The Creeps: Part III

PHOENIX (B+) - Go all the way or don't go noir.

Writer/director Christian Petzold and his star, Nina Hoss, team up again after a successful '80s period piece (based in East Germany), "Barbara," for this harrowing tale of a Holocaust survivor in the days immediately following the fall of the Third Reich. The film not only has the classic look and feel of that era's noir cinema, but it borrows the genre's most common device: the idiot plot.

Hoss plays Nelly Letz, who we first see horribly disfigured while her friend (cousin?) Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) drives her through an American checkpoint charlie and to Lene's home in Berlin (itself home to the desolate Phoenix cabaret). Nelly undergoes extensive plastic surgery that alters her looks.

In fact, when the bandages come off and she ventures out in public in search of her husband, he doesn't recognize her. Or at least we are supposed to believe that he doesn't know it's her. (Therein lies the main aspect of the idiot plot.) But Nelly looks enough like her old self to give lunky Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) a bright idea: a scheme in which this new lady portrays his wife and stages a valiant arrival by train, fresh from the camps. And then, he and "Nelly" will claim Nelly's fortune.

It's difficult to maintain credulity throughout this middle portion of the film, as Johnny dresses her like Nelly and schools her in Nellynalia. Nelly, meanwhile, delves into Lene's theory that Johnny was the one who gave Nelly up to the Nazis. (Lene, who's rather butch in her trousers, is either quite crushy on Nelly or fears for her well-being, or both.) Nelly plays along with Johnny and nearly trembles at the thought that Johnny truly loved her -- or may yet again.

Hoss is devastating as a wounded bird, traumatized by the horrors she has seen and endured. (Her face, with bags under her eyes, literally looks haunted.) Zehrfeld has the marshmallow stud visage of Brad Pitt and Brenden Fraser. (Friends, more attuned to classic cinema, saw Clark Gable.) Berlin, meanwhile, is in rubble -- a city destroyed by bombs and a people devastated by what has been unleashed in their name.

The story is both complicated and a bit corny. But Petzold knows his way around a narrative and provides subtle twists and turns as he ever so gradually churns this from a simmer to a slow boil. This could be an epic picture from the golden era, a poor sibling to "Casablanca," a rich homage to Hitchcock.

And the filmmaker has an ace up his sleeve the whole time -- a zinger of a final punchline that is both clever and unforgettable. (It seems like one of those instances in which a writer starts with a great ending and builds a story to lead up to it.) Petzold knows how to frame images and convey great emotion. Hoss is his muse (this is their eighth film together), and together they know how to break your heart.
 

Doc Watch: Fight the Power

 Two from PBS ...

UNION (A-minus) - With ultimate insider access, this granular documentary provides classic fly-on-the-wall observations of the rag-tag group that heroically organized thousands of workers at an Amazon plant on New York's Staten Island, the first ever bargaining unit sanctioned at a warehouse of the e-tail giant.

 

In the shadows of COVID in 2021, Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer formed the unaffiliated Amazon Labor Union, following a worker protest that had led to the firing of Smalls, who channeled his fury into an Ahab-like determination to topple a giant. Shunning an affiliation with a major national union, the ALU focused on grass-roots organizing, zeroing in on individual sign-ups in a short period of time at a facility whose workforce turns over roughly every six months. 

In all kinds of weather, a handful of diehards manned a tent at a bus stop outside the warehouse, offering food (and at one point weed) to win over the overworked crew members. We sit on on the leadership's Zoom meetings, where democracy gets messy (and prissy) at times (one of them will defect by the time the big vote arrives) but hope never dies. We trek with them to the offices of the National Labor Relations Board as they navigate the ancient bureaucracy, and hidden cameras take us inside the facility to lay bare the anti-union indoctrination sessions known as captive-audience meetings. 

Smalls, on balance, is a hero you can root for. He is a single father who displays an interesting mix of empathy for the workers and vengefulness toward the behemoth that tried to crush his spirit. Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story are dogged in their pursuit of the story, their cameras often rolling in predawn hours as the huddled masses spill out of buses, steeling themselves for another 10-hour shift on their feet, with too-few breaks. As if we needed another reminder of the reality behind our blithe online shopping addictions.

HANNAH ARENDT: FACING TYRANNY (B) - This is another matter-of-fact installment of Philosophy for Dummies, meaning a Philosophy 101 class for people like me. We get a tick-tock through the life and career of Hanna Arendt, the foe of totalitarianism who rose to prominence when she coined the term "the banality of evil" while covering the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 (reporting for the New Yorker magazine.

A German Jew, Arendt fled the rising Nazi regime in 1933 after briefly being incarcerated, settling in Paris, working toward a Jewish state in Palestine, before a brief pilgrimage to her postwar homeland and then becoming an American citizen in 1950, the year before she published The Origins of Totalitarianism." This "American Masters" production is a bit obsessed with her love life -- she famously dated the legendary Martin Heidegger (who would fall in with the Third Reich) and later had an open marriage. But it gives full berth to her words -- through archival interviews and her writings, voiced by actress Nina Hoss.  

The rise of the Nazis (later echoed in the Nixon-Vietnam era) should send chills down the spine of modern Americans, with a rhyme scheme readily apparent. We get this quote:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.  And the people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act, but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people, you can then do what you please.

The message from this surface-level analysis of one of the 20th century's big thinkers: Pay attention to the past; totalitarianism can take root anywhere and at any time.

Best of the Fest

The Santa Fe Film Festival made a welcome return to early December, if not to its glorious form of the past.  Let's not put too much pressure on it. The festival had a good run for about seven years in the '00s, and maybe it's working its way back to that level. We caught eight films this year. We start with the most commercially viable one and then rank the rest in order of preference.

"Rust and Bone" (B+) - I had high hopes for Jacques Audiard's follow-up to his epic "A Prophet," which is my favorite movie of the past few years. This new one is making early Top Ten lists, and Marion Cotillard's performance is powerful. But it doesn't add up or cohere as a story. I'm growing increasingly grumpy with any use of CGI lately, and I was distracted throughout by the technique of removing Cotillard's legs; the director lingers on her stumps as if unable to resist the urge every ten minutes or so of saying, "Looks real, don't it??" Technicalities aside, the actual connection between her sad character and the brute she falls for is rather weak. And the climactic scene of a frightening accident is superbly crafted but ends up standing out from the rest of the film and giving the whole production an oddly Hollywood ending. Wonderfully shot, though, throughout, and always engaging.

"Shun Li and the Poet" (A-minus) - A quiet, touching film about two immigrants forming a simple bond across cultural lines. It is set in a seaside town near Venice, Italy. Shun Li is from China, and she's working off some sort of debt as an indentured servant, hoping one day to earn enough to win back her freedom and her son, who is being kept from her. Bepi is Yugoslavian, known among his fellow fishermen as "the poet" for the simple rhymes he comes up with. When Bepi and Shun Li start to hang out, the small town talks, and her overlords are not happy. The rest unfolds believably and beautifully. (Trailer)

"Violeta Went to Heaven" (B+) - A powerful biopic of Violeta Parra, the Chilean folk singer and national hero. This smartly blends amazing music (all of Parra's songs are performed by actress Francisca Gavilan) with the story of a deeply troubled woman struggling to control her relationships with her children and her lovers. It could have been 15 minutes shorter, but I was mesmerized throughout. (Trailer)

"A.K.A. Doc Pomus" (B+) - An uplifiting and often giddy documentary about the prolific songwriter Doc Pomus ("Save the Last Dance for Me," "Teenager in Love," Ray Charles' "Lonely Avenue," "Little Sister," "This Magic Moment," "Viva Las Vegas," "Can't Get Used to Losing You," etal.), this is thoroughly entertaining and emotionally moving. Pomus contracted polio at age 6, requiring the use of crutches and eventually a wheelchair the rest of his life, making the story behind "Save the Last Dance" especially poignant (even as recounted by his ex-wife). This is a hagiography in many ways, so we don't get the full picture (his split from songwriting partner (and cousin-in-law) Mort Shulman is glossed over, as is Pomus' fall from the radar in the 1970s). But this is sheer fun, and you won't believe how little you know about the output of one of the greatest pop songwriters ever.

"Barbara" (B+) - A tight, efficient, low-vibe thriller about a woman sent to an East German town in 1980 to work as a doctor at a hospital while double-dipping as a spy for the West. This is a pale companion to the brilliant "Lives of Others," but it's lifted by solid lead performances by Nina Hoss (looking like an older Farrah Fawcett) and Ronald Zehrfeld. You can see the ending coming, but that doesn't detract from its effectiveness. This is old-fashioned human storytelling.

"Amour" (B) - I've been thinking about this for a week, and I still can't decide whether this is more frightening or tedious. An elderly couple are hit with the inevitable: one of them starts to decline physically. At its best, the couple and their grand apartment create a dread that reminded me of "Rosemary's Baby." And the subtle humor lends it gravitas. But at its worst, the story wears you down by making the same point repeatedly as it creaks toward a predictable ending. The leads, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, are compelling, but Isabelle Huppert, as their distracted daughter, is lost; she is symbolic of the thinness of the story overall. If you've ever cared for a loved one at the ugly end of existence or as they try to recover from a stroke, you'll be jolted by unsettling scenes of caregiving; but after a while, you might wonder what the point of such an exercise is.

"Hitler's Children" (B) - A strong doc about the descendants of the Nazi regime leaders.  Half their stories are rather dull (including Bettina Goering, who ended up in Santa Fe and, along with her brother, decided to become sterilized). A few are quite moving, including Niklas Frank, who writes and lectures on why we needn't respect or admire our parents, and Rainer Hoess, who returns to Auschwitz to witness the exact spot where not only Jews were killed but where his family had lived in comfort among the horrors. At the screening, some in the audience openly wept.

"In Another Country" (B-minus) - Another missed opportunity with Isabelle Huppert. This Korean film places her in three vignettes, held together by the wonderful human frailty of miscommunication. While some of those scenes, especially between Huppert's character and the young life guard, are funny and touching, the repetition dilutes the whole endeavor. Not funny enough to be a comedy, nor touching enough to be an effective drama.

Lost in Romania

 The long and the short of it from Radu Jude:

DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (B+) - This sprawling, raunchy, rollicking black comedy, ostensibly about hyper-commercialization, captures the zeitgeist of our crude, unraveling modern culture. Writer-director Radu Jude ("Aferim") takes our ad-addled Tik-Tok gurglings and shoves them back down our throats.

 

Ilinca Manolache stars as Angela, a harried, overworked production assistant supporting a multinational company's making of a self-serving workplace-safety film. She spends most of her time driving, often alone, captured in a claustrophobic side shot from the passenger seat of her car. She is addicted to bubble gum -- popping bubbles like a schoolgirl -- and recording herself spewing raunchy misogynist rants, employing a cheap video filter that transforms her into "Bobito," a bald bro with a monobrow and patchy facial hair.

Angela is perpetually jaded and a model of practicality as she pinballs around Budapest and beyond to attend the shoots of victims of workplace accidents who are manipulated into portraying their stories in just the right way to satisfy the expectations of the filmmakers (and shift blame from the employers). The film climaxes -- if a half hour hunk toward the end of a 2-hour 43-minute movie can be called that -- with a degrading scene of an industrial worker, surrounded by his family, forced to repeat and tweak his horrific tale over and over outside the scene of his accident, even as rain spatters them and the sun eventually starts to set. 

This might be Jude's self-loathing spilling out; he seems to be revealing the slimy truths of the filmmaking process in general and the unreliability of all narrators and witnesses. Angela's brute of an alter-ego represents the two ways of coping with the blurry crudeness of the modern, tech-tonic world. At times she'll wander just a few feet away from a shoot and we'll hear her wildly inappropriate MAGA-tinged rants while ordinary folks are trying to conduct business. Like many fame-seekers and online influencers she ironically has no app filter for her id.

Jude is a provocateur, an Eastern European Godard, smacking us across the face with a hand mirror. He splices in manipulated clips from an actual older film (Lucian Bratu’s 1981 drama "Angela merge mai departe"), about a cabdriver, also named Angela, who brings to mind Angie Dickinson's "Police Woman" -- all for no readily discernible reason. 

Break this into two pieces in order to ingest the nearly three hours of egested fulminations. Manolache can be riveting, with her streetwise manic energy. Stay for Nina Hoss ("Transit," "Barbara") as the floating head in Zoom videos, the Big Sister from abroad directing the peons carrying out the project. This is a fine rebound for Jude, whose more recent effort, "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn," aired similar grievances about our online doom but in a much less acerbic and assured manner than he pulls off here.

BONUS TRACK

THE POTEMKINISTS (2022) (B-minus) - Jude knocked out this 18-minute short during COVID, a glib riff on Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin," reduced here to a conversation about erecting a statue to memorialize Romania's role in the battle of Russian mariners. As the New Yorker critic Richard Brody summarizes, "a voluble sculptor (Alexandru Dabija) reveals to a cultural bureaucrat (Cristina Draghici) the historical truth behind the fictional elements of Sergei Eisenstein’s classic ... namely, that the real-life battleship’s rebellious sailors didn’t return to tsarist Russia but, rather, demanded and received asylum in Romania."  

Brody sees a "sharp and sardonic discussion" that "touches on Romania’s sufferings under Soviet rule, Russia’s latter-day aggression, and the contentious politics of official commemoration." I saw a lot of clips from "Battleship Potemkin" distracting me from the meandering dialogue. Snippets of the conversation were engaging, especially the glib parts, but I wouldn't say this is must-see cinema.

BONUS TRACK

In his short, Jude takes a jab at our present-day horrors by quoting a poem from 100 years ago, "Century," the third in a troika of poems by Osip Mandelstam, from 1922:

You brute of a century, who could look
into the centers of your eyes
and with their blood glue back
two centuries to a severed spine?

New to the Queue

Scraps ...

Joshua Oppenheimer follows his bizarre documentary "An Act of Killing" with a companion film, "The Look of Silence."

From James Ponsoldt ("Smashed," "The Spectacular Now"), the chatty David Foster Wallace biopic, with Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg, "The End of the Tour."

A French remake about a single mother who goes into business with a gigolo, resulting in violence and intrigue, "Alleluia."

"Barbara" director Christian Petzold and his star, Nina Hoss, re-team for a follow-up set in post-war Germany, "Phoenix."

Keith Miller follows his hit-and-miss "Welcome to Pine Hill" with another urban verite ramble, "Five Star."

A psychological workup from Israeli writer/director Nadav Lapid, "The Kindergarten Teacher."

When Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley went at each other during the 1968 political conventions, "The Best of Enemies."

Jem Cohen follows up his moody "Museum Hours" with a moody thumb-sucker, "Counting."

A promising debut from Alex R. Johnson, about a swindler in Austin, Texas, "Two Step."
  

Mr. Wrong

TRANSIT (B+) - Christian Petzold cooks up another slow-burning drama with a sharp ending in this tale of refugees fleeing fascist rule during an undefined era (the story is based on a 1942 novel). Franz Rogowski stars as Georg, the displaced person who inadvertently obtains the papers of a German writer who died in Paris. Georg heads to Marseilles, where he eventually meets up with the writer's estranged wife, Marie (Paula Beer, "Frantz," "Never Look Away").

Petzold takes his time digging into Georg's melancholia as a man without a home and -- after assuming the identity of the dead writer as a means of escape -- without a true identity. Georg's attraction to Marie is complicated by her belief that her husband may yet still return to reconcile and escape with her.

Petzold has beguiled before with the "complicated and a bit corny" "Phoenix," and "Barbara" (both with Nina Hoss), and his languid period pieces never quite come together like they should, but they can be hard to shake. Here, Rogowski is a compelling sad sack, and Beer, as always, cuts a beguiling figure. Petzold also has a patented twist up his sleeve for the ending. This one feels light and heavy at the same time.

LONG SHOT (C) - In which Seth Rogen seduces Charlize Theron. What do you expect?

Rogen stars as Fred Flarsky (first red flag: a dorky character name from the '50s), an out-of-work investigative blogger who happens to run across his old baby-sitter, Charlotte Field (Theron), the U.S. secretary of state about to launch her bid to succeed a clownish TV star occupying the White House (Bob Odenkirk). She improbably invites him to be her speechwriter and, eventually, her lover. Gasp!

He struggles to keep his integrity, and she must fight to stay pure and to resist the big-money influences that include -- of all people! -- the nasty billionaire homunculus who downsized Fred, as well as the compromised president. High-jinks ensue.

Rogen and Theron are really good, as expected, and they actually have some chemistry. The cutesy script (by Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah) peels off a few zing-o one-liners and wacky situations. (But do we really need the obligatory uptight-authority-figure getting-high-at-a-rave scene?) Some of the supporting cast helps here (June Diane Raphael and Ravi Patel are funny as the secretary's key staffers, and Lisa Kudrow is gold in a cameo as the campaign's incredibly candid pollster), but others flop badly, like Paul Scheer and Kurt Braunohler as offensive Fox-type TV hosts who are only offensive, not funny.

The real problem here is that, as hip as Sterling and Hannah and Rogen and Theron might hold themselves out to be, this is a painfully conventional romantic comedy. Rogen even gets his very own Black Best Friend (a bland O'Shea Jackson). As meta as they may think they are getting here, the production is wrapped in cliched rom-com formula, and never manages to rise above it or attain ironic detachment. And that leaves us with an intermittently funny -- and a full two-hour -- throwaway genre exercise.