Old Yorker

  • The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Hymyilevä mies

    Juho Kuosmanen (2016)

    On 17 August 1962, a boxing match took place in Helsinki.  The contest for the world featherweight title, between the American Davey Moore, the defending champion, and the challenger Olli Mäki, was the first world championship bout ever to take place in Finland.  At an early stage of Juho Kuosmanen’s film about Mäki, his coach-manager Elis Ask tells him the day of the fight will be the happiest day of Olli’s life.  Since we already know that Olli has mixed feelings about his big chance and his manager an eye to the main chance, we know this is wishful thinking on Ask’s part – the fight won’t make Olli happy, whatever the result.  It’s equally clear what will make him happy:  he has recently fallen in love with a girl called Raija.  The movie ends with twilight falling on Helsinki on 17 August 1962.  Davey Moore has retained his title, on a technical knockout, after only two of the scheduled fifteen rounds.  Olli and Raija, who by now have decided to marry, make their way home, quietly and blissfully.  As they pass an elderly man and woman walking together, Raija asks Olli, ‘Do you think we’ll be like them when we’re old?’  The two senior citizens are the real Olli and Raija Mäki, still married today, fifty-odd years after the big fight.

    Kuosmanen’s first feature (he also wrote the screenplay, with Mikko Myllylahti) has won various prizes and currently has a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the ‘Critics’ Consensus’ reads as follows:

    ‘The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki sidesteps sports biopic clichés with a beautifully filmed, well-acted look at the balance between career fulfillment [sic] and personal happiness.’

    Hannah McGill’s review on the BFI website expands on the latter part of that summary, with reference to films about protagonists ambitious for success in artistic as well as sporting endeavour.  Citing The Red Shoes and Whiplash, along with Rocky and The Fighter, McGill suggests that:

    ‘… the notion of necessary sacrifice remains hard for movies to resist – perhaps because filmmaking makes its own disruptive demands; perhaps because audiences enjoy being reminded that the gifted, driven and garlanded get their own share of hardship. When love can be enjoyed, it’s because the lover is a proven boon to the gifted one’s progress … The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki bucks this convention with one bracingly simple suggestion: that finding, being with and caring for the person you love might be more important than running yourself ragged in pursuit of passing glory.’

    The picture is beautifully filmed and well acted – by Jarkko Lahti (Olli) and Oona Airola (Raija) anyway – yet I found it irritating, for reasons stemming from a further difference between it and the other films mentioned by McGill:  its factual basis.  Although this has magnified some of the praise for Olli Mäki, it is, in several ways, a puzzling foundation for a parable about forced, unwanted expectations, in professional sport or beyond.  I’d have no problem, in principle, with a fictional piece carrying the moral message that Hannah McGill attributes to this film (except that I’m struggling, in spite of what she says, to think of movies that don’t warn against the perils of single-minded pursuit of sporting success).  But in order to make the point using this material Juho Kuosmanen has to distort it.  The Moore-Mäki fight must have been a big deal in Finland, and an unusually good payday for Olli, but the film stresses only its artificial and pressurising aspects:  a magazine photo shoot, with the pint-sized fighter on a stool in order to appear taller than the glamorous model beside him; an interfering film crew making a documentary about his training.  Even allowing that he’s showing things from Olli’s increasingly anxious point of view, Kuosmanen presents a decidedly partial (in more ways than one) account of the fight build-up.    He may have been a reluctant national hero but it’s surprising, for example, that the other boxers with whom Olli trains don’t react, either in awe or in envy, to his relative celebrity.  (Mäki also had an impressive record as an amateur, winning the 1959 European Lightweight title before turning pro the following year.)  Yet he’s just one of the lads, treated by the others with a mild affection that’s almost patronising.

    There’s no real sense of Olli’s being subjected to relentless attention wherever he goes.  Interest in the world title bout is entirely commercial and metropolitan.  Olli and Raija are from the same town of Kokkola.  Concerned that her presence is hindering his training, Raija returns home there and Olli temporarily follows; his impending big day in Helsinki isn’t mentioned by anyone in Kokkola.   At one point, Elis Ask (Eero Milonoff), exasperatedly trying to gee up the self-effacing, downbeat Olli, makes the reasonable point that he is, after all, a professional sportsman.  We’re given no clue as to why Olli became one – the strong implication is that he was happier working as a baker than as a boxer.  You’d never guess from the film’s conclusion that the real Olli Mäki continued to fight professionally for more than a decade after 1962, winning the EBU Light Welterweight title in 1964 and holding it for the best part of three years.  After retirement from the ring in 1973, he worked as a boxing coach and manager.

    Olli is the minnow in the fight with Davey Moore and I guess what also irritates me is the plucky-little-Finland condescension implicit in the critical enthusiasm for it.   (The English title, by the way, is different from the Finnish, which translates literally as ‘smiling man’.)  The premise of the movie would be derided by self-respecting British reviewers if the story were set in Britain (let alone in America).  The black-and-white cinematography by Jani-Petteri Passi is a critical help in a different way.  Monochrome does make the film naturally evocative of its period.  It also gives it an arty feel that’s likely to reassure critics uneasy about the piece’s simplicity – so that Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian can describe Olli Mäki, photographed in ‘luminous black-and-white’, as ‘drawing inspiration from Scorsese and Truffaut’.  Bradshaw substantiates this by likening Olli psychologically to Jake La Motta (‘zoning out in public occasions at the thought of his love’) and physically to Antoine Doinel.  Both comparisons are remarkably far-fetched.  Peter Bradshaw wouldn’t even have thought of the latter one if the title of the Truffaut film didn’t suggest taking punishment.

    Mäki was twenty-six in August 1962.  Jarkko Lahti is in his late thirties and looks it but that helps in reinforcing the picture that Juho Kuosmanen wants to convey of Olli as a careworn journeyman whose need for contentment in life is increasingly urgent.  Lahti’s likeability in the role goes beyond underdog charm and the extraordinary physical commitment required of him:  he also gives Olli a distinctive and engaging blend of solemnity, puzzlement and wry humour. As Raija, Oona Airola, a relative newcomer, is truly lovely – she has an elating naturalness and emotional transparency.  The good editing is by Jussi Rautaniemi.  Kuosmanen’s repeated cuts from quietness into an explosion of noise – the clash of boxing gloves, the rush of water in the showers after gym training – have impact.  The characterisation of Elis Ask is obvious (and doesn’t ‘[sidestep] biopic clichés’), right down to the revelation that this domineering martinet is a henpecked husband. The punchline to an episode in which Elis goes cap in hand to financial backers makes no sense.  Olli accompanies him – so too do Elis’s young kids, on his wife’s instructions.  When the men leave the meeting, they also leave behind in the house the youngest child, who needed to use the toilet there.  Elis might be capable of such negligence but not the conscientious Olli.  It’s admittedly unlikely that large numbers of parents will take their children to see a subtitled, black-and-white art-house movie.  The title of this one could possibly give the wrong idea, though, and I’m surprised Olli Mäki has a 12A certificate, in view of the sequences describing the desperate, punishing measures to which the hero must resort to get down to the required weight (featherweight is a  division below his usual one).

    Olli and Raija quickly take their leave from the large formal dinner that follows the climactic, short-lived fight.  A shot of Davey Moore (John Bosco Jr) standing alone implies that, in spite of his triumph, Moore too can be ignored by the rest of the company – the managers and money men and people who’ve come to the dinner in order to be seen.  I’m not sure whether Kuosmanen means to suggest this is how boxers of the time, including champions, were treated socially or if he’s making a racial point: the African-American Moore is (as I remember this scene) the only black person in evidence.   In effect, the image of Moore’s isolation has a different and more specifically unhappy resonance.  In his next defence of the world featherweight title, against the Cuban Sugar Ramos in March 1963, the referee stopped the fight before the start of the eleventh round to spare Moore further punishment.  The fighter collapsed in the dressing room afterwards and died from a brain injury three days later, without regaining consciousness.  As a warning against at-all-costs endeavour in the boxing ring, the true story of Davey Moore is more eloquent than the true story of Olli Mäki.

    26 April 2017

  • The Zookeeper’s Wife

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Niki Caro (2017)

    Much of the work of the New Zealand director Niki Caro has been for television.  In the cinema, she is best known for Whale Rider (2002) and North Country (2005).  Both those films are built round a strong heroine (played, respectively, by Keisha Castle-Hughes and Charlize Theron, each of whom was Oscar-nominated for her performance) – so too is Caro’s latest, The Zookeeper’s Wife.  The title character is Antonina Żabińska, who, with her husband Jan, ran the Warsaw Zoo before and after the Second World War.  During the war years, following the near-destruction of the zoo by a German aerial bombardment, the couple took in new, human inmates – secretly rescuing Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto and giving them refuge.  Bringing this story to the screen presents Niki Caro with the usual challenges of dramatising the lives of outstandingly brave civilian war heroes.  Will the film-maker be prepared to complicate and humanise her thoroughly admirable protagonists?  Will she stick to the historical facts?  Will she be able to reinvigorate what is, by now, a familiar kind of narrative?  In this case, the answer to all three questions is no[1].  Working with a screenplay by Angela Workman, Caro has made a conscientious but unimaginative movie.  One important respect in which The Zookeeper’s Wife departs from the facts is more startling than most of what has ended up on the screen.

    The pre-war Warsaw Zoo, as described in the opening sequences, verges on the prelapsarian.  Lion cubs sleep in the Żabińskis’ bedroom.  Antonina goes out into a perfect summer’s day to greet her husband (Johan Heldenbergh) and the zoo staff, all cheerfully at work.  The various animals that frolic about seem like exotic household pets – there’s barely a cage in sight.  The Edenic atmosphere darkens at a drinks party the Żabińskis host for German visitors:  the guests include the immediately creepy Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl), director of the Berlin Zoological Garden.  Later the same evening, Antonina proves her resourceful, life-saving qualities by reviving a newly-born elephant calf but the Nazi invasion of Poland then gets underway.  On 1 September 1939, the zoo takes a direct hit and many of the animals are killed.  Heck urges Antonina and Jan to let him save what remains of the prize specimens by moving them to Berlin, for the duration of the war.   They agree, reluctantly and suspiciously; Heck, now a high-ranking Nazi officer, returns soon afterwards and orders the destruction of the remaining, less valuable animals, on the grounds that they couldn’t survive the oncoming winter.  In case we were in any doubt of his actual motives, he proves his sadism by shooting an eagle and telling a subordinate to have it stuffed.

    Heck also wants to use the zoo’s surviving bison in experiments aimed at reviving the breeding of aurochs, the wild oxen extinct since the seventeenth century (and known to this viewer thanks entirely to Beasts of the Southern Wild).  Jan and Antonina successfully propose to Heck turning the zoo’s remaining facilities into a pig farm, to provide food for the occupying forces.  From this point, the Żabińskis develop a project to give shelter to local Jews – first a friend (Efrat Dor), then a teenage girl (Shira Haas), whom Jan rescues from the Warsaw Ghetto, where she’s been raped by German soldiers.  Jan is soon making regular trips to the Ghetto, to pick up vegetable waste for the pigs.  He conceals children in his truck, beneath the peelings.  The Żabińskis’ humanitarian mission expands, as their daring increases, to include men and women too.  The secret guests live in the large cellars of the couple’s house in the zoo grounds.

    The Zookeeper’s Wife is a reminder that the title of the Thomas Keneally novel that became a Steven Spielberg film was Schindler’s Ark.  The story contains a nexus of themes relating to the protection and destruction of animals and people, and to the bestiality of which humans are capable.  This makes the image of the Jewish children hidden under prospective pig food especially disturbing; there’s a sequence too in which Jan witnesses inhabitants of the Ghetto being ‘herded’ into the cattle trucks that are an essential part of Holocaust iconography.  Lutz Heck’s breeding experiments naturally evoke the Nazis’ interest in eugenics and the work of Josef Mengele in particular.  Yet, remarkably, Niki Caro and Angela Workman (whose script is based on a non-fiction book by Diane Ackerman) downplay the shocking imagery of human captivity – at least if Wikipedia is to be believed.  According to the entry on Jan Żabiński, only a small minority of the Jews sheltered by him and his wife resided in their house:

    ‘Many cages in the zoo had been emptied of animals during the September 1939 air assault on Warsaw, and Żabiński decided to utilize them as hiding places for fleeing Jews. Over the course of three years, hundreds of Jews found temporary shelter in these abandoned animal cells, located on the eastern bank of the Vistula River, until they were able to relocate to permanent places of refuge elsewhere.’

    During the rebuilding of the zoo after the German surrender, Antonina paints yellow Stars of David on the bars of the cages – a touching but more easily palatable translation of the use that it seems was actually made of them in wartime.   (In the film, the stars also echo the Jewish symbols and texts with which the younger lodgers have continued to cover the cellar walls during their stay.  This ‘I woz here’ artwork seems incredible, in the clandestine circumstances.)

    A mother and her daughter, whom Antonina helps disguise as Aryans and who leave the Żabińskis to live independently, are found out, tracked down and executed by the Germans.   There are no other fatalities among the secret residents and this turns out not to be a case of soft-pedalling by Niki Caro and Angela Workman.  A legend at the end of the film confirms that every one of the others whom the Żabińskis sought to save – some three hundred people all told – survived the War.  In other respects, it’s clear that history has been ignored or distorted for the sake of dramatic conflict – to mostly counterproductive effect, because the result is so clichéd.  Virtually the full load of Nazi evil is loaded onto the shoulders of Lutz Heck.  It’s obvious from his very first appearance that, to make matters worse, he has lustful designs on Antonina.  The marital tensions between her and Jan that result from Heck’s unwanted attentions are weakly realised:  a rather silly scene in which Jan asserts his conjugal rights appears to explain Antonina’s pregnancy with the couple’s second child.  When Jan, fighting for the Polish Resistance, is shot and taken prisoner, Antonina improbably appeals to Heck’s better nature, supposedly to try and discover her husband’s whereabouts but really to engineer a prolonged showdown with the villain of the piece.

    The post-war scenes of reconstruction at the zoo echo the earthly paradise introduction and build to the required heartwarming big finish.   The staff return and some of the Jewish guests stay on.  This gives the impression of a quasi-commune but the happy family is incomplete:  finally, the long-lost Jan reappears in the distance and Antonina rushes towards him and into his arms.  Their reunion is emotionally stirring but, as a viewer, you also experience a sense of mission-accomplished relief:  what’s more, you almost feel that Niki Caro is experiencing the same.  Her approach seems to have infected the cast, most of whom give competent, somehow dutiful performances.  In the lead, Jessica Chastain is highly accomplished but curiously uninvolving.  One of the strongest presences on the screen is the physically extraordinary Shira Haas, as the young rape victim.  (Along with the richly gifted Michael Aloni, Haas also provides the best moments of Shtisel, an engaging though exasperating Israeli television drama that Sally and I have recently been watching on box sets.)

    27 April 2017

    [1]  For some examples of the film’s approach to historical accuracy, see http://culture.pl/en/article/the-zookeepers-wife-fact-vs-fiction.

     

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