Monthly Archives: June 2019

  • Cronofobia

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Francesco Rizzi (2018)

    The woman introducing the Swiss film Cronofobia at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) welcomed the director (and co-writer) Francesco Rizzi to the stage, then reminded us to be ready with questions for him in the Q&A session after the screening.  At the end, more people seemed to be leaving than staying to hear more.  The man in the late-middle-aged couple I followed out said to his female companion, ‘I’ve got a question – what the fuck was that about?’  (You need to hear this in a Scottish accent to get the full effect.)  This may read as a typical philistine judgment on a complex, challenging arthouse piece but Cronofobia deserves the putdown.

    In some ways, this debut feature feels antique.  It’s as if Rizzi (who did the screenplay with Daniela Gambaro) has just discovered Antonioni and the Resnais of Last Year at Marienbad.  The style might be described as obvious crypticism.  Each carefully composed image (the DP is Simon Guy Fässler) proclaims its ingenuity and withholds its deeper meaning.  Even so, and pace the disgruntled punter quoted above, familiar themes do come through.  Halting dialogue, for example, signals how hard it is for two people really-to-communicate.  Rizzi is chiefly interested in the uncertainty of personal identity.  The lead male character Michael Suter (Vinicio Marchioni) puts on false moustaches and beards.  He shares his forename with an elder brother who died in infancy.  As the relationship between them develops, Michael’s female counterpart Anna Martini (Sabine Timoteo) engages him in conversations that she also recorded with her recently deceased husband Manuel (Alberto Ruano, glimpsed in the video recordings).  Michael eventually takes his leave of Anna by imitating Manuel’s appearance and putting other clothes from the latter’s wardrobe in a suitcase, before driving away.  By demonstrating to Anna that her husband has left her, Michael is, I suppose, enabling her to ‘move on’.

    The most striking element of Cronofobia concerns Michael’s job, which is the main thing he wears disguises for and which involves leading people in a variety of occupations to reveal that they are, or are prepared to be, on the fiddle.   These start with an assistant in a jeweller’s shop (Adele Raes) and end with a worker in a motorway services eatery (Jasmin Mattei).  As well as the others in between, it emerges that a previous assignment centred on Manuel Martini, a financier who committed suicide thanks to Michael’s exposure of his malpractice.  Until he becomes increasingly uncomfortable with his work, Michael is having an affair with his line manager (Giorgia Salari).  The sinister agency that employs them, and which appears to operate across Switzerland, gives a Big Brother-ish charge to what looks to be Rizzi’s other main purpose:  to show the individual’s alienation from a society at best depersonalising and at worst threatening.

    You watch Cronofobia with a feeling of surprise that this kind of stuff is still considered worth dramatising on a cinema screen.  Perhaps Rizzi feels it’s time to update what Pauline Kael disparaged in a 1963 article as ‘Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe parties’.  Whatever his intentions, the director relies on strong details from other famous movies to help him on his way.  In her first scene, Anna takes a shower, then (puzzlingly) puts on jogging gear and makes her way to a railway line near her home.  She waits for a train to roar by and yells, rather as Sally Bowles did in Cabaret, except that the noise Anna makes is decidedly tortured.  When she first suggests a relationship to Michael, she stipulates no names, no pasts – like the rules of engagement declared in Last Tango in Paris.  Other echoes have a more generic feel, such as a scene in which Michael visits his aging, seemingly demented mother (Carla Cassola) in a nursing home – the mother’s only appearance.  There are plenty of shots from within Michael’s camper van that show ominous empty roads ahead.

    Both main female parts seemed to me overplayed, though Sabine Timoteo is much more technically accomplished than Giorgia Salari.  Vinicio Marchioni is considerably better.  Immediately before seeing Cronofobia, I went to a highly entertaining and informative EIFF interview, conducted by the journalist Siobhan Synnot, with the fine young actor Jack Lowden (a member of this year’s festival jury).  Lowden was funny talking about his first film job after working exclusively in theatre in his early years.  He followed an experienced screen performer’s advice to ‘do nothing and you’ll do everything’.  When Lowden saw the rushes, he realised, to his dismay, ‘I really was doing nothing’.  In his best moments here, Vinicio Marchioni gives seeming to do nothing a relatively good name.  If Rizzi means to create a sense of mystery, Marchioni is his chief asset in that department.

    The film is mostly in Italian, though at one point a rough, expressive voice reads Charles Bukowski’s poem ‘Nirvana’ in its entirety and in English.  (Is it Tom Waits’s voice?  The YouTube clip of Waits reading ‘Nirvana’ certainly sounds very similar.)   Francesco Rizzi’s title means ‘fear of the passage of time’.  To end on a cheap shot, fear that time has come to a standstill is likely to be a bigger concern to viewers of Cronofobia.

    21 June 2019

  • The Captor

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Budreau (2018)

    A would-be droll dramatisation of the 1973 bank robbery and hostage-taking that gave rise to the term ‘Stockholm syndrome’, the Canadian writer-director Robert Budreau’s film was released in North America as Stockholm.   Its British release title is not only less than distinctive.  Given what Stockholm syndrome necessarily involves, it’s insufficient too – why no mention of the captive?  The weak title may have helped depress audience numbers for this screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.  The fact that The Captor was being released in cinemas the following day couldn’t have helped either.

    Advance knowledge of the film’s subject precludes surprise about what happens in The Captor and Budreau’s decision to preface the action with the words ‘based on an absurd but true story’ amounts to something of a tonal giveaway.  Almost as soon as Kaj Hansson (Ethan Hawke) appears, he puts on a wig, a false moustache, shades and a cowboy hat.  He looks inept even as he constructs his disguise, and its effect is nearly comical.  Kaj, who’s preparing to rob a Kreditbanken in Stockholm, is evidently not a sharp-minded, cold-blooded professional criminal.  When the heist goes wrong, he takes three hostages, including bank employee Bianca (Noomi Rapace).   He also negotiates the release from prison of his friend Gunnar Sorensson (Mark Strong), with whom Kaj means to escape once he gets the cash he came for, and who is brought by police to the bank.

    Like another charming-bank-robber movie of 2018, David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun, Budreau’s has a screenplay based on a New Yorker article:  in this case, one by Daniel Lang, published the year after the events in Stockholm.  (Budreau nevertheless alters plenty of the historical facts, including the main characters’ names.)   As a piece of cinema, though, The Captor more obviously invites comparison with Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – and comes off badly.  Budreau clearly wants to convey, as Lumet did, the accumulating chaos arising from the botched robbery, the fallibility and desperation of the main players.  That combination generates the black comedy, as well as the human drama, of Dog Day Afternoon.  In contrast, the zany, absurdist register of The Captor feels imposed.

    More oddly, the film also imposes a justification from outside the bank vault – where Kaj, Blanca, Gunnar and the two other hostages (Bea Santos and Mark Rendall) are holed up – of the growing rapport between captors and captives.  Budreau looks only superficially at what develops within the vault.  In order to explain how the people there have more in common with each other than with the authorities presiding over the crisis, he stresses, as an objective fact, the unattractive qualities of the latter – the police (Ian Matthews, John Ralston), the bank manager (Vladimir Jon Cubrt) and the government – in the person of prime minister Olof Palme (Shanti Roney).  Palme’s presence in the story is somewhat distracting:  it keeps reminding you that his assassination in February 1986 had a greater impact on the Scandinavian psyche than the events reconstructed in The Captor.

    In a similar way, Budreau accounts for Bianca’s increasing attachment to Kaj largely by showing her husband Christopher (Thorbjørn Harr) in an unfavourable light.  Allowed briefly to visit the bank vault, he volunteers to take the place of his wife but from there it’s all downhill.  When Bianca phones home and pleads to speak with their daughter, Christopher refuses:  he’s just got the little girl to sleep.  While he’s in the vault, Bianca gives him detailed instructions on how to prepare the fish she’d intended to cook for supper.  On the phone, she asks how the meal turned out.  He says he didn’t bother with the fish – he took some meatloaf from the fridge instead.  Budreau is at a loss how to handle the impact on Bianca’s family of reports emerging from the bank that she has been killed during the siege, so he ignores them.  Her husband and their two children eventually learn from the television news that she’s safe and well.  Christopher’s reaction suggests this comes as a mild relief rather than a bewildering miracle.

    The international cast – Americans, Canadians, Scandinavians and Mark Strong – are all competent enough.  Ethan Hawke expresses Kaj’s vulnerability well but overall this is one of those performances that lurch between emotional extremes.  That’s mirrored vocally:  if Hawke isn’t shouting, he’s mumbling and hard to make out.  The role of Bianca is relatively underwritten but Noomi Rapace, also in big glasses, is alert and appealing.  As in The Guard, Mark Strong gets onto a criminal wavelength with impressive ease.

    20 June 2019

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