Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

Thrilling dysfunction...and Samuel

Our films this month include a thriller from Eastern Europe, a drama about a dysfunctional Swedish family, a blues melodrama and a ghost story—two of which have Samuel L. Jackson in them, after he escaped those snakes on a plane.

13 Tzameti
Directed by Gela Babluani and starring his brother, Georges, this Eastern European film reeks of nihilism with its mysterious plot, casual slaughter and coincidental ending. The stark black-and-white photography, isolated settings, natural sound and unfamiliar actors add to the tension in a film that never misses a step in its suspense and pacing.
Like Aura, reviewed here in September, the first part of 13 Tzameti deals with a young man as he follows directions that he doesn’t understand because he has assumed another man’s identity in order to acquire money. Twenty-year-old immigrant Sebastian (Georges Babluani) repairs houses on the Normandy coast to take care of his mother and brother, and one day he overhears a conversation and encounters a letter addressed to a man who has just died of a morphine overdose in the house where he is working (only later do we understand the morphine addiction). Thinking there is money to be made, he impersonates the man and follows the letter’s directions, which lead him to an isolated mansion. Two groups of men have assembled here. The first is a group of high-stakes gamblers who bet on the survival rate of the men in the second group; these men participate in a lethal game, something like Russian Roulette. Sebastian finds himself as the thirteenth player in the second group. Guns are fired, the suspense ratchets up as the chambers are spun and the movie works its way to a somewhat surprising conclusion.
This is a brutal film with a jaundiced view of human nature, and director Babluani, whose father is an acclaimed Russian filmmaker, admits that growing up in the ex-Soviet province of Georgia during two civil wars and assorted other violence has affected the way he sees the world, even though he now lives in France.
Despite the savagery and excruciating suspense, 13 Tzameti is tightly constructed and edited, the actions are believable and the acting is excellent. Georges Babluani, strikingly handsome, is effective as Sebastian and the rest of the cast is made up of fine character actors who bring believability to what, at times, is a totally absurd situation. Although the bloodshed usually is downplayed, its impact is further lessened by the beautiful black-and-white wide-screen photography; Hitchcock filmed Psycho in black-and-white for the same reason.
A very interesting supplement on the DVD is the “Testimony of a Survivor,” an apparent interview with a man who has participated in real games such as those portrayed in the film and survived. If true, it’s a chilling account; if not, it’s an interesting attempt to add verisimilitude to the film’s narrative.
A number of critics objected to this film’s English title on the grounds that “tzameti” in Georgian is the same as “thirteen,” thereby making a redundant title, while the film’s Georgian title is only “13.” It’s the sort of silly mistake one would expect Hollywood to make with a non-English film. However, in the film, the hero recalls a license plate with the numbers “13 13,” thereby justifying the double number in the title.
The film won a best first feature prize at Venice in 2005 and a grand jury world cinema award at Sundance. Anyone looking for an edge-of-the-seat thriller who can stomach the violence should enjoy this film thoroughly; it’s unforgettable. The movie is in French with English subtitles. Top

The Inheritance
When a person works at a job he does not like, he often builds a wall between his work and the rest of his life. The Inheritance, a Danish film directed by Per Fly, explores what happens when that wall fails to function.
At the beginning of the film, Christoffer (Ulrich Thomsen) manages a restaurant in Stockholm, where his beautiful wife, Maria (Lisa Werlinder), works as a stage actress. Christoffer’s father owns a steel mill in Denmark; the young man worked for his father until mental and physical ill health, brought on by the decisions demanded of a steel company executive, caused him to lose thirty pounds and find other work. In the opening scenes, he is completely happy with his wife and successful in his new position.
Then a call from Denmark brings bad news: his father has committed suicide, revealing a huge deficit that he had concealed previously in the steel company. At the funeral, his mother Annelise (Ghita Norby) asks him to stay on and help her guide the company through reorganization and a merger with a French company. Christoffer, supported by his wife, refuses, but then at the last minute, standing before the workers at his father’s factory, he agrees to stay for two years until the company is profitable again.
The rest of the film traces how Christoffer, usually for good reasons, gradually slips into an executive mode of thinking, yielding to his mother’s requests and preserving the family business, while gradually losing his humanity and his wife. Along the way, he is forced to fire his brother-in-law, alienate his sister, lay off 200 workers and see his wife take their young son and return to Stockholm. Materially, he lives well, but his way of life gnaws at him, stripping away his humanity as his decisions isolate him from his wife and the life he loves in Sweden.
The film does not make clear what his personal reasons are for his actions, and that is one of the film’s major weaknesses or strengths, depending upon how you see it—some would argue we often make decisions that rebound against us without knowing our reasons.
It would be easy to make a film showing how the ruthlessness of the corporate world could corrupt a man’s soul with money and power, but that is not what the director shows. Rather, the decisions Christoffer makes are reasonable ones. Everything he does is intended to preserve and benefit the company, and if he fails to preserve it, the workers will lose their jobs. These people have worked for his father for years and are too old to find other work; he has known some of them since he was a child. At the end, he has preserved the company at a very high price to himself, and the title of the film has taken on a very negative connotation.
The Inheritance is the second in a trilogy of movies by Fly, the first being The Bench, about lower class people in Denmark. While this film treats the upper class, the next will treat the middle class. The entire film has an austere quality, like fine Scandinavian furniture, and the sets and buildings are all beautiful. Ironically, the steel mill where the movie was filmed found itself in exactly the same economic situation (reorganization and a merger) as the fictional company in the movie. Some of the workers, who play extras in the film, are shown receiving termination notices on the screen, and a few days later they received them in real life.
The acting is solid with Thomsen gradually becoming more withdrawn, Werlinder so beautiful that most men would give up anything for her and Norby manipulative and steely as Christoffer’s mother.
The film is told in flashback, with an opening scene at the present time with Christoffer in Stockholm, and then it comes back to that scene at the end for what is the most perplexing part of the film. Critics, reviewers and internet bloggers are in disagreement about what it means, and this reviewer doesn’t pretend to understand Christoffer’s motivation. By this time in the film, he is so isolated it is impossible to guess his emotions.
The Inheritance is a deliberate, intelligent film about an important subject—can an intelligent, sensitive man function in the corporate world? It doesn’t pretend to have the answers, but it does offer a careful and artistic examination of one man’s life, and that, perhaps, is all one can expect. The movie is in Danish with English subtitles. Top

Black Snake Moan
The title and publicity photos for Black Snake Moan promise a trashy exploitation film with racial stereotypes (black man chaining a half-naked white woman to a radiator), nymphomaniac sex and violence. Although the setting is Tennessee, the iconography vibrates with sleazy echoes of Tobacco Road, third-rate Tennessee Williams, and Southern Gothic architecture and thunderstorms. And director Craig Brewer’s previous film (the Oscar-nominated Hustle & Flow) was about a pimp. If that combination doesn’t guarantee a youthful audience, nothing will.
While the film certainly incorporates all of these elements, as well as a solid soundtrack of Southern blues, it uses them to set up situations it then exploits for other purposes, such as a positive theme of people healing other people.
As the film opens, the two main characters have been abandoned by their respective lovers. Lazarus (yes, it’s a symbolic name), played by Samuel L. Jackson, is told by his wife that she is running off with his younger brother because her life with Lazarus has been too boring to be endured. Lazarus, full of anger at the two, almost kills the brother when he tries to effect a reconciliation before the two leave. Lazarus returns to his vegetable farm to be alone and lick his wounds.
Rae (Christina Ricci) is losing her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) to the military, which he has joined as the first step to getting them out of the trailer and the town where they live. Rae has another problem—she is a nymphomaniac, apparently because of childhood sexual abuse—and Ronnie is barely out of sight before she begins to renew her career as town slut. After booze, drugs, several men and a severe beating, she is dumped, two-thirds naked, at a crossroads near Lazarus’s house (yes, the symbolism is heavy handed, especially with the blues soundtrack).
Lazarus takes her into his house, chains her to a radiator when she hallucinates and tries to escape. It ponders what he is supposed to do with this problem that God has dropped at his door. How these two come to respect and heal each other without becoming romantically involved is the plot for the rest of the film. Ronnie is discharged from the Army for “anxiety attacks” that cause him to throw up, Rae confronts her mother and various other characters become involved.
Granted, some of the narrative shouldn’t be examined too closely. The radiator that figures so prominently as the anchor for Rae’s chain looks strangely out of place in a poor one-story Tennessee farmhouse. Most small Appalachian farmhouses had free-standing stoves or fireplaces, not hot water radiators, unless they were two stories and had a basement. Lazarus’s house doesn’t look as if there is room under it for a furnace to fire a radiator, not to mention the cost of such a system. But let’s take the radiator in his house as a given—consider it a necessary special effect.
The acting is excellent in all respects. Jackson said this is his best performance, and he may be right. In the film, Lazarus had played the blues professionally when he was younger, and Jackson learned enough to play on the guitar and sing for the film. Ricci manages to elicit sympathy for her unsympathetic character, and Timberlake is surprisingly good as the anxiety-ridden Ronnie. S. Epatha Merkerson is fine as the good-hearted Angela, and John Cothran brings an earthy reality to Lazarus’s friend, Reverend R.L. Several blues solos, a steamy band performance at a local dance hall, an archival clip of the venerable Son House, and a blues soundtrack all add to the atmosphere.
The title refers to a song written in 1927 by Blind Lemon Jefferson and despite the apparent sexual innuendos, in the film it comes to stand for the hidden fears experienced by the main characters and the psychic damages they have sustained. Despite its lurid advertising and calculated stereotypes, Black Snake Moan is a complex, surprising film well worth seeing. Top

1408
Adaptations of Stephen King’s works have been uneven, to say the least. Some have been excellent—Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Shining, Stand by Me, The Dead Zone; some have been average—It, Salem’s Lot, Firestarter, Christine, Silver Bullet; and others have been poor—Cujo, Pet Sematary, etc. Usually, the success of a work depends on the sensibilities of the writers who adapted it and the director who oversaw it.
Although some reviewers liked 1408 a lot, it seems pretty average to me. The short story needed to be padded out substantially, and the additions add little to the basic story. The special effects, while spectacular, are more impressive than scary, and the pacing and development of the story are almost nonexistent—it’s just one special effect or sound cue jolt after another. On the positive side, John Cusack as Mike Enslin is good, although even he cannot sustain the level of hysteria necessary for an hour of scares, one after another. Samuel L. Jackson, playing Mr. Olin, manager of the Dolphin Hotel, creates a character as different from Black Snake Moan’s Lazarus as could be imagined, and he dominates most of the scenes he’s in. Let’s look at these cons and pros in more detail.
In the film, Enslin is given a background story, something I normally like, but the story here is perfunctory—he’s a travel writer, sliding downhill, whose daughter has died and whose wife has left him. These personal elements are used in the story by the evil room 1408 (1+4+0+8=unlucky 13) to torment him, but they are intertwined with nonpersonal elements (ghosts of previous tenants jumping out of windows, paintings of hunts and ships that come to life) in such a way that the order seems haphazard. Were the other people who died in the room also tormented by elements in their personal lives? What exactly is the method of operation for this evil room?
The special effects, while spectacular, in most cases either are not scary, are things we have seen before, or are elements King has used before. In the first case, the room’s temperature dropping to zero and the walls becoming covered with frost is interesting, but not really scary (at least not in the U.P.), as are cracks in the wall, a window that comes down on Enslin’s hand and various other incidents. Too many horror movies have placed their heroes in front of a mirror in which they see someone behind them with an axe or a knife and escapes it; too many have shown doors that lock themselves, radios that come on by themselves, lights that go on and off and doors that open into alternate universes or the past. It’s hard to add material to a King haunted room story without echoing The Shining or one of the other pieces of writing of this incredibly prolific author. Here the most obvious borrowing is the scene where Enslin walks along a narrow ledge high up on the side of a building and finds that he must retrace his steps. Still, there are a few good scares, and one clever plot gimmick.
Perhaps the greatest weakness is the narrative order and the pacing. Things happen but there seems to be little reason why events happen in the order they do. Why does the room freeze at one point? Why does water pour in at another? Why do the paintings change when they do? Why do the ghosts appear and leap out the window when they do? Perhaps the most annoying thing is that after each FX episode, the room returns to its pristine, undisturbed condition, clearly indicating what was seen was an hallucination, and since it didn’t work, the room will now try something new. It’s just a succession of big boos.
It all might have worked better if the film had progressed from scary things happening to ghosts appearing to the manifestation of elements from Enslin’s past. Maybe that would have worked better—maybe.
The lack of clear structure is evident in the film having one ending, which somewhat works, and two alternate endings, neither of which work as well. If, however, they wanted a “gotcha” ending, they failed. Of course, the endings usually are the weakest parts of King’s books, Pet Sematary being one of the most obvious examples, so maybe they’re just imitating their source. 1408 is worth a look, but, given the stars involved and the special effects generated, the film should have been much more impressive. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

[ Home | Home Cinema | Top ]