Movie Review: I'm Your Man (2021)

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A tall, kind, supportive, handsome, dark-haired man with a British accent who looks at the woman that he's with with puppy dog levels of adoration, if Tom (Dan Stevens) seems like the perfect man, that's because he is…for the most part. Unfortunately, however, what he isn't is a man.

A humanoid robot designed to be one hundred percent compatible with Alma (Maren Eggert), a Pergamon Museum academic who has agreed to evaluate Tom for a three week period in order to fund and further her own research into ancient cuneiform writing, although their prospective relationship seems like a joke to the deeply uncomfortable Alma, Tom takes his romantic mission deadly seriously.

From being startled when she gives him his own bedroom instead of sharing a bed with him to being hurt when she's too busy to indulge in a romantic brunch he whipped up for her the next morning, just like we all learn and adapt to our own partners over the years, Tom does as well. Not allowed to tell others that he's a robot, an embarrassed Alma deposits him in a cafe by her work the next day and, just like the metaphorical puppy dog he resembles following his “master” around, Tom happily stands outside in the rain once the business closes and waits for her to return.



Humanistic and true, despite the fact that it deals in the artificiality of technology, acclaimed actress turned director Maria Schrader's German film “I'm Your Man” – which she co-wrote with Jan Schomburg, based on a short story by Emma Braslavsky – begins as a gentle comedy of manners and errors. But, aided immensely by the chemistry of our leads and the fact that the delightful Stevens never once slips and plays Tom with a wink instead of absolutely straight, the film soon modulates into a melancholic, timely meditation of the importance of human affection and connection and a study of loneliness in contemporary society.

Embodied extraordinarily well by Eggert (in a difficult balance of vulnerability and strength throughout), the more we learn about Alma, including the source of her pain and the reason why she's put up so many walls, the more we understand how hard it is for her to knock them down for someone – anyone – let alone a robot programmed to be her dream beau.

Choosing, as we all do, which people we're willing to let into our weird little worlds, Alma is a woman who's been burned in the past. Furthermore, the screenwriters' decision for the film's tech firm to bring to life a mate who, through no fault of “his” own, calls up the mental picture of someone Alma loved when her life was much simpler and everything was in front of her both professionally and personally, makes “I'm Your Man” resonate on a deeper, more universal level than one would assume going in.

While on the lighter side of philosophical, it nonetheless raises valid questions about how relationships build or disintegrate over time as our needs change and how we all walk around with different levels of trauma. Yet Schrader's movie has far less in common with other films about romantic robot surrogates like Steven Spielberg's Kubrickian “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” than it does with either mythology or George Bernard Shaw's “Pygmalion” (and its musical counterpart “My Fair Lady”).

A critical hit overseas, especially in its native Germany where lead actress Maren Eggert won the first-ever gender-neutral Silver Bear acting prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, although the ending of “I'm Your Man” comes off as abrupt and a bit tonally dissonant with respect to the rest of the film's harmony, it's still a wholly impressive foreign import overall.

Befitting of the phrase “and now for something completely different,” while the tendency would be in America to play the whole thing for laughs, there's something far more refreshing and earnest about Schrader's approach. Following Tom's lead, as you view “I'm Your Man,” it gazes right back at you with interest, hoping that – if you look closely enough – you'll catch not only a flicker of recognition but your whole self reflected back at you as you watch.


Text ©2021, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement Movie Review: Final Set (2021)

Opens Virtually & in NYC on 8/27

“If you'd won quicker, you'd suffer less.”

 
Watching her son, thirty-something professional tennis player Thomas Edison (Alex Lutz) apply an ice pack to his knee during dinner, Judith (Kristin Scott Thomas) can't help but ask, “why lose the first set?”

 
Having helped propel Thomas to early greatness as a young prodigy, Judith struggles to remove her coaching hat to support her son the way that a typical mother would. Coming from a place of not only criticism but also love – because to care for Thomas and the knee he'd had operated on multiple times in the past is to question why he still feels the need to try to compete against the top players of the world at his age – to say that their relationship is complicated would be an understatement. But understating it is precisely what makes their dynamic and everything else in French writer-director Quentin Reynaud's “Final Set” so real and compelling.

 
Minimal and precise, the dialogue between not only Thomas and Judith but also Thomas and his loving, supportive, but equally conflicted wife Eve (Ana Girardot) is spare throughout the work which boasts a quasi-documentary feel. Yet, delivered by this exceptional group of actors who can say so much with a look or tone, we feel the weight of one’s meaning even though the English subtitled lines are spoken in French. In fact, generating a great deal of conflict and depth from these micro-moments, it's a film where those inquisitive looks over dinner or cautious actions – even the way one character packs or carries a tennis bag – speak louder than words.

From the Australian Open in January to the ATP finals for the highest-ranked male players in November, tennis, more than most sports, is essentially played for eleven months out of the year. Unfortunately, with a ranking of 245, which is a far cry from the great hope he was supposed to be twenty years earlier when he choked during a grand slam, Thomas' respectable but still low stats keep him out of most major tournaments, which cater only to the top players in the sport. 

And while he would prefer to enter every competition he can, his wife – a former player herself who now handles the behind-the-scenes business decisions – has to gently remind her husband that when you subtract the travel, food, and lodging costs, far too often, the actual winnings from some of these events don't justify the expense. Supplementing the income he barely receives from matches he's allowed to enter by working as a children's coach at his mother's tennis club, while everyone around him is waiting for him to hang up his racket or join the over thirty-five tour, Thomas decides to make one last stand at Roland Garros.

 
Otherwise known as the French Open, at Roland Garros, tennis is played on courts of famous red clay where the surface of the terrain not only sticks to a player's shoes, socks, legs, clothes, and arms if they take a nasty fall, but as legends like Andre Agassi and Roger Federer are first to admit, it's also sheer hell on the knees. And if it's hard on those joints at any age, you know it's destined to be agony for Thomas whose prominent knee surgery scars, arthritis, ligament lesions, and osteoarthritis are shown and discussed within the first five minutes of Reynaud's movie.

Nonetheless, knowing he doesn't have a lot of time left but not quite ready to follow in his wife's footsteps and train for another career because – despite being a husband and father – a life outside of tennis isn't something he's ever considered, Thomas decides to make a run at the Open by playing several brutal rounds as a qualifier. Facing other players not lucky enough to get in via wild card or ranked highly enough, even though his wife Eve tells him to “have fun” before he leaves for a match, we know that for the serious Thomas, fun doesn't really enter the equation. No, in this quixotic, underdog run, it's just about determination, desperation, and the work.

Drawing a parallel throughout to a cocky, young, but exceptionally gifted seventeen-year-old phenom on the rise (played by real pro player Jürgen Briand), who even Eve admits reminds her of her husband, obviously, you know that eventually, the two men will have to square off at some point to achieve the dramatic potential of Thomas “playing himself” in “Final Set.” Still, it's in the authenticity of the film's battle to that battle – and particularly the amount of regret, guilt, excitement, frustration, and pain of both the past and present that flood our main ensemble from start to finish – that makes this film feel like something beyond just your typical inspirational sports drama.

 
Furthermore, the time that Reynaud takes off the court and how much trust he puts into this excellent trio of actors (with once again, Scott Thomas doing some of her best work both later in life and in French) makes his bold decision to spend the film's final twenty-five minutes on the court so incredibly effective. Set during a showdown between the two pros at different points in their life, Reynaud goes right for the greatest hits of dramatic tennis. 

Zeroing in on a five-set grand slam match between a David and a Goliath, which features a never-ending deuce, racket smashes, cramps, long rallies, and more, the film achieves something so thrillingly intense that for a long time, I actually forgot for a while that I was watching a movie instead of championship play. More than that, as someone whose TV is often left on The Tennis Channel, it was only after the movie ended when I was reading the film's production notes that I realized that the final match went on for nearly the length of a traditional “act” of a Syd Field screenplay.

 
Yet, similar to the way that I love a good football movie even if it isn't a sport I actually watch, this isn't to say that one needs to be an avid tennis fan or even know much about the sport to enjoy “Final Set.” Filmed at Roland Garros and using that tried and true blueprint of “Rocky,” which similarly spends a good chunk of the film's last half right in that boxing ring as we watch events unfold in what I'd call “hyper-real time,” Reynaud's film is wildly ambitious in its scope. Refreshingly, though, it's as invested in the human story as it is in its tennis, which comes through in the film's fully earned last shot. A superbly executed ensemble effort that plays out against a backdrop that's the stuff of modern myth-making, as we watch Alex Lutz's Thomas fight against time and his own body's wear-and-tear, we're right there with him, eager to battle it out to the very end.

Text ©2021, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Riders of Justice (2020)

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After making a striking first impression in his earliest screen role in Nicolas Winding Refn's gritty and groundbreaking feature filmmaking debut "Pusher" in 1996, actor Mads Mikkelsen became a sensation in his native Denmark. And although Refn's film had more in common with say, Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" than it did with the newly launched naturalism based Dogme '95 film movement from directors Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, Mikkelsen evolved into one of the most internationally recognizable stars from this school of filmmaking, thanks to a vital, early collaboration with writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen.

Following Jensen's 1998 Oscar for Best Short Film, fresh off the heels of having been nominated in the same category the two years prior as well, Mikkelsen's alliance with the filmmaker began with Jensen's feature directorial debut "Flickering Lights" in 2000. But their partnership really reached the height of its power in the films "Open Hearts" and "After the Wedding," which Jensen co-wrote with their director Susanne Bier (and the latter of which garnered Bier her first of two Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film). The global success of those films, along with some which made Mikkelsen the muse of other Dogme vets led directly to his Hollywood crossover and subsequent popularity as a franchise favorite with turns in new Marvel, James Bond, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Indiana Jones properties.

Unwilling to leave his friends, language, and country behind, the loyal chameleon regularly alternates between huge studio tentpoles and the latest films from those he first found success alongside decades earlier. And this is not only true of Vinterberg, for whom he just starred in the Oscar-winning "Another Round," but especially Jensen, who has written and/or directed Mikkelsen in some of his most surprising fare over the years, from the morality tale "Adam's Apples" to the western "The Salvation" (for director Kristian Levring) to the new unorthodox holiday revenge dramedy "Riders of Justice."

Playing a recently deployed soldier who's sent home to care for his teenage daughter after she survives the train explosion that claimed the life of his wife, Mikkelsen's Markus is given an unexpected outlet for his rage when he's visited by two statisticians, including a survivor played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who was the last person besides his daughter to see his wife alive. Presenting Markus with evidence indicating that her death might have been part of a coordinated attack to prevent a man from testifying against the head of a notorious street gang, after a colleague in facial recognition manages to narrow down a suspect, these three odd wise men join forces with their new soldier friend.

Having neglected to figure out precisely what they should do once they confront the man, when their first interaction impulsively escalates into murder, the motley crew decides they're not done just yet and soon find themselves in the midst of a war with one of Denmark's deadliest crime syndicates.

But rather than give in to the basest instincts of the revenge genre and turn the film into something resembling "Death Wish," by setting the film around the Christmas holiday and populating it with social misfits just out of step with society, Jensen takes the opportunity to explore the questions of faith, chance, fate, and human connection that have fascinated him throughout his entire career.

While not entirely successful, most likely owing to differences in culture and translation, Jensen's tendency to weave startling bits of humor into the plotline, ranging from a recurring focus on weight regarding the teenage daughter of Markus or the blunt handling of a Ukrainian male sex slave they liberate makes the film hit a few discordant notes here and there. Still, with this talented cast, including men like Mikkelsen and Kaas – who've worked together for decades – once again able to add new layers to these at times tonally uneven yet undeniably complex characters, it works much better than you fear it will early on.

Culminating in a thrillingly photographed violent western-style showdown in the snow where the wounded and outnumbered men must figure out how to get out of this situation alive, Jensen punctuates his final act with a few true surprises as his characters struggle to figure things out amid the chaos.

Though unable to authentically balance its swings from sardonic to brutal to funny to sad without the film feeling the least bit artificial, Mikkelsen and company ensure that although – like their characters – they always remain ready to battle, the real thing that sets "Riders" apart is in the ensemble's journey towards one another and away from revenge. Of course, having proven it again and again over the years, it seems as though that kind of loyalty is more than just a plot point, in the end, it's the Mikkelsen way.

Text ©2021, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Film Movement Movie Review: A White, White Day (2019)

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According to eight-year-old Salka (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir), when the composer Robert Schumann found out that his wife Clara had had an affair with Johannes Brahms, he jumped to his death. And while the facts surrounding classical music's most enigmatic love triangle are a bit more complicated than the young girl's description, the story hits her beloved grandfather Ingimundur (Ingvar Sigurdsson) harder than she ever could have imagined in “A White, White Day.”

Introduced to the widowed Icelandic police chief after his wife dies in the opening sequence of the movie when her car plows off a mountain road and she plummets to her death, in Ingimundur, we meet a man that is trying his best to keep his head down and get by from one day to the next.

Bringing this to life in a vivid montage where he tries to distract himself from his loss by building a home for his daughter and granddaughter, writer-director Hlynur Palmason's film focuses on the sunlight of one day that fades into the darkness of the night again and again as he uses this technique to illustrate the passage of time.

The first of many dialogue-free sequences which use images, body language, and behavior to bring us deeper into Ingimundur's world, we soon learn that beneath his quiet exterior exists an ocean of rage below the surface that begins to rise when just like Schumann, he realizes that his beautiful younger wife (Sara Dögg Ásgeirsdóttir) may have been involved with a Brahms of her own. Sorting through a box of her belongings that an old co-worker drops off at his house, he's shocked when he discovers not only his wife's old Mini DV camera but a cassette which shows her in a romantic tryst with another man whom he is determined to track down.

Less a conventional thriller than a psychological portrait of a man caught between the planes of heartbreak and scorn, while I'd be fascinated to see what somebody like Paul Schrader might’ve done with this material, it's clear that Palmason is less concerned with telling a palatable story than he is just eager to spend time in the same space as his lead overall.

A somewhat frustrating, meandering, and at times, unfocused film, in “A White, White Day,” we spend nearly a full hour watching Ingimundur drive around, shower, and breathe in and out, until Palmason, at last, decides that it's time to follow through on the dilemma he presented early on.

More in love with his own technique than he is truly able to deduce what he needs to make the best film that he can, Palmason moves from ambiguous scenes to overt sign-posting most evident in a bizarre sequence that fills the screen with images from a faux experimental children's TV show where he spells out the film's larger themes in the weirdest of ways. 

Buoyed by a tremendous turn by Sigurdsson and a second-half that is light years better than the first, while the film is beautifully made and the score by composer Edmund Finnis is as gorgeous as Maria von Hausswolff's cinematography, in the end, it's no match for the story of Schuman and Brahms as distilled down to its very essence by an eight-year-old. 

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Sputnik (2020)

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“Sputnik” is a work of Russian space horror that takes place in 1983 – it has to be 1983. Not only is that, as the film's director Egor Abramenko acknowledges, the “golden age” of science fiction as “Sputnik” shares a direct lineage to Ridley Scott's masterful “Alien,” but it's also the ideal time for its allegory about the complexities of identity to pay off on the upcoming fall of the Soviet Union. Additionally, 1983 was the peak time after the rise of astronauts in the space race – both in Russia and here in the states – where kids grew up dreaming of being one of those chosen few, the heroic explorers who represented their country and the entire planet as they journeyed into outer space.

This was before the devastation of the Challenger explosion in 1986 and before kids were old enough to see some of the (then) contemporary works of space horror from “2001: A Space Odyssey” to the 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (before its director Philip Kaufman would go on to make the brilliant, flag-waving space docudrama “The Right Stuff”) to “Alien” and beyond. Not only brilliant works of existential science fiction, these films serve as cautionary tales, warning us that perhaps not all of the life forms that awaited us in space were as friendly as the one in “E.T.”

In setting his film in 1983, Abramenko taps into all of these contradictions, including the desire to answer that childlike call in all of us to be a pioneering national hero and the body horror that occurs in its protagonist as a result that is so perfectly suited to '83. 

Written by Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev (and inspired by Abramenko's short film “The Passenger,” penned by Roman Volobuev, which played at Fantastic Fest), “Sputnik” tells the story of the sole survivor of a space wreck. Chronicling the crash of the Orbita 4 spaceship at the start of the film, after the ship lands, Russian cosmonaut Konstantin Veshnyakov (played by Pyotr Fyodorov) is held under observation in a secure facility in Kazakhstan while scientists work to deduce exactly what happened and what if anything might be wrong with the man who walked away. 

Having traveled to Moscow to recruit risk-taking neuro-psychiatrist Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) to evaluate the man with promises that he'll take care of her ethics board inquiry from the health ministry, Semiradov (Fedor Bondarchuk) listens to Tatyana's cursory diagnosis that the cosmonaut is suffering from PTSD, knowing full well that the riddle that is Konstantin becomes far more complex by nightfall. Left in the dark right along with Tatyana, we soon discover that although the cosmonaut arrived back on Earth alone, he is very much not alone in a truly shocking reveal that's as disturbing as it is a genuine throwback to the type of space and/or body horror fare we saw in the late 1970s through the early '80s.

An intelligent puzzle that grows progressively scarier as it continues, while the film lays on some of the psychoanalysis regarding the root of the man's troubles a little heavily (and far too early, when it could certainly use one more twist before its thrilling climax), “Sputnik” is still one sophisticated scarer, overall. 

Exceedingly well-crafted and featuring chilling antiseptic production design that's heavy on barriers, mirrors, glass, and mazes – all of which become, in Abramenko's hands, an effectively symbolic motif – "Sputnik" benefits from its uniformly excellent cast, particularly Fyodorov and Akinshina who ably carry the film. Infused with an intense, percussion-heavy score from composer Oleg Karpachev that feels at once both well-suited to this film as it also does very reminiscent of the scores of 1983, “Sputnik” is a damn strong calling card for Abramenko in an assured feature filmmaking debut.

The latest in a long line of films that were inspired by “Alien,” from a quality standpoint, “Sputnik” belongs to the upper echelon of these movies and I appreciate just how much it paid tribute to and deviated from the blueprint that is the Ridley Scott classic. 

Frustratingly never paying off on a twist involving one of our main characters that it foreshadows but then abandons, “Sputnik” admittedly does start to run out of gas in the last half of the film. Polished and unrelenting nonetheless, it remains gripping enough to hold your attention as we watch the scientists try to figure out who the real Konstantin is deep down and how to separate the “passenger” from its host for good.

Trying (and at times struggling) to juggle both horror and allegorical satire, Abramenko's film is intriguing from a historical perspective as well. Watching its leads question the ethics involved in their work as they wonder if they should report their superiors when things fall apart (just like the Soviet Union would eight years later), Abramenko's “Sputnik” plays especially well to kids who remember the '80s and dreamed of going to space, before Hollywood informed them that the greatest risk might come from within. 

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: Out Stealing Horses (2019)

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Last month, after seeing and loving director Joseph Losey's 1971 film “The Go-Between,” I was asked on Twitter just what it was about the movie that I responded to so much. 

“It's hard to sum up in a tweet,” I replied and, by way of explanation of the film's finest qualities, added that I admired “the way that it unfolds slowly like a summer's day, brings you back to childhood being in rooms with adults having conversations you don't fully understand, coming-of-age and discovering love.”

And although those remarks described my reaction to “The Go-Between,” intriguingly, when I watched “Out Stealing Horses” this week to review, I realized that while writer-director Hans Petter Moland's adaptation of the bestselling book by Per Petterson was in no way as narratively successful as “The Go-Between,” what I loved most about Losey's film is exactly what drew me into this one.

A straightforward adaptation of Petterson's novel, “Out Stealing Horses” centers on Trond (played by the always outstanding Stellan Skarsgård), a sixty-seven-year-old grieving widower who moves out to the Norwegian countryside to live a solitary life. Shortly into the film, he discovers that his new imposing, slightly off neighbor (played by Bjørn Floberg) is none other than the younger brother of his best friend from childhood but since Trond chooses not to acknowledge this, we gather that this reunion is anything but joyous. A framing device shot with drab colors, dim lighting, and a general sense of malaise, the more “modern” sequences set in 1999 never really pull us in quite as well as Trond's recollections of life in the 1940s, which make up a bulk of the film.

With the rich shimmer of cerulean hued water and the lush, deep, jade-colored greenery of the surrounding trees, when fifteen-year-old Trond (Jon Ranes) skims his hand over the lake during the film's extended flashback, “Out Stealing Horses” nearly takes our breath away, thanks to the cinematography of Danish cameraman Rasmus Videbæk. Reveling in nature in a way that recalls the work of master director Terrence Malick, as we watch Trond and his father (a fine Tobias Santelmann) rely on rain for showers, boats for transportation, and trees for their prosperity in their wooded existence, we realize that their work chopping down tall trees serves as a terrific metaphor. 

For, just like the two men clear the woods while logging, with each tree they chop down, Trond begins to see the complexities of life a little more clearly as he comes of age. Following a shocking tragedy in the life of his best friend Jon's (Sjur Vatne Brean) family, which he uncovers on the day the two went “out stealing horses” – which just means going for a ride – Trond begins to realize that things aren't always what they seem. 

And this certainly hits home when his father insists that Trond's mother and sister should not join them in the countryside and Trond realizes this rule doesn't apply to all women. Observing but failing to fully process his father's closeness to Jon's mother (Danica Curcic) since – at the exact same time – he's developed a crush on the beautiful married woman as well, “Out Stealing Horses” is a languid yet engrossing account of a fateful summer.

As specifically tied to its time and place as the film is, just like Losey's “Go-Between,” and many other contemplative chronicles of an adolescent being thrust into adulthood when they realize that the most important people in their life are flawed individuals of flesh and blood, the thoughts and feelings that Moland's film conveys are universally relatable. Additionally, by emphasizing the ways that the events of our life – and in particular our role models – can shape us whether we want them to or not, the film will undoubtedly make us think about some of the big early turning points of our lives, which occurred before we could truly understand their significance or impact on others. 

Structurally challenged, while it takes a good half-hour or so to truly become invested in the plight of its characters since the 1999 sequences seem to belong to an entirely different movie, overall, it's an uneven yet ultimately compelling work anchored by Videbæk's romantic cinematography and uniformly strong turns by Ranes and Santelmann, in particular.

The fifth collaboration between Moland and Skarsgård might not be as thrillingly riveting as “In Order of Disappearance,” (which Moland later remade in the states with Liam Neeson as “Cold Pursuit”) or as emotionally draining as “Aberdeen,” but it's still an intensely personal work for the filmmaker.

A moderately cogent adaptation of Petterson's novel, which has been translated into more than fifty languages, the film's shortcomings left me wanting to read the book to get the full impact of the storyline. Yet Moland deserves credit nonetheless for transforming this very Norwegian tale into an emotional saga that we all can feel a kinship with even if we've never showered in the rain or chopped down a tree a day in our life.

Though hindered by the pacing of its opening act, “Out Stealing Horses” is at its best when it flashes back to Trond's life as he moves between childhood and adulthood and discovers the gray between the black and white that exists out there in the countryside amid all that blue and green.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Samurai Marathon (2019)

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Alternate Title: Samurai Marathon 1855

A velvety timbre that contains equal parts smolder and menace in the sounds of a rich baritone, actor Danny Huston's cognac of a voice is tailor-made for screen villainy. And indeed it's his voice that cuts through the ceremony of Commodore Perry's (Huston) sudden visit to Japan in 1855 when — having arrived from America uninvited on a purported mission of friendship from President Fillmore — he tries to interact with the Japanese officials greeting the Americans getting off their "black ships" with suspicion. 

Unable to translate Perry's words since the man whom the Japanese lords have brought with them to do the job speaks Dutch instead of English, they have no idea how to interpret the language being uttered by that devilishly seductive voice. Trying to meld the context clues of Perry's smile with the mixed signals of the presents he offers when he lands, although Perry begins harmlessly with a daguerreotype, the stakes are suddenly raised when he hands over Kentucky bourbon and a .45 caliber single-action Colt army revolver, ironically known as "the peacemaker."

Introducing a faster way to kill and dominate with these American "gifts," a direct correlation is made between the debut of the gun on Japanese shores with the end of the samurai in director Bernard Rose's handsomely crafted but woefully uneven Samurai Marathon. 

Testing the samurai to ensure that they have what it takes to stand up to the Americans and their weapons, which can kill quickly from afar, a thirty-six-mile marathon is held across tough, hilly terrain for all men under the age of fifty who serve the lord of the Annaka clan. Fearing this signals a future war, an Annaka accountant (played by Takeru Satoh) who privately serves as a Shogun spy sends a coded message to those in Edo before he has all of the facts. Though written in earnest, Satoh's note escalates things, setting in motion a hefty amount of chaotic swordplay, gunfire, and violence that follows as he tries to right this wrong. Added to this mix is the rebellious Princess Yuki (Nana Komatsu), who, after rejecting her father's candidate for marriage, slices off some of her hair and joins the marathon as well.

One of those period pieces which tries to excuse away its ludicrous plot machinations by centering the action on a historical event in the form of the samurai marathon (which later became the Japanese marathon and is still run to this day), the film starts to lose us in the very first act. Breathlessly jumping from Huston's veritable cameo to Satoh to Komatsu, rather than endear us to our two leads, Marathon is never sure which story it wants to tell, let alone the tone it should take.

Working from a novel by Akihiro Dobashi, throughout the film, it's obvious that Rose and his co-writers Hiroshi Saitô and Kikumi Yamagishi have no shortage of enthusiasm or ideas. Utilizing an everything and the kitchen sink approach — from weird flashes of humor that feel incredibly out of place to one harrowing sequence involving a mass shooting that's spliced into what could otherwise be described as a ho-hum chronicle of a marathon — this film goes everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Even underwhelming from an action perspective, although it's painted with a masterly brush by cinematographer Takuro Ishizaka, whose frames are jaw-droppingly lush, there's little to recommend the film as a whole. Given a typically impressive high gloss transfer to Blu-ray high definition from Well Go Entertainment, although it might be of morbid curiosity to fans of Bernard Rose as this seems to work as a cross between some of the most diverse entries in his head-scratcher of a filmography (including the horror favorite Candyman and say, the underrated Immortal Beloved), others should steer clear.

A lackluster samurai film that's about as exciting as watching a thirty-six-mile marathon run by nobody you know, though it impressively follows up the promise of duplicity in the guise of Danny Huston's symphonic voice with the strains of a notable score by legendary composer Philip Glass, Rose's Samurai never quite manages to find its rhythm.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: The Truth (2019)

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We are creatures of habit. From relitigating past wrongs to repeating the same mistakes, we fall back on old patterns like grooves on a record, destined to play the song we know so well until we take it upon ourselves to move the needle, flip the damn thing over, and start again. And nobody makes us spin around and around quite like family, whether it's in the joy of playing an old hit or the anguish of trying to avoid the inevitable scratches and hisses in the vinyl that we know are coming but can't escape.

Raised in the shadows of the limelight surrounding her famous French movie star mother Fabienne Dangeville – played with icy precision by Catherine Deneuve – whose demands always come first, it's no wonder that Lumir (Juliette Binoche) traded Paris for New York and married the most American man she could find (a TV star played by Ethan Hawke).

Having become a screenwriter, undoubtedly to give herself a greater sense of control by making the characters she invents say precisely what it is that she wants for a change, at the start of Hirokazu Kore-eda's “The Truth,” Lumir finds herself challenged once again by her mother, this time on a personal as well as professional front.

Returning to France with her husband Hank (Hawke) and their imaginative daughter Charlotte (Clémentine Grenier) in tow to celebrate the publication of Fabienne's memoirs, as Lumir begins reading the words that her mother had promised and failed to run by her first and finds it more fiction than fact, that sense of literary and familial control begins to vanish fast. Soon she confronts Fabienne about not only the glaring inconsistencies she has in her memory to her mother's sunshiny version of events but also her decision to completely ignore her relationship with and betrayal of a late contemporary of hers.

A woman whom Lumir idolized and looked to like the mother she always wished she'd had, as the film continues, we begin to see just how much their view of the past differs. Though it begins as a polite but firm objection, their standoff culminates in one particularly tense argument at dinner that finds Lumir snapping at her well-meaning husband to stay out of it since – to misquote Tom Hagen in “The Godfather Part II” – it's between mother and daughter, Hank.

Using an embedded narrative to add another layer to their relationship that lets them relive the past in the present, writer-director Kore-eda plants a film within his film. In “The Truth,” Fabienne stars in a science fiction movie called “Memories of My Mother” along with a younger up-and-coming actress who looks like and reminds Lumir of the late star, and as the mother-daughter drama shoots, they're forced to see each other's perspective a little clearer.

An ambitious if not wholly successful experiment, which finds the Japanese master filmmaker of “Shoplifters” and my own personal favorite “Like Father Like Son,” making a movie in both French and English, even though he only speaks Japanese, “The Truth” is a well-intentioned yet underwhelmingly slight endeavor. The passion project of Juliette Binoche who'd journeyed to Japan in 2011 to see her friend and suggest that they do something together in the future, the film, which is based upon a play he'd started to work on in 2003, illustrates the universality of the family dynamics that flood his oeuvre.

Laced with a touch of magical realism in Charlotte's relationship with her grandmother who she believes lives in a castle and might be a witch – that in itself ties into a fairy tale her mother used to love as a girl that she's reading her at bedtime – Kore-eda fills his movie with symbolism and metaphor both overt and subtle. From setting the movie in the fall as the events take place in the autumn of Fabienne's life to referencing the fact that behind her estate is a prison multiple times early on in the movie, it's clear that the imaginative Kore-eda has no shortage of ideas. Unfortunately, as clever as the film is, it's hard to empathize with the characters, as “The Truth” seems more focused on the meaning of and behind everything we see on the screen rather than on who they are as people.

Less gripping than other experimental Binoche led works from the last decade including Abbas Kiarostami's “Certified Copy” and Olivier Assayas' “Clouds of Sils Maria” that toy with narratives, nesting stories, and allusions, while the performers are tremendous and Kore-eda's thesis on family rings true, its success is more academic than involving.

Admittedly, it's worth the investment for cinephiles, if only for devotees of Kore-eda and our leading ladies, who have somehow never starred in a movie together before. Yet while the frustrated Lumir is the easiest character to understand, it's hard to watch scenes centering on the untimely death of a young actress without imagining how emotional they would've been for Deneuve who lost her own sister – actress Françoise Dorléac – at such a young age.

Relegating Hawke's intriguing if underwritten Hank to the sidelines, while Kore-eda's work is enticing in any language, sadly, it doesn't take long for “The Truth” to get stuck in the same scratchy groove – spinning around and around – in desperate need for the record to be flipped.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Career Tribute: Tony Leung Will Break Your Heart

Tony Leung Will Break Your Heart

by Jen Johans

Soulful, stirring, and often somber, even when he isn’t playing a lover, Tony Leung will break your heart. Famously dubbed by “The Times” in London as “Asia's answer to Clark Gable,” the Hong Kong native (whose full name is Tony Leung Chiu-wai) is one of the most acclaimed and adored actors of his generation.

Routinely reading his scripts at least forty times before – as he confessed to “The Guardian” – possibly calling the writer in the middle of the night with his thoughts, for Leung (who celebrates his birthday on June 27), acting is not so much a profession as it is his addiction . . . as well as his therapeutic recovery.

Giving him an outlet for the feelings he'd been holding onto since he was a shy, repressed child whose gambler father had walked out on the family when Leung was just six-years-old, the ability to exorcise his emotions under the guise of playing someone else hooked him as soon as he signed up for an acting course at the age of nineteen.

Quickly finding stardom on the small screen in the early 1980s as the protagonist of the popular series “Police Cadet” – opposite his soon-to-be frequent leading lady Maggie Cheung – Tony Leung was one of five up-and-coming young male stars who were labeled “TVB's Five Tigers,” which you could liken to Hong Kong television's answer to the Brat Pack.

Making the move to film, Leung found his way into early critically and commercially successful ventures like Taiwanese helmer Hou Hsiao-hsien's Venice Film Festival award-winner “A City of Sadness” in 1989 and John Woo's “Hard Boiled” in 1992.

Reuniting with Woo two years after he worked with the director on his personal opus “Bullet in the Head," in the now contemporary crime classic “Hard Boiled," Leung was cast opposite one of Hong Kong's biggest box office draws, Mr. Chow Yun-fat.

A veteran performer who'd starred in the epic crime series “A Better Tomorrow,” and “The Killer,” both of which had turned him and Woo into huge box office sensations, it was Chow who was given the undisputed lead role in Woo's final Hong Kong “bullet ballet” before the director made the move to Hollywood.

The end result marked a decidedly different outing for the filmmaker. Criticized for glamorizing killers in his earliest films with Chow, in “Hard Boiled” – which underwent copious changes in its 123-day shoot after the death of screenwriter Barry Wong – Woo opted to use the same formula he'd had success with before, only this time with a police officer in the role of the protagonist.

Not playing a hitman or gangster this time but a hard-headed, impetuous cop nicknamed “Tequila” who's eager to bring down the Triads responsible for his partner's death, just as he did in “A Better Tomorrow” and “The Killer,” it's the wildly charismatic Chow Yun-fat who has the showiest role in Woo's film.

Yet, written as a cross between Don Johnson in “Miami Vice” and Bruce Willis in “Die Hard,” as marvelous as he is in “Hard Boiled,” because it's missing the same quiet poetry of his romantic antihero in “The Killer,” the film's soul is found less in Chow's lead than it is in the subtly mesmerizing turn by supporting player Tony Leung. And with this in mind, on repeat viewings, you'll notice that it's Leung who manages to sneak in and – while you're being dazzled by Chow's ability to fend off a hospital full of armed assassins while cradling newborn babies – sails away with your heart. In fact, the first person to acknowledge this was Chow himself who felt like the film's final cut removed some important moments for his admittedly one-dimensional character to show the depth of his feelings, which is why Leung's supporting turn rings so true.

At least partially inspired by Alain Delon's character in Jean-Pierre Melville's crime classic “Le Samuraï,” “Hard Boiled” finds Leung in the type of coolly contemplative role that has since become synonymous with the star while playing a police officer who's been on a deep undercover assignment with the Triads for far too long.

Torn by his allegiance to two father figures on both sides of the law who ask him to kill and protect in equal measure, the only peace Leung finds is from living a solitary life on his boat. Docked in the bay, much like his yacht, Leung is forever waiting to set out for a new life on a new land far away from everything he knows and wants to forget. Making paper cranes as a form of penance and acknowledgment of the lives he's taken, Leung's tragic yet compelling internal struggle adds emotional depth to what is otherwise a completely awe-inspiring work of action filmmaking.

Giving him the more romantic inclinations that wouldn't have been out of place for Chow's killer in “The Killer,” even though it's Chow who's in an on-again, off-again relationship with his superior (Teresa Mo) in “Hard Boiled,” it's Leung who sends her white roses and coded Elvis lyrics when he needs to convey a message to the police department.

And in this respect, Leung's performance in “Hard Boiled” marks a terrific precursor to his staggering turn in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's 2002 “Infernal Affairs” trilogy, which was remade by Leung's favorite American filmmaker – Martin Scorsese – as “The Departed” in the states with Leonardo DiCaprio in the Leung role.

A top-notch work of Hong Kong cop noir and a great introduction to Leung for new film fans hoping to see something a little more western minded before they venture onto the actor's more daring art films, even though it was made twenty-eight years ago, “Hard Boiled” still feels fresher than most CGI heavy, assembly-line manufactured action movies being released today.

But as great as he is at adding hidden layers to his co-lead or supporting characters in his mainstream Hong Kong fare, it's the lovers that come to mind most when you think of Tony Leung and doubly so when you look back on his heyday in the '90s and early '00s.

So fiercely devoted to his craft that he'll learn anything for the right collaborator, film, and/or role, when it came time to meet up once again with his most frequent director Wong Kar-wai in Argentina for the gorgeous gay love story "Happy Together" in 1997, Leung took up not only the tango but also Spanish. Still, this was not the only time he would adopt a whole new language for a role. Most notably, Leung learned Mandarin for Zhang Yimou's 2002 stunner "Hero," which, despite being dubbed in the final release, paid off for Leung five years later when he spoke Mandarin in Ang Lee's startling film "Lust, Caution."

Yet, regardless of the dialect that Leung takes on in the multilingual "Happy Together," fans of Wong Kar-wai know that his films are truly universal. Dedicated to the human connection we need and crave in others (director Sofia Coppola is a huge fan), Wong's movies speak a language we immediately understand – a language Leung is more than fluent in throughout his filmography – the language of love.

"Let's start over." Habitually said by his “Happy Together” character's flighty lover (played by Leslie Cheung) whenever he hopes to reunite with Leung's romantically drained lead and begin anew, “let's start over” is the refrain that holds the pair in each other's orbit after they venture from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires and break up yet again.

Knowing that he can no longer let himself backslide into a relationship where the two men's affection for one another is outweighed by suspicion and mistrust, by the end of the film that garnered Wong Kar-wai the prize for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, Leung's protagonist knows that in order to start over, he's going to have to ignore the “let's” and go it alone.

Watched in quick succession with Woo's “Hard Boiled,” the parallels are obvious between his '92 solitary protagonist and the conflicted one he plays here who's heartbroken by his lot in life and his relationships with others, from his ex-lover to his father to a co-worker with possible romantic potential. And indeed, the double-edged sword of promise and penance wrapped up in the phrase “let's start over” seems to apply not only to his “Happy Together” character in one of Leung's strongest performances to date but to all of the men he's played for Woo, Wong, Zhang, Lee, and beyond.

Yet although his collaborations have been legendary, in the more than half a dozen films they've made together over the past three decades, in the end, it's Wong Kar-wai who seems to best understand how to use Leung's penchant for emotional complexity to disarm viewers and draw them in. Famous for his chaotic productions which find Wong shooting without a script – and often with only a kernel of an idea as to who each character should be which might change multiple times during the improvisational shoot as the actors feel things out with his guidance – the trust and respect the two have for one another is unmatched.

While “Happy Together” marked one of Leung's most soulful performances for the filmmaker, the actor is perhaps most famous for Wong's “Chungking Express” – where he played a lovesick cop so distracted by an ex that he nearly misses the chance at a new love – and the director's 2000 masterpiece “In the Mood for Love.” Starring in the latter as a repressed married man living in 1960s Hong Kong who develops an attraction to the wife of the man his wife is having an affair with (played by Maggie Cheung), "Mood" finally garnered Tony Leung the award for Best Actor from the Cannes Film Festival that everyone assumed would've been his three years before for “Happy Together.”

Skilled at bringing to life his own unique brand of morally and internally beleaguered men who fall in love without trying and want to start over but can't until they figure out what (and who) it is that they truly want, Leung shined exceptionally bright in Zhang Yimou's 2002 film “Hero" as the epitome of this type of role.

Inspired by Jing Ke's assassination attempt on the King of Qin which took place in 227 B.C., in “Hero,” Jet Li's nameless swordsman regales the king with tales of his successful battles against three of the man's most wanted enemies, including a man named Broken Sword (Leung) who fights alongside his lady love Falling Snow (played once again by Maggie Cheung).

A secondary supporting character whose true motives are uncertain for nearly two-thirds of the stylish wuxia feature, as Li shares his version of the events that brought him to the palace, we see the plot involving Leung's character unfold a handful of different ways as Li's narrative evolves from start to finish.

Is Broken Sword a jealous, possessive lover who acts impetuously and seduces Zhang Ziyi out of brokenhearted spite at Cheung's one-night affair with Donnie Yen? Is he a resigned, peaceful man who's outgrown life as a warrior? Or is he something else entirely – something that exists halfway between the two poles?

Leung's performance in “Hero” is passionate, ponderous, and (once again) predominantly quiet. A subtle turn overall, Broken Sword allows the actor to play both sides of the same solitary, zen-like coin of the man he's embodied for most of his career – a man who's looking to start again but doesn't completely know how to do so.

A gripping, somber, and lushly beautiful epic that found Leung and Cheung hired by Zhang precisely because he loved their chemistry in Wong's “In the Mood for Love,” the fascinating “Hero” questions how history is made and asks whether a sacrifice crafted from love carries just as much weight as one made of sword and blood.

Much like “Hard Boiled,” and “Happy Together,” “Hero” is proof once again that – having perfected silence as a child only to live to manifest his repressed emotions as an adult – Tony Leung plays thoughtful, quietly tormented men better than nearly anyone since Robert De Niro. (Thus, it should come as no surprise that De Niro and Leung are mutual fans of each other's work.) Always ready to learn a new skill and speak a new language besides – of course – love, in his richest and most daring performances, Tony Leung puts everything on the line to break your heart while also risking his own. He's the addiction as well as the cure.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.