In the
wonderful gangster film A Prophet, Niels Arestrup and Tahir Rahim played ersatz
father and son. In the Belgium
film Our Children, the two are together again to play…ersatz father and
son. All right. It may not have the same ring to it of
Hepburn and Tracy, but the two are wonderful together and perhaps the main
reason to see this domestic drama that, like Berberian…, starts out very
intriguingly, but soon enough stops going anywhere and stagnates about half way
through.
The movie is
really more about Murielle (played by Emilie Dequenne, the wonderful actress of
The Girl on the Train and Rosetta), who marries Mounir (Rahim). Mounir is Moroccan and was adopted by Andre
(Arestrup) after Andre married Mounir’s older sister so she could get her
papers. However, Mounir is not marrying
Murielle for citizenship; he truly does love her.
But this is
where things start taking an odd turn as it slowly becomes clear that, also
like Berberian…, something is off
here. First, Mounir asks Andre to come
on their honeymoon. At the wedding,
Mounir’s younger brother suggests something’s going on between Mounir and
Andre. Murielle and Mounir live in
Andre’s spacious apartment/doctor’s office and Andre pays all the bills while
Mounir works as his receptionist. When
Murielle suggests that she and Mounir move to Morocco
where the standard of living is cheaper, Andre says that if Mounir does, he
will never have anything to do with him again.
But what
exactly is going on behind all this in your face subtext? One keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop,
but it never does. So was there
something really going on or are the writers (Thomas Bidegain, Joachim Lafosse,
and Mattieu Reynaert) and the director (Lafosse again) just misleading us for
some reason? Well, Lafosse only knows
and he ain’t telling. And Murielle does
the same thing, or actually doesn’t do the same thing, as Gilderoy in
Berberian…: she never asks. She never
asks what most people would ask somewhere along the way: just why is Andre so
generous and paying for everything and just what is he getting out of this odd
situation?
As the story
goes on and Murielle has four children, she becomes increasingly stressed out
and depressed. And then she does the
unthinkable. But why? I really couldn’t tell you except that she
was depressed, but I’m sorry, I just didn’t buy it. And though I did empathize with Murielle and
her situation, it’s almost impossible to pull off a Medea. But at least Media had a clear and
understandable motive—revenge. Murielle
reasons seem a bit too vague and confusing.
So, for me, it doesn’t really have the emotional impact the movie is
aiming for.
Though I
think Arestrop and Rahim give the best performances, it’s Dequenne who won at Cannes
(in the Un Certain Regard section). And
maybe they’re right in a way. Murielle’s
character made no real sense to me and I felt there was no character for her to
play, but in spite of this, she does succeed in giving a first rate
performance—from my perspective a triumph of talent over substance.
Finally,
Barbara is Christian (Yella and Jerichow) Petzold’s new directorial
effort. It stars his usual leading lady,
Nina Hoss, both of whom are becoming two of Germany’s
most exciting emerging talents.
The story
takes place in 1980 East Germany,
still under Communist rule. Barbara is a
doctor who has just been released from prison for some unspecified crime
against the state. She is sent to a
small town where she is to perform her duties at a local hospital while being
heavily watched by the authorities. At
the same time, she is planning to escape the country with the help of her West
German lover, that is until her plans are complicated by her becoming
emotionally involved in some local issues at her place of employment (don’t you
hate when that happens?).
Barbara is
quite effective in the first half. There
is a wonderful feel of time and place, the very atmosphere tinged with a
feeling of despair and sadness best symbolized by her riding a bike past a
lonely cross in the middle of nowhere while the strong wind bellows around her;
even when she’s in open country and can see for miles, she’s still afraid that
somehow, some way, someone is watching her.
The details of everyday life in East
Germany are convincingly dramatized (having
to be careful what you say and where you say it because you don’t know who will
report you and who won’t). And there are
deeply moving scenes of a young pregnant woman being forced into a work camp
(called a death camp by Barbara) and the unclear diagnosis of young man who has
tried to commit suicide.
Foss is
excellent in the title roll, a character who has to be very careful about
sharing her emotions. As an actress, she
has some of the same qualities of Greta Garbo, a haunting beauty who was also very
reserved in her emotions so that when she laughed, as Barbara does
occasionally, it lights up the scene. But the writers, Harun Farocki and Petzold, do
her a bit of a disservice. As the movie
goes on, it tends to lose its way mainly because Barabara is given two
competing motivations for her actions, while also not given enough time or the
structure to develop either one for their maximum emotional impact. Instead, the closer one gets to the end, the
more muddled everything becomes until the plot loses all forward momentum and
the ending feels a bit too anticlimactic.
No comments:
Post a Comment