin' Down The Road, Rip-Off and Between Friends), the true Master of Canadian existential male angst and Paul Lynch's despair-ridden The Hard Part Begins with Donnelly Rhodes as a washed-up country and western singer playing to ever-unappreciative audiences in small tank-towns.

The list goes on.

And here were are, in Canada, over 30 years later, and Igor Drljaca - whether intentionally or not - has picked up the baton of this strange form of Canadian drama. The big and most interesting difference is that the 60s/70s Canadian pictures in this genre focused primarily on White Anglo Saxon Protestants. Krivina deals with surface despair and inner violence within the context of recent immigrants to Canada - and in this case, they are immigrants who have experienced the savagery of war in their countries of birth.

EXISTENTIAL MALE ANGST in CANADIAN CINEMA - FULL CIRCLE:
SKIP TRACER (Top Left), FACE OFF (Top Centre), PAPERBACK HERO (Top Right), THE HARD PART BEGINS (Middle Left), GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD (Bottom), KRIVINA (Middle Right)

One of the most haunting elements of Miro's journey from Canada back to Bosnia is how the bucolic Bosnian countrysides, villages and farms do not betray the reality of spilled blood fertilizing the soil of Miro's place of birth. The land is rich with natural beauty, but also enshrouded in mystery. It haunts Miro, as it haunts us. He meets with several people on his journey, learning more and more about Dado and yet, the more he learns, the more isolated he appears to feel.

Krivina is Canadian to the hilt, though unlike its 60s/70s predecessors, we're dealing with "New" Canadians. This, in so many ways, is a natural thematic visit to a time and place that obsessed young Canadian filmmakers at the dawn of English Canadian cinema. A new day in our cinema is dawning and it's a very good sign that our cinematic storytellers, from all walks of life, are reflecting our culture as mediated through their own personal experience - one that truly does mirror the multicultural makeup of Canada.

Goran Slavkovic as Miro delivers a performance of mind blowing beauty and simplicity. His subtle, reactive qualities work perfectly within Drljaca's mise-en-scène which, in and of itself is one that through its simplicity yields complex tableaux and a dexterous, yet deeply felt narrative that, much like life itself, fades in and out of time, alternating between "reality" and a dream state. It's never confusing, but very unsettling. In spite of these disturbing qualities (and maybe because of them), we're always rooted in the sort of humanistic elements that remind us continually of how the best filmmakers (Renoir for example) can touch both our hearts and minds by rooting us in a reality that can only exist in both cinema and life itself and in particular, a cinematic world that reflects life as only cinema can.

The film's soundscape (a haunting score, strains of folk music, digital manipulation of natural and unnatural sound) transforms Miro's (and our) experience with throbbing, oppressive tones. Like an irregular heartbeat, the layers of sound strain desperately for life, to move on, to not give out until Miro, this human vessel of blood - the life force that courses through the thin meandering highways and byways of veins and arteries - searches, perhaps in futility, for a sense of peace, of contentment.

War, however, has a way of touching every soul that crosses its path. As Miro talks to one person after another on his journey, we see the toll of war etched into the ethos of those who continue to live and this clearly affects Miro as it does us. Director Drljaca achieves the near-impossible - using the poetic qualities of cinema (so seldom exploited to their fullest), that we are narratively and thematically plunged into an experiential work of art that affords us the unique opportunity to find within ourselves the sense of loss that war has instilled in the characters, the world at large and, in fact, all of us - whether we have experienced it or not.

In countries within the Balkans and Eastern Europe, blood always seems to be imbued with properties that are genuinely replete with the seeming eternal suffering of our ancestors - the blood ties us to each other and yet, it the force that inspires so many of us to look inward for answers.

Do we find them?

Yet another question in search of an answer.

Krivina is an extraordinary film - a personal vision that genuinely affects our sense of self to seek out our own worth, our own place in the world. And it moves us - beyond words - just as the film itself thrives best by using the language of cinema: the visual, the aural and the spiritual. Like Olexander Dovzhenko, Sergei Paradjanov and, to a certain extent, Tarkovsky, Drljaca achieves what I believe to be the fullest extent of what cinema can offer - the ability to touch the souls of its characters and, in so doing, touching the souls of those lucky enough to experience the magic that can only, I think, be fully wrought by cinema.

That the film is written and directed with grace and intelligence, photographed with necessity, genuine beauty and "terrible" beauty, blessed with an astounding sound design and score are all more than enough to rejoice in the fact that a powerful new voice in world cinema has found its way to the screen.

I reiterate - no bullets are fired and yet, Krivina might well be one of the greatest anti-war statements ever etched on film. The movie is, sans blasts from automatic assault rifles, explosions from bombs and mines, the screams of death and pain, the blood that spills into the soil, a film that is replete with violence - the violence of both memory and loss.

Until the world of man can move beyond its primitive state, this violence will haunt us all and until such a time and place that we're ready for a more positive state of existence, we can be grateful that artists exist to provide work that has the power to touch us all.

Krivina shook the foundations of my soul and moved me to both tears and an almost transcendent state of both despair and hope. Hope overcame despair, however, and I feel my life has been altered by a consummate work of art. Cinema is truly a great gift to mankind. It should not be squandered solely on ephemeral trifling. It must inspire thought, elicit emotion and change our lives.

I am grateful to Krivina. It succeeds in these goals.

Some try. Some fail. Some don't bother.

Director Igor Drljaca and his talented team of artists go the distance and then some. They have made a film for the ages.

A HEAD-SCRATHCHER FOR ALL TO CONTEMPLATE: 

After a triumphant debut at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2012), KRIVINA will make its International Premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Hilariously and pathetically, Canada's official federal agency to support Canadian Cinema, Telefilm Canada, invited the film to apply for Marketing Assistance Funds to promote the movie to international audiences at Rotterdam, then turned around and denied the film funding under its appallingly ethnocentric and discriminatory policies that will only acknowledge a film's "Canadian-ness" by the languages spoken in the film. To qualify for ANY Telefilm assistance, a film must be in English or French (Canada's "official" languages), though there are grudging exceptions on a case-by-case basis to acknowledge the languages of Our First Nations.) KRIVINA, a powerful anti-war film about the effects of the Bosnian War upon immigrants who fled to Canada to seek a better life is mostly in the Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian languages. Makes sense to me. The last time I checked, Canada, by the tenets of Pierre Trudeau's historical policies when he was Prime Minister, is in fact, a multicultural nation. Wander into virtually any "ethnic" business, bar or cafe in either French or English Canada and tell me how much English or French you actually hear. Yet another disgraceful cultural policy to drive nails into the coffin of Canadian Culture because bureaucrats seem unable to get their narrow minds around the fact that things don't always fit into the nice little boxes designed to make things easier for bureaucrats to assess projects with tick-boxes and/or handy-dandy check-lists rather than having to, uh, maybe, uh, think. Luckily, this is one of the best and most critically acclaimed films of the year and puts many of the Telefilm-supported films with substantially huger budgets to shame, so without the agency's help, I'm hoping domestic and international audiences will have enough advance notice to make a point of seeing the film. So, just go see it! You'll be rewarded with a transcendent and moving motion picture experience.

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