AFI’s EU Showcase ’15: Liza the Fox Fairy

Japan is the land of the kaidan and the grudge. Nobody does ghosts better. Even in a whimsical retro-1970s capitalist Hungary, you will find Japanese ghosts tormenting the living. The spirit of 1960s crooner Tomi Tani might look benign, but he will cause all sorts of problems for a naïve private nurse in Károly Ujj Mészáros’s Liza, the Fox-Fairy (trailer here), which screens as part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.

For years, Liza has dutifully cared for Marta, the Hungarian widow of the former Japanese ambassador. Through her employer, Liza has absorbed a love of Japanese history and culture, including Tani’s sugary grooves. For years, the singer has inexplicably haunted Marta’s flat, but only Liza is able to see him, assuming he is a benevolent spirit. Tani has fallen in love with her, but that is a bad thing, especially when the lonely-hearted Liza finally starts to get proactive about romance.

When everyone who gets close to her starts to die, including Marta, Liza figures out she has been cursed to become a mythological Fox-Fairy. All men who love her are doomed to such a fate. Naturally, the police start to suspect her of multiple murders, especially since she inherited her employer’s flat, over the objections of Marta’s greedy relatives. The only exception is the pure-hearted but dangerously clumsy Sgt. Zoltan, an ardent fan of Finnish country music, who becomes Liza’s other unlikely flat-mate.

Fox-Fairy looks like a Wes Anderson film on twee steroids, but it has a surprising edge to it. Arguably, it is more kaidan than quirk-fest, which is cool. However, Liza and Zoltan are also refreshingly gentle souls, whom even the most jaded viewers will root for. Evidently, Mészáros and Bálint Hegedűs adapted a stage play by Zsolt Pozsgai for the big screen, but it is hard to imagine how all their visual mischief-making could be rendered for live theater. Still, it would be worth watching Broadway take a shot at it, even if the production fell on its face. Frankly, the film has way more special effects than you would imagine, but it would be either spoilery or utterly baffling to try to explain their context. Yet, Mészáros always maintains a very personal vibe throughout the film.

Mónika Balsai and Szabolcs Bede-Fazekas are terrific as Liza and Zoltan, respectively. They are both endearing in a puppy dog kind of way and achingly earnest, without ever getting cloying. Likewise, the Danish-Japanese David Sakurai is gleefully evil and impressively suave as Tani. As if he were not entertainingly villainous enough, Zoltán Schmied truly personifies oily sleaze as Henrik, Marta’s playboy nephew, whom Liza mistakenly falls for.

Somehow, Liza manages to be both cute and dark, which is quite a feat of filmmaking on Mészáros’s part. It is a wildly inventive film, but the style never overwhelms the characters or narrative. Very highly recommended, Liza, the Fox-Fairy screens this coming Thursday (12/17) as part of the AFI’s EU Film Showcase.

AFI’s EU Showcase ’15: The Magic Mountain

Where could a mountaineering Polish dissident go to most effectively fight Communism in the 1980s? Obviously Afghanistan. Of course, getting there was no easy feat and staying alive once he arrived was even trickier. However, the late Adam Jacek Winker was not easily dissuaded. Anca Damian tells his extraordinary story in the animated documentary The Magic Mountain (trailer here), which screens as part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.

For Winker, the opposing the spread of Communism was a decidedly personal matter. His cousin and uncle were among those murdered by the Soviets at Katyn. He was able to get out of Poland while the getting was relatively good, but he also felt guilty about abandoning his homeland in a time of prolonged suffering. As a result, he was always looking for a way to take the fight back to the Soviets. While living in Paris, he was a bit of a gadfly, providing unwanted reality checks for the French Communists’ Labor Day festivities, but he was truly called to Afghanistan.

Since Winker only had a French “refugee” passport, getting to Afghanistan, by way of Pakistan, was a complicated process. However, once there, Winker fell in with the Mujahedeen relatively quickly. He had the extreme good fortune to join up with Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir,” an ardent foe of Communism, who later rejected the Taliban’s oppressive fundamentalism just as vigorously. Alas, Mountain also serves as an elegy to the assassinated Massoud, as well as his somewhat eccentric Polish friend and comrade.

Indeed, some the most poignant moments of Mountain focus on Winker’s efforts to promote and then memorialize the fallen Afghan hero. Yet, with respects to her central figure, Damian never descends into blinkered hagiography. Winker’s fault are readily identified, making him the stuff of classical tragedy, but viewers will understand where his zeal came from, and admire him for harnessing it.

Mountain incorporates archival photos of Winker and Massoud into the distinctive and diverse work of its team of animators and artists, including Theodore Ushev, Tomek Ducki, Matei Focsa Neagoe, Dan Panaitescu, and Raluca Popa. Frankly, a few sequences are almost excessively stylized to the point of self-defeating abstraction, but other visuals are absolutely arresting. Regardless, the film is always powered along by its sweepingly dramatic narrative.

Winker really was a character—a heroic character. He was also a principled individualist, who did not let his experiences in Afghanistan blind him to the dangers of Islamist ideology in his final years. Basically, he stayed on the right side of history, every step of the way, making his life story quite fascinating and instructive. Very highly recommended for fans of animation and biographical documentaries, The Magic Mountain screens this Saturday (12/12) as part of the AFI’s EU Film Showcase.

AFI’s EU Showcase ’15: Tale of Tales

Neapolitan poet Giambattista Basile’s fairy tale collection predated Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, but despite their subtitle, “Entertainment for Little Ones,” they are considered idiosyncratically macabre and even a little NSFW. Of course, those are both rather cinematic qualities. Matteo Garrone duly emphasizes the strange and baroque in Tale of Tales (trailer here), his English language adaptation of a trio of intertwined Basile fables, which screens as part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.

Three neighboring kingdoms largely coexist quite peacefully, because their respective monarchs are so self-absorbed with their own issues. Thanks to the help of a necromancer, the Queen of Longtrellis magically conceives the son she always desired, at the mere cost of her indulgent husband (and basically her soul). However, Prince Elias never adequately returns her codependent love. Instead, he prefers to spend time with the commoner Jonah, who is his exact spitting image.

The King of Highmountain is equally problematic in the completely opposite way. He ignores his antsy-to-be-married daughter, Princess Violet, preferring to obsess over his abnormally large trained flea. When he finally makes a show of arranging a contest for her hand, he inadvertently grants her hand to an ogre.

Meanwhile, the horndog King of Strongcliff has fallen in lust with the voice of the peasant Dora. However, he does not realize she is one of two old crone sisters living hand-to-mouth in a cottage on his estate. Feigning coyness, Dora manages to hold off the King until she can come to him under the dark of night. Complications ensue.

If you haven’t realized yet, there is sex in these fairy tales. There are also flashes of violence that are shocking in the moment, but not at all gratuitous. Be that as it may, it is easy to see why the archetypal source material has been largely passed over by animators and children’s publishers. Tale of Tales still seems likely an unlikely direction for an ultra-realist like Garrone, but he reportedly claims all his films have a kinship with fairy tales. You can sort of see that in a morality tale like Reality, but it is less apparent in the thinly fictionalized social expose, Gomorrah.

Regardless, there is a lot of cool stuff in Tale, including Toby Jones talking to a giant flea and Salma Hayek eating a dragon’s heart. There are also tightrope walkers, damsels in distress, damsels causing distress, shapeshifters, and Shakespearean confusion with twins. Garrone and editor Marco Spoletini shrewdly time the shifts between narrative strands, maintaining a nice up-tempo pace. Alexandre Desplat also contributes a very Desplat-sounding score (classy, but not particularly distinctive). However, production designer Dimitri Capuani and the battery of art directors creates a richly detailed fantasy world that is both lovely and sinister.

Tale of Tales could be considered The Princess Bride’s evil twin, making it exactly the sort of fairy tale movie we have needed. It is much more fun than Catherine Breillart’s fairy tale films and more subversive than Snow White and the Huntsman. Recommended for fans of dark fantasy, Tale of Tales screens this Saturday (12/12) as part of the AFI’s EU Film Showcase.

AFI’s EU Showcase ’15: The Fencer

Upper body strength means little in fencing. It is all about the legs. Lunging and retreating are key to the sport, or as Endel Nelis puts it: “controlling the distance between you and your opponent.” Those instincts have also served him well as a fugitive from Stalin’s secret police. He has come to Haapsalu, Estonia, because the provincial town is the perfect place to lay low. However, his fencing classes attract dangerous attention in Klaus Härö’s biographical drama, The Fencer (trailer here), Finland’s official foreign language Oscar submission, which screens as part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.

The school principal is the sort of petty apparatchik who resents any form of talent or accomplishment. Naturally, he takes an instinctive dislike to Nelis, the new physical education teacher from sophisticated St. Petersburg (or Leningrad as a Party hack might call it). Nelis has no intention of rocking the boat or standing out in any way. He is working under an assumed name, hoping to avoid capture and exile to Siberia. Against his will, Nelis was pressed into service by the German Army. He managed to avoid combat by deserting into the forest, but he has still been declared an enemy of the people.

Naturally, Nelis is required to voluntarily manage an athletic club, but the principal refuses to allot him any resources. However, when he starts giving fencing lessons with mere switches cut from trees, many students are intrigued. Of course, the principal thinks little of this “feudal” sport, but parental support temporarily ties his hands. While Principal Skinneruu plots against him, Nelis prepares to take a small team to compete in an all-Soviet open invitational.

Based on a real historical figure, The Fencer ought to be catnip for Oscar voters. Like Mr. Holland’s Opus with fencing foils, crossed with The Lives of Others, Härö and screenwriter Anna Heinämaa tell the true story of an initially cold and standoffish teacher, who comes to care about his students as they deal with some pretty extreme challenges, like the arrest and exile of family members. It is not a dramatic conversion, but a subtle evolution of character that Märt Avandi plays with great strength and nuance. He also develops terrific chemistry with Joonas Koff and Liisa Koppel as his two star pupils, both of whom have “missing” fathers.

There are a number of scenes that could have been embarrassingly cheesy and saccharine, but at each potential pitfall, Härö reins in the film, going for a quietly stoic Baltic moment instead. As a result, he truly earns the comparatively sentimental closing. It is also impressive how much attention was given to proper fencing technique. They really are doing it right.

Throughout the film, Härö vividly captures a sense of the late Stalinist era paranoia, as well as the drabness of Soviet life in general. It is also engaging on a human level. These are reserved people, but when they make a connection, it is meaningful. Very highly recommended, especially for Academy members, The Fencer screens this Thursday (12/10) as part of the AFI’s EU Film Showcase.

AFI’s EU Showcase ’15: 1944

Estonian fought Estonian, but it was not a civil war. Fifty-five thousand men from the small Baltic nation were shanghaied into service with the Red Army during the first Soviet occupation. When fortunes on the Eastern Front temporarily tilted Germany’s way, another 72,000 Estonians were drafted, primarily by the Waffen-SS, because the Wehrmacht maintained a strict German national identity. The Estonian wartime experience becomes the stuff of high dramatic tragedy in Elmo Nüganen’s 1944 (trailer here), Estonia’s official foreign language Oscar submission, which screens as part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.

Like most of his Estonian comrades, Karl Tammik has little hope of living through the war. Although he has no love for the National Socialists, he is resigned to his service in their army, in part because he holds such a grudge against the Soviets. Tammik also bitterly blames himself for not moving quicker to prevent his family’s exile to Siberia. He is particularly haunted by the memory of his baby sister. Under his leadership, the ragtag Estonian unit will temporarily help hold the Tannenberg Line.

When momentum swings back to the Soviets, Nüganen and screenwriter Leo Kunnas shift their focus to an Estonian Red Army platoon. In a twist of fate worthy of Sophocles, Tammik will face Jüri Jõgi in the heat of battle. It was Jõgi’s collaborator father who denounced Tammik’s family to the Communists. However, the son has none of his father’s ideological zeal, at least not anymore. Yet, since he has the right sort of family background, the ruthless political officer is determined to recruit him as an informer against his unusually competent commander.

Nüganen stages some of the best trench warfare scenes ever filmed. He also convincingly portrays the confusion and arbitrariness of warfighting without letting the film descend into random bedlam. Basically, viewers can tell exactly how doomed the characters are, in ferociously realistic terms. Yet, there is also a sweeping irony that somehow seems to flow naturally out of the fundamental absurdity of the Estonians’ situation. Kunnas structures the film with almost perfect symmetry, escalating the grief and sorrow with each reprise.

As Tammik, Kaspar Velberg broods like a man possessed, despite his natural Baltic reserve. Likewise, Kristjan Üksküla’s Jõgi quietly wears his angst and guilt on his sleeve like badge of dishonor, until he finally explodes (by Baltic standards). Peeter Tammearu is also profoundly loathsome as Kreml the political officer. Not surprisingly, there are not many roles for women in 1944, but Maken Schmidt makes the most of her screen time as Tammik’s sister Aino. It is a heartbreaking but complex performance that will knock the wind out of you.

Nüganen’s battle scenes can hang with anything Hollywood has produced in recent years, but it is the massive micro and macro ironies that make 1944 such a powerhouse. Based on its graphic depictions of the Red Army’s brutal tactics, the Russians are sure to have Nüganen and Kunnas’s names on a list if they ever invade Estonia again—and if you find that scenario highly unlikely then you really need to see 1944. Very highly recommended, 1944 screens this Saturday (12/5) as part of the AFI’s EU Film Showcase.

AFI’s EU Showcase ’15: Bridgend

These Welsh teens ought to be happily working in coal mines and listening to Tom Jones. Instead, they spend too much time in a creepy internet chatroom that may or may not be encouraging them to take their own lives. Many have already. As a result, their county has become internationally notorious as a so-called “suicide cluster.” It is a very real, still unresolved tragedy that gets a fictional work-up in Danish documentarian Jeppe Rønde’s English language narrative Bridgend (trailer here), which screens as part of the AFI’s 2015 EU Film Showcase.

Dave the copper has returned to his ancestral home of Bridgend with his moody teenaged daughter Sara, despite knowing suicide runs rife amongst the young adult population. There he will apparently be the only civil servant investigating Wales’ most notorious string of untimely deaths. Hey, a gig’s a gig—and what’s the worst that can happen? Despite her Englishness, Sara quickly falls in with her fellow classmates, because they presumably have open spots for new mates.

It does not take long for tragedy to strike anew, but she is shocked to hear it is Thomas, the school’s bad boy with whom she had already developed a complicated relationship. She soon falls back on her first choice, the ineffectual minister’s son Jamie. He is a sensitive lad, who takes Thomas’s kid brother under his wing, but he seems to know more about the suicide epidemic than he lets on.

Rønde’s film is ill-conceived right from the start, largely since the Bridgend phenomenon remains an open mystery. You can tell he is conflicted, laboring to find the right tone and structure, vacillating between some sort of high-end genre conspiracy yarn and a meditative examination of grief and alienation. Magnus Nordenhof Jønck’s lush cinematography is stunningly evocative and Rønde has an undeniably keen sense of visual composition, but the film suffers from an initial, insurmountable credibility gap. You just can’t accept a single widower father would knowingly move his angsty, overwrought daughter to a known suicide cluster.

Problematically, Game of Thrones’ Hannah Murray and Josh O’Connor are both rather vanilla as Sara and Jamie. Frankly, the film feels the lack of Scott Arthur’s Thomas and his visceral brooding rather acutely. Elinor Crawley is also so charismatic as Sara’s welcoming new BFF Laurel, we necessarily fear for her longevity in the film.

Bridgend looks great, but it is impossible to know what to make of it. Clearly, Rønde had no idea where to take it, especially since he could not give it any sort of closure, per se. Instead, it is a strangely accomplished exercise in flailing about, with no sense of direction. It is a bold, potentially offensive failure that will probably gain cult defenders over time. For the forewarned, it screens this Wednesday (12/2) as part of the AFI’s EU Film Showcase.