Monthly Archives: July 2019

  • Cell 211

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Celda 211

    Daniel Monzón (2009)

    The unbelievable really can happen when you begin a new job:  think of Ben Sliney, who took up his appointment as National Operations Manager for US Federal Aviation Administration on 11th September 2001.  In Daniel Monzón’s Cell 211, Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) is keen to make a good impression at the Spanish jail where he’s about to start work as a prison guard.  He goes there the day before his employment starts and is given a tour, during which a disturbance overhead brings down debris.  A piece of it hits and injures Juan, who passes out.  His colleagues place him in the vacant cell 211 while they go to call an ambulance.  By the time Juan comes to, a riot is underway, prisoners are in control of a large area of the jail and his fellow officers have hurriedly escaped, leaving him in the cell.  Juan works out what’s happening.  He decides to pretend to the rioters – led by the brutally charismatic Malamadre (Luis Tosar) – that he’s not a new guard but a newly arrived prisoner.

    Juan’s colleague, giving evidence to a committee of inquiry that Daniel Monzón uses to frame the account of what happened in the prison, confesses he’ll never know what made him and another officer decide to leave Juan in the cell instead of getting him away from where he’d collapsed.  The admission has an uneasy ring beyond the colleague’s guilty conscience.  It’s as if Monzón and his co-scenarist Jorge Guerricaechevarría hope, by acknowledging the improbability of the story’s premise, to transcend it.  The audience has to accept the premise in any case, recognising there’s no film without it.   We’ve also taken the hint – from a prologue in which the previous occupant of the title location gorily commits suicide – that Cell 211 is not a place where good things happen.

    Malamadre (‘bad mother’) and the others at the forefront of the riot are part of a ‘DSS’ programme – inmates under special surveillance, regularly on the receiving end of violent treatment by staff and who are protesting to draw attention to the conditions of their imprisonment.  When Malamadre learns that Basque separatist terrorists are also being held in the jail, he plans to use this ETA contingent as a bargaining tool.  The riot quickly becomes national news and triggers disturbances in other prisons.  As the government becomes involved and the situation increasingly politicised, Juan’s nightmare isolation intensifies.  Although its source is a work of fiction by Francisco Pérez Gandul, Cell 211 highlights what presumably are or were urgent causes for concern in the actual Spanish prison system.

    It was no surprise, however, to hear Daniel Monzón, introducing this multi-award-winning film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (where it screened as part of the ‘Once Upon a Time in Spain’ retrospective), talk about Hollywood’s keen interest in an American remake of the movie – even though this hasn’t materialised.  In several respects, Cell 211 already feels like a standard Hollywood suspense thriller – with its nearly relentless action, its pounding, percussive score (by Roque Baños) and its melodramatic mechanics.  The dramatisation of tensions between the prison and government powers-that-be and among the prisoners are pretty routine – so too the repeated shifts in the balance of power within and between the two groups.

    The extra grimness and mayhem are what make the film distinctive.  Juan has a beautiful, pregnant wife at home:  instead of suffering in loving silence there, as such wives usually do, Elena (Marta Etura) hotfoots it to the prison gates.  Caught up in the heaving crowd, she’s beaten to death by a prison guard.  Monzón shows Juan compelled to carry out increasingly vicious and entirely uncharacteristic acts, cutting off the ear of an ETA prisoner, slitting the throat of the vicious guard (Antonio Resines) who not only proclaims to Malamadre et al Juan’s true identity but also brought about Elena’s death.  There’s no happy ending for Juan either – a device that often comes in useful as a means of persuading a film audience that they’ve been watching something honest.  The closing line goes to a prison official who asks the committee of inquiry, ‘Any more questions?’  These ironic last words are a nifty way of sending us out with a renewed sense that the film has been raising issues that the Spanish authorities are failing to answer.

    A further generic requirement is for the two main characters to move from outright mutual antipathy to a sort of kinship.  At the start, Malamadre makes Juan strip naked for the amusement and/or delectation of the assembled rioters.  By the final shootout, they are, to put it simply, in it together.  That’s putting it too simply, though.  The development of this relationship is one of the film’s more nuanced elements and the two men are never less than wary of each other.

    A role like this, one that stresses his physically formidable quality, doesn’t allow Luis Tosar the contrapuntal scope he had in Flowers from Another World, which I saw in Edinburgh twenty-four hours before Cell 211.  He’s impressive, nevertheless.  Malamadre’s raw, deep voice is a remarkable invention.  As well as embodying the character’s intimidating aspect with ease, Tosar captures his watchfulness and the anxiety in his determination to remain top dog.  Pleasant, handsome Alberto Ammann, in his cinema debut, certainly complements Tosar but you never quite believe in Juan as a prison guard, let alone as a man pretending to be starting a sentence for homicide.  He suggests the deputy head of a primary school who’s probably a lay reader at his local church.  Ammann is good in the occasional flashbacks to Juan’s happy home and sex life with Elena but, though he tries hard, you seldom feel the spiritual distance travelled by Juan from the bedroom to his doomed battle for survival within the jail.

    23 June 2019

  • The Art of Self-Defense

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Riley Stearns (2019)

    Mild-mannered office worker Casey Davies (Jesse Eisenberg) is brutally attacked one night by a gang of masked motorcyclists.  He recovers from his injuries and returns to work but decides he needs to be better able to protect himself.  His first thought is a firearm:  he goes to a gunsmith and puts in an application for permission to buy a weapon.  He then happens to see a notice for karate lessons outside a building and inquires within.  For a young American man in Casey’s situation, karate seems a constructive and morally preferable alternative to gun ownership but the black (belt) comedy The Art of Self-Defense, which had its UK premiere at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), gradually reveals the dojo to be a hotbed of toxic masculinity.  And although that discovery shocks Casey, it’s not completely antithetical to what he wanted.  As he explains to the quietly charismatic Sensei (Alessandro Nivola) at an early stage of their acquaintance, ‘I’m intimidated by men – I want to become what intimidates me’.

    Casey, the accountant for a small business, is shunned by macho colleagues in the office and almost totally isolated outside of it.  In his mid-thirties, he’s single and seems to have no friends or family.  He shares his apartment with his dachshund.  When he returns there after his stay in hospital, the only message on the answering machine is from his boss, hoping that Casey’s on the mend and reminding him of the strict time limit of full sick pay entitlement.  Casey is teaching himself French and likes the idea of going to Paris.  His music of choice is adult contemporary.  Sensei firmly advises that all this must change if Casey is to become a real man.  He should abandon AC for heavy metal and align himself with a country whose image is more militaristic than that of France – like Germany.  Casey fancies he has a head start because he owns a Teutonic breed of dog but, of course, it’s not the right kind:  a dachshund, Sensei tells him, is a poor substitute for a German Shepherd.  A diligent pupil, Casey is soon learning the language of his master’s choice.  He instructs the barista at the café he frequents, ‘I’ve got a new usual:  coffee – black – with nothing to eat’.  He tells the dachshund, ‘I won’t be petting you any more’.  His decisive, aggressive manner at work startles the colleagues who once treated him with contempt.

    Sensei regrets Casey’s unisex name – ‘very feminine’ – though he doesn’t suggest changing that too.  He takes a shine to Casey from the moment he first enters the dojo, in spite of his standing out as physically unprepossessing beside the other karate students.  Sensei’s faith in the newcomer’s potential isn’t misplaced and it’s a pleasant surprise that the writer-director Riley Stearns (this is his second feature, after Faults (2014)) doesn’t waste much time showing the protagonist as comically inept:  Casey is determined to make a success of the karate lessons and he soon shows aptitude.  (When he proudly earns a yellow belt, he becomes obsessed with wearing one all the time, with jeans as well as his training outfit.  Keen to ingratiate himself with Sensei, he places a bulk order of differently coloured belts so that everyone in the group can follow suit.)  Sensei runs a day class and a night class, and the participants in both are male – with the sole exception of highly proficient, conscientious Anna (Imogen Poots).  Sensei lets her run a regular class for youngsters – boys and girls – but Anna has been waiting a long time for promotion to black belt.  In due course, Sensei confides to Casey that her wait will never be over.

    The basic set-up naturally calls to mind Fight Club (1999); one of the most significant lines in Stearns’s film also somewhat echoes the famous ‘The first rule of Fight Club …’ mantra of David Fincher’s.  When Casey joins the karate class, the camera lingers on a list of eleven rules posted on the wall of the training room but it’s an additional dictum that proves just as important.  Early on, we watch Casey watching a gangster film on television; one man stands with a shotgun over the corpse of another and declares, ‘I didn’t play by the rules … but there never were any rules’.  Once the extent and consequences of Sensei’s lethal tyranny have fully emerged, Casey challenges his teacher to a karate fight to the death.  They face and bow to each other; Casey then pulls out the gun he’s now acquired, shoots Sensei dead and repeats the words from the gangster movie.

    This coup de théâtre has terrific instant impact but its implications are troubling.  Rule 11 on the dojo wall is that ‘Guns are for weaklings’.  Casey knows he hasn’t a hope of matching Sensei’s technical skill in unarmed combat – he takes the weakling’s way out – but there’s more to it than that.  It’s hard to avoid thinking here of the NRA notion that ‘the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun’.  That Sensei is a bad guy without a gun might seem a crucial difference – but the film has by now demolished the idea that martial arts, at least with males in charge, are a morally superior means of looking after yourself.  At this stage in The Art of Self-Defense, we know that the bikers who mugged and beat up Casey were members of the karate night class, with Sensei the main assailant.

    ‘I didn’t play by the rules … but there never were any rules’ turns out to be Riley Stearns’s film-making motto here.  To make the points he wants to make, Stearns jumps outside the hitherto realistic frame of the story.  Sensei’s black robe in the training room and matching biker leathers are two sides of the same coin of corrosive machismo – but the attack on Casey amounts to no more than a demonstration of this.   Stearns relies on the old it’s-a-comedy-don’t-take-it-seriously defence against objections that certain things in the film which make us laugh don’t make sense [1].  Yet he’s alert to the need to deliver a politically acceptable conclusion to which people seriously subscribe.  After Sensei’s death, it’s somehow in Casey’s gift to confer on Anna a black belt and the leadership of the karate class.  The art of self-defence was a lost cause with a man calling the tune but it’s a woman’s turn now.  Anna tells the class that there ‘will be changes round here’ and that it’s possible to be ‘brutally tolerant or savagely peaceful’ (which sounds as densely gnomic as some of Sensei’s pronouncements).

    There’s no doubt that The Art of Self-Defense is clever and entertaining.  I’m damning with faint praise to describe it as the best of the four new films I saw at EIFF but its margin of superiority over the other three (The Captor, Cronofobia and Balance, Not Symmetry) is wide.  Stearns negotiates very adroitly the tonal shifts of his narrative, moving from funny to uncomfortably funny, to horrifying, and back to uncomfortably funny.  It’s only the ending that feels weak.  There are good illustrations of relatively low-grade but still hurtful male aggression:  in the behaviour of Casey’s work colleagues; and in an upsetting scene, shortly after Casey has started karate, when he’s abused and threatened by a thug neighbour, hasn’t the nerve to fight back using the new skills he’s acquiring, and privately weeps in shame.  Even pacifists in the audience will want to see him get his own back on the boor-next-door and it’s a happy moment when he does – especially since it’s the neighbour’s car, rather than the man himself, that’s on the receiving end.

    Jesse Eisenberg is almost too perfectly cast as the nervous, nerdy physical underdog but it’s churlish to complain:  hard to think that anyone could have played Casey better.  Eisenberg is well partnered by Alessandro Nivola:  he’s so meticulously alpha male and in control that it’s very amusing when Casey discovers and utters, to his face, Sensei’s real, very feminine name:  Leslie.  Well though Imogen Poots plays Anna, the character is kept virtually on ice until it’s time for her to serve her final purpose.  It’s not easy to believe that Riley Stearns was making another gender-political point by severely underwriting the only significant female role.

    23 June 2019

    [1] A review of the film by Nathaniel Beller-Brimmer on  the website Edinburgh 49 (at https://edinburgh49.org/2019/06/27/eiff-the-art-of-self-defense/)  supplies a good example of the reaction Stearns wants:  ‘Some of these moments do have some lightly questionable implications … but Stearns deftly stops short of making anything too serious [for these] to be an issue …’

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