MALL GIRLS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Polish director Katarzyna Roslaniec made this dazzling debut at TIFF 2009. She's back at TIFF 2012 with a new film, "Baby Blues". "Mall Girls" is an extremely moving portrait of young teenage women and recommended viewing before or after seeing "Baby Blues".

Three years ago, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2009) presented an extraordinary feature length debut by director Katarzyna Roslaniec called "Mall Girls".

Coming to TIFF 2012 is a new film from this talented director. Entitled "Baby Blues", it will be showing at TIFF 2012 Monday September 10 Cineplex Yonge & Dundas 9 6:00 PM, Wednesday September 12 Cineplex Yonge & Dundas 4 9:00 PM and Saturday September 15 Cineplex Yonge & Dundas 2 12:15 PM.

I have had a chance since I first saw "Mall Girls" to see it a couple of more times. Here's a new revised version of a piece I first wrote in 2009.

Mall Girls
Galerianki (2009) ***1/2
Dir. Katarzyna Roslaniec
Starring: Anna Karczmarczyk,
Dagmara Krasowska, Dominika Gwit, Magdalena Ciurzynska

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The most alarming trend in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism has been the sexual exploitation of women. In spite of the promise of a new life through capitalism and the free market, pretty much all of these countries have suffered a drastic rise in poverty and homelessness.

Add to the mix an Old World patriarchy that remains entrenched in Slavic cultures, a veritable explosion of organized crime and an increasing demand for sexual services – life for many young women has become desperate, cheap and dangerous. The combination of basic needs not being met and an ever-multiplying Western-styled consumerism creeping into the consciousness of the people through advertising has meant a rise in women either choosing to be prostitutes, or worse (as so expertly detailed in investigative journalist Victor Malarek’s shocking book “The Natashas”), women are duped and/or kidnapped and subsequently forced into prostitution. One million women per year from Eastern Europe disappear and are sold into sexual slavery.

Mall Girls, a Polish film by director Katarzyna Roslaniec, is a terrific feature length debut. Focusing upon the lives of several disadvantaged 14-year-old girls, it is an exquisitely directed piece of filmmaking.

Using a swirling, occasionally jittery camera and settings that offer stunning contrasts between the colour-dappled world of the mall where the girls find true happiness and the dank hallways and scuzzy, cramped apartments in housing projects where the grime and poverty ache with despair, Roslaniec creates a visual palate that reflects the dichotomous lives of the girls. We see both the dreams (the mall, consumerism and easy money) and the realities (squalid homes where physical abuse and poverty run rampant, cramped classrooms presided over by frustrated teachers and sordid backdrops for all manner of sexual activity).

When I first saw the film, I felt quite strongly that an intermittently fine screenplay betrayed this perfection by veering into territory that seemed too expected and finally, much too convenient. Luckily, the film holds up very well on subsequent viewings in spite of this.

I still feel like the story rushes to a conclusion that strains the credibility the film garners in its first two-thirds. I wonder now, too, if this is less a script problem as perhaps one that occurred with respect to exigencies of production (perhaps on-set rewriting to compensate for lack of time to garner all the elements on the page) and/or post-production (where the result might have been a lack of footage to begin with or a second-guessing of what footage existed). Or, perhaps this is precisely the way the director wanted to make it. And there are also several elements within the screenplay that do work beautifully in tandem with other elements that work very well.

My quibbles aside, Roslaniec ends the film with such a daring and evocative final shot, that one forgives and frankly forgets the script’s eventual deficiencies in its last act. Film, after all, is a visual medium and as such, the final image speaks volumes.

The movie is dazzlingly directed and Roslaniec elicits fresh, natural and realistic performances from her young cast. All these elements combine to exquisitely capture the contrasts in these girls’ lives. Between their burgeoning sexuality and their willingness to risk it all for emotionless, loveless sex in exchange for money and other favours, the film delivers reality-based polar opposites to render a very solid narrative conflict that drives the film forward.

Mall Girls very successfully navigates the area of public school peer pressure and the various rollercoaster-like emotional rides these women are taken on, and indeed, choose to take.

This touching portrait of how womanhood in European cultures rooted in a Slavic tradition is assaulted, perverted and exploited is imbued with a very indelible reality. In a society and culture so full of promise, it bitterly offers only despair and easy ways to make poor and often tragic choices.

Countries like Poland, Russia and Ukraine have an ages-old history of a warrior mentality. It might take another thousand years to fully dissipate. Though in fairness to those traditions, one could also point to Western influences as having their own form of negative impact upon the treatment of women. To blend that with a male-centric combatants' mentality is a highly combustible mixture.

"Baby Blues", the new film from Kasia Roslaniec plays TIFF 2012. For ticket info, visit the TIFF website HERE.

ANTICHRIST - Feel the pain

A CINEMATIC 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, EASTERN-RITE NATIVITY AND FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY: Join me in this special celebration of cinema as each day I will be publishing a review in honour of this season of good will and focusing on films and filmmakers who have made a contribution to both the human spirit and the art of film.

For the TWELFTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS, Klymkiw Film Corner gives to you…

Antichrist (2009) Dir. Lars von Trier
Starring: Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg

*****

By Greg Klymkiw

Antichrist is a movie that burns its reflection of pain into your memory like a branding iron – plunging itself through your cranium and searing your brain matter, creating that sickeningly sweet stench that only burning flesh gives off and remaining in your nostrils for (no doubt) a lifetime. The pain and by extension – the Passion – also stays with you.

A first viewing renders you drained, immobile, and numb and yet, paradoxically there are feelings of profound excitement – that you have witnessed an expression of emotion in ways that only cinema, of all the art forms, is capable of delivering. You are also breathless, and in spite, or maybe even because of the horror you’ve witnessed, you’re almost giddy with the desire to recall every beat, every image and every soul sickening moment of the experience. It’s a movie that demands to be seen more than once – it is a movie to be cherished, savored and devoured as ravenously and gluttonously as possible.

There’s simply no two ways about it – Antichrist is a great movie! It will be loved! It will be hated! It will be debated! And it will never be forgotten – neither by those who see it, nor by the sands of time! It’s a picture designed to live forever and will, no doubt, be Lars von Trier’s masterpiece.

Now, I will be the first to admit that my feelings about von Trier used to be mixed. In his early work, he was clearly a serious filmmaker who demanded the sort of regard one lavishes upon great artists, yet in spite of this, I often felt that the art, though dazzling, seemed rooted in spurious posturing. His motives (in spite of his visual gifts) seemed no more serious than any hack machine-tooling a product for the widest consumption possible. I must admit, though, he grew on me and with each subsequent effort I was constantly and increasingly reminded of the fact that all films and certainly most great films ARE exploitation – they exploit subject matter, human emotion and the audience – the best doing so with great panache.

And in this regard, von Trier is a master. The difference, of course, is that rather than working within genre and/or dramatic convention, his is the work of the high-toned, the intelligentsia (if you will) and his genre is that of the “art house film” and as such, he has developed his voice and craft to a sufficient degree that he has earned the right to be called “master” even though I still detest his pretentious early work like The Element of Crime and Epidemic. (Medea's heart is in the right place, but it too, finally stinks.)

This all changed for me with Europa, 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 pointed a finger at America's complicity in the evils of Nazi Germany and in creating a literal act of hypnosis, von Trier plunged us into a nightmarish world that seemed to open the floodgates for one movie after another that brilliantly and entertainingly ripped down the bulwarks of cinema's borders whilst oddly adhering to them as well.

With Antichrist, von Trier has made a horror film – pure, though not so simple.

Alternately fueled by his clear love and respect for Strindberg’s great play “Miss Julie” and the work of filmmaker Carl Dreyer, von Trier ventures into the sort of daring territory we not only expect from him, but frankly, must demand of our greatest artists. As a horror film, however, it might not immediately be in the territory we expect, but certainly as it proceeds on its unrelenting journey, we know all to well that we are ensconced in the genre – not in a traditional manner, but certainly in its use of expressionistic elements.

At the end of the day, Antichrist creates exactly what we have come to expect from the genre of horror and it oozes a creepy quality that not only keeps us on the edge of our collective seats, but inspires the sort of revulsion that dares to make us feel resolutely unclean for having participated in this powerful, foul descent into human suffering. Goose flesh of the most unpleasant kind overtakes us as we watch the picture and when it ramps up to scenes of PHYSICAL torture and violence (the first two-thirds of the picture deal in psychological aspects of the above mentioned), one’s revulsion takes on dimensions that are almost indescribable.

The movie is broken into four parts, or “chapters” as von Trier labels them, which are bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue introduces us to the characters of a man (Willem Dafoe) and a woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as they make love – the only sound accompanying their passionate coupling being a haunting aria by Handel. As they reach a pitch of orgasm, we follow their infant child as he wanders about the house and eventually perishes in a horrendous, tragic accident. The four chapters that follow are entitled “Grief”, “Pain” “Despair” and “The Three Beggars” as we experience the couple’s suffering and the man’s attempts to help his wife (he’s a psychiatrist) deal with her pain and in so doing, to assist himself with his own feelings of despair.

Most of this is set against the backdrop of a remote cabin in the wilderness where much of the creepy qualities emanate from the natural world itself. This extended therapy session builds to one of the most sickening extensions of inner pain imaginable – where the internal becomes very external. It’s Strindbergian as all get-out, but von Trier doesn’t merely place a razor in “Miss Julie’s” hand, he takes us into the full-blown horror of the actions, which in Strindberg’s play are only implied.

The epilogue, which follows the orgy of horror, contains some of the most stunning images I have ever seen in a picture – images that are as heart-achingly beautiful as they are grotesque. And while von Trier is definitely in Strindberg territory, he does not separate naturalism from expressionism, but is quite happy to make use of both and, when necessary, blend these elements.

As to the charges of misogyny leveled against the film, I can only hurl out the invective, “Bullshit!” While von Trier does not fully attain a level of spirituality that infuses the work of Carl Dreyer, he is nevertheless playing in a similar sandbox in terms of exploring the subjugation and exploitation of women at the hands of patriarchy and/or organized religion. The relentless analysis forced upon Gainsbourg’s character by Willem Dafoe’s character takes on the creepy hysteria and austerity that Dreyer himself explored in The Passion of Joan of Arc, Day of Wrath and Gertrud.

That said, however, von Trier allows a turning of the tables that Dreyer could never have brought himself to actually do, though in fairness, I have some belief that if Dreyer were making films today, he might well have dared to cross into the same territory von Trier does in Antichrist – territory that is as horrific as it is uniquely and profoundly moving.

I reiterate – Antichrist is a great picture!

"Antichrist" is available on an astounding Criterion Collection Bluray and DVD. The picture had its North American premiere at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and was theatrically released in Canada by E1 Films.