Of non-deserving attempts and silent monks

Sep 12 2008 06:00

Air France Film Festival
Showing at Nu Metro Hyde Park from September 19 to October 1, this festival offers French films, old and new, with a few African and American films thrown in (though why we’re not sure).

Among the French films you really should see are: André Téchiné’s excellent The Witnesses (Les Témoins), a touching ensemble drama that showed at the Out in Africa fest last year; the vampire send-up Irma Vep; Claude Chabrol’s version of the Flaubert classic Madame Bovary; Luis Buñuel’s 1967 classic Belle de Jour; and Téchiné’s family drama My Favourite Season.

Francophone African film is represented by Rachid Bouchareb’s World War II drama Days of Glory (Indigènes). There are also the kiddie-comedies Les Visiteurs and Asterix in America. Angels in the Dust is a documentary about Marion Cloete, who started a sanctuary for children orphaned by Aids. For the full programme go to www.hydeparkshopping.co.za.

Elite Squad
Here is the biggest, fattest, dampest squib of the week: perhaps the most disappointing film ever to have won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival. Brazilian director José Padilha made the documentary Bus 174, about a man who stormed aboard a city bus in Rio in 2000 and held the passengers to ransom at gunpoint on live TV.

His fiction feature, based on the memoirs of a cop in the city’s paramilitary elite squad, tells the story of how these hardcore officers were horrified to discover in the 1990s that Pope John Paul II on his upcoming visit wished to stay near the favelas and that they were therefore required to storm these no-go areas to clean them up. There’s an awful lot of very clichéd Brazilian slum-porn, gun-porn and poverty-porn, all knocked off from the influential favela masterpiece City of God. The movie’s evasive cynicism, morphing gradually and insidiously into lip-smacking adoration of the macho lawmen in their SS-style black uniforms, is pathetic.

The worst moment comes when the anti-hero Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) jeers at a feeble cop applying to join their ranks: “You belong with the whores, you belong with the pimps, you belong with the abortion clinics.” Um, excuse me? Abortion clinics? Getting a reactionary sermon from a pumped-up man in uniform is the last thing we need. -- Peter Bradshaw © Guardian

Into Great Silence
For a film which has silence at its core, there is a surprising amount of ambient sound in Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille). Here you see the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery high in the French Alps go about their tasks -- sawing wood, cleaning, gardening and, of course, praying. Wind ruffles the leaves of the forest, a gardener trudges through snow to clear vegetable beds, a monk pushes a cart down a corridor leaving food in the cells, sunbeams play across a wooden floor.

The monastery agreed to the film only 16 years after director Philip Gröning first approached them. He lived at the monastery for six months and filmed it alone. With the absence of speech, you notice the other sounds. Monks clear their throats, shuffle along wooden floors, open and close doors. This is a quietly ecstatic medi-tation on their lives. -- Matthew Burbidge

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