Film Movement Movie Review: The Charmer (2017)

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For Tony Manera (John Travolta) in John Badham’s Saturday Night Fever, it's all about the suit. Transforming him from a blue collar worker by day to a disco god of the night with a simple wardrobe change, the suit is the thing that gives Tony the power, courage, and bravado of a superhero on the prowl.

Having taken on the same recognizable status as James Dean's red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause and Marilyn Monroe's floaty white dress from The Seven Year Itch, admittedly, the suit worn by Esmail (Ardalan Esmaili) in Milad Alami's feature filmmaking debut The Charmer will never be as iconic as the suit that John Travolta wore four decades earlier in Fever.

However, it's the only one the Iranian immigrant has and it fits him well both literally and figuratively. Making the already bedroom eyed man even more attractive, it also gives Esmail the confidence he needs to go out on the hunt in pursuit of women and a better life the same way Tony did, even if sex in Saturday Night was a perk and not a transactional down payment on his future as it is for Esmail.

Wearing that suit not to cross Saturday's Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan but in order to stay in Denmark by finding a mate to give him legal residency, the suit sets Esmail up — like an emotionally present gigolo — for what Leona Naess called in her hit 2000 song a "Charm Attack."

And, having been dumped by his latest girlfriend for going so fast that he'd moved into her place without being asked, this sort of morale boost is exactly what our main character needs when we first encounter Esmail at the beginning of Alami's topical, superlative character study The Charmer.

Played and especially framed like an existential Noir, not only does most of the film's action take place at night but Alami's cinematographer Sophia Olsson also makes great use of glass and barriers to give Esmail an introspective outsider aura that wouldn't be out of place in an Edward Hopper painting or a scene helmed by Michael Mann.

Yet, dazzling as it is, this approach is made all the more riveting by Swedish and Iranian actor Ardalan Esmaili's haunting, emotionally naked performance that manages to hit you right in the gut, whether or not he's in his character's trusty suit.

Moving from woman to woman over a series of nights that all start to blur together as one, the film passes no overt judgment on its lead character’s actions, nor the ones by the various women he encounters who approach him with expectations of their own.

However, when he meets Sara (Soho Rezanejad), a beautiful woman from his homeland who immediately sizes him up and warns him not to dare hit on her Danish friend, Esmail switches off the suit inspired autopilot and lets himself get swept up by this woman who invites him into the home she shares with her mother, which is like a gateway back to Iran.

Additionally, Esmail finds himself sought out by a mysterious man who at first glance seems like a typical pick-up artist before he reveals his own link to the hard-working immigrant.

Balancing his nights playing the sexual long game with days filled with short-term jobs to send money home to his family, soon Esmail's past mistakes threaten to catch up with him in this wildly compelling film.

Sneaking up on viewers, while it takes a few scenes to fall into its rhythm, the multi-layered picture is so thematically rich that I found myself thinking about it days later.

Perfect for post film discussion — political and otherwise — The Charmer, which was released by Film Movement, is now available both on DVD as well as its streaming subscription channel Film Movement Plus, Esmail's suit not included.

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Movie Review: Ava (2017)

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As bold as it is angry, in writer/director Sadaf Foroughi’s semi-autobiographical feature filmmaking debut Ava, an eponymous seventeen-year-old girl on the cusp of graduation (played by Mahour Jabbari) struggles to come-of-age amid the repressive surroundings of a hypercritical home and school life in present day Tehran.

Used like a pawn by her Type A doctor mother as well as her more easygoing father who’s frequently out-of-town on business, in an early sequence wherein the two (played by Bahar Noohian and Vahid Aghapoor) argue about Ava as though she were not in the next room but the next town, it becomes obvious that Ava's guardians want radically different futures for their daughter.

While her dad wants to give Ava the freedom to choose her own career, after her seemingly impossible to please mother cruelly cuts Ava off from her best friend and violin in an effort that her daughter not repeat any of her own mistakes, Ava's ability to just keep her head down, obey, and follow orders soon reaches a breaking point.

An award-winning Canadian-Iranian feature fresh off the 2017 film festival circuit, while Foroughi’s work derives a great deal of conflict from its setting in the Middle-East, at its core, Ava is a universally relatable film about female adolescence, peer pressure, and teenage struggle with authority both in and out of the classroom.

And even though it isn’t nearly as successful from a structural standpoint, as many viewers have pointed out, Ava would make a surprisingly excellent double feature to last year’s thematically very similar (and likewise female helmed) Lady Bird.

However, unlike Greta Gerwig's multiple Oscar nominee, Ava bears much more in common with French New Wave titles such as Cleo From 5 to 7 and especially The 400 Blows (to which it pays homage in its final moments) than it does with most English language high school features, which makes sense given Foroughi's educational background pursuing post-graduate film study in France.

Nonetheless there are still some lyrical filmic touches throughout Ava including claustrophobic framing with mirrors and bars (which illustrate the way she’s being increasingly watched and isolated) that wouldn't have been out of place in The Virgin Suicides or Fish Tank.

Yet while it could raise some intriguing post-film discussion about the freedom the movie’s men feel in contrast to the women, Ava’s emotionally exhausting depiction of tyrannical female authority figures grows increasingly repetitive as it continues, particularly because the less three-dimensional some of its characters appear, the less Foroughi seems clear about exactly what it is that she wants to say and why.

Helping to keep it from spinning too far out of control, Ava is augmented by both the poetic edits of fellow award-winning Iranian-Canadian filmmaker Kiarash Anvari as well as Sina Kermanizadeh’s lush cinematography.

And while Ava would’ve undoubtedly been better served with either a shorter running time or sharper script (especially one that better represented Ava's mother's point-of-view for greater empathetic impact), overall it's still an ambitious and auspicious debut from Sadaf Foroughi that promises great things from the filmmaker to come.

Text ©2018, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order 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.

Movie Review: About Elly (2009)

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Given its potential to ignite the creative spark of an infinite number of narrative possibilities, a professor once told me that the only prompt a writer would ever need was to place two characters in a room together, wherein one wants to stay and the other desires to leave.

Using this deceptively simple premise as a slow-burning jumping-off point roughly one hour into this character-driven mystery, in About Elly what begins in the same vein as Kasdan's The Big Chill morphs into something much closer to L'avventura by Antonioni.

At its core a like-minded tale of two female friends bound together in a push/pull relationship, in this understated masterpiece, Oscar winning Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) multiplies the aforementioned two individuals by two cars of people vacationing together on an ill-fated weekend by the sea.

A haunting film of ambiguities bursting with secrets and lies, Elly makes clever use of foreshadowing both in its subtitled dialogue and classically composed cinematography that plays much better not only the second time around but also on a much larger screen.

Daring to fill the frame with people as far as the eye can see (as opposed to methodically introducing its large cast of characters one-by-one), Elly respects our intelligence right from the start.

Hoping to fix up her daughter's beautiful teacher with a recently divorced friend visiting from Germany, the scheming, if well-intentioned Sepideh tells a handful of white lies in order to see if love between her friends could potentially thrive.

Without any idea just how badly her plan will go awry, Sepideh continues to push the two together after early excitement and exasperation gives way to a few false starts.

A stranger in the midst of a tight-knit group, although Sepideh argues that "to know Elly is to love Elly," just how well anyone knows her (or one another for that matter) is suddenly brought to light when Elly vanishes in thin air after she's last seen (symbolism alert!) flying a kite.

Deflecting guilt and suspicion over whether a woman chose to leave or was forced to stay, as the remaining characters begin turning on each other, secrets come tumbling out.

Made in 2009 and finally released stateside in 2015, admittedly the quality of Netflix's About Elly stream does date the image slightly.

However, much like Farhadi's Douglas Sirkian inspired high gloss soap The Past, given the way that Elly draws upon everything from '40s women's weepies to existential Noir via Preminger's Laura (as well as its most overt inspiration of Antonioni), the aged look works for this instantly addictive and emotionally thrilling timeless tale.

Produced supremely well and seemingly on the cheap, About Elly proves once again how little budget, A-listers, and effects matter when it comes to crafting a masterful work in any language. Even if it's as simple as the debate to stay or go (and just as my professor predicted nearly two decades ago), story is still king.

Text ©2016, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order 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.

Blu-ray Review: The Past (2013)

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Just because this fleeting thing we call time marches on, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we move on with it as sometimes we remain emotionally, psychologically, romantically, spiritually – even somewhat physically – stuck in moments of the past.

And no film captures this idea better than the Cannes Ecumenical Jury Prize winner The Past which introduces us to an extended group of people that are making plans and doing everything they can to move forward beyond various life-changing events (some public, some private) that have kept parts of them forever bookmarked in time and place.

Cinematically reminiscent of both 1950s Douglas Sirk movies and Three Colors era Krzysztof Kieślowski, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s riveting follow-up to his 2012 Oscar, Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award winner A Separation centers on the dramatic fallout that occurs with regard to another separated couple.

Hoping to get remarried to her new boyfriend (Tahar Rahim), a French mother of two named Marie (played by Cannes award winning Best Actress Bérénice Bejo) invites her estranged Iranian husband Ahmad (Ali Mostaffa) to Paris to grant her a divorce – completely unprepared for the collision of past and present that coincides with her plans for the future.

An intelligently crafted soap opera, The Past is as riveting as an Agatha Christie mystery due to the intricacy with which Farhadi reveals one emotionally devastating puzzle piece after another and allows us to continually rearrange the evidence to create a constantly changing portrait of an extended family.

Yet even when he threatens to go too far off the melodramatic deep end, writer/director Farhadi manages to keep things universally relatable against all odds.

Furthermore, unlike far too many American dramas that tell you how to feel with song cues, everything is left open to psychological interpretation… including the possible implication of the film’s blink-and-you-missed-it final shot that all count on your participation (and thankfully filmmaker commentary on the luxe Blu-ray release) to help clarify.

Throughout the deeply engrossing film, we’re invited to not only speculate as to the real reasons behind the tension between the children and adults in the film (who are often so much wiser than their parents) but also place ourselves in the unenviable shoes of its complex characters who go through the emotional wringer from start to finish.

While thankfully it does provide a number of answers, one of the most fascinating things about The Past is that the characters – and by extension the viewer – is then faced with the prospect of what (if anything) to do with the information.

Easily the most impressive Sirkian adult foreign drama I’ve seen since I first discovered the films of Susanne Bier (Open Hearts, After the Wedding), while unfortunately The Past failed to receive an Academy Award nomination for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film, it is both vastly superior to and infinitely more relatable than this year’s Italian surrealist winner The Great Beauty.

 

The type of work wherein the less you know going in the better, The Past may be a sophisticated Iranian-French coproduction but it could just as well have taken place in any country.

Yet fortunately because of the origins of its director, The Past has helped shine much needed light on the talented directors of the Iranian filmmaking community, which has sadly been overshadowed for decades due to political unrest.

Now hopefully thanks to present hits – from great Iranian helmers of the past like Children of Heaven’s Majid Majidi to masters of the future like Asghar Farhadi – Iranian cinema won’t remain a secret for long as time marches on.   

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Persepolis

Directors: Vincent Paronnaud & Marjane Satrapi

Based on two autobiographical graphic novels, Persepolis, which chronicles the life of young Marjane Satrapi as she comes of age during the Islamic Revolution has been nominated as the Best Animated Feature Film of the Year from the Academy Awards. Although it is animated with most of the characters and sets drawn with stark lines and filled in with either black or white color, it feels far more urgent and sophisticated than most animated films. It not only resonates with contemporary issues facing the relationships between countries today but also in its unique insider’s analysis of the history of Iran following the end of its modern movement under dictator Shah which led to a Islamic fundamentalist era that forced women such as our young heroine Marjane to hide their faces from men and forsake all Western influences such as Marjane’s beloved punk rock music and sneakers. Of course, the young teen’s rebellion is one thing but it’s only a small plot in the much bigger picture of the way the country is forever changed with relatives and friends being killed and liberties being taken away until Marjane is sent to Vienna to stay with friends. It’s about this time when the film which had been so engrossing and informative begins to falter slightly as, although we empathize and respect our feisty heroine, we long to learn more of what’s happening back in Iran other than following Marjane through her failed romances and encounters with prejudice on foreign soil. Still, it’s a vivid work one won’t soon forget and one that will hopefully educate America’s younger audiences (teenaged and up) who are drawn to animated films to think more about global issues and appreciating other cultures and points of view. As IMDb reports, Sean Penn, Gena Rowlands and Iggy Pop have all lent their uncredited voices to the film’s English language version which should up the appeal and ease of the film as the white subtitles were a bit hard to read with the black and white scenery as the filmmakers should have stuck with the traditional yellow color.