Film review

  • Poppy Field

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Câmp de maci 

    Eugen Jebeleanu (2020)

    This Romanian film has been among the online offerings at both the Glasgow and BFI Flare festivals in recent weeks.  The best of the three Flare films I saw this year, Poppy Field is among the best I recall seeing at this festival in any year.  It’s a character study, of Cristi, a thirtyish, closeted gay man in present-day Bucharest, and covers rather less than one day in his life.  At eighty-one minutes, it’s an unusually short feature but long enough to be almost completely satisfying in what it sets out to do.

    In Firebird, another Flare 2021 film, Peeter Rebane describes his main characters’ working routines on a Soviet-era air base before revealing that they’re gay.  First-time director Eugen Jebeleanu does the opposite in Poppy Field.  The first quarter-hour or so concentrates on the protagonist’s private life.  Cristi (Conrad Mericoffer) welcomes his French lover, Hadi (Radouan Leflahi), who’s come to stay for a few days at his apartment.  They spend some time together there – making love, chatting, eating and, in Hadi’s case, praying to Allah – before Catalina (Cendana Trifan), Cristi’s sister, stops by.  She’s come with a present of food and, it’s clear, to satisfy her curiosity about her brother’s boyfriend.  Cristi mentions that he has to work later in the day but says no more about his job.  Jebeleanu eventually cuts from the apartment to inside a van carrying Cristi and colleagues in the Jandarmeria, Romania’s paramilitary police.

    To be fair, it would have been almost impossible for Peeter Rebane to keep the military base under wraps while introducing the principals in Firebird.  The approach of Jebeleanu and Ioana Moraru, the writer of Poppy Field, is more dramatically effective, nevertheless:  they build a picture of who Cristi is before placing him in a macho working environment that’s quickly confirmed as inimical to his sexuality.  The chat inside the police van is straight talk – mostly about girlfriends – but things will soon change.  Cristi’s unit is en route to a cinema, where protesters have interrupted the screening of a queer (lesbian) film.  The gendarmes are confronted by a stand-off between angry audience members and the protesters – a group of Christian nationalists.  They brandish Madonna icons and Romanian flags, sing hymns and the national anthem, yell homophobic abuse.

    Heading the police presence at the cinema are a senior female officer, Oancea (Valentina Zaharia), and Mircea (Alexandru Potocean).  Cristi remains relatively in the background.  His face shows the personal pressure of what’s going on but not to the extent that preoccupied colleagues would notice.  It’s in the margins of the disturbance that the situation turns more directly threatening to him.  A young man (Florin Caracala), there to see the film, speaks to Cristi, asking ‘Don’t you recognise me?’   He’s persistent and attempts to ignore him are futile.  Cristi loses it and thumps the man before being restrained by furious colleagues – Stroia (George Pistereanu) is the most furious – and told to calm down in the now emptied and out-of-bounds theatre where the film should have screened.  His colleagues’ reasoning is that, if there’s no sign of Cristi, it’s easier for them to rubbish the victim’s claims as to who assaulted him.

    In the minutes that follow, as a hubbub continues in the foyer, Cristi alternates between bursts of anger, trying to escape from the auditorium to sort things out, and complete inaction.  He slumps in one of the seats, stupefied.  At one point, he stands on the stage in front of the screen – facing the rows of red plush seats that presumably give the film its name and the audience that isn’t there.  Every so often, a different colleague enters the room but only one member of the public does so – a man who thinks he dropped his mobile under his seat but can’t remember where he was sitting – and he’s accompanied by a gendarme.  Cristi is taciturn throughout the film but says even less than usual in one-sided conversations inside the theatre with Mircea and Claudiu (Alex Calin).  The emotional dynamic of this whole episode – with Cristi reluctantly ‘closeted’ – is potent.

    In terms of incident, that’s just about it.  At the end of their shift, the gendarmes stand round their van in the cold, dark street.  Though he doesn’t stand physically far apart from the others, Cristi is detached from the group.   Everyone but him has bought fast food.  When Mircea offers parts of his sandwich Cristi declines (Mircea knows something’s eating him).  Taking a phone call from Hadi, Cristi reminds him about food in the fridge and says, quietly and tenderly, that he’s looking forward to getting home.  Mircea gives him a lift and, as before, does nearly all the talking.  The man Cristi assaulted had a bloody face but wasn’t seriously injured.  Oancea – ‘a good guy’, according to Mircea – has said she won’t be instigating any disciplinary action.  Mircea urges Cristi, in light of this narrow escape (‘the stars were aligned for you’), to talk to him in future if he feels the need.  Cristi says – in the form of a hollow ‘yes’ – that he will.  It’s early morning when Mircea drops him off, though not in the street where he lives.  Cristi says he wants to walk on his own for a bit.

    ‘Kisses,’ says Mircea as Cristi gets out of his car.  This, the last word of Ioana Moraru’s script, somehow captures Cristi’s fraught and fragile situation.  Mircea is genuinely concerned for his younger colleague, though also exasperated by him.  His farewell – jokey yet regretful – may be Mircea’s way of telling Cristi he knows he’s gay.  The earlier, longer scene between them in the cinema is also remarkable.  Mircea tells the sad story of how he and his wife have fallen out after briefly adopting a poorly stray dog that Mircea then insisted getting rid of.  Given the film’s total running time, this monologue accounts for too much of it.  It’s absorbing nonetheless, thanks to Alexandru Potocean’s delivery, and it brings about real mood changes.  Mircea feels better for getting things off his chest.  Cristi, though sorry to hear of Mircea’s troubles, is relieved at being expected to listen but not to reply.

    The brief exchange with Claudiu  is a startlingly effective contrast – here, Cristi listens mutely and in fear.  Claudiu expresses sympathy with him, recounting an incident in a gents’ toilet where another man exposed himself to Claudiu then cast aspersions about him.  After oddly remarking that he admired the flasher for his nerve in trying it on, Claudiu says the man now causing trouble for Cristi has claimed they used to be an item.  Claudiu reassures his colleague that ‘Your secret’s safe with me’.  Do those words suggest Claudiu is acknowledging a secret of his own?  At any rate, Alex Calin gives the sequence an electrifying ambiguity.

    Eugen Jebeleanu doesn’t explain much but this is an enriching strength of Poppy Field rather than a careless or evasive weakness.  We’re told Cristi already has a black mark on his work record for aggressive conduct but not the details of the earlier incident.  We’re not told what Hadi’s work is.  When he arrives he’s wearing a business suit; when he leaves, he tells Catalina, he’ll be on a flight to Hamburg.  This is enough to give a sense of Hadi’s living an extrovert, larger life than Cristi does.  We don’t know whether the screening resumed or was cancelled.  Protests of the kind described in Poppy Field really have taken place in Romania (in response to Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right (2010) and Robin Campillo’s BPM (2017), among others).  They’ll presumably take place again – so there’s logic in not confirming a definite outcome to the one Jebeleanu depicts.  We don’t know the facts of Cristi’s acquaintance with the young man in the cinema – or, indeed, the latter’s name (he’s ‘The guy’ in the IMDb cast list).  The point is, rather, to imply that Cristi has had gay liaisons and, to that extent, is vulnerable.  Beyond what Claudiu tells him and the possible subtext of Mircea’s cryptic cheerio, we don’t know either quite what ‘the guy’ tells Cristi’s colleagues about him.  That gives an added charge to Cristi’s sequestration in the cinema.

    The most important unresolved element, of course, is the conflict between Cristi’s sexuality and his secrecy about it.  He has survived a crisis but that means things will go on as before – except, maybe, worse than before.  (The events of the night will surely put a damper on the short time he’ll have with Hadi.)  Conrad Mericoffer is exceptionally good in the lead.  He conveys subtly yet strongly the continuous strain of the life that his character has chosen to lead.  Cristi has got so used to keeping his feelings under wraps that part of him is withheld even when he’s with – and loving being with – Hadi.  When he holds Cristi, Hadi seems to try to make him less tense.  Even as they lie side by side and chat, though the talk is sometimes humorous, Cristi is never quite at ease.  Hadi proposes they go on a trip to the mountains for the weekend and can’t understand why Cristi won’t agree.  The reason is soon clear enough:  for Cristi, being in the closet means staying in the apartment.  Even though his sister knows he’s gay, he sees her visit as an invasion of privacy.  (When he gets mad with Catalina it’s a foreshadowing of his more violent reactions in the cinema.)

    The visualisation of Cristi’s predicament is obvious but effective.  After stressing the limited space of his apartment, Jebeleanu and DP Marius Panduru show Cristi virtually caged in the police van.  When the gendarmes enter the cinema, packed with angry people, a handheld camera reflects the volatile situation and, increasingly, the danger it poses to Cristi.  There’s also handheld camerawork in the earlier scenes in Cristi’s flat.  I was less convinced by this as I watched:  in retrospect, I can see that Jebeleanu meant the jumpy camerawork to suggest Cristi’s situation even at home – at least when he experiences a sense of threat there.  If memory serves, the handheld camera isn’t used when Cristi and Hadi (played by Radouan Leflahi with sensitive charm) are on their own.  It’s certainly conspicuous only once Catalina arrives – when handling the situation becomes more complicated for Cristi.

    Catalina isn’t a deliberately hostile presence – and is puzzled by her brother’s increasingly hostile manner towards her.  She and Hadi chat awkwardly but pleasantly.  (The cultural mix in the scenes at the flat is rich:  there are bits of conversation in English and French, as well as Romanian; Hadi says his Muslim prayers; one of the traditional Romanian dishes that Catalina brings with her includes pork.)  But Cristi’s sister does reveal a prejudice less conscious than that of the Christian nationalist demonstrators:  as he angrily shows her the door, she refers to the ‘gay phase’ Cristi’s going through.  Other gendarmes occasionally disparage members of the cinema audience; and the fact that the latter, unlike the protesters, are repeatedly asked by the police to show their ID implies institutional homophobia.  Yet the only determinedly anti-gay remarks from officers at the scene are voiced by Cristi, in the panicky hope that verbal attack is the best means of defence.

    There aren’t too many reviews of Poppy Field in evidence online and only four so far on Rotten Tomatoes.  Most of these are positive (and Jennie Kermode’s enthusiastic Eye for Film piece especially cogent) but reservations expressed about the film are instructive, too.  Ştefan Dobroiu, on a site called Cineuropa, ends up ‘wishing that Cristi would put up more of a fight in his struggle as a gay man’:  not for the first time, a reviewer comfortable with stories of gay pride or anti-gay persecution is uneasy with descriptions of gay anxiety and guilt feelings – it’s as if these are letting the side down.  The one negative review on Rotten Tomatoes, by Alistair Ryder, is more broadly critical.  (The notice has evidently appeared in more than one online location.)  Ryder describes Poppy Field as ‘an overly familiar tale of the pressures of the closet that detracts from the more compelling drama happening around it’ – by which he means the demonstration at the cinema.

    In other words, the film should have explored the menace of the retrogressive forces behind such protests rather than the mindset of one closet gay.  Ryder’s argument ignores both the scale of the challenge involved in dramatising this menace (as opposed to making a documentary about it) and the signal achievements of Eugen Jebeleanu’s auspicious film-making debut.  He and Conrad Mericoffer have created a moving portrait of a convincingly unhappy man but the protest that triggers a crisis in Cristi’s life isn’t, in any case, consigned to the margins of Poppy Field.  It’s a particularly strident expression of the cultural pressures that have nurtured Cristi’s rarely relieved, unquiet struggle with himself.

    24 March 2021

  • Tove

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Zaida Bergroth (2020)

    Zaida Bergroth’s biographical film covers around a decade in the eighty-six-year life of her fellow Finn, the writer, artist, and illustrator, Tove Jansson (1914-2001).  Focusing on a short part of a life is currently conventional in biopic.  It means, most obviously, that the actor playing the biographee doesn’t have to age many decades.  It can also imply that the period covered is sufficient to convey the subject’s essential qualities.  I don’t know if Bergroth and the scriptwriter, Eeva Putro, think that’s the case here but their timeframe short-changes Tove Jansson and Alma Pöysti, who plays her.  There’s more to them both than Tove is prepared to show.

    The film, streaming as part of BFI’s Flare/LGBTQI+ festival, begins in 1944 and ends somewhere in the 1950s.  This is the period in which Jansson became a famous name, internationally as the author of the Moomin books, in Finland as a comic-strip artist too.  (There’s some overlap between the two.  From the mid-fifties, Moomintroll was published as a daily strip in the London Evening News.  Tove includes a scene in which the heroine is astonished by the highly lucrative offer made her by the paper’s representative (Jonathan Hutchings).)  The main purpose of the chosen time span, however, is to concentrate on Tove’s unhappy affair with the theatre director, Vivica Bandler (Krista Kosonen).  Late on in the narrative, Tove meets Tuulikki Pietilä, the graphic artist with whom she shared the rest (and more than half) of her life.  Bergroth and Putro aren’t interested in this remarkably enduring partnership.  Even summary text at the end majors on Tove and Vivica.  We’re told not only that they always stayed friends but that Vivica, in later years, regretted not being able to return Tove’s love. 

    The film-makers may have deemed Jansson’s settled life with Pietilä too unexciting for their purposes – but her attachment to Bandler, on Tove‘s account, wasn’t long on drama either.  Once the initial seduction, of Tove by Vivica, has taken place and we get the message that Vivica, unlike Tove, is promiscuous, the relationship is predictable and repetitive – without developing substance through repetition.  Its static quality is reinforced by Krista Kosonen’s Vivica – Kosonen has a gravid allure but her expressions change rarely and, when they do change, slowly.  That’s not at all the case with the excellent Alma Pöysti.  She’s always emotionally alert and eloquent in Tove’s human interactions and shows her mind working as she draws, and appraises what she’s drawn.  It’s frustrating, though, that Pöysti is obliged to be mutely melancholy much of the time.  Bergroth’s camera occasionally scans pages of Moomin drawings but this hardly does justice to Tove Jansson’s vigorous, sustained creativity.  Anyone coming to the film without prior knowledge of her is liable to get the impression she was too depressed to get much work done.

    Joanna Haartti’s Tuulikki is on screen for only a few minutes but she’s a bracing presence from the moment she appears.  Haartti suggests a personality – positive, straightforward, intellectually inquisitive – in a few incisive strokes.  In the film’s last scene, she visits Tove’s studio:  just the way that Haartti hands Tove the bag of pastries she’s brought is expressive.  I was left wishing that Bergroth and Eeva Putro had chosen a different structure and emphasis, describing more of the early stages of Tove’s life with Tuulikki, perhaps using flashbacks to her time with Vivica by way of contrast.  The inertness of the central romance and the late arrival of Tuulikki on the scene have the effect of deflecting interest to Tove’s relationships with men – her father (Robert Enckell) and Atos Wirtanen (Shani Roney), a political philosopher and member of the Finnish parliament.

    Shani Roney’s Wirtanen is a clever, sensitive but faintly ridiculous fellow.  Despite his public and cultural standing, there’s a persistent diffidence about him in Helsinki’s bohemian circles, where he gets to know Tove.  They’re lovers for a time; at one point, she invites him to propose marriage to her.  Atos is amazed but happy to do so, and Tove accepts.  I couldn’t, though, believe his reaction to her subsequent admission that their living together is never going to work:  he already knows her sexual preferences – hence his astonishment when she asks him to propose.  (We’re told at the end that Atos like Vivica, continued to be friends with Tove.)   Viktor Jansson was a successful sculptor whose style was decidedly traditional.  The film’s presentation of his chilly discouragement of Tove’s artistic efforts is a bit overworked but Alma Pöysti has one of her most powerful moments in the aftermath to her father’s death.  Her mother (Kajsa Ernst) hands Tove a scrapbook that Viktor kept scrupulously up to date – full of press cuttings that chart his daughter’s increasing success and reputation.  Seeing this, Tove is convulsed in silent grief – she never suspected her father took pride in her.  Pöysti shows in her face and attitude that the suddenly abundant evidence he did now makes things worse, as well as better.

    I read Moomin books as a child and, many years later, some of Jansson’s fiction for adults.  I was interested enough to watch Moominland Tales: The Life of Tove Jansson on BBC television in 2012; and impressed enough by it to make a CD copy.  Disappointed in Bergroth’s film, I looked out the CD and enjoyed this documentary all over again.  The voiceovers are exemplary (main narration by Samuel West, Tove Jansson’s words spoken by Janet Suzman); the talking heads are admirably well chosen.  It’s only to be expected that the BBC film, directed by Eleanor Yule, is more factually informative than Tove, not least in explaining the links between the most important people in Jansson’s life and the characters in her fiction.  But Moominland Tales is more dramatically involving too – thanks especially to still photographs, and home movies featuring Tove and Tuulikki, mostly on Klovharu, the small island in the Finnish Gulf where they built a home and, for many years, spent their summers.  There are extraordinary images of sea and sunlight both in the home-movie snippets and in Yule’s location filming on the island.

    According to Wikipedia, Tove, with a budget of 3.4m euros, is the second most expensive picture ever made in Finland.  Shot by Linda Wassberg and designed by Catharina Nyqvist Ehrnrooth, it’s a good-looking piece, and boasts some fine acting.  It’s hard and dreary work, though.  During the closing credits, Bergroth plays video footage of the elderly Tove doing an ecstatic little dance (Eleanor Yule’s documentary uses the same piece of film).  Two or three times in the course of Tove, Alma Pöysti dances similarly, to the accompaniment of Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller music, but these bursts of energetic joie de vivre are highly untypical of the film.  In the last scene, Tove shows Tuulikki the picture she’s currently painting – a self-portrait, of a woman whose face is featureless.  The painting, Tove tells Tuulikki, is called ‘The Beginner’.  You get Zaida Bergroth’s point but wonder if she quite realises the aptness of that blank-canvas face or the irony in the painting’s name.  Tove ends just as things begin to get interesting.

    21 March 2021

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