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Azor (2021)
Aggressively anti-action take on hearts of darkness/apocalypse now
This review contains spoilers and this movie is particularly designed to be watched without spoilers so please read the review after watching the film.
The opening of the film is a view of palm trees. It is the precise same opening frame you will see when you watch Apocalypse Now, one of Hollywood's biggest movie spectacles. But as the film unfolds we are treated to a movie that has no real spectacle and is aggressively anti-action, so the comparison seems absurd. Fontana and Llinas have crafted a movie that is free of action not because of budgetary constraints but by artistic choice. This is a modernist take on Hearts of Darkness and its themes of colonial imperialism, cultural dissonance and moral nihilism.
The structure is a series of dialogue set pieces in which our Marlowe, Ivan de Weil, navigates the murky financial world in 80s junta-era Argentina. He is new and the waters are muddy. The unseen Kurtz of the piece, his missing colleague, hovers at the outer edges of the screen. De Weil passes through a series of meetings with increasingly sinister and more powerful stakeholders. He does not know what is going on and neither does the audience. The tension in each scene is maintained by methodical multilingual interaction, with no clear picture of who is a good guy and who has gone rotten.
De Weil is motivated by a sense of professionalism to his clients and also by a need to maintain his business. Added to this is a keen sense of his own precarious position as a male breadwinner. His companion on the trip is his wife. She is charming throughout, they are the epitome of a modern professional team. But in private she presses her husband to succeed. He feels a sense of impending emasculation should the trip end in failure. He must do the 'manly' thing.
Spoilers
The film culminates in a trip up river. De Weil arrives at what appears to be a trade of some kind, there are trucks and men and someone is in charge, reading from a list. The list sounds mundane. It must be code for something. But code for what? Guns? Ammo? Drugs? As the list continues it becomes clear that it isn't code at all. This is not a trade concerned with horrors to come but a trade concerning the horrors that have already occurred.
What will De Weil do? Well, he will do what any good colonial always does - he will exploit it.
Country Music (2019)
Hugely enjoyable
Ken Burns has delivered touchstone documentaries on many subjects, the Civil War and Vietnam War amongst them. This on its face is less serious and certainly much more enjoyable but it also delivers a story every bit as important to America's cultural, social and political life. Essential stuff
1917 (2019)
An immersive thrill
1917 takes a familiar storytelling approach to the calamity of the western front. Send a couple of fictional characters into a real world event and follow them around. We are introduced to two honest British tommies and literally follow them, without a break, through the crucial details of the conflict. There is no mistaking the intention of the film as memoriam to the men who fought in the war. Mendes dedicates the film to a family member who was there and wants us to remember what happened. The film does not raise the question of how or why. It seeks only to examine the what of it, for this is the only bandwidth available to any Private or Lance Corporal in war.
The plot is basic. Two Lance Corporals are sent into hostile territory to call off a doomed attack. The film is structured into 6 set pieces (excluding exposition and coda). Each is their own short story that could be played in any order.
Following our two NCOs through the desolation of no man's land, the horrors are impressionistic. We barely notice dead bodies camouflaged in muck. A few misty tree trunks imply the ground was partly forested before being pounded to mud. Further in, we see churned up humanity left to the vermin. In the opposition trenches the German resources are noticeably superior to the Brits. The Brits have sandbags and corrugated iron lining their trenches whilst the Germans have concrete walls. The Brit dugouts are small and dark, whilst the Germans are billeted in underground barracks. And this is the position the Germans have abandoned for far superior defences! The Germans are better trained too. A key facet of the film is the contrast between naive British soldiering and the ruthlessness of the German men. Time and again Schofield is caught out by more decisive counterparts. The key moment in the film occurs whilst demonstrating mercy to an injured German pilot. They do what any decent civilian would have done, but these are not civilians and it does not end well.
Must Schofield sacrifice his sense of humanity and decency to be a better soldier? The film's answer is resoundingly no. Following a near fatal exchange of rifle fire with a sniper, Schofield does not fire a single other shot, despite opportunities (and dire need) to do so. It may be the case that he has simply run out of ammo but this is not explicitly shown, so it is left to your own judgement what motivates his reticence. His only other kill is by strangulation, but this is clear cut survival.
In a hellish sequence, surrounded by fire and smoke, we meet the only civilian and only woman in the story. A sort of good witch offering safe harbour from a sea of horror. She patches up the wounded man and tries to keep him safe from the outside world. He leaves. A safe harbour is no place for a solider anymore than the burning town is any place for a civilian.
The most moving sequence has an eerie feel reminiscent of Tarkovsky or 'Come and See'. After a horrifying scramble over bodies of dead civilians, we hear ethereal singing coming from the woods. Through the trees we see hundreds of faceless men listening to a human voice singing a folk hymn. Here is the lost generation. The millions that left and didn't come home. Their very absence from Britain immeasurably changed its future in unknown ways. Deakins' camera wheels around slowly to reveal some of the faces. Here are teenage boys transfixed by the last moment of human produced beauty they will ever witness. As soon as the singing stops, they wake from the dream and return to human produced terror. We go with them, desperate to call a halt.
In the end the officer in command sees no hope for these men. If they are not sacrificed today, they will be next week. It doesn't really make any difference, we will simply follow orders. The irony is that deferentially following orders is what put everyone in these trenches in the first place. New orders might save them today but aren't going to save them in the long run.
One technical quibble. By necessity the artillery explosions in the final charge are CGI'd into the scene but they cross the eyeline where Schofield is running and this takes us out of the picture. We lose the very 'you are there' essence of the film up to that point. Nevertheless, expect to see the peerless Roger Deakins pick up his second Oscar on a technically challenging production and even in a strong field for Best Picture, you wouldn't bet against this.
Noah (2014)
Thought provoking epic
The term 'biblical epic' is enough to render the most sensible film-goer numb at the prospect of another bombastic smash over the skull. 'Ben Hur', 'The Ten Commandments' or 'The Passion of the Christ' do not inspire much confidence in cinema's ability to render the human element from the spectacle demanded of big budget movies. Full disclosure – I am an atheist. I take an interest in biblical stories purely from a curiosity standpoint.
Mainstream Christianity and Judaism have long since abandoned the position that these stories are literally true, more often viewing the bible as a talisman for the spiritual guidance of the flock. The genocides, slavery, rape, torture and desecration of humanity that exists in so many of the bible's canon are often glossed over by the faithful today but those stories were written with a purpose. They found an audience willing to listen, believe and act on them. Who were these people? What was the state of their humanity? Did they have had the ability to think, to feel and to empathise as we do. Did they have the capacity to reason right from wrong, separate truth from fiction? What were they really like and would the answer shame us? We have no way to know for sure who these people were and how they thought. The documentary and archaeological evidence can be dug up and appraised, analysed and speculated upon. These are academic pursuits beyond the casual reach of the general public. Ultimately it falls on mainstream storytellers to breathe life into the past, through novels, TV and movies.
The story of the flood and Noah is one of the truly awesome biblical tales. Global warming and climate change alarmists lend the story fresh impetus. The challenge to combat climate change may be a challenge from on high. The Lord himself said every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. The challenge of rising sea levels may yet prove him right. Advances in science have reached a point where catastrophic flooding might be avoided but there seems little inclination to do so.
In this telling we see Noah and his family living far from human society. What glimpses we see of the world of men are fearful and hellish in imagery. Men are led by brutal force and scarce resources are rationed to feral masses. Noah is driven by fear and contempt for mankind. The set-up is told faithfully. Things get interesting when the filmmakers deviate from the text. In this version Noah has lived a devout and righteous life. As Noah watches the degraded humanity on the outskirts of the forest he decides he cannot vouch for any men, not even his own offspring or successors. Goodness is not genetic. What may start from a place of honesty may become corrupted by greed or jealousy or any other vice of man. Noah comes to believe that the Creator wants man to die in order to allow decency to prevail on earth. However, it is not actually apparent to the audience that this is true. This is Noah's own judgment from his observations of the corrupted souls of men. He decrees to his family that they must be the last of their species. They will save the animal and plant kingdoms but they will not procreate. His family are not impressed.
When Ila announces her pregnancy, Noah resolves to murder the child if it is a girl. Here we see another divergence from biblical text. In the story of Abraham it is God's angel who stays Abraham's hand. Here, at the point of reckoning, Noah cannot bear the burden of infanticide and drops the knife of his own accord. Is he being weak or strong at this point? Was he just mad all along? Was it a test to see if he had the humanity to stay his own hand? Is this an inversion of the story of Abraham and Isaac, where the test is to prove his own mercy in defiance of God? The spectacle and narrative drive is provided by the clash between Noah and the men who need to get into the ark. A battle ensues between the fallen angels in the form of rock monsters called 'The Watchers' and the advancing hoard. The world of men are held back until the flood crashes upon the scene. The battle then distils down to an act of betrayal by Noah's son Ham. The youngster is at odds with his father's decisions, especially allowing the death of his girl, trampled underfoot by the masses. Ham harbours Tubal-cain, the dangerous king of men, on board the ark. It's a side story but one designed to emphasise the lack of control any man has over his own children. Ham is his own agent with his own emotional motivations. Noah cannot decide things for him without repercussions. By the end of the story Ham sets off on his own journey, leaving his family behind.
So, in the end, what do we learn about our ancient antecedents? The murderous and terrifyingly brutal nature of man portrayed here is as uncivilised as any you will see. But these hoards are illiterate, uncivilised and prone to all manner of ignorant superstitions, how are we connected to them? 20th Century history teaches us that even so called advanced civilisations can produce absolute calamity. It happened twice during that fateful century. Should an asteroid come and make man extinct would the world be a better place? Are we so arrogant to presume that it is God's design that we inhabit the earth? Nature in the deepest wilderness of the planet can provoke awe when left untouched by man. If we figure that an idyllic Garden of Eden could only really exist in the absence of man, then we could consider the world better off without us and the notion that original sin is a real and tangible thing.