Change Your Image
johnnieoz
Reviews
Va, vis et deviens (2005)
Simply life-affirming
Just returned from the first screening of this movie. An amazing start to the Berlinale Film Festival. It was long (2 and 1/2 hours), absorbing, well-scripted/acted, and very moving. The director and the lead actor were there afterwards and we applauded them heartily. This is what a film festival is about.
The basic plot follows the life of a young Ethiopian boy, Shlomo, whose mother realizes that he can be saved if he poses as one of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews. They were clandestinely airlifted to Israel from Sudan in the mid 1980s. This is a story of migration,assimilation and identity through the eyes of an individual. It shows how Israel deals with these 'different' Jews, how he deals with not really being one of them, how he is adopted by an idealistic left-wing family, falls in love with a young Israeli girl whose father is a racist, and his ongoing inner-dialogue with his mother still somewhere in a Sudanese refugee camp. Very multi-layered, critical without being moralistic and preachy. Unlike Mr. Mihaileanu's other big movie "The Train of Life" this is not a comedy, but it contains plenty of warmth and humor, and also stars a Shlomo.
Funny Games (1997)
This one's for all of us...
Some folks might not be able to stomach this wonderfully shocking film, and if this is the case, they should ask themselves why. For those of us who managed to sit through this psychic skewering, the answer couldn't be simpler. Confrontation with fear, be it realistic or fantastic, brings our mortality out of its protective sheath. This film shoves it in our faces and manipulates our expectations with the use of more or less brilliant techniques. It doesn't take a full-fledged masochist to want to jump the white-picket fence every so often.
Peter and Paul, the innocent looking antagonists, emerge as tormenters without the intensity of David Lynch's monsters like Frank Booth. They are perhaps therefore even more effective in scaring the hell out of us. In a way they reminded me of some of Ingmar Bergman's on-screen incarnations of evil, especially from the Seventh Seal and the Virgin Spring.
A naive bourgeois family is brought into the world of Beavis&Butthead and Tom&Jerry (P&P's pet names for each other) minus the invulnerability. Excellent acting makes the callousness of the psychos and the helplessness of their victims believable. All viewers ask themselves how they would react in such a situation and few of us know. But I would like to believe director/writer Haneke's version is sadly true. If you read Philip Gourevitch's take on the Rwandan genocide you can begin to see why. As for this film's contribution to the world of violence we live in...well, it may be a comment on that vidiots and tube zombies spend their lives unable to distinguish between CNN's "The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated" and Itchy&Scratchy, but in the end it's surely an indictment of the former. Infotainment coverage of real-life horror numb, while films like Funny Games resensitize us to how savage we can be to each other.