Film review

  • Monster

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kaibatsu

    Hirokazu Kore-eda (2023)

    Hirokazu Kore-eda treats his characters kindly.  That made his last film, Broker (2022) – like his television series, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (2023) – often charming but finally bland.  With Monster, Kore-eda, although never unkind, almost over-compensates.   For anyone who, like me, found Broker too gently humane for its subject matter, much of this new film is bracingly different – and grim.

    The last of the ten films I saw at this year’s London Film Festival, Monster begins with an urban fire, the flames in the night sky eclipsing the street lights below.  The conflagration is watched by ten-year-old Minato Mugino (Soya Kurokawa) and his widowed mother Saori (Sakura Ando) from the balcony of their flat, on a high floor of a nearby apartment block.  The fire, which begins in a ‘hostess club’, destroys the building of which the club is part.  How and where the blaze started are the talk of the neighbourhood next morning.  There’s disapproving mention of a local schoolteacher who patronised the club.  His name is Michitoshi Hori and Saori’s son is one of his pupils.  Soon afterwards, Minato is clearly troubled by something that happened at school: his mother prises out of him that Mr Hori said Minato’s brain had been ‘switched with a pig’s brain’ and had struck him.  Saori promptly turns up at the office of the school principal, Mrs Fushimi (Yuko Tanaka), to demand an explanation.  Although she immediately arranges a meeting with Hori (Eita Nagayama) and other staff, Mrs Fushimi insists on speaking in formal platitudes that explain nothing and madden Saori all the more.  The principal’s male colleagues seem to take a cue from their boss until Hori, feeling the pressure of the situation, blurts out that Minato has been bullying another boy in his class,

    Kore-eda himself is more informative:  we soon learn, for example, that Mrs Fushimi has only recently returned to work following the death, in shocking circumstances, of the grandson whose photograph is on her office desk.  It’s uncertain what has happened to Minato in the typhoon that ends the first part of Monster but once Kore-eda returns to the blaze in the hostess club and starts showing the fire, then other incidents already featured, from a different point of view – Mr Hori’s – we twig what the film’s overall shape is going to be.  Re-setting and re-telling a story in this way isn’t typical of Kore-eda and Monster is the first film he has made working with a script that he hasn’t written.  The screenplay is credited to Yuji Sakamoto alone but a narrative structure that shows how different individual perspectives make for varying interpretations of the same events, can hardly fail to evoke another famous Japanese screen drama, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950).  Each of Monster’s three ‘acts’ begins with the fire and climaxes in the typhoon though the third act also describes the storm’s aftermath.  The longer the film goes on (it runs a few minutes over two hours), the more Kore-eda’s characteristic human sympathy registers in the narrative.  But not his usual clear storytelling:  although Monster’s main concerns emerge clearly enough, I didn’t know what to make of its conclusion.

    The film’s last third, although it also reveals Mrs Fushimi’s unhappy secret, focuses chiefly on the relationship of Minato and Yori Hoshikawa (Hinata Hiiragi), the slight, gently eccentric classmate he’s alleged to have bullied.  Other boys make fun of Yori because he’s fey and rather feminine.  He and Minato are friends but the latter is increasingly anxious and touchy both about what the friendship signifies and what it may lead others to think of Minato himself.  (A similar theme propelled Lukas Dhont’s Close (2022).)  At the end of the second part of Monster, while the typhoon is still raging, Hori joins forces with Saori, who’s desperate to find her son; they struggle through an area of wilderness to the abandoned railway carriage that is Minato’s and Yori’s secret hiding place.  The carriage has been overturned by the storm; Hori manages to force open a door and, after peering inside, gives Saori a look that is deliberately tantalising:  we can’t be sure whether or not what he has seen confirms her worst fears.  In the last part of the film, however, we see Minato and Yori emerge unscathed from the carriage in the benign, sunlit morning after the typhoon, into green meadows beyond the wilderness.  I didn’t get if this was meant to indicate what had actually happened or that the children had died and been reunited in some kind of paradise – stupidly vague as that sounds and hard as it is to believe from a film-maker as imaginative about the next world as Kore-eda showed himself to be in After Life (1998).  Neither alternative satisfies.

    Even so, Monster mostly feels like a return to form for Kore-eda.  While the narrative structure might seem excessively complicated, the delaying and drip-feed of revelations are less mechanical than is often the case because lying and obfuscation are essential to the texture.  Kore-eda explores in different ways what it means to be a ‘monster’ or to do monstrous things.  (The title also links to a game that Minato and Yori play – that game where the name of someone or something is written on a post-it stuck to your forehead and you have to ask questions to try and work out your identity.  It seems in Japan this game is called ‘Who’s the Monster’?)  The film is dedicated to Ryuichi Sakamoto, who wrote the score and who died earlier this year.  Sakamoto’s music is different from what we’re used to hearing in a Kore-eda picture – they hadn’t worked together previously – but it’s both expressive and effectively used.  Peter Bradshaw put it well in his Guardian review of Monster from this year’s Cannes festival (where the film won the screenplay award and the Queer Palm):  ‘plangent, sad piano chords will often counterintuitively be added to a scene of apparent drama or tension, implying that the meaning of this scene has not yet been disclosed’.

    As usual, Kore-eda gets lovely performances from his child actors.  The adults are excellent, too, especially Eita Nagayama, whom I don’t remember seeing before.   My favourite parts of the film were the descriptions of Hori’s private life and relationship with his hostess girlfriend (Mitsuki Takahata).  Hori’s attention to text eventually yields important insights that help unravel some of the mystery of what’s been going on in Minato’s mind.  There’s also a  minor, funny example of the importance Hori attaches to the written word.  As his girlfriend reminds him, he’s so fastidious about correct expression that he replies to phishing emails by telling their authors about the typos they’ve made.

    14 October 2023

  • The Goldman Case

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le procès Goldman

    Cédric Kahn (2023)

    Pierre Goldman, born in Lyon in 1944, was the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants to France, both active in the French Resistance; he was raised by his father after his parents separated and his mother returned to Poland.  Goldman’s career in radical left-wing activism took root in the mid-1960s.  In 1966 he dodged compulsory military service and travelled to South America, attending the Tricontinental Conference in Havana; he got to know Régis Debray and, through him, Venezuelan guerrilleros.  After a brief return to Paris (where he didn’t engage with May ’68 agitators), Goldman went back to Venezuela:  in 1969, he was part of a guerrilla group that carried out a major bank robbery in Puerto La Cruz.  He avoided arrest by returning once more to Paris and robbed several small businesses there.  One of the robberies with which he was charged resulted in the killing of two staff in a pharmacy.  While admitting to the other robberies, Goldman denied responsibility for this one and the killings but was found guilty on all counts.  In 1974, he received prison sentences of twelve years for the robberies and life for the murders.  The following year saw the publication of his memoir, Souvenirs obscurs d’un juif polonais né en France, in which Goldman accused the French police of institutional anti-semitism and racism, and of conspiring to convict him of a crime he did not commit.  The book’s impact, combined with growing concerns about inconsistencies in the police investigation, led to Goldman’s retrial – on all the original charges.  This second trial began in April 1976.

    The Goldman Case is, as its French title says, ‘The Goldman Trial’.  In the opening scene of Cédric Kahn’s dramatisation, showing at the London Film Festival, a man hurries along a Paris street.  After that, The Goldman Case takes place entirely indoors:  in the office of Goldman’s counsel, Georges Kiejman; in a prison cell where Goldman is held during the trial, and where he argues with Kiejman; but predominantly in the courtroom itself.  There are no flashbacks to Goldman’s earlier life in radical politics or his life of crime.  Most of the dialogue in the screenplay that Kahn wrote with Nathalie Hertzberg is presumably lifted verbatim from the trial transcript.  The sequence in Kiejman’s office makes clear from the outset Goldman’s hostility towards the man who’ll be trying to overturn his murder conviction.  A junior lawyer (he was the running man in the street outside) delivers to Kiejman a statement from Goldman, explaining why the latter wants to dispense with the former’s services:  the client derides his barrister as ‘an armchair Jew’ – an accusation that Kiejman particularly resents.  He does in the event represent Goldman in court but that preliminary scene in Kiejman’s office is an effective way of establishing what is, in courtroom drama anyway, an unusual dynamic between the accused and their counsel.  Goldman (Arieh Worthalter) refuses to call any witnesses in his defence – ‘I’m innocent because I’m innocent’, he claims.  He’s primed to disagree with Kiejman (Arthur Harari) in open court whenever he feels like it.  Goldman’s implacable anti-establishment animus is such that he believes he is ultimately representing himself.  It’s also what causes the exasperated Kiejman, in a conversation in the prison cell between court sessions, to accuse Goldman of a ‘suicidal’ attitude in the trial.

    This was certainly a cause célèbre in France.  Goldman’s memoir earned him some high-profile supporters – the likes of Françoise Sagan, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Signoret, along with Régis Debray.  The anti-semitic aspect of the case led it to be labelled a modern-day Dreyfus affair.  I’d never heard of Goldman, though; I looked him up on Wikipedia before seeing Kahn’s film just to get a minimal idea of who he was; I deliberately avoided reading what actually happened in court.  What a difference that makes to the experience of watching a dramatic reconstruction of a real-life trial!  For this viewer, The Goldman Case was truly suspenseful.  So:  if you don’t want to know the verdict, look away now …

    It takes a while to work out who’s who in the courtroom – it’s packed with judges, lawyers and witnesses, as well as in the noisy public gallery – but The Goldman Case is thoroughly absorbing.  (The absence of music on the soundtrack further concentrates your attention.)  Both main performances are strong.  The Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter may be rather too mature for the title character:  he’s thirty-eight and looks a few years older; Goldman was only thirty-one in 1976.  But Worthalter’s dynamism in the dock is powerful:  he conveys, without obvious histrionics, Goldman’s intensity – and how maddening he is, especially from his counsel’s point of view.   Arthur Harari blends very successfully Kiejman’s forensic skill and his somewhat pedantic quality.  He may not be an armchair Jew but he’s evidently very well read:  his addresses to the court are replete with literary and philosophical allusions.  Kiejman emerges rather as the hero of the story.  When a colleague urges him to invoke his own Jewishness in his closing speech, Kiejman pooh-poohs the idea as unprofessional but thinks again.  His speech strikes a masterly balance between matters of principle and matters of fact.  He focuses attention on pertinent questions (for example:  why, if he carried out the robbery and killings in the pharmacy, did Goldman decide to claim an alibi in a location so close to the scene of the crimes?)  And Kiejman does mention, though without milking it, the ethnic heritage that he and Pierre Goldman share.

    Stéphan Guérin-Tillié is the presiding judge – mildly confusing for this viewer, who’d seen the same actor play the culprit only a week or two before in the French TV series, Spiral of Lies, part of Channel 4’s Walter Presents collection.  (Spiral of Lies, by the way, features increasingly bonkers plotting but also an excellent performance from Thierry Neuvic.)  Guérin-Tillié does a good job nevertheless as the judge, who struggles throughout to subdue raucous shouts, pro- and anti-Goldman, in the public gallery.  The eventual verdicts confirm Goldman’s guilt on all charges – except for the robbery and murders in the pharmacy.  The deafening reaction from Goldman’s supporters, once these two ‘not guilty’ verdicts are announced, forces the judge himself to shout to be heard as he reads out the remaining ‘guilty’ judgments.

    The on-screen text that concludes Cédric Kahn’s impressive film tells us what happened to Pierre Goldman but not Georges Kiejman.  As well as enjoying a long, stellar legal career, Kiejman went on to hold political office in François Mitterrand’s government, in the early 1990s (for a few months, he was Minister of Justice).  Goldman was acquitted and released from prison in late 1976.  In September 1979, he was assassinated – shot at point-blank range – in Paris.  The identity and political motivation of the assassin(s) continue to be debated.  Georges Kiejman, who died earlier this year, lived to be ninety.  Pierre Goldman was killed at the age of thirty-five.

    13 October 2023

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