LABIRENT (2011)

Thanks to Netflix, Americans have readier access to a more complete range of films from around the world than they ever had before. That means not just art-house or cult/exploitation fare, but middle of the road stuff that represents each country's popular cinema. Labirent, for instance, is a Turkish counterterrorism thriller written and directed by Tolga Örnek, and in many ways it's like counterterror thrillers you might see anywhere. Adorned with 24-style split-screen effects, the film shows the complicated hunt for an Islamist terror cell (with some roots in Germany) carrying out suicide attacks in Turkey. What's different about it is a critical but not quite hostile attitude toward the west, here represented by a British spy (Martin Turner) who collaborates with the Turkish heroes but clearly serves his own country's agenda, even when it compromises the Turkish operation. What comes through is Turkish resentment of the western attitude, probably portrayed here accurately, that doesn't really trust the Turks to keep their own house, much less the region, in order. After all, this is the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an Islamist of sorts in his own right with alleged authoritarian tendencies. Labirent, however, doesn't appear to represent Erdogan's point of view.

Örnek made his name in part with an admiring documentary film about Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the man who abolished the Islamic Caliphate and founded the secular Turkish republic. A picture of Ataturk is conspicuous in this film's anti-terror headquarters, and perhaps even more conspicuous, if not scandalous in the eyes of culturally conservative Turks, is the prominent heroic role of Reyhan (Meltem Cumbul), a female anti-terror operative who serves as the film's second lead after its more tragic male hero Fikret (Timuçin Esen, who speaks fluent English in scenes with Turner). Reyhan is a generic international superwoman, and I say that with admiration. Captured by the terrorists, she's put to the torture, punched repeatedly in the face, subjected to long electrical shocks, and made to watch a friend executed in front of her. Apparently beaten unconscious, she's only playing possum, waiting for just the right moment to untie herself and beat her torturer to death. For a fleeting, almost fatal moment she comes face to face with her antithesis -- a girl terrorist wearing traditional headcovering and wielding a gun, but in the next moment Reyhan's buddies come to the rescue.

One moment Reyhan is down (above), the next she's up and the other guy's down.

Labirent is a little too self-consciously dour and tragic to be that much fun most of the time, and like many a counterterror thriller it grows repetitive portraying terrorists out on walks being stalked by strolling antiterror agents. It has just enough local flavor and attitude to make it not quite as generic as it could be, but fans of the genre from around the world probably could sit through this without finding anything really alien about it. I'm still not sure if that's a virtue or not.

THE SNITCH CARTEL (El Cartel de los Sapos, 2011)

Carlos Moreno's film is based on a based-on-true-events miniseries that was a big hit on Colombian TV. Moreno and his screenwriters presumably opened the story up considerably with extensive location work and some impressive action sequences. Whatever its basis in Colombia's violent history of drug trafficking, the story follows a recognizable Scorsesean rise-and-fall pattern, only here the protagonist never gets high on his own supply. Martin, aka El Fresita (Manolo Cardona) seems rather straitlaced for a drug dealer. He's really a romantic, pining after his dream girl Sofia (Juana Acosta) since childhood. He has a mildly Pescian sidekick, the impulsive, motormouthed Pepe (Diego Cadavid), whose family ties to a Cali cartel don give him and Martin a fast track to the top echelons of crime. On a more Coppolesque note, the film opens with Pepe's wedding, complete with a gun-toting dwarf in a gift package. He's just a joke, actually, but the joke goes sour when the dwarf gets hit with real bullets and the wedding comes under attack.

The pragmatic Fresita and the entrepreneurial Pepe -- he can spew out the math proving how the cartel will profit from his schemes -- ship cocaine to Mexico and later directly to the U.S., dealing dangerously with Mexican gangster Modesto (Pedro Armendariz jr in one of his last roles). While they make money up north, things fall apart at home. The destruction of Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel only results in the Cali leaders turning on one another. All the while, the DEA (represented by guest American Tom Sizemore) encourages cartel members to turn "sapo" and inform on each other. Once Pepe's uncle is killed, the odious Cabo (Robinson Diaz) takes power, resenting Fresita for past slights despite his moneymaking ability. While Pepe becomes little more than Cabo's flunky, Fresita is targeted for death despite turning down an offer to join the so-called snitch cartel. Barely escaping a Mexico City hit, Fresita finally turns informer to save his life. He also hopes the DEA will protect Sofia, who having married him will be Target Number One for Cabo's revenge. However, Sofia has gradually plumbed the depths of Fresita's life, having followed him to New York to see him blow away a would-be hijacker, and now wants no part of his Miami safe house and his seven-figure bank account. The film is open-ended, suggesting that Martin still hopes to win Sofia back after his abbreviated prison stay. I don't know if this single film adapted both El Cartel TV series, but one way of another there hasn't been a cinematic sequel that I know of.

Cartel de los Sapos has a charismatic cast and is slickly shot with a genre consciousness and film-buff sensibility that can throw a Third Man homage, among possible others, into the mix. There's arguably nothing original to it, apart from the setting for someone unfamiliar with South American cinema, but the picture is effectively entertaining and the climactic running gunfight between Fresita and Cabo's gang is very well done. Cardona makes a good tragic antihero, complemented by the unforgiving Acosta, and Cadavid as Pepe gives an interesting performance as someone who proves to be less than you expect in every regard. Pepe's dwindling away to relative insignificance, except for a spiteful late attack on Fresita when both are in prison, may seem like a weakness in a script that had built him up so much, but it convincingly conveys, if that was the intention, Pepe's essential weakness, the hollow core of his bluster. As the pig-loving Cabo, the massively moustachioed Diaz looks the perfect villain, if also a moron, and his performance lives up to his visual. Everything falls together to make Snitch Cartel worth recommending to fans of global crime cinema.

Alexander Sokurov's FAUST (2011)

The latest film from the director of the acclaimed one-take stunt film Russian Ark has something in common with that perennial candidate for Worst Film of All Time, Manos: The Hands of Fate: an pathetically diabolical actor with grotesquely stuffed trousers. Happily, the resemblance ends there, unless you feel let down by Alexander Sokurov's refusal to show us a war in heaven or the more spectacular episodes of the Faust legend. He's freely adapted Goethe's famous verse play -- with my poor high-school German I still recognized some of the poet's original lines in the film -- but treats the legend as an epilogue (or prequel) to a trilogy of films about 20th century tyrants: Moloch (Hitler), Taurus (Lenin) and The Sun (Hirohito). We are invited to see in Heinrich Faust a precursor of their destructive will to power, and to make him a more immediate ancestor Sokurov has updated the legend to Goethe's own time, the early 19th century. Making a German Faust film he couldn't help but tread on F. W. Murnau's territory but Sokurov's Faust is more reminiscent of Murnau's Nosferatu, while the setting and the mania that drives both Faust and his deranged assistant Wagner are reminiscent as much of Werner Herzog as of Murnau. The film may be as much a riff on German cinema as a riff on German culture and history.

Faust contemplates man (above) and civilization (below)

Sokurov sticks to the first part of Goethe's play, which is fine since Goethe himself didn't get around to part two until almost the end of his life. This leaves us in a mundane setting in which Faust (Johannes Zeiler) and Wagner (Georg Friderich) go about their archetypal quest for knowledge by dissecting cadavers. Wagner is creepy from the start and gets creepier later. The ever-frustrated Faust falls in with Mauricius the moneylender (Anton Adasinsky), Sokurov's Mephistopholes. In a great performance, Adasinsky sets the tone for the film. Mauricius is a petty if not pathetic devil -- the bulges in his clothes suggest that his angelic and demonic physical attributes have been stuffed inside his own grotesquely gnarled flesh. As a moneylender, he's often busy collecting on debts in this world, and in that role he's more hated than feared. He makes the traditional promises to Faust, and Sokurov mystifies the proceedings enough with distorted lenses to indicate that Mauricius can back up his claims. Faust isn't sure what he wants from this strange man until he encounters Gretchen (Isolda Dychauk) in a public bath where Mauricius makes a ridiculous spectacle of himself by stripping and flirting with the other girls. As Faust's desire for Gretchen grows, Wagner grows madly jealous, while Gretchen takes interest in Faust, despite his apparent involvement in her brother's death in a pub brawl, as a form of rebellion against a controlling mother.

 

Anton Adasinksy as Mauricius, clothed (above) and sort of unclothed (below)

The story follows the barest bones of Goethe's outline, though Sokurov doesn't follow Gretchen's storyline to its melodramatic climax. Indeed, the way he ends the film is a stunning statement of, if not his own than Faust's indifference to the moral stakes involved in his dealing with the devil. Like just about everyone else in the picture, the doctor has treated Mauricius with scorn during their walks through town and countryside. After the moneylender finally entices him to sign the infamous pact with blood, and Faust has his night with Gretchen, Mauricius seeks to recruit Faust into some infernal army, giving him armor to put on while donning some himself for a trek into a wild landscape that might be Hell. The armor soon grows uncomfortable and ridiculous for both travelers. More unexpectedly, Mauricius is increasingly uncomfortable with the environment itself, while Faust is increasingly fascinated.  For the devil this is, presumably, both his domain and his punishment, while for the man it's just a new world to conquer by gaining knowledge of it. A geyser terrifies Mauricius while Faust adores it until it bores him with its repetition. Impatient and uncomfortable, Mauricius demands Faust's soul, but the doctor tells the devil to wait until he's dead -- and if he won't wait Faust is happy to stone the helpless, wailing moneylender until he's buried under rocks, leaving our antihero free to explore this wonderful, terrible new world.

Repulsive as Mauricius is, you may find yourself feeling sympathy for the devil, for rarely has his work been shown to be more thankless, even when he seems to be winning. If Mauricius is a rebel angel of myth his punishment seems to be an inability to enjoy whatever power he gains over men. In town, he's plagued by a woman who claims to be his wife, while Faust, as a contemptuous ingrate, may be typical of what our mediocre Mephistopheles has to deal with in his real work. It's an interesting take on the devil, but where does that leave Faust in Sokurov's scheme of things? If he wants us to link Faust with his historical subjects from the next century, the thing in common must be a certain arrogant fearlessness or an indifference to consequences -- or a failure to take his own soul seriously.

Faust may leave you wondering what the ultimate point is, but it's a beautiful thing to ponder. Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography -- he's since worked with the Coen brothers brilliantly on Inside Llewyn Davis -- will put you in mind not just of Murnau and Herzog but of the paintings, contemporary with Goethe, of Caspar David Friedrich. Visually the picture is as much a masterful accomplishment for Sokurov as Russian Ark was, and the acting lives up to the images. Zeiler is great in the title role, but Georg Friedrich as Wagner nearly steals the film with a Kinskian tirade in which he demands to be called "the great Wagner," tries to convince Gretchen that he's really Faust, and shows her a homunculus -- a disembodied face, really -- he made all by himself to impress her. I must admit that I don't entirely get Sokurov's philosophical or spiritual points, but on a mere movie level Faust is a feast of elegant madness that can be enjoyed on that level -- depending on your taste, or your morals.

THE RAID: REDEMPTION (Serbuan Maut, 2011)

The decade's new standard for martial arts movies was set by a police thriller combining Indonesian performers and a Welsh director. Gareth Evans's Raid is the sort of action movie that may compel some American viewers to suspend disbelief as it segues from conventional cop action to martial arts mayhem. Where did the guns go? There's plenty of shooting early, but as the raiding cops, having no hope of backup and actually set up, fight their way up a tenement tower, practically a panopticon of peril, to the lair of crime lord Tama, we go from guns to machetes and finally to feet and bare hands. The transition is nearly seamless if you know what you're getting into, but Evans, who writes as well as directs, overplays his hand just a little when he has Mad Dog, one of Tama's sub-bosses, make a speech about how much more he enjoys beating people to death with his hands than he enjoys shooting or stabbing them. All pretense of urban realism falls away in that moment and The Raid stands revealed as pure pulp fiction. Anyway, Indonesia probably isn't as much of a gun culture as the U.S. or some other places. As The Act of Killing ably illustrates, people of the peninsula are often quite inventive about dispatching their enemies.

The Raid remains very much a cop film after it shows its true genre colors. Its behind-the-scenes subject is the treacherous politics of policing. The raid's commanding officer, Wahyu, doesn't tell his men until they're already in too deep that they can't expect backup because his is an unauthorized mission, his rogue action to kill or capture Tama. Wahyu's agenda is so close to his vest that he's ready to betray his men to the ultimate extent. Yet he proves a dupe, or so Tama claims when he tells the officer that he'd been tipped off about the raid and invited to kill a troublesome cop, the rest being a bonus. One gets the sense that the Jakarta police are authoritarian, ruthless and corrupt, except for an honest handful, many of whom end up sacrificed to the ambitions or rivalries of higher-ups. I could see an American film on the same subject, except it'd be guns all the way to the top floor.

I'm not complaining about The Raid, because the martial arts lived up to the film's already-lofty reputation. The highlight and instant entry in the best-fight-scene-ever sweepstakes is the two-on-one climax pitting the aforementioned Mad Dog (fight co-choreographer Yayan Ruhian) against a surviving cop and another sub-boss who happens to be the cop's brother. Again, Mad Dog takes the story into preposterous pulp territory; he has his erstwhile partner chained and is pummeling him like a heavy bag when the cop shows up. There's a pause while Mad Dog frees his captive, who proves hardly worse for wear, so our villain can test his might against two antagonists. Fastidious Mad Dog even raises the chain back up the ceiling so it won't impede the action or be used unfairly. If that sounds silly in the description, especially when I mention how the brothers wait patiently for him to finish, it's also a brilliant way for Evans to build anticipation for a battle that justifies the wait. For all the all-out mayhem he directs, Evans also proves himself quite good at suspense. He's happy to bring things to a halt after a gangster has plunged his machete repeatedly through a flimsy wall like a magician running his swords through the magic trunk with the girl in it. Our cop hero is behind the wall with a wounded partner and has just had his cheek sliced by that machete when something distracts the criminal. He has to stand there with that blade literally in his face, and he has to make sure somehow that there's no blood to tip off his pursuer when the blade is finally withdrawn. Nicely done.

Remarkably, Evans has not yet been assigned a Hollywood tentpole -- the Godzilla people went with a different Gareth -- though he did contribute to last year's portmanteau film V/H/S2. Instead he released The Raid 2 earlier this year and has announced a Raid 3, while an American Raid is reportedly in the works with little if any input from the original director. Evans may simply prefer to work in his adopted homeland, and it's not as if he hasn't made a name for himself worldwide from that base. Watch this space for a review of Raid 2 before the year is out; that should give some idea of whether Evans bears further watching.

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS (2011)

Sean Branney's adaptation of the H. P. Lovecraft story is the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's follow up to The Call of Cthulhu (2005), which Branney wrote. He co-wrote and co-produced Whisperer with Andrew Leman, the director of Cthulhu. Both films were made in the Mythoscope process, in which the producers employ such modern production techniques as they can afford to recreate the sensory experience of antique film. The idea behind Mythoscope is to imagine that movies had been made of Lovecraft's stories at the time he wrote them. Thus Call of Cthulhu is one of the 21st century's neo-silent movies, while Whisperer adds sound to the mix to adapt a story published in 1931. Both films, of course, are staunchly monochrome. Of the two, Cthulhu is the more ingenious imitation of its era. Whisperer bears little resemblance to a 1931 movie apart from its lack of color. The widescreen presentation could be excused as a nod to the Grandeur process, Hollywood's early but Depression-aborted widescreen format (The Big Trail, The Bat Whispers, etc.), but Branney's technique is mostly alien to the period. There's an anachronistic film-noir approach to some scenes that might be dubbed "Expressionist," but the main problem is the director's reluctance to hold shots as long as Hollywood movies did back then. While an authentic 1931 movie would film dialogue scenes mostly in mid to long shots that had all the speakers in the frame, Branney constantly cuts back and forth between close-ups of his actors. The more-or-less amateur standing of his actors may explain why he didn't opt for long takes that required extensive memorization, but whatever his reasons it kills the illusion of period filmmaking for anyone familiar with period films.

What Branney, like Leman before him, is much better at is reviving the iconography of authentic pulp fiction. Their images often look ripped from the pages, or better yet the covers, of the magazines that published Lovecraft and his peers. Their strategy of using high tech to achieve a low-tech look often pays off. Anyone who reads and loves these stories as they were originally presented will smile in recognition of how right Whisperer's communication device looks, which enables disembodied brains preserved in canisters to communicate with ordinary humans. Plug in the components and Strickfaden-esque circuits crackle until a face appears between the device's antennae. If Branney doesn't quite succeed in imitating 1930s film directors, he makes up for it by capturing much of the genuine imagination of the period.

The Whisperer screenplay turns out to be an extensive elaboration of the Lovecraft story, padding it to a length (104 minutes) rare for the horror or sci-fi of the period, though 1939's Son of Frankenstein is almost as long. Lovecraft's story is a straightforward account of skepticism debunked. Professor Wilmarth dismisses accounts of weird creatures in rural Vermont, exchanges letters with a scholar on the ground, and finally visits the man only to discover that he isn't what Wilmarth thought he was. Branney and Leman expand on Wilmarth's skepticism by staging a radio debate between him and real-life paranormal research pioneer Charles Fort, who gets the better of our protagonist by pointing out his prejudice against observation on the ground. Wilmarth is increasingly intrigued by photographs appearing to show alien footprints, and one that reveals an alien corpse when viewed with the right lenses, and by a phonograph record of human and apparently alien voices mingled in prayer to strange gods. While for Lovecraft it was enough to horrify readers with Wilmarth's discovery about his correspondent, Branney and Leman use that as a jumping-off point for a more familiar scenario (for modern audiences) in which an evil priest (his outfit is another cool pulp visual) plots to open a portal between dimensions so the aliens can take over the world. They cap this new plot with a barnstorming climax from beyond Lovecraft's imagination in which Wilmarth and a young girl battle flying aliens in a biplane. While Merian C. Cooper and Willis O'Brien probably would have filmed this better than Branney does, the ineptitude of the aerial battle isn't really untrue to the period.

If the film feels padded compared to genuine genre films from the Thirties, it still tells its story effectively. And if the cinematography isn't what you'd see in a 1931 picture, it's often evocatively effective on its own terms. It's easy to make an inexpensive movie look good these days, or so you'd assume from this one, but credit is due to committed craftsmanship all around. The acting is hit or miss; some are flat but others sound so true to the period that they could have worked in radio. It's easier to see how Whisperer could have been a better film in more experienced hands, but that shouldn't make what the H.P.L.H.S. has accomplished with their modest resources any less impressive. Since Lovecraft died in 1937, I guess there's nothing left to do in a third film but introduce Technicolor, but if they want to give up the Mythoscope gimmick and just keep making Lovecraft movies, I'll be all for them.

Jafar Panahi in THIS IS NOT A FILM (2011)

The director Jafar Panahi made two of my favorite Iranian movies: the small-time crime drama Crimson Gold (2003) and Offside (2006), an impressive bit of guerrilla filmmaking about female soccer fans sneaking into a men-only stadium. Since then, Panahi has been at increasing odds with what seemed an increasingly reactionary government during the Ahmadinejad administration. During the turmoil following the disputed 2009 election, Panahi was arrested but quickly released with an apology. After making public his sympathy with the opposition at the Montreal Film Festival, he was arrested again in 2010. This time he was accused of making propaganda against the Islamic Republic, apparently for working on a documentary about the recent unrest. The verdict amounted to a blacklist with the force of law. Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison; beyond that, he was forbidden to direct movies or communicate with foreigners for twenty years. Iran does allow appeals, and the prison part of his sentence appears to amount to a loose form of house arrest. But it's the ban on directing that hurts -- not that he's taken it lying down.

 

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb is the credited director of This Is Not a Film, but it's plainly Panahi's show. Shot on a camcorder and iPhone, it's a document of Panahi's isolated existence during the appeal process. Confined to his pretty nice apartment, with his family out visiting relatives and only his pet iguana for company, Panahi can have visitors and so summons Mirtahmasb to film his musings on frustrated projects. Close to his heart now understandable reasons is a screenplay he was denied permission to film about a young woman imprisoned by her parents to prevent her attending art school. He believes he can tell the story and even demonstrate how he would have shot it by using tape on his carpet to lay out the girl's apartment. The inadequacy of it all gets to him, however, and he flees to his balcony to brood. Fortunately, he has a very picturesque view of a massive construction project across the street.

 

Panahi's impulse is to protest and struggle, but his humane storytelling instincts gradually take over in the second half of the 78-minute film. A neighbor from another floor shows up to ask the director to take care of her dog Micky while she goes out. He initially agrees but gives the dog back before the girl is out the door because it scares his iguana. In the final act of the movie, Panahi takes an elevator ride with a college student who takes out everyone's garbage. In a bright moment of comic unity, they end up on the girl's floor and she tries to inflict Micky on the student, who proves even more reluctant than Panahi to deal with the animal. At last they reach the ground floor and go into the courtyard, the student cautioning Panahi not to venture out with his camera. As we'd seen earlier from the balcony, this is "Fireworks Wednesday," a periodic show of dissent denounced on the news that day as having no religious basis. It's almost too perfect a visual summation of the life of the street and the vein of protest from which Panahi has been isolated. At the same time the spontaneous moments of comedy he captures tie in to his reflections (illustrated by an American DVD of Crimson Gold, among others) on the virtues of casting amateur actors in his movies.

Since then, it turns out, Panahi has managed to make another clandestine film that premiered at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival. I don't know whether he's suffered any reprisal for doing this, and one might expect (or at least hope for) an amnesty (should it be in his power) from the new administration of President Rouhani. For the most part, This Is Not a Film is for Panahi fans only, or for people interested as much in Iranian politics as in Iranian cinema. Still, even those who know Panahi only as a kind of martyr, an Iranian counterpart to the Hollywood Ten, may see in it the qualities that make movie fans around the world hope he can make movies without Dada disclaimers in the near future.

HARA-KIRI: DEATH OF A SAMURAI (2011)

American movie buffs will recognize Takashi Miike's film as a remake of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 Harakiri and wonder why anyone should remake a classic. Some Japanese fans might have felt the same way, but since both films are adaptations of a novel by Yasuhiko Tamaguchi there's no reason why you can't eventually have as many Harakiris as there are movies of, for instance, Les Miserables. My example has a point, since anyone moved by the grim portrait of oldschool poverty that even the musical version of Hugo offers should be moved similarly by either version of the Tamaguchi novel. The movie are more distinct for Japanese audiences, since they call the 1962 film Seppuku and the 2011 Ichimei. Nevertheless, the stories are the same, and I refer you to my review of Kobayashi for plot details. The two films differ in emphasis and more profoundly on the sensory level, for not only is the Miike film in color, but it was also made to be shown in 3D. It may be a virtue that you can watch it flat and not realize that you missed a dimension. Miike, often a provocateur in his prolific career, works in neoclassical mode here so you can appreciate the widescreen framing and cinematography without ducking at simulated flying gore. You get the impression that he respects the source material, both the novel and the earlier film.

The biggest difference I can see, relying on my memories of the Kobayashi film, is Miike's gimmick of the hero, Tsugumo Hanshiro (kabuki star Ichikawa Ebizo XI) taking his righteous anger out on the heartless retainers of Ii with a bamboo sword similar to the one they made his hapless son-in-law Chijiiwa Motome (Eita) use to commit seppuku. This is a good idea, since Miike has stressed how torturously difficult it is to disembowel oneself with such a weapon. It creates the impression that Tsugumo wants to inflict pain rather than death on the cruel samurai and teach them a lesson in the process. Miike also stages the final battle in snowy weather, most likely to show off the 3D by adding a layer to the image. It looks quite nice flat, too.

Overall, cinematographer Nobuyasu Kita makes a good case for color alone justifying a remake. But the story itself is the best justification of all. If anything, a story of a man forced out of honorable employment and watching helplessly as his child sinks into poverty and sickness has more resonance for Japanese and global audiences today than it had 50 years ago. When I reviewed the Kobayashi version I compared it to Vietnam-veteran films, given the hero's samurai status, but modern audiences should simply see poverty without worrying about the man's profession. Miike seems to stress the poverty of his protagonists more consistently than Kobayashi did. I recall their poverty seeming more genteel for at least part of the earlier film before the illness of Tsugumo's daughter and grandson precipitates a crisis, while even in color the family home in the Miike looks darker and more drab throughout. Miike plays for pathos more blatantly, aided by a poignant score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, but this isn't an inappropriate course to take with this story. The more abject the family's plight, the more righteous is Tsugumo's wrath at the climax. Also helping justify that cathartic violence are the performances of the Ii retainers. I was particularly impressed by Munetaka Aoki, who took over Testuro Tamba's performance in the original as the bullying retainer who refuses to finish off  Motome despite his agony with a broken sword. Since Miike truncates the story's duel between this bully and Tsugumo, Aoki gets by mainly with a formidable and not unhandsome glower and a hissible contempt for the weak, and that's enough. He could play villains for life with that face. The whole cast benefits from Miike's strong sense of dramatic pacing in the very formal dialogue scenes that frame the non-linear story. The sustained deliberation sustains suspense, even for viewers familiar with the story from the earlier film.

My first impression is that Miike doesn't equal Kobayashi, primarily because Ichikawa Ebizo doesn't equal Tatsuya Nakadai in the lead role. But the new Harakiri is a worthy effort that proves the story evergreen. The flashbacks and the pathos and the righteous anger worked before, work now and probably could work again a generation from now. We may not have needed Miike's Harakiri, but I'm glad we have it.

ELENA (2011)

Andrey Zvyagintsev's film starts as a visually eloquent portrait of class divisions in post-Communist Russia. All the director needs to do is follow the title character on a long commute. Elena (Nadezhda Markina) is a middle-aged former nurse who married a former patient, a wealthy businessman. She still seems as much a nursemaid as a spouse to Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov). She sleeps in a separate bed and rises ahead of him to draw his curtains and prod him awake. We'll see evidence later that the couple remains intimate and occasionally affectionate. But something stands between them: Elena's adult son Sergey (Alexey Rozin) and his family. The best sequence of the film traces Elena's long commute from Vladimir's spacious, modern home to Sergey's cramped apartment. Elena doesn't drive; for her there's a lot of walking and riding trains, and a stop at a grocery store, before she makes her way past a nuclear power plant to Sergey's home in the projects. Zvyagintsev directs with an empathy rare in modern film for modes of travel other than driving, and a keen eye for the geography of class. Living in the shadow of a nuclear plant is today's equivalent of the proverbial other side of the tracks. In her commute, Elena seems to cross from one world to another.

Sergey is unemployed, an apparent deadbeat. Married, he has a teenage son and a baby. The boy isn't promising. He may be Russian but you know the type. Apart from the occasional gangfight, he stays in his room and plays video games. Sometimes his dad will join him. If the boy can't get into college his only future is the military, a prospect Elena dreads. A scholarship isn't going to happen, and Sergey certainly can't afford to pay the boy's way. Vladimir can, but he can't understand why he should have to support Elena's people -- he didn't marry them. But he doesn't want to hurt Elena's feelings, either, so he says he'll think it over some more after initially refusing her. Then he goes and has a heart attack while swimming at his health club.

Vladimir's health crisis brings his own estranged child, a daughter, out of the woodwork. He's desperate to reconcile with her and is willing to make that a monetary transaction if necessary. While giving Elena a final refusal on subsidizing her grandson's education, he proposes to write a will giving most of his wealth to the daughter. That provokes Elena to take extreme measures....

That's the story, and you might be forgiven if, after memories of the impressive cinematography of Mikhail Krichman and the dependably ominous music of Phillip Glass fade, you find yourself wondering: is that it? In a way, I could argue that Elena is more realistic for doing without the melodramatic complications that usually follow this film's defining act. Zvyagintsev and screenwriter Oleg Negin clearly aspire to some damning portrait of pervasive ruthlessness in 21st century Russia. The constant background noise from TV is obviously meant to underscore this point -- a sports commentator observes that a sports coach is using "typical Soviet tactics" to push his team to the limit, for instance. But the obvious artistic ambition on display seems to demand that more happen in the picture than actually does, and Elena appears more pretentious in retrospect than it really should seem. Bringing in Glass to score the picture furthers that impression; using the arch-minimalist of modern music isn't exactly cinematic minimalism. The real problem may be that we don't see enough of Elena's two families to understand the choice she makes. We can see that the story's a kind of tragedy, but the presentation is perhaps too deadpan, too concerned with widescreen composition, for us to feel the tragedy enough, Markina's fine performance notwithstanding, for the social criticism to strike home. Maybe something's simply missing in translation. On the other hand, maybe my dissatisfaction with the ending was what the filmmakers intended: a blunt representation of Russia's constant injustice. That possibility allows me to recommend Elena despite my reservations. The film has a lot going for it in any event. Whatever it wants to say about Russia, its issues are really pretty easily recognizable no matter where you watch it.

LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE (2011)

 
There's a storm coming....
 

Johnnie To may be the premiere crime-film director of the present time. His films about Chinese triads have a reputation as slick, sleek thrillers with a classical gravitas beyond the B-movie material. For his most recent film he keeps one foot in the gangster milieu but expands his scope to sweep across Hong Kong society, showing how everyone -- crooks and cops, bankers and brokers -- gets caught up in the maelstrom of a global economic crisis. Almost inevitably, his story -- the work of five writers -- takes a Tarantinian non-linear form. That is, it's only well after we're introduced to new characters that we learn that their story intersects with that of the characters previously introduced at the point in time when we left those characters. Some find the concept tired by now, but To and his writers keep it fresh by luring us to expect something to happen and surprising us with something else.

Life Without Principle features four primary characters in three storylines. The first we meet are actually the least developed, a cop and his wife who are arguing over whether to close on a high-rise apartment. From them the spotlight shifts to Teresa (Denise Ho), an investment broker under the gun. She's last on the sales chart and the office gossip is that whoever finishes last loses her job. She works late trying to scare up business but she seems to lack the gift for sales. She finally finds a prospect in an elderly woman impatient at the interest rate in her current plan. The old lady is rated a low-risk investor but Teresa pushes the high-risk package on her, promising huge and rapid profits. This section culminates in an ingeniously excruciating scene in which Teresa is obliged to record the old woman acknowledging and consenting to the risk. Teresa has coached her to say "I understand completely" whenever prompted, but as Teresa goes through her script questions keep arising. Twice over, Teresa has to scrap the recording and start over again after reassuring her client. Finally, her boss witnesses the transaction and the old woman explains her reason for risky investing: "I want more money."

Teresa is kept off-balance by Yuen (Lo Hoi-pang), a loan shark who's made a timely cash withdrawal just before the markets take a dive. Greece is on the brink of defaulting on its debt and dragging the entire global financial market with it, and people are panicking while Yuen gloats at his own cleverness, taking calls constantly. He learns that he doesn't need as much ready cash as he thought and gives several million back to Teresa, telling her to re-deposit it. He doesn't have time to do the paperwork himself and rushes off, leaving his cellphone behind. Noticing this when she hears his Peking Opera ringtone, Teresa rushes after him, reaching the parking garage to find cops converging on his car. The man appears to be dead, slumped against his windshield with blood streaming down his face.

The spotlight shifts again to small-time gangsterdom. We now follow the misadventures of Panther (Lau Ching Wan), a rumpled fixer who seems to get along by the seat of his pants. He makes a big show of delivering payments to his boss and arranging for a banquet, without necessarily knowing everything on the menu. The banquet is disrupted by the arrival of the West Kowloon Police, who arrest Panther's Boss Wah. It's now up to Panther to scare up bail money, which isn't as easy as  you might assume. Money seems scarce everywhere, and our man has to spend a lot of time buttering up a junk man who taunts Panther, claiming that he makes more money collecting cardboard than he does as a criminal. He finally coughs up some money just to be rid of the earnest and increasingly hapless-seeming gangster. In any event, Boss Wah makes bail, but moments later the East Kowloon Police show up to arrest him and Panther needs to find more bail money.

Panther looks up another "sworn brother" who runs some sort of underground day-trading business. Brother Lung (Phillip Keung) boasts of his success and urges Panther to learn how to play the market, leaving him a chart of trends to study while he steps out briefly. Dutifully Panther studies the chart until Lung bursts back in, desperate to log on and sell some rapidly depreciating assets. It's too late; Lung has been shut out of his accounts and faces ruin. So now Panther needs to find money for Lung, and a loan-shark they know seems the most likely target. At this point, since we recognize their quarry as Yuen from Teresa's story, we can guess what will happen as Panther breaks into the man's car in the parking garage. But as he lies in wait, someone else entirely attacks the loan shark while Panther huddles helplessly in the back seat. The two men brawl, the mugger bashing the loan shark over the head with a tire iron. The older man is tough, though. He gets up and bashes his attacker from behind, finally beating him to death and stomping back to the car before the effects of his own injury catch up to him. Panther finally slips out with a few millions before the cops and Teresa arrive at the scene.

While Teresa faces a simple, classical moral dilemma -- with no paperwork indicating that the loan shark left any money with her, and with the carjacking apparently explaining any loss, should she take the money and run? -- Panther's adventures become a regular day from hell. He and Lung are soon accosted by one of the bigger players in the clandestine market, someone whom Lung owes big time. Panther puts himself in danger simply through his inability to keep his mouth shut, but the big man seems more amused than angered by him. Lung's another story, however, and the guy takes some sort of floral-design icepick and drives it through Lung's breast. The good news, he tells Panther, is that Lung might live if Panther gets him to a hospital in time. He lets them go, and Lung takes the wheel as they head off for help. But Lung remains more interested in getting money than in keeping alive -- he seems to think money will save him. After almost getting trapped in a converging circle of police detours -- these are related to a suspense storyline involving Inspector Cheung -- Lung drops Panther off outside another brokerage with desperate instructions to bet their remaining loot on the market continuing to drop.  Inside, Panther promptly forgets the instructions and has to rely on his own hunch. He bets that the market will rise. In a blackly comic climax, the market continues to fall as an unwitting and dying Lung roots the trend down in his car and Panther despairs in the brokerage. Then, improbably, the market reverses -- Greece will be bailed out -- and as Panther rejoices a horrified Lung, not realizing his good fortune, stumbles into the street to make a final cry for help, only to be ignored as the cops focus on the hostage situation nearby.

To ends the film on an unnecessary note with Teresa (I'll leave her decision unspoiled) and Panther almost crossing paths on a crowded street, but with uncertainty still hanging over the city. Where will Teresa go from here? After his ordeal, does Panther remember that he still needs to bail out Boss Wah? The English-language title doesn't necessarily clarify things, especially when Panther seems to be the most principled person in the picture in his doglike devotion to too many bosses and sworn brothers. To the extent that Teresa is a sympathetic character -- I expect audiences to empathize with the worker on the firing line with an impossible goal imposed on her -- I wonder whether To wants us to root for her to take the money or not. It may be one of those situations where the idea is to implicate the audience; if you root for Teresa and/or Panther to take the money, aren't you involved in a life without principle? Or do you apply survival logic and assume that in a world without principle people had better look out for themselves? These moral complications only enhance the picture, and the performances by poker-faced Denise Ho and frantic Lau Ching Wan are pillars that keep the whole structure aloft, with support from a fine ensemble, several of whom (along with Lau) have won awards for their work here. Life Without Principle is one of the best films so far to deal with the ongoing economic crisis, and possibly the most entertaining of them.