Wild Tales (2015) Review

Directed by

Damian Szifron

            The BMW pulls into the driveway of the mansion late one night.  The license plate has been ripped askew and has blood marks on it.  The kid leaps out of the car sobbing and tells his parents that he hit a woman and fled from the scene.  Soon, news about the hit-and-run is broadcast on TV with an angry crowd gathering and demanding that police find the perpetrator. The kid is scared.  He should be.  Fortunately, his father is rich.  With the help of his own personal Michael Clayton/Winston Wolf-type “fixer,” the father hatches a scheme: Give $500,000 to the family’s poor groundskeeper to take the fall for the kid.

            The plan almost works.  But soon the fixer demands a $500,000 retainer fee of his own.  When the local prosecutor arrives, he immediately sees right through the scheme and demands a $1 million payment in order to keep silent.  When the groundskeeper sees that the prosecutor is being paid more money, he demands an increase of his own.  And so it goes.  More money, more convoluted details, and more angst for the father who in earnest just wanted to do what he could to keep his kid out of prison. 

            This story, entitled La Propuesta (The Proposal), is one of the six 20-minute episodes from Damian Szifron’s Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales), and it is also the strongest. It works because all the events take place within a self-contained time and place: A single evening, at a single location.  Its story does not contain enough characters or dramatic situations or progressions to merit a feature-length film, but the moral questions it asks are of the same caliber as the best of Renoir, Kurosawa or Hitchcock: What is the price of a human life?  Who has the authority to set the price of a human life, and is it ethical, if put in a position of vast financial wealth, to indulge in temporary deceit in order to amend unfortunate happenstance if the result is a greater good for all?  Look at the facts: The son stays out of prison, the groundskeeper’s family is abundantly provided for, the dead woman’s family gets justice, and heck, you could even say wealth is more equitably distributed among all the parties.  But of course, there is always a steep price to pay – a price greater than any amount of money – when deception and human fallacy are at the center of a cover-up.  The conclusion of La Propuesta illustrates this in no uncertain terms in its startling and abrupt climax.

            Had La Propuesta been a feature film, we perhaps would have gotten a deeper backstory into the troubled father-son relationship or the difficulties the groundskeeper faces at home with his poor wife and children, or the way that the prosecutor is trying to work his way up the corporate ladder at work.  Of course, we don’t need any of that.  The episode’s greatest strength lies in its brevity – its simple and lucid examination of character types and their flaws, and how hasty, rash, immoral thinking leads to tragic results.  Further depth would only proselytize.  That’s the benefit of a short film.  It stays with us just long enough to get the major point across and not too long that the point becomes banal.  

            In some ways, La Propuesta is the most atypical of Wild Tales’ episodes.  Most of the others are more comedic and even operatic, as in the case of El mas fuerte (The Strongest), where a simple game of chicken played between two drivers on a remote highway escalates into deranged anger and homicidal rage.  This comes dangerously close to veering into Tex Avery material, but Szifron does a good job at showing the intoxication that rage and violence sometimes breeds; one-upmanship simply isn’t enough.  There is a cathartic thrill to unleashing the anger that resides deep within even the friendliest of people.  The episode concludes in a deeply ironic vein, but also in a way that illustrates the absurdity of violence as well as the universality of passionate anger.

            If there is a recurring theme in the episodes of Wild Tales, it may be how extreme revenge rarely fulfills its stated intentions.  An example of this is found in Las Ratas (The Rats), which tells the tale of a chance encounter between a young waitress and the man who destroyed her family’s well-being and caused her father’s suicide.  When this man enters her restaurant on a dark and rainy evening, the waitress tells her cook that she’s been waiting her entire life to have the enact revenge on the man.  The cook suggests poisoning his food, which at first appalls the waitress, but gradually begins to intrigue her.  Like La Propuesta, the episode initially revolves around the moral decision-making that the waitress is forced to make, and concludes with the unintended and tragic consequences that stem from that decision. 

            Another episode, Pasternak, is the unfortunate byproduct of bad timing on a global news scale.  The story involves a seemingly random group of people on board a plane who gradually realize they share a common connection to a mentally disturbed individual out to enact revenge on each of them.  Then they realize this individual is in the cockpit of the plane.  This story, which feels labored and pat in its standard O. Henry-esque formulation, is unfunny in its own right and even less so as a result of the recent Germanwings Flight 9525 crash (somehow seeing a doomed flight hijacked by a mentally unstable pilot doesn’t feel especially funny or novel).  The episode ends with the pilot’s psychologist pleading through the cockpit door that his feelings of worthlessness stem solely from his parents.  This sets up the last image of the episode, which looks spectacular from a visual standpoint but from a narratively, comes off rather inert and depressing when I would assume the intent was poetically comic.

            The other two episodes, Bombita (Little Bomb) and Hasta que la muerte nos separe (Until Death Do Us Part) involve individuals who are put through tremendous suffering.  In Bombita, a structural engineer’s car is unfairly towed by the corrupt municipal towing authority, which prompts a downward spiral leading to the engineer’s firing, divorce from his wife, and accumulating debt from parking tickets.  The engineer decides to undertake a plan of revenge enacted against the towing authority.  At times this episode feels like it’s going down a similar path to Pasternak in its disturbingly lightweight depiction of homegrown terrorism, but fortunately, the engineer’s fate takes a heroic turn.  In Hasta que la muertre nos separe, which concludes the film, a joyous wedding takes a turn for the worst when the bride is informed her new husband has not been faithful.  The excessively madcap anger of the bride makes her feel like a character from a Pedro Almodovar film (not surprisingly, Almodovar is listed as an Executive Producer) and as the wedding devolves into mass uncivilized chaos, the bride and groom soon realize the futility of their actions. 

            With the exception of La Propuestra, none of these films are masterpieces, but indeed that is precisely the beauty of the short film form – the episodes never grow long enough to become an unwelcome presence.  They are generally light, amusing, and often surprising.  According to Wikipedia, Wild Tales is the most widely-seen Argentine film of all-time, which given its bold and breezy structure is not particularly surprising.  During its opening credit sequence, cast and crew names are presented on top of backgrounds featuring still photographs of wild animals.  What does Damian Szifron mean by this?  It could be read as humans being no more civilized than our brethren of the animal kingdom.  Or something else entirely.  We do not know the answer, nor the ways in which the six episodes are related (or if such a throughline even exists), but the catalog of images and the films do just enough for Wild Tales to leave an indelible impact on audiences, just like all good short films should.

            (Note: Wild Tales was Argentina’s official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 87^th Academy Awards). 

Rating: 3 Stars

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2015) Review

Directed by
Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz

Like Luis Bunuel’s surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel (1962), the entirety of Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem takes place within the confines of a single physical space.  In the case of Bunuel, that space was a lavish dining room where the aristocratic dinner guests could not bring themselves to ever depart; in Gett, that space is an Israeli courtroom where a divorce proceeding is taking place.  In both films, the narrative and characters are restricted to those enclosed spaces for absurd reasons – for Bunuel, it was the self-imposed alienation of the entitled social classes while in Gett, it is the absurdity of the inefficient Israeli judicial system, governed by the archaic and misogynistic laws of the Talmud more than the modern, progressive, “enlightened” conceptions of justice and equality.

But the comparisons to The Exterminating Angel are perhaps most resonant in both films’ cumulative effects on viewers: Both films are exercises in dullness, repetition, and extreme frustration.  They do not contain character development, dramatic tension, or narrative climaxes – at least not in any traditional senses.  They are rooted in the political task of placing viewers in the same social, emotional, and intellectual positioning as its characters, even if that necessitates that the events of the film become monotonous and a chore to watch.  Just as we ask with Bunuel, Why can’t these people just leave the dining room already?, the Elkabetz’s film forces us to ask, Why can’t these people just be granted a divorce already?  The answer, of course, has less to do with the people involved (and even their reasons for divorce) and everything to do with the individuals and institutions given the unimpeded power to grant divorces.

Gett (the Hebrew term for “divorce”) begins with Viviane Amsalem (Ronit Elkabetz) and her lawyer, Carmel Ben Tovim (Menasche Noy), bringing their case before a trio of Rabbi judges.  For over 30 years, Viviane has been unhappily married to Elisha (Simon Abkarian) but under Jewish law, divorces can only be granted by husbands.  Viviane pleads her case to the Rabbis that Elisha should be forced into absolving their marriage, but her initial arguments are unconvincing; by all accounts, Elisha is a pious, loyal husband who does not physically abuse her, has remained monogamous, and supports her financially.  Viviane simply does not love him anymore – an attitude which confounds the Rabbis, who see love and affection as frivolous byproducts of wayward, inferior femininity (the Talmud crucially does not contain the words “irreconcilable differences.”)  Instead of Elisha’s character being questioned by the Rabbis, it is Viviane’s; they reprimand her for speaking out of turn, attack her for inappropriate wardrobe, and take little sympathy on her, even when Elisha fails to show up on several different occasions.  The subtitle of the film, The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, is absolutely correct and ironic in conveying that for an Orthodox Jewish woman to be granted a divorce, her morality and her actions -- rather than her husband's -- must be inordinately chaste and unblemished. 

Gradually, we learn more about the marriage through witnesses and testimony.  Viviane runs a beauty parlor, but because Jewish custom demands that she have a joint bank account with her husband, she has little financial autonomy.  Elisha, who does not appear to have a job, lacks a driver’s license and does not have credit cards.  He claims that Viviane does not sufficiently observe the Torah and treats him badly.  The two barely look at one another, and have not cohabitated in the same house for three years.  This raises the key question: So why doesn’t he grant her the divorce?  None of the Rabbis or lawyers ask this question, which may reflect how no one in the courtroom is eager to rewrite gett policy or ask straightforward questions; rather, the Rabbis only seem interested in secondhand gossip or unsubstantiated but juicy hearsay (such as when they ask Viviane’s unmarried sister whether she or Viviane attend mixes for singles).

But Gett is not only about the ways in which Orthodox law constrains women’s abilities to have independence.  It is also about the bureaucratic stagnation, repetition, and obstruction of the gett process and its utter lack of resolution.  As the film opens, Viviane has already spent a year and a half in court hoping to have her marriage officially dissolved; by the end of the film, that number has swelled to five years.  Each sequence in the film is separated by 2-4 months, with titlecards serving as a sobering reminder of the total amount of time that has elapsed from the first time Viviane requested her divorce.  In limiting the narrative to only the days spent in court, the effect is unusual; we never really get to know Viviane and Elisha outside of the testimony offered by their family, friends, and neighbors, and this is not surprisingly littered with half-truths, false accusations, and misinterpretations (one witness for Elisha accuses Viviane of cheating when he once spotted her having lunch with another man; this man is deduced to be only Carmel, her lawyer).  But viewed in another light, this deliberate framing device conceals key events, characters, and exchanges from their daily lives, and as a result, strips the characters of their humanity, which is what the film argues that the Israeli judicial system is systematically guilty of doing.  Viviane, Elisha and their marriage become clinical, emotionless, and even immaterial.  The only thing that matters is that courtroom decorum and reverence toward the Rabbis and rabbinic law is upheld and unchallenged at all costs. 

The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is a frustrating and challenging film, not just because the inert actions of the Rabbis and the courtroom testimony become often quite dull and repetitive for the viewer (which is the intended effect), but because the whole judicial process is a waste of time for everyone – particularly when it is the husband, not the Rabbis, who has the final say on whether the divorce will be granted or not.  Elisha’s attitude is quite clear throughout.  So why does Viviane continue to pursue legal channels to challenge gett policy when the system of law is so patriarchal, unmoved and sedentary?  (A second, more nitpicky question would be how she could continue to retain the cost of Carmel, who we are told comes from a lineage of prestigious litigators, for the entirety of the five-year legal process.)  A divorce is more than simply symbolic, since it would liberate Viviane from financial dependence on her husband, although as a result of the dramatic action being removed from their daily environments outside the courtroom, both Viviane’s and Elisha’s financial statuses remain underdeveloped and vague – to the detriment of the film.  American audiences may wonder why Viviane doesn’t simply opt to leave Israel forever, and may read Elisha as a stubborn, one-dimensional zealous tyrant.  But I think the filmmakers intended to demonstrate how the reality of Viviane's plight is more complicated and inconvenient, and the film especially illustrates how Orthodox Judaism, embodied by the trio of aloof Rabbis, is rigidly unable to adapt to changing times and cultural attitudes.

Actually, let me correct that: A couple of things do change during the course of the film.  When Viviane is introduced at the beginning, she is draped in a long, black robe.  By the end, she has gradually morphed into donning a shorter white gown, revealing sandals, and has even let her hair down.  She now smokes and swears.  At first the Rabbis reprimand her, but eventually they stop caring.  Because after five years, wouldn’t you?

            (Note: Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem was Israel’s official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 87^th Academy Awards.)

Rating: 3 Stars

Force Majeure (2014) Review

Directed by

 Ruben Östlund

             A Swedish family is on vacation in the Swiss Alps.  The father, mother, and young daughter and son all appear happy and pose for pictures in front of a snow-capped mountain.  They look like an advertisement found in an REI catalog.  On day two, they enjoy lunch atop a restaurant balcony overlooking the slopes.  Suddenly, an avalanche begins to form.  As it grows larger and larger, the patrons gather in front of the ledge to take pictures.  But soon the avalanche appears to grow out of control and everyone begins to scream and embrace for impact.  Dusty white powder covers the balcony.  The mother grabs her children and pulls them under her.  The father grabs his iPhone and flees the scene.

            This is the crucial episode that sets forth in motion the events of Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure, which despite its premise is not a disaster movie, but instead a subtle, introspective study of what happens when the avalanche fiasco turns out to be a false alarm.  The family and all the restaurant patrons emerge from the scene physically unharmed, but for the mother, the emotional damage is irreversible and cannot be easily healed: At the time of crisis, her maternal “fight-or-flight” instincts triggered the immediate reaction of protecting her young children, while her husband’s reaction was self-preservation at all costs.

            The father, named Tomas (played by Johannes Kuhnke) doesn’t appear to be selfish or uncaring.  And the mother, named Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) initially does not appear to be too disturbed by her husband’s actions (or, perhaps more accurately, non-actions). Östlund photographs Force Majeure mostly in series of long, unbroken static shots so when as viewers we first witness the avalanche, the camera does not pan to Tomas’ fleeing or Ebba’s stunned reactions like it would in a Hollywood film (this may be a scene to rewind and pause several times if viewing the film on DVD).  We see the chaos of the event just as the characters do, which proves to be crucial because in order for the emotional complexity of Force Majeure to work, we have to understand both sides of the issue.

            In Tomas’s view, he was simply acting on his natural impulse to run to safety, and since the avalanche ultimately ended up benign and everyone ended up safe and unharmed, why dwell on grave hypotheticals?  For Ebba, the issue is much more complicated – so complicated, in fact, that she doesn’t even broach it until later that night, while having dinner at the lodge with friends.  At first her tone is playful, but perhaps inevitably, it turns to genuine pain and disappointment over his abandonment of her and the children.  Now one of the core aspects of marriage is that we are privy to our significant others at their best times as well as their worst (not unlike the famous maxim attributed to Marilyn Monroe, “If you can’t handle met at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”)  Ebba and Tomas have undoubtedly witnessed each other at their best and worst moments, and Tomas’s actions during the avalanche would undoubtedly qualify as one of his worst moments (his ensuing self-denial and defense of his actions don’t exactly absolve him, either).  But marriage is also about mutual respect and courtesy for one another, and the acknowledgment that no one is perfect and some things are better left withheld from friends and other loved ones.

            That being said – while Tomas’s actions may have been indefensible, is it any better that Ebba confronts and embarrasses him about them in front of their mutual friends?  Yes, Tomas may be in denial about the severity of the situation (similarly, male audience members may grow impatient with the movie’s near-obsessive focus on the event), but Ebba’s decision to share these details with friends not once but on two separate occasions constitutes a major marriage faux pas.  If we are to believe that Tomas truly cares about his wife and children, isn’t it natural to expect that his reaction to her feelings of abandonment would be his own sadness and regret that he couldn’t have acted as a better protector?  Isn’t Ebba’s public shaming of her husband unnecessarily cruel?  Or is it justified on the grounds that it was Tomas’s own selfish and uncaring behavior that led her to have these feelings in the first place, and a public airing of grievances may be just the stern treatment Tomas deserves?

            As you can probably see, Force Majeure is designed to push buttons with viewers (particularly married ones) and make you ask serious questions about your own strengths and inadequacies.  It’s so easy to read a book or watch a film about the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement and proclaim that had you been there, you would have sacrificed yourself in the name of justice and Universal Good.  Watching Force Majeure, I thought about the first thing I would reach for in the event of a fire at my house (the answer is not my iPhone.)  But at the same time, as Tomas -- or someone like Steve Bartman -- essentially tells his friends: You weren’t there, you didn’t see what I saw, and regardless of what you want to believe, had you been there you more likely than not would have done what I did.

            Of course, Steve Bartman had the luxury of pulling a Henry Hill and going into hiding, removing himself from the moralistic scowls of casual onlookers and talking heads.  Tomas and Ebba have no such luck, and have to endure the rest of their vacation – hell, the rest of their lives – with the knowledge that Tomas acted less than heroically during time of crisis (in this respect, he joins the likes of one George Costanza).  How can their marriage, which may have already been fragile to begin with, continue to survive?  What’s fascinating about Force Majeure is that Tomas and Ebba both desperately want to forget about the events during the avalanche – this should be Exhibit A in the school of “the less said, the better.”  Put another couple into this scenario and maybe they laugh about it over a couple of drinks, or perhaps it’s so insignificant that it’s never even formally brought up.  But Tomas and particularly Ebba prove incapable of not talking about it and not thinking about it, and this begins what appears to be a path leading down the road of self-destruction.  Like many unhappy married couples, they are the only ones laying the bricks.

            There are other characters in Force Majeure.  There’s the couple Tomas and Ebba dine with, who go back to their hotel room and naturally begin to question their own actions and inclinations if placed in the same circumstances.  There’s a married friend of Ebba’s seeing a much younger man, who informs her that monogamous relationships tend to have the toxic effect of defining an individual’s identity solely in relationship to the man or woman they are attached to.   Then there are Tomas and Ebba’s young children, Vera and Harry, who spend most of the vacation distracted by their iPads and yelling at their parents.  It’s possible to interpret these kids in a few ways: Their bossiness and aggression (at one point they kick Tomas and Ebba out of the hotel room) demonstrate how they are the products of a dysfunctional marriage.  Or maybe it’s just that they’re spoiled.  Or maybe they recognize that their parents may be on the brink of divorce and are trying to keep them together in whatever misguided and naïve ways they can.  Or maybe they don’t understand anything at all.    

            Force Majeure is not a perfect movie.  At times it is too slow-paced, the supporting characters are underdeveloped, and the final ten minutes feel tacked on and heavy-handed.  But Östlund is a masterful provocateur of resuscitating the baggage we want to sweep underneath the rug during a long marriage, and how small, casual moments are capable of revealing deep and profound defects.  Even more broadly, the film dares to ask questions about contemporary masculinity and the Tomas’ contested role as the “man as protector,” a socially conservative ideal now considered anachronistic and even politically incorrect today.  As George Costanza asks prophetically, “What kind of a topsy-turvy world do we live in where heroes are cast as villains?” The answer is a world where there are no heroes or villains, but only vulnerable husbands and wives whose personal insecurities and feelings of guilt need not necessarily require avalanches to be triggered.  

           (Note: Force Majeure is Sweden's official submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 87th Academy Awards.) 

Rating: 3.5 stars