Lions – Jazmín López and Meteora – Spiros Stathoulopoulos

Lions (Leones) (Jazmín López – Argentina/France/Netherlands) 82 minutes

Meteora (Spiros Stathoulopoulos – Germany/Greece) 82 minutes

Young Argentine director Jazmín López’s debut film is an elliptical exploration of youthful grief that manages to be both slight and weighty at the one time. Five young rich kids from Buenos Aires embark on a day trip to the country where they appear to be looking for the holiday home belonging to the family of one of them. There is a brother and sister – the nervy, and possibly autistic, Arturo (Pablo Sigal) and Sofi (Macarena del Corro) – Sofi’s boyfriend Félix (Tomás Mackinlay), Niki (Diego Vegezzi) who goes around recording all the sound within his earshot, and Isa (Julia Volpato), who has recently lost her brother in a car crash in which at least one or two of the party may have been also involved.

Lions is a meandering film in which the quintet wander through the lush greenery, telling each other inconsequential jokes and anecdotes, playing games (one is the ‘Hemingway game’, that variation on the six-word short story) and being revisited by the fatal car crash that claimed the life of Isa’s brother. There is no real plot to speak of – what recognisable narrative elements there are drift in and out like the sounds and noises on Niki’s dictaphone. Occasionally López introduces a trope that suggests some drama might be around the corner, like when the edgy Arturo steals a pistol from a tractor they come across, but there is Chekovian pay-off to be had.

The film ends with something resembling a narrative conclusion but an ambiguous close is as near a concession to convention that López makes. Her free-wheeling narrative will madden many (and, to be fair, it does at times have the feel of a student film about it) but the performances are fresh and natural and she has a nice way of incorporating diegetic music into the fabric of the film (Daniel Johnston’s ‘Devil Town’ and Sonic Youth’s  ‘Do You Believe in Rapture’ interpreted by the characters). There are touches of Gus Van Sant (director of photography Matías Mesa operated the Steadicam on Elephant and Gerry) and Terrence Malick about Lions (and, like much cinema that reminds you of Malick, it is far more interesting than the Texan mystic’s current output) and, after Santiago Mitre’s recent El Estudiante, is another glimpse of a very talented young Argentine director.





Another impressive film from a young director is the second feature from the Greek Spiros Stathoulopoulos. His first film, PVC-1, was set in his mother’s native Colombia and was notable for being one single continuous take. Meteora is similarly formally inventive, mixing live action and mesmerising animation in the style of Orthodox icons, even if the story at its core is hardly original – forbidden love between a monk and a nun at the famed Meteora monastery complex in northern Greece.

The convent and the monastery stand opposite one another, atop precipitate limestone buttes (so precipitate that the only way to access the convent is to be hoisted up inside a net). Theo, a young monk (Theo Alexander – best known as Talbot in True Blood) woos Urania, a Russian nun (Tamila Koulieva), communicating with her via light reflected into each other’s bedroom windows. What starts off as a seemingly innocuous friendship soon turns carnal and you wonder quite how Spiros Stathoulopoulos got clearance for the film from the notoriously conservative Greek Orthodox church.

Nothing much happens in the film – Stathoulopoulos even (wisely) refrains from having the couple face any retributive justice for their transgressions. Instead he documents the minutiae of monastery life and the farming hinterland – the slaughter and skinning of a goat reminded me of the ethnographic cinema of Michelangelo Frammartino or the Iranian Abol-Fazl Jalili. We see the film’s narrative reflected and glossed in the beautiful animation sequences. There are voice-over asides on faith but, though a theological consultant is credited in the closing titles, it is hard to glean much from that angle. The strength of Meteora is its narrative and formal beauty – undoubtedly helped by having such a photogenic location; it is a little gem of ontological cinema – the pleasure is all in watching the action unfold before your eyes, as ordinary people go about their business in an extraordinary environment.

La fille du 14 juillet – Antonin Peretjatko & Before Midnight – Richard Linklater

La fille du 14 juillet (Antonin Peretjatko – France) 88 minutes
Before Midnight (Richard Linklater – USA) 109 minutes

The opening scene of Antonin Peretjatko’s madcap comedy is one of the funniest set-pieces I have seen in the last couple of years: former President Nicolas Sarkozy inspects the troops and greets dignitaries at the official celebrations on the French national holiday of the title (only foreigners call it ‘Bastille Day’). Sarkozy is shown all jittery in sped-up motion, with comic music accompaniment. Lest Peretjatko be accused of political favouritism, Sarkozy’s successor François Hollande is then portrayed in the same light; we also see tanks edging in and out of position with geometrical punctiliousness – it’s good that someone is ridiculing France’s militaristic holiday celebrations, which are little more than a fancier, less dogmatic version of North Korea’s.

After the promising start though, La fille du 14 juillet is only fitfully funny. The hero of the film, Hector (Grégoire Tachnakian), a young slacker working as a museum guard, is besotted with Truquette (meaning 'Thingamijiguette', played by Vilmala Pons), a pretty woman whom he encounters while working on the 14th of July. Hector’s friend, Pator (Vincent Macaigne) has the idea of inviting her and a friend along with them on holiday in the south of France. Unfortunately, the friend’s licentious Benny Hill-esque brother insists on tagging along and intends on doing all he can to get his way with Truquette first.

There are some good gags here and there, such as an amusing scene in a dole office where the absurdity of French bureaucracy is laid bare, and the central trope where la rentrée, the French return to work and school after the holidays, is brought forward one month, in response to the economic crisis, something that sows panic amid the film's characters. The film has the free-wheeling air of the New Wave and later French films, such as early Bertrand Blier, but underneath the playfulness lies a certain piety, and it soon becomes clear the film is a rather annoying homage to its forebears. It also reminds you of one of the less appealing features of the New Wave – the dolly bird portrayal of many women; Vilmala Pons doe-eyed, yé-yé girly Truquette is worse still – she is one part Anna Karina, three parts Zooey Deschanel. Some might see La fille du 14 juillet as a riff on classic French slapstick; to me, though, for all its zaniness, it looked tired and hackneyed.






Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy return for the third instalment of the films charting the relationship between Jesse (Hawke) and Céline (Delpy), who first met in Vienna in the 1994 film, Before Sunrise. That film was a charming talky piece that brought Linklater’s goofy philosophising to an international context – a Generation-X Brief Encounter. The pair were re-united ten years later in Before Sunset, when Céline tracks down the now-married Jesse at one of his book signings in Paris. Before Sunset was clunky in comparison to its predecessor, possibly because of the pretensions of its older characters, and it made heavy play of the prevailing tension between the US and France, in the wake of the Iraq war. Delpy has, in the meantime, turned director and copied the formula for her own brand of particularly lugubrious comedy (2 Days in Paris and 2 Days in New York).

Before Midnight finds the pair now married, having made the fateful choice following their reunion in Paris. They have twin daughters and Jesse is at loggerheads with his ex-wife, who, none-too-surprisingly, is doing her best to impede his relationship with his fourteen-year-old son, Hank (Séamus Davey-Fitzpatrick, from Moonrise Kingdom). The film opens with Hank and Jesse bidding farewell at the airport in Greece, where they have been holidaying. It’s an extended scene and is Linklater at his best – sharp dialogue and the same eye for social awkwardness that has marked his work since Slacker and Dazed and Confused. Once Hank is on the plane, Jesse returns to Céline and the kids and the next long scene, where they drive back to their holiday home, is equally good, bringing us up to speed on what has passed since the last film.

Both Hawke and Delpy have aged considerably in the past few years, the former looking scraggly, like Chris Cooper, the latter, morphing into something resembling Hilary Clinton. The film loses its way when it strays into holiday bucolic, with the guests trading idle banter with their host, Greek writer Patrick (played by Zorba the Greek cinematographer Walter Lasally) and his family. It is sunny and carefree, light years from the edgy cinema of Athina Rachel Tsangari, director of Attenberg and producer of Dogtooth and Alps, and who plays one of the hosts, Ariadne, here. There is little sense of the economic crisis crippling Greece, referred to only once in the entire film.

To his credit, Linklater knows that films about holidays are uninteresting unless something goes wrong, like L’Avventura, About Elly and Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, which is explicitly referenced at one point by Céline. The simmering discontent in the marriage boils over in the second half of the film, when an intended relaxing stay at a luxury hotel becomes the backdrop to a protracted argument of vicious mutual recrimination between the couple. The argument, which stems from Jesse’s wish to move to Chicago to be closer to Hank (and which Céline is having none of), introduces darkness into the trilogy for the first time and severely undermines the youthful romance of the first two films. These scenes are a mixed bag – they have a maddening energy but it is difficult to have too much sympathy with such a dislikable pair; Jesse is sanctimonious and cruel while Céline is insufferably smug (as is Delpy in many of her films). Hawke and Delpy collaborated once again with Linklater on the screenplay, after their Oscar nomination for Before Sunset, but the dynamic at play here is far from the heightened claustrophobia of Cassavetes or Bergman. The ending is sufficiently ambiguous to leave open the chance for a fourth film. Before Midnight recaptures some of the spark of the first film in the trilogy but it is an uneven effort. Maybe taking Jesse and Céline out of picturesque locales might be a better idea for Linklater to consider in a future film.

Two Films from the Balkans

Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos – Greece) 93 minutes

Children of Sarajevo (Djeca) (Aida Begić – Bosnia-Herzegovina/Germany/France/Turkey) 90 minutes

Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 film Dogtooth, winner of the Un certain regard award at Cannes, was a surprise sleeper hit around Europe, its success largely propelled by word of mouth. Surprising mainly because Lanthimos’s style – static shots, mannered acting and absurdist drama – doesn’t lend itself naturally to public appeal. His follow-up, Alps, is more of the same, though somewhat more uncompromising.

A group of four amateur actors form a company called ‘Alps’ who offer their services to bereaved families and individuals, playing out the roles of deceased friends and relatives to help them grieve. The roles taken on include a teenage girlfriend, a Canadian lover of a middle-aged man and the daughter of a bookish elderly gentleman.  Even if you know this conceit beforehand, it is hard to follow the film at times, as the characters shift from role to role, including their own ‘real-life’ ones – one of the ‘actors’ is a paramedic and the other a nurse – and the plot lurches into one narrative aporia after another. That said, the performative aspect of Alps is interesting, with its absurd set-ups recalling the soberly deranged cinema of the Portuguese directors Pedro Costa, João Pedro Rodrigues and Miguel Gomes.

You are tempted at times to read more into the film than might be there – is it a parable for a crisis-stricken Greece? Does the accumulation of references to Hollywood actors and American singers – with not a single Greek cited – reflect the current economic emasculation of the Greek nation? These may or may not be pertinent but Alps is a sufficiently elastic narrative to give rise to such ruminations. And sometime, trying to figure out what is going on on screen can be as liberating as it is frustrating. In many ways it is similar to Athina Rachel Tsangari’s more narratively robust Attenberg (2010) – a film that Lanthimos had a supporting role in (Tsangari is the producer of this film). Many people will loathe Alps and it does feel like a minor diversion but it is also pleasingly free-wheeling and for all its inscrutability, quite entertaining.













Young Bosnian director Aida Begićs first feature Snow was another Cannes prize-winner, picking up the Grand Jury prize during Critics’ Week in 2008. It was a solid drama about a Muslim village whose menfolk have been obliterated by the war and which is now about to bought by a foreign company; after such a promising debut, Children of Sarajevo is particularly disappointing. Like its predecessor, the film tells the story of victims of the Bosnian War – this time, a twenty-something woman and her teenage brother, both left orphaned by the conflict. The older sister, Rahima, wears a headscarf though she doesn’t appear to be an especially devout Muslim – it is gradually revealed that it her embracing of religion is more a way of distancing herself from her junkie past and securing custody of her brother to keep him out of the orphanage. The brother, Nedim, is being bullied at school, and though he is well able to take care of himself, he does so inflicting costly damage on his bully’s iPhone.

Rahima, who works as a cook, is forced to replace the phone, as Nedim’s tormenter is none other than the son of a government minister, a philandering boor with some dodgy connections, who is a frequent diner in the upscale restaurant where Rahima works. This is where the film begins to go wrong. Though Begic’s portrayal of life in a Sarajevo tower block is finely detailed, with the ordinary poverty of low earners delineated in trips to the local convenience store, the chilliness of under-heated apartments and the hacking cough of the sibling’s middle-aged neighbour Selma, the film’s drama is woefully schematic and its characterisation crude.

All the figures of authority, be they Nedim’s school principal, the restaurant manageress, the social worker who assesses Rahima’s fitness to take care of Nedim or, the biggest cardboard ogre of the lot, the minister Melic (played by Velibor Topić, a regular face as a generic Balkan thug in English-language films such as Snatch), are un-nuanced villains. They are all people that have either profited from the war or managed to get out, drawing frequent recrimination from Rahima, whose wartime past is evoked in real footage shot during evacuation of civilians from their homes. It is a valid dialectic, and familiar from narratives with a post-war setting. It is also, not surprisingly, a familiar one in recent Bosnian films too, such as Ognjen Sviličić’s Armin (2007) and Jasmila Zbanić’s Grbavica (2006) and On the Path (2010). The problem is Begić’s narrative is far clunkier than either of those and you can far too easily see the joins. It begins to wear long before the end.