The Rake Magazine

Poor Eran Kolirin. When I spoke with the director of The Band's Visit a few weeks ago, he had been traveling so much that his jet lag kept him from even an hour's sleep. Then, just minutes before this interview, he managed to whack his head against the door frame of the car that brought him to the Nicollet Island Inn. Despite all this, he was a gracious interviewee.

I loved this movie. The Band's Visit is funny, touching, and filled with performances so subtle and sweet, it makes you swoon. When I emerged from the theater, I ached to spend a quiet evening over tea with these characters, talking about nothing, and talking about everything.

The Rake: The film opens with "Once, not long ago, a small Egyptian police band got lost in Israel. Not many people remember this. It wasn't that important." Why is the "unimportant"… important?

Eran Kolirin: Some of this came in this book by Ali Salem, famous Egyptian playwright, the only one who ever came to Israel. He wrote this lovely book about his trip called Journey Into Israel. At the beginning of his book he describes how he lost his way in his car when he came from being a bit stressed and scared from visiting Israel for the first time. Instead of getting to Tel Aviv he got to Netanya. Not a small town like the movie, but it wasn't where he was heading. So he has to stay there, but he describes a conversation between himself and this girl at the front desk of his hotel. And this tension between this very big premise of history—an Egyptian writer in Israel---and suddenly life throws you into something unexpected and unintentional. The tension between the big story in the background and the small story out front, I found very interesting.

Rake: The Band's Visit reflects a rich understanding of every character, even the smallest, most seemingly insignificant people. Like the man on the phone. Are any of these people from your life?

Kolirin: You have to find yourself in every character that you write. When my wife and I lived in an apartment in Tel Aviv, there was this guy sitting in his car waiting for hours and hours. We used to call him "The Waiter", because that's all he would do. Finally, one day I saw him in his car passionately kissing this woman. I think this guy was just waiting for this woman. He waited and waited and something finally happened.

Rake: Tell me how you ended up composing this film. Did you just read Salem's book and think about a being lost...

Kolirin: The process is always this: First you have this Egyptian band. Then you ask why? Why is this important? Then I can go back and think of my influences, the Egyptian films that I used to enjoy as a child, which influenced me. In fact, so much that I originally wanted Omar Sharif in the starring role. But your first impulse just comes to you. Then you analyze it backwards.

Rake: There's a political undertone, but a distinct lack of religious undertone. None of the Egyptians, for instance, are ever seen stopping to pray. Was this a conscious effort on your part?

Kolirin: That's an interesting question. In my life I'm very religious in certain ways, but not with the exterior stuff. There's something religious in the movie in you insist on looking at it this way—but not in the way the characters act. The conflict is religious, but on a very big scale, but not when a Muslim meets a Jew, not on this level.

Rake: There seems to be a wonderful spontaneity in the film. Like the scene in the restaurant, it felt very real...

Kolirin: Well, it wasn't spontaneous, it was completely controlled. I don't know how to improvise. It's funny that you say that because it's real—I hope it's real!—but actually it's very unrealistic. It's not naturalistic, it's very slow acting with precise gestures. Like the scene in the rollerskating rink, with dramatic gestures. But sometimes you have to be very unreal to get something real.

Rake: The Band's Visit seems to be a call for peace, though a very subtle one--it certainly doesn't hammer you over the head with a message. But it does focus on the lovely, small things that unite us--food, conversation, music. And if you look at that dinner table scene, with the family staring down the musicians and arguing among themselves, it even suggests that our family strife and our squabbles are the same.

Kolirin: I don't go it thinking I have this message of peace. The movie likes these characters and is OK with them. That's something peaceful. Just to let people have the time to think for themselves, to communicate with each other, to share emotion with each other is necessary.

Rake: In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine you said that you don't think peace is achievable in the Middle East. And yet the film suggests otherwise.

Kolirin: Oh, yeah [Laughs]. If you ask me on a realistic level if I look at what's happening and do I have any clever solution, unfortunately all I see is bloodshed. Again, there's reality and there's the movie that you make, which can yearn for some other kind of existence. That doesn't mean that in real life if I observe our politics I think it's very bad.

Rake: I read that there was hope this would be shown at an Egyptian film festival...

Kolirin: No. There's no way it can be shown in Egypt.

Rake: At all? Anywhere in the country?

Kolirin: Formally, no. There's a ban against any kind of cultural relationship with Israel. And it was accepted at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, but it was rejected at the last minute due to political pressure. It's shown in film festivals where I've met many audience members from the Arab world. But not formally in any Arab state. It's a shame, really.

"My inspiration can from an image I had in my head," said director Eran Kolirin. "I pictured a tough Arab man—a man in uniform—singing a song that had been trapped inside of him." There is no better way, really, to describe The Band's Visit. It is a starkly beautiful work that carries all the tension of a trapped song. This tension and the awkward channeling of emotions by the characters is really what the movie is about. The plot is more of an afterthought, but in a good way.

What happens is simple enough. An Egyptian police band (The Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra, to be precise), arrives in Israel to play at the inauguration of an Arab cultural center, only to discover that they have been completely forgotten. No one shows up to meet them at the airport, so they plow ahead by themselves and end up lost in a desolate village somewhere in the deserts of Israel. This is where they meet Dina, a woman with a personality much too big for the tiny town she lives in, and a smattering of other poignant characters.

It is truly the characters that make the movie. We meet a hodge-podge of interesting personalities throughout the film, some of whom only have a few lines but are memorable nonetheless. There is the man who waits every night for his girlfriend to call him on the village pay phone, the young man who is so afraid of women that every time he is around them he "hears the sea" in his ears, and the frowning turtleneck-clad teen known to us simply as "gloomy girl." Then there is the colonel.

Colonel Tawfiq Zacharya is the hardened, dignified leader of the Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra who stands up straight and demands order and discipline from his group of less-than-dedicated orchestra members. However, Zacharya is more of a poet than an officer. As the movie unfolds, we are introduced to the softer side of a man that has been plagued by hardships. Under his grizzled exterior, we find a man who is haunted by the deaths of his wife and son, a man worried about his nation's increasing disinterest in music, a man who loves nothing better than fishing in the morning and listening to the symphonic sounds of his village waking up.

Despite the heavy themes in this movie, there are plenty of awkward, Napoleon Dynamite-like moments that you can't help but relate to as you laugh at their ridiculousness. My favorite scene was at the roller disco (yes, there is a scene at a roller disco) with "gloomy girl" and "scared-of-girls boy" as they awkwardly hook up. They provide a perfect illustration of the film's recurring pent-up tension looking for release. The characters also lend a charm and a depth to the movie as we witness their painfully candid moments and uncomfortable encounters with each other. Not everyone speaks well, not everyone is sure of themselves, and not everyone is comfortable in social situations. They seem to be real people that Kolirin just happened to film. It is the believability and simplicity of the film that make it a superb production.

It may be a bit difficult to find this movie in the United States, so be sure to catch it at the Edina Cinema, where it opens on February 29th. It will be well worth your while.

The Signal, which opens today in theaters, is an ambitious survival horror film. Written and directed by newcomers David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry, and starring a no-name cast, The Signal does a lot of things well, but loses itself in its pointless brutality and aimless plot.

It's a genre film, so pick your favorite survival horror flick, vary the details a bit and you'll get a good idea what this one's about. A handful of protagonists are forced to survive against a sea of people brainwashed into killing each other by "the signal," a mysterious transmission sent through the TV, cell phones, and radios. Once infected, their perceptions are turned against each other and the necessary fake blood splatters at the camera.

The film isn't entirely run-of-the-mill. Each of the film's three chapters (or "transmissions") is directed by a different member of the writing trio. The marketing for the film is trying to play this up as an asset. It is not. The first part of the movie sets the stage for some serious survival horror. However, what could have been a decent movie is dropped in the second act to make way for a Shaun of the Dead-style black comedy. Before you can catch your breath, the third act (now survival horror again) wraps up the movie as if M. Night Shyamalan had burst into the theater and shouted "IT'S A TWIST!" at the top of his lungs for the remaining 20 minutes, at which point you're so confused about what you've just witnessed that you just don't give a shit.

That's not to say that The Signal is without merit. Of the film's three leads, two of them are pretty decent, and certainly better than other examples of the genre (*cough* Saw *cough*). I would even credit the film for its good direction, but it's ultimately style over substance. The film's slick editing and visual style aren't enough to save it from a muddy, inconsistent plot.

On top of it all, the film is frustratingly bloody and violent. Before you go and call me a squeamish whiner let me compare it to a movie with a similar level of gore: Hostel. Sure Hostel kinda blew, but at least the splattering blood and guts support the plot. In contrast, The Signal opts for savage disemboweling in lieu of a plot. In fact, it really feels like bad porn. It rips off all its clothes and bangs you for a solid hour while the filmmakers swoop in to see what's going on under the covers. It's not sexy. Or even interesting. It's just boring.

At this year's Academy Awards, there will be films that — believe it or not — are actually judged on their artistic merit. No one will remember them a year from now, or probably even a month from now, but these reels contain imaginative innovations and emotional depths that surpass those evoked by any nominee for Best Feature-Length Film. I'm speaking of course (of course!) about the nominees for short films.

As every year, ten movies — five animated and five live-action — have been selected from around the world to vie for the golden trophies in a lesser-known, lesser-cared-about subset of the Oscars. None of these films was ever widely distributed; none took any sort of cut from the box office; none will fetch big DVD sales. For the most part they bounced around festival circuits, garnering praise and niche attention. Still, they range from dreamy to lifelike, uplifting to devastating — all of them (except one) mini-masterpieces.

By and large, the animated shorts were more creative than the live action vignettes. This isn't so strange — cartoons are inherently more imaginative than life; one might say a photograph is a fact, a painting an interpretation. And while all the animated shorts take pains to tell a story, some of them seem more preoccupied with their medium, and feel like odes to animation itself. Which is totally okay. One of the great joys of these films is their cinematic lawlessness. There is no obligation to plot, and no actors to placate. As such, the directors and animators enjoy a freedom to do as they please. Not incidentally, this is stuff that makes Persepolis and Ratatouille look like fare for Saturday morning television.

My Love, a Russian film by Alexandre Petrov, is literally a breathing Impressionist painting. An October palette of watercolors smears the screen as we watch a sixteen-year-old boy, Anton, fall in love variously with his maid and his neighbor. "She stepped out of the novel as if from a dream," Anton says of his current infatuation, and indeed, the entire film seems to have sprung from Petrov's subconscious (and completely in tact). The story — a straightforward tale of peasant courtship - runs too long, but this seems deliberate, as if Petrov wanted to extend the movie just so he could keep painting it.

The likely winner (or at least the most buzzed-about), Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, is another labor of love. A thirty-minute exhibition of stop-motion animation, it allegedly took 100 artists, sculptors, and animators five years to make. Can you imagine someone spending five years on Alien vs. Predator? Clearly this is not art for the sake of entertainment. It's a realm where attention to detail is revered above all-every eyelash is molded anew for each frame of the film. Set in modern-day Russia, (and thus giving the story a fresh twist, as the scenery includes a heavily graffiti'd urban center), we watch Peter as he tries to escape from his grandfather's backyard into the wilderness beyond. The interplay between boy/duck/cat/wolf is as tense and intricate and heartfelt as anything in No Country for Old Men.

Rounding out the animated nominees, Madame Tutli-Putli and Even Pigeons Go To Heaven are exhibitions of computer effects. The figures look so human that at times it's easy to forget one is watching something animated. Which is why, in the Canadian Tutli-Putli, one is so viscerally scared as we watch some beast of the night cut out a person's kidney. I Met The Walrus, a recorded interview between then-fourteen-year-old Jerry Levitan and John Lennon finishes off the group. In it, every single word Lennon speaks is turned into drawing, so the dialogue becomes this sort of visual representation of itself.

Between each film, much whispering ensued amongst the audience, as if there was a need for instant discussion and digestion. And there's a lot to be talked about. When one leaves the theater, the emotional and intellectual impact really is the same as if having sat through five features. The way a good short story is said to contain the same elements and even the same depth as a novel, so these short films imprint themselves upon the faculties.

What they lacked in visual imagination, the live action films made up for in storytelling. Though the narratives were fairly linear, they all worked to expose their characters' emotions, stripping them barer and barer until, in each short (save one) there was no more sentiment to be squeezed. In these films, it's as if the narrative is a predator, its prey being emotion, and the narrative will not stop hunting until it's sure it has tracked down and strung up and tortured and exposed its target.

At Night, a Danish film, because apparently Danes make films now, is more morally complex than all the feature-length nominees combined. Three young women are in the oncology ward of a hospital, awaiting their imminent deaths. There is Mette, who at this point can barely move anymore; Sara, who is to undergo an operation that could either cure her or kill her; and Stephanie, whose illness has made her suicidal. It is December 30^th, and together they celebrate the New Year because they are unsure whether Sara will survive her surgery the next day. Here in the U.S., we take a sort of Mary Poppins approach to our dramas, wherein, for the past few decades at least, the genre of ‘tragicomedy' has emerged and taken precedent. We temper our heartbreak with humor, and tell ourselves it's because the absurdity of pain is funny at times. Really, though, it's because we simply can't stomach anguish without a sugar coating.

Director Christian Christiansen (love that name) has done away with the patina. At Night is kind of like a bruise you keep poking and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, more painful, and finally you just know it's going to bust. Its very lack of levity may prevent it from taking the Oscar, though in terms of affecting filmmaking, it certainly deserves to win.

All the other shorts, though, are just a tad too cute. Tanghi Argentini is about a guy who meets a woman online and ostensibly wants to learn the tango to impress her, but really he's trying to hook up his lonely, tango-savvy co-worker. Il Supplente presents us with a man who poses for a few minutes as a substitute teacher and wreaks havoc on a high school class, only to be belittled like a child when he goes into his own office. Actually, these two in particular, though clever and charming, feel a bit like extrapolated Super Bowl commercials.

The Mozart of Pickpockets is similarly cute, and goes maybe a little deeper than the two films mentioned above. In it, a pair of bumbling miscreants accidentally adopt a deaf-mute boy, who turns out to be a master thief. He, the boy, scrambles under the seats at movie theaters and steals purses from women caught in a cinematic daze. The two men are apparently gay, which is artsy, and they really seem to care for each other and the boy, which is also artsy. But at the end of the film, I just don't know what the message is, whereas after At Night, there is a haunting sensation that pervades for days.

Finally there's The Tonto Woman. For the life of me I can't figure out how it picked up a nomination. It is the only film with breasts in it — unnecessary breasts, I would argue, which turns them into gimmicky breasts, which may have then been enough for the nod. Or maybe there were only five short films made all year, so they had to let it in the running.

Here's how it goes: A woman was enslaved by a group of Mojave Indians and they tattooed her chin, so that when she returned to ‘regular' society she was an outcast. In comes Ruben Vega, who immediately falls for her. One wonders what sort of psychological condition Vega has that he should instantly become infatuated with the town's exile. Clearly he's a sadist, too, as he parades her around town to her obvious embarrassment. In the end nothing is really solved, except for that the credits role and the next film comes on, which is a good thing.

Remarkably, The Tonto Woman was the only American output in the live action category. The others hail from Denmark, Belgium, France, and Italy. If you include the animated shorts, the country list includes Russia, Canada, and England, too. Considering the heavy bias toward American films in the ‘regular' categories, it's kind of amazing how international this particular group is. Especially if you're of the mindset, as I am, that these are the best films being judged in the entire ceremony. It shows, I think, that cinematic artistry, and cinematic mastery, transcends the U.S. border — is even rare within the U.S. border, the evidence would suggest.

In short (no pun intended...okay, yes it was), these films function as the true artistic center of Academy Awards. Their very existence lends Oscar night the legitimacy it needs to keep from devolving into the mere popularity contest it so badly wants to be.

Written for realbuzz.com, by former Rake intern Max Ross.

Ever since Bruno Dumont was bequeathed the honors of the Cannes festival jury (including two grand prize awards for this and this film), I have been doubtful of just how significant the honor is. That is not to say that Dumont didn’t deserve the awards (he did) but that they had almost no effect whatsoever on the mass shitting that all his movies, save his debut, have wrongfully received. Somehow, I don’t think 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days will have that problem. It was the surprise winner of the Palme D’or for 2007 and it’s easy to understand why - Its eloquently affecting power is too moving to ignore and too tenacious to be misunderstood. The film is already getting its due both critically and commercially, in fact it will soon open in the area via Landmark theatres. I suggest you see it, but be warned – it’s not the kind of date movie that will result in a pleasant romp later in the evening. Then again, that disclaimer should be self evident under consideration that the film is being referred to as “that Romanian abortion movie.”

The film documents a day in the life of two college roommates. Gabita is the underprepared pregnant one and Otilia is her friend who, it turns out, is willing to do almost anything to help her. The girls prepare for the illegal abortion like they would an exam – with a sort of dignified verve. They overcome some small setbacks only to be faced with some much bigger ones. The overcome those, then a short diversion and then the procedure and the clean up. Finally they are left to face the reality of what they just did. This is where we leave the characters and their struggle in the film’s beautiful final moment. In strictly real time we experience these events and the transformations that they cause, and this is where the power of the story rises above any particular cinematic aesthetic.

The style is not necessarily anything new. Michael Haneke, the Dardenne brothers, Bella Tarr, Lars Von Trier, Bruno Dumont, and many more have successfully stripped realism to its rudimentary core when approaching modern subjects. What this film contributes to that towering (and intimidating) canon measures in at least two traits. First, it’s a story about abortion. Not a message, but a topic that is contextualized within the milieu of post-Ceausescu Romania. Of course framing the story in an oppressive political state also carries strong political implications. But Mungiu downplays them and renders significance in the way that they are not ever specifically mentioned, only alluded to. It is consistent with the realist tradition that the context is explored only in the implications of the films primary characters. The second quality is revealed in the moments of black irony that will somehow make you laugh in the midst of such real pain and difficulty (particularly if you’re Romanian, I’m told). Notice the dizzying dinner table conversation that logically progresses from raising children and family values to the idea of waiting 9 months for a soldier to come home. The camera is focused intently on Otilia and the audience experiences the implications of the painfully clinical abortion scene that just occurred right with her. At one point the phone quietly rings in the background. She hears it, and we hear it – has something gone wrong at the hotel or is it nothing? Is someone going to answer it? The scene is simultaneously excruciating and mischievous. And, it’s devastating, as is almost every scene in the film. (For definitive evidence of black irony pay attention to the meal that Gabita eats in the final scene after expunging her child)

It's textbook realism, yes, but it's also the moment where Mungiu reveals his cards and stakes claim as the commanding director that he is. His scenes frame the incidental narratives that drift in and out of people’s lives in such a way that he bestows the utmost effect on the viewer using tiny hints of activity drawn from our collective prosaic activities. It's this subtle yet potent statement in the midst of a brutally real and painfully accurate story that speaks to Mungiu's power as a great director. And it indicates his truly grand sense of irony, suggested so intuitively onto the screen. 4 Months also proclaims the vitality of the emergent Romanian New Wave (now that’s a catchphrase to watch out for!) better than anything else associated with the “movement” so far. But if you need further proof of its actual vitality, check out the Walker’s February 8^th screening of the late Cristian Nemescu’s exceptional final film California Dreamin’ (Endless).