Filmmaniak

Club Zero is a mildly provocative film with a notable subject, but it comes across as only a very shallow satire that only shakily skims over the theme consisting in criticism of self-indulgent consumerism. On the one hand, it encourages a more responsible approach to eating habits, but on the other hand, it makes fun of alternative nutrition trends. Mainly, however, the film lacks sharp edges, as it doesn’t dare to get into anything that’s truly radical, nor is it in any way shocking or even unsettling. Though it is visually engaging and successfully works in places with the motifs of hypocrisy and elitism among the upper social classes and the building of a cult of personality around the schoolmistress, whose manipulative influence has harmful effects on the adolescent children, the film rather fails in other respects, as it doesn’t exploit its potential and leaves the impression of merely being a bit of festival bizarreness whose introductory warning about the explicit depiction of eating disorders is just an empty gesture.

About Dry Grasses is an extremely complex and layered film-novel containing numerous themes – from a teacher’s abuse of power from a position of authority to an intellectual-love triangle – which overlap without any of them being clearly dominant. All of the film’s components, including the detail-oriented directing, the surgically precise screenplay and the fantastic cinematography, which in long shots frequently captures toiling characters and their long, lively exchanges of dialogue, creating an extremely pliable and realistic world that completely absorbs the viewer. It’s just necessary to get used to the company of the misanthropic and morally dubious protagonist and the omnipresent, extremely cynical tone towards humanity.

The ultimate food-porn. A supreme tribute to French gastronomy, in which most of the characters are hedonists and gourmets, top chefs and experts in the areas of food, animals and nature. They’re also great conversationalists, so they also talk about food and its origins and history in an exquisite way. A large part of the film is composed of scenes of cooking refined dishes and their subsequent consumption, for which viewers are prepared in the opening half-hour sequence featuring dancing between cooktops and serving on the table, accompanied only by the ambient sounds of the kitchen and epicurean sighs. The connective tissue between courses is a tender romantic storyline in which expressions of love are never delivered without a candlelit dinner and the shared stirring of vegetable broth or Burgundy sauce is a prelude to intimate moments. A film in which the way to one’s heart is really through their stomach and in which even the anatomical description of eating sounds like love poetry.

This documentary works with an interesting concept in which the director brings her relatives and former neighbours into one room in order to recollect the past of their families and their street, especially in the context of the massacre of civilians in Morocco at the beginning of 1980s, which was carried out in response to demonstrations against rising bread prices. The powerful personal accounts are accompanied by illustrative shots taken in a detailed cardboard model of the street and the surrounding area with all of the houses and the people who lived there at the time, each of whom is represented by a clay figurine in the model. The search for the truth opens up old wounds, but the confrontation between the residents of one house (particularly in relation to the strict, despotic grandmother whose rules everyone had to follow) apparently didn’t lead to as much friction as the director had perhaps hoped for during filming. The recollections of the past are thus interspersed with more mundane shots of a birthday party and the director’s mother singing. The initial promise of a glimpse beneath the veil of lies that the uncompromising and feared matriarch had built up over the years thus remains unfulfilled, as it is not even clear what the substance of her lies was supposed to be.

A film about two brothers whose lives are shaken by several events, including the unintentional serious injury of an elderly lady and the hospitalisation of their dying father somewhere in faraway Luxembourg. The tone of the film shifts vaguely between serious social drama and comedy rich with scenes and dialogue abounding with black humour. The narrative is similarly unfocused, as it initiates minor storylines and then abandons them, seemingly without leading to anything in particular. However, the ending brings the brothers’ journey to Luxembourg and offers a few pleasingly constructed twists, so the film ultimately redeems itself with verbal humour together with a series of fateful moments full of the ironies of life.

This tender romantic drama tells the story of two people who are clearly meant for each other, but fate determines that their steps will not lead them to a life together. Spanning three decades with three major jumps in time, the narrative focuses only on a trio of characters who are united by the theme of fateful predestination and the millennial interconnection of their souls. The bittersweet, timeless story benefits from reminiscences of long-ago loves, painful relationship situations and well-cast actors who shine even without words. Though the beginning may seem somewhat rushed along with the characters’ entry into adulthood, the narrative comes together and focuses on what is essential. Sometimes strength and beauty really do lie in simplicity, especially when that simplicity consists in precise, economical directing and clever and mature dialogue.

This deeply felt and precisely directed drama initially deals with social issues, but then allows its entirely believable characters of an ex-convict mother and her young son to find their way out of the misery of their lives thanks to their strong will and determination and to lead a normal life with a bright future, though it’s definitely not an easy life. With the passage of time, the mother shifts away from the position of protagonist and her son comes more to the fore, thus shifting the point of view. The final act then presents an unexpected shot to the heart and reveals that the well-thought-out and solidly constructed narrative is even more sophisticated than it may have seemed before.

This well-made debut works with the subject of morality and existential fear, but because of its sluggish pace, it smoulders very slowly  and even the suspense builds only minimally. For that matter, the film is given more spark by the tense relations between the Taiwanese officers and the Filipino engineers on the cargo ferry than from the situations arising from the motif of the migrant secretly concealed in the bowels of the ship.

The best part of Omen is its first twenty minutes, in which the protagonist travels from Belgium to his native Congo after eighteen years to see his family, who cling to traditional values and once rejected him because of an alleged demonic curse. Instead of understanding and reconciliation, however, he encounters only unrelenting scorn, benighted prejudices and obscurantist practices. This part is absolutely excellent, but then the narrative unfortunately splinters among a larger number of characters and unsteadily spreads out to cover a broader range of themes, from shamanic healing of venereal diseases to the territorial rivalry of youthful street gangs. Despite being slightly chaotic and unclear, the fragmented narrative, arranged in chapters and taking place during the Easter holidays, still manages to be entertaining thanks both to its distinctiveness, which draws on tribal cultural traditions, and to its bizarre scenes including, for example, an African version of a gingerbread house.

A Zen spiritual film with a magical atmosphere and emphasis on the motif of sleep and dreams. Watching it is akin to having a transcendental experience. After the first half, which takes place among monks in a Laotian monastery and the surrounding area, the film invites viewers to take part in accompanying the soul of a deceased elderly woman into the next life. The second half of the film comes with an endearing point and a fundamental change of location, though it also contains unnecessary additional literalness and less interesting action. Full of poetic melancholy, Samsara is a remarkable meditative film that offers deep thoughts and several original and understated creative concepts. Ideally, however, it would have ended shortly after its original, unconventional and long-resonating middle section.