Blu-ray Review: Amen. (2002)

Now Available to Own   



  Photo Slideshow
   

Alternate Titles: Der Stellvertreter; Amen

A well-intentioned, emotionally charged yet historically questionable passion project from Oscar winning filmmaker Costa-Gavras that’s been roughly forty years in the making, Amen. takes you on a behind-the-scenes journey of what should’ve been naturally engrossing terrain.

Hoping to investigate the question of who knew what, when and why more wasn’t done to stop the “Final Solution” that led to the mass execution of Jews during the Holocaust, Amen. initially resonates with viewers on a humanistic level.

Unfortunately, as the film continues the admirable motives of the piece get bungled by leisurely pacing, static editing and an overreliance on manipulatively manufactured melodrama to try and make points when understated simplicity would’ve been far more effective in driving the moral subtext home.

Based on Rolf Hochhuth’s divisive 1963 play The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy which was criticized by those from all nationalities and religious walks of life for the artistic liberties that were taken with real figures and events surrounding the horrific genocide that occurred during the second world war, Amen. confronts the controversies inherent in Hocchuth’s text head-on.

Adapted by Costa-Gavras as well as Jean-Claude Grumberg, the audacious script raises valid (if contrived) questions about the culpability of other leaders by daring to make the government officials of other countries and various organizations – most notably the Catholic Church and Pope Pius XII in particular – accessories to the crimes that occurred at the Nazi Death Camps.

Centered on a historical figure, the film revolves around the moral crisis faced by a hardworking German chemist named Kurt Gerstein (played by Ulrich Tukur) after he discovers that the vaccine that he’d created to provide a safe haven from typhus is instead being used in the form of a gas to murder men, women and children by the thousand.

Hoping to alert the Vatican in order to put a stop to the horrific actions of the SS officers he has no choice but to work alongside for fear they’d slaughter his wife and children, Gerstein’s pleas to reach the pope fall on deaf ears.

Finding an ally in a young Jesuit priest (played by Matthiew Kassovitz) who’s as passionate to stop the insanity as he is despite having no means or influence, the two men realize they cannot stand by while such atrocities are occurring nearby.

Needless to say, it’s easy to understand why the work riled up viewers for its shocking portrayal of the Catholic Church (and foreign governments) especially when you realize that portions of the plot in addition to the Jesuit priest character had been invented entirely out of thin air.

However after researching Gerstein out of curiosity in order to separate fact from fiction, I couldn’t understand why someone as drawn to political filmmaking as Costa-Gavras was had chosen to use the play as the basis of his film when the details available that chronicle Gerstein's real life are far more riveting on their own.

As debated as the facts are surrounding the man in question via Gerstein’s own handwritten accounts, rather than relying on fiction to formulate a clumsily crafted and overly contrived final payoff in the film’s meandering final act, Costa-Gavras could’ve instead crafted an intriguing, investigate thesis worthy of Oliver Stone.

The last film from the director to utilize an English language track to date, the rather heavily accented dialogue would’ve benefited from the inclusion of a subtitle option on this otherwise technically stellar high-definition Blu-ray that shows off the meticulous frame composition, production design and cinematographic quality for which a Costa-Gavras picture is known.

Likewise it’s the technical specs of Amen. as well as the moving performances by our two leads that serve as the saving graces of this otherwise uneven production.

Furthermore, just like subtitles would’ve heightened our understanding, another read-through of the onscreen text might’ve augmented the film overall.

In a mind-boggling juxtaposition of pictures and words, Amen. illustrates one fate for our character and then uses a decidedly contradictory word choice moments later that makes us wonder if we either missed something, misunderstood some vital detail, or if the screen cards had been given an unsupervised translation after being written in a different language altogether.

While any foreign film buff understands that typos are quite common, because Amen. had been so structurally all over-the-place (not even clarifying the years when time flies by), ultimately we’re left with one awkward final impression of a film that attempted to reveal the truth about the final solution without understanding the importance of the final act in doing just that.

Disappointingly underwhelming despite its original potential as a work so many decades in the making, Amen. will be of particular interest to devotees of Costa-Gavras, even if it’s a minor entry in an otherwise staggering career of major achievements (aside from the lukewarm reception of another WWII inspired effort via Music Box).

The rest of us will do better to opt for one of several finely crafted, emotionally riveting and historically sound films that brought the horrors of the Holocaust to life for the current generation – whether by way of The Pianist or Schindler’s List.   

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.

Movie Review: Séraphine (2008)

Pre-Order the Blu-ray or DVD

Bookmark this on Delicious

Print Page





Now more than sixty years following her death in the Clermont-de-l'Oise psychiatric hospital, the paintings of Séraphine Louis a.k.a. Séraphine de Senlis are finally on display in galleries around the globe.

Yet when looking back on the life of the French maid turned painter in writer/director Martin Provost's seven-time Cesar award winning film Séraphine, I couldn't help but become overwhelmed by the amount of mystery and contradiction that pervaded throughout her time here on Earth.

Although the lives of artists are seldom happy (but then again as Tolstoy warns, "Happy families are all alike," and that certainly doesn't make for good cinema), startling mysteries as well as mental illness are a recurring theme of artistic biopics from Camille Claudel to Artemisia.

Therefore it's only fitting when Provost discusses his movie in the press notes created for the Music Box Films release, that he quotes Picasso's ominous yet accurate assertion that, "If I don't paint, I'll get sick, I'll die," that helps shed some light on one possible mystery in particular.



Puzzlingly however, is the fact that although Séraphine spent the last ten years of her life away from canvases and brushes while instead confined to a mental institution, Séraphine's first and indeed most enthusiastic and influential supporter-- Picasso's first buyer and Rousseau discoverer German collector Wilhelm Udhe (Ulrich Tukur)-- listed the death of the talented yet deeply troubled woman as 1934 in his autobiography instead of 1942.



Why he did so has always been something of a controversy but perhaps the answer can be found in something as straightforward and logical as those words of Picasso's. Simply put-- without a paintbrush, paints or the means to somehow creatively make sense of the visions and voices of those such as the guardian angel who told Séraphine that she needed to draw and later to paint-- the woman in fact was essentially as good as dead.

However this conclusion is only one possibility and furthermore, it's one that's discovered in the research as questions and answers aren't of the utmost importance to the filmmaker in Martin Provost's vague, airy, slow-moving, and rather contemplative film which is both Séraphine's hypnotic strength and its yawn-inducing weakness.



For, fitting to the "naive" or naturalistic style of Séraphine's artwork, Provost's film-- that's gorgeously lensed by cinematographer Laurent Brunet (AFC) and heightened by In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express composer Michael Galasso's original score-- dedicates itself to establishing the mood and setting for the artist's life, ultimately painting Séraphine via broad strokes and letting the actors do the rest.

And with this talented cast, it's definitely the right decision to make as it's led by Amelie actress Yolande Moreau as Séraphine and The Lives of Others' star Ulrich Tukur as Udhe and together they never make a false step.

However, it's in the surprisingly Cesar award winning screenplay which-- although comprised of any historical documentation that could be found regarding Séraphine's life-- wears on the patience of the viewer as the film meanders. Indeed, its major flaw is in the lack of focus right off the bat in taking a good thirty to forty-five minutes before we finally begin to grasp just who the two people are in the scheme of the art world.



In fact, it works better as a character study as the film develops and we become more acquainted with the strange relationship of the nearly destitute female maid whom Provost described as representing "at the time what was the lowest on the social ladder" and her foreign, gay, and lonely employer.

And sadly, although it's a lovely piece overall (despite the overly long 125 minute running time)-- and as a woman I feel we can never have too many films about female artists since there's too few as it is-- Provost ultimately bogs down the work with some overly symbolic, dull, and pretentious sequences early on in Séraphine.



And building off the plodding set up with the concluding act of the requisite scenes of hysteria that ultimately bookend the movie, I was left with a sense that I was no closer to understanding the artist or her work than I had been before the film began.

Additionally, this is coupled with the sense that ultimately we're faced with yet another movie about mystery and contradiction in the lives of artists as so many questions are raised in the movie that aren't answered. However, while this is fitting and inspiring not to draw a clear conclusion when faced with a few aspects of the individuals' lives, more often than not, it's frustrating that even the most basic ones take awhile to try and wrap your head around.

Yet, the question I was most troubled by when the picture ended was what the filmmaker's aim was in telling the anticlimactic story in the first place to perhaps see where it may have gone wrong. And this is especially worrisome because the harsh reality is that-- minus the press notes and more research-- I'm not sure I would've been able to connect the dots or understand what was deemed so significant about the storyline. For much like an artist without a brush or a canvas who has an incredible idea for a work but can't quite figure out just how to express it, I understood Provost's passion but overall felt that the film was missing a central dilemma other than just slowly watching Séraphine self-destruct.