Old Yorker

  • Playground

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Un monde

    Laura Wandel (2021)

    It all takes place within the precincts of a school, often but not entirely in the playground – there are scenes in classrooms, sports facilities and the head teacher’s office.  This isn’t the only reason why the French title of this Belgian film, the writer-director Laura Wandel’s debut feature, is more apt (and expressive) than the English one.  For much of her short (seventy-two-minute) drama, Wandel and the DP Frédéric Noirhomme shoot the action from the eye level of the seven-year-old protagonist, Nora (Maya Vanderbeque) – the world as she sees it.  And hears it:  reverberating sounds convey the affect – disorienting, sometimes threatening – of the gym, the swimming pool and the playground.  The last location, in Wandel’s unsentimental view of primary school as a social organism, emerges as a kind of battlefield.

    Playground begins on the morning of Nora’s first day at the school.  At the entrance, she’s sobbing with apprehension at the prospect.  Her father (Karim Leklou) tries in vain to reassure Nora that her older brother Abel (Günter Duret), already a pupil at the school, will be looking out for her.  At break times, Abel tells Nora to stick with her new classmates but he isn’t pulling rank on his sister.  Abel seems anxious.  By the end of the day, Nora has seen the first evidence that her brother is being bullied by other boys – evidence that accumulates and drives the story.  Although Wandel shows Nora gradually finding her own place in the school community, she too is soon on the receiving end of a spiteful peer group, even if it’s not ill treatment of the grossly physical kind that Abel suffers.

    Un monde implies a self-contained sphere.  The circumscribed setting reinforces that implication but the unity of place is also responsible for a curious weakness of the film:  Wandel doesn’t allow anything to happen beyond the school gates, even off-screen.  Although Abel begs her not to, Nora feels compelled to tell their father about his being bullied but subsequent scenes don’t give any sense that this is then discussed at home.  The father is a single parent; Nora’s classmates ask why he always brings her to school and arrives to collect her – hasn’t he got a job to go to?  When Nora replies that their father cares for her and Abel rather than going out to work, another child says that her parents think people who don’t have jobs are lazy.  Nora reports this to her father but, once she’s done so, the matter is dropped, even by the other school kids – unlikely as that seems according to the law of the playground as Wandel presents it.  You end up thinking the issue has been raised simply to make clear how different the main family’s domestic set-up is from the norm (though it’s surely not so extraordinary in twenty-first-century Belgium).  Wandel also has problems bringing Playground to a close.  The final shot is of Nora and Abel hugging each other, as if having decisively come through.  You’re grateful for the relatively upbeat ending without being convinced by it.

    This distressing and compelling film is variously impressive, though.  Wandel sets up the situation in quasi-documentary sequences that nevertheless have dramatic shape.  In keeping with this, she gets natural but incisive performances from her very young cast, and Maya Vanderbeque is simply amazing:  it’s one of the best pieces of acting by a child of this age that I can remember seeing.  The different kinds of bullying and discrimination in evidence give texture to the piece:  one little girl’s giving and taking away of invitations to her upcoming birthday party is shown to be as tyrannical, in its way, as older boys plunging Abel’s head into a toilet bowl.  Both he and Nora learn that attack is a victim’s best means of defence.  Nora rips up the party invitations.  It’s not too long before Abel decides that if you can’t beat them join them, and a different boy becomes the focus of abuse.  The teachers aren’t unkind or indifferent but – with the exception of Mme Agnès (Laura Verlinden), who talks and listens sensitively to Nora – they don’t, or can’t, do much to help.  There’s no music:  Playground is the latest proof that a film doesn’t always need it.

    26 April 2022

  • Navalny

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Daniel Roher (2022)

    The Russian political dissident Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent and fell critically ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow in August 2020.  The young Canadian documentarian Daniel Roher started to film Navalny soon after he regained consciousness, following transfer from a hospital in Omsk to one in Berlin, and began his remarkable recovery.  Filming continued throughout his convalescence in Germany and right up to Navalny’s arrest the moment he set foot back in Russia, in January 2021.  At both the beginning and the end of his film, Roher asks Navalny what message he wants to leave his supporters if this turns out to be his last chance of doing so.  The first time this question is asked, Navalny brushes it aside, along with the prospect of being murdered.  He urges Roher to make not a ‘boring film of memory’ but ‘a thriller’.

    Roher takes that instruction on board – not in a crass way, except that the film’s music, by Marius De Vries and Matt Robertson, tends to give superfluous ‘dramatic’ emphasis to what’s happening on the screen.  A good deal of the narrative is naturally suspenseful:  Roher realises that, in order to tell a compelling story, he need do no more than present it.  If he doesn’t avoid making a ‘film of memory’ it’s because events since January 2021 have made that impossible.  Within weeks of his arrest, Navalny was given a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence.  In March 2022, the sentence was increased by a further nine years.  Navalny’s detention until who knows when can’t fail to give Roher’s documentary a strongly elegiac flavour.  The result is anything but boring.

    The film comprises four main elements.  There are interviews with Navalny and those close to him, including his wife and daughter; numerous examples of his YouTube and other social media activity; news film at various stages of his public career and of the events of August 2020; and the ‘action sequences’ filmed by Roher over the course of the next few months.  Once he was well enough, Navalny resumed his vigorous anti-corruption activism online.  He also worked with the Bulgarian journalist Christo Grozev, the lead Russia investigator for the Netherlands-based Bellingcat investigative journalism group.  Their collaboration supplies Navalny with its highlight sequence, one that authors of fictional thrillers (and black comedies) must envy.  Shortly before the Bellingcat website published details of the eight Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who allegedly poisoned him, Navalny, posing as a government aide, started phoning each of the officers with an invitation to discuss the incident, supposedly for a report he’d been assigned to prepare.  With the second operative that he contacts, Navalny strikes gold:  Konstantin Kudryavtsev, swallowing the aide story, confirms that he and colleagues applied Novichok to the ‘inner seams’ of Navalny’s boxer shorts while they were in the laundry of the Tomsk hotel where he stayed.  (Kudryavtsev‘s gullibility is much more surprising than the news that, since this notorious phone conversation in December 2020, no more has been seen or heard of him.)  You listen to this sequence open-mouthed, until the point where you want to join in with the incredulous celebrations of Navalny, Grozev and their colleague Maria Pevchikh.

    As Roher demonstrates, Vladimir Putin can’t bring himself to speak Navalny’s name and habitually refers to him as ‘this person’, with a view to minimising Navalny’s importance.  With plenty of evidence to suggest that Putin is as vain as he’s thuggish – the footage of his judo moves, the photos of him bare-chested astride a horse, and so on – it must grieve Russia’s aging poster boy that his highest-profile adversary is a dynamic communicator with a handsome face and amazingly blue eyes.  In terms of screen time in Navalny, the Russian leader has a sizeable supporting role but the identity of the film’s star, and his star screen presence, seem bound to infuriate this person in the Kremlin.  Navalny himself is neither short of self-esteem nor a political progressive.  At least he didn’t seem that way until his public image crystallised into Putin’s bête noire.  Christo Grozev recalls that he once despaired of a Russian opposition whose leader kept company with neo-Nazis on freedom marches.  Roher raises this with Navalny, who insists, irritably though none too convincingly, that as broad a coalition as possible is needed to defeat Putin.

    Alexei Navalny gives the impression of a colossal ego but there’s no doubt that he has, as well as charisma, courage to match.  So does his wife, Yulia; the couple’s relationship, as shown here, is increasingly affecting.  The big question that Daniel Roher doesn’t ask Navalny is why he has decided to return home rather than continue his campaigning work, in relative safety, outside Russia.  Roher has subsequently said in interview[1] that he thinks Navalny would have answered that question with one of his own:  ‘How am I supposed to, as the leader of the opposition, ask people to take to the streets, ask people to protest, ask people to put their lives and their careers and their families on the line, if I’m sitting comfortably in the West?’

    At the end, Roher somewhat rephrases what he asked at the beginning.  What would Navalny’s message now be in the event of his being ‘killed or detained (my italics)’?  This time, the hero – that is the right word for him – is less dismissive.  Anticipating what he must be expecting to happen as soon as his plane touches down in Moscow, Navalny says, ‘Don’t do nothing.  …  If they decide to kill me, it means that we are incredibly strong.  We need to utilise this power, to not give up, to remember we are a huge power that is being oppressed by these bad guys’.  Navalny premiered (and won prizes) at this year’s Sundance festival in January.  Well before the documentary’s mid-April release in British cinemas and television screening in the BBC’s Storyville’s slot, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had enlarged the scale of his tyranny to an extent that might have threatened to reduce Navalny’s treatment at its hands to a seeming drop in the ocean.  On the other hand, Roher’s film might also have served as a timely reminder that the many voices with something to say about events in Ukraine could no longer include Navalny’s.  Yet he hasn’t, even behind bars, been silenced on social media.  He has called on Google and Meta to (quoting the Forbes piece) ‘use their ad-tech to do an end-run around Putin’s iron control’ on the Russian media.  He has tweeted regret for the killing by Russian soldiers in Ukraine of someone who shares his surname.  He encouraged French voters to support Emmanuel Macron in this month’s presidential election run-off.  As an inmate of ‘Penal Colony 2’ in Pokrov, east of Moscow, Alexei Navalny is still not doing nothing, and is no doubt still paying the price.

    26 April 2022

    [1] With Andy Meek on the Forbes website (https://www.forbes.com/)

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