FILM REVIEWS: Seven years after he played the whistle-blower on incestuous sexual abuse in the riveting Festen, Ulrich Thomsen persuasively plays the pivotal character in Inheritance, another unflinching Danish family drama, and the second in writer-director Per Fly's planned trilogy of self-contained movies exploring the different social classes in present-day Denmark.
INHERITANCE/ARVEN
Directed by Per Fly. Starring Ulrich Thomsen, Lisa Werlinder, Ghita Norby, Lars Brygmann, Karina Skands, Peter Steen
Club, IFI, Dublin, 115 min
I have not seen Fly's first film, The Bench (2000), which is set in a working-class milieu, but on the evidence of Inheritance, which deals with the upper class, he succeeds admirably in his stated objective to see the world through the eyes of his fictional characters, not necessarily with sympathy, but with an understanding of their actions.
Thomsen plays Christoffer, a man in his 30s who has left Denmark and his stressful job at the family steelworks to run a restaurant in Stockholm, where he lives happily with his wife, Maria (Lisa Welinder), a rising theatre actress cast in the female lead in an imminent production of Romeo and Juliet. If the movie continued in such an idyllic mode, there would be no drama other than on stage, but the catalyst is just around the corner.
When his father commits suicide, Christoffer is persuaded by his domineering and manipulative mother (redoubtable veteran Ghita Norby) to return home and take over the steelworks, which is threatened with bankruptcy. There are hard decisions to be made, resulting in strained relationships with his wife, who wants to stay in Stockholm; his sister, whose ambitious husband has a senior position with the firm; and the workforce, hundreds of whom are faced with losing their jobs.
Thomsen's subtle, perfectly measured performance charts Christoffer's transformation from laid-back restaurateur to glacial executive as, prodded by his callous mother, he becomes consumed with his work and with the bottom line. The Shakespearean references extend far beyond Maria's rehearsals for her role as Juliet, as this merchant prince of Denmark is forced to re-examine his own roles as employer, husband, and son to a contemporary reincarnation of Lady Macbeth.
Free of any hints of dramatic compromise, Inheritance is a cautionary tale of, and for, our times, told with insight, honesty and dramatic skill, and given the sharp edge of credibility by the fine ensemble cast playing its firmly etched principal characters. - Michael Dwyer
WITHOUT A PADDLE
Directed by Steven Brill. Starring Seth Green, Matthew Lillard, Dax Shepard, Ethan Suplee, Abraham Benrubi, Burt Reynolds
12PG, gen release, 99 min
When American woodsmen visit town to exchange squirrel innards for Vaseline they must occasionally catch a glimpse of some of the DVDs in which Hollywood producers, few of whom live in shacks or kill their own game, put forward such a negative image of the outdoor life. Ever since the release of Deliverance we have become used to the idea that living by rivers and among trees causes hairy men - no women seem to exist in such places - to grow up homicidally peculiar. If we are to believe the movies, the forest is the only place more infused with human evil than the American high school.
Without a Paddle - the title nudges the imaginative viewer towards a four-letter expletive which sums the film up nicely - puts three city boys in the way of two stereotypically unfriendly, gun-toting nutters. The heroes, solid chums as lads, have reunited after many years to track down a large sum of money hidden, or so a treasure map suggests, somewhere near perilous rapids and giant, killer bears. After several early disasters they happen upon a marijuana farm run by the surly brutes mentioned above. A robust exchange of views follows.
The film, though only occasionally disgusting, is as moronic as you would expect from a project whose producers allow Matthew Lillard's name to appear on advertising material. Were the script a little more robustly offensive towards its various undeserving targets - gays, environmentalists, those woodsmen - then it might at least induce an exciting guilty frisson. As things stand, the only pleasure comes from detailing the surprising number of films Without a Paddle rips off. Aside from Deliverance, I spotted The Big Chill, City Slickers and Southern Comfort. - Donald Clarke
AALTRA
Directed by Benoît Delepine and Gustave Kervern. Starring Benoît Delepine, Gustave Kervern, Aki Kaurismaki, Benoît Poelvoorde, Jason Flemyng
Club, IFI, Dublin, 93 min
"People like you give people in wheelchairs a bad name," an angry Jason Flemyng bellows at the two heroes of this singular Belgian comedy. Well, quite. What we have here is a sort of accidental riposte to Inside I'm Dancing. While Damian O'Donnell's film was carefully researched and keen to show its heroes as rounded personalities, Aaltra makes no attempt to engage seriously with disability issues and is happy to portray its central characters as ruthless, selfish misanthropes. I mean none of this as criticism.
Ben and Gus, two neighbours from some rural part of central France, set out for Finland to secure compensation from the engineering firm, Aaltra, whose unsafe tractor contributed to their being paralysed from the waist down. Every piece of kindness they meet along the way is repaid with ingratitude. Offered a lift in a Danish family's motor home, they immediately seek out the liquor cabinet and get so drunk that the good Samaritans feel forced to abandon them before a rising tide. When Flemyng offers Gus a ride on his customised motorbike, the unappreciative loon drives it into a ditch.
In truth, though often brilliantly funny, Aaltra, which is shot in such grainy black and white that brighter areas of the screen occasionally eat away the subtitles, comes across like a compendium of rather good short films.
Indeed, when the heroes - played with nasty relish by the picture's directors Benoît Delepine and Gustave Kervern - finally make it to Aaltra they encounter the sort of wearingly neat punchline that the makers of student shorts often feel essential to their art. Appropriately enough, that coup de grâce is delivered by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, whose mordant surrealism must surely have been a significant influence on these unusual film-makers. - Donald Clarke
TRIPLE AGENT
Directed by Eric Rohmer. Starring Katerina Disaskalou, Serge Renko, Cyrielle Clair, Grigori Manoukov, Dimitri Rafalsky
Club, IFI, Dublin, 115 min
In Arthur Penn's 1975 thriller Night Moves, Gene Hackman's character, private eye Harry Moseby, remarked: "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry." Moseby would probably have opted for staring at a wall had he been faced with the alternative of watching Rohmer's latest movie, Triple Agent, which the 84-year-old director happily admits is his most verbose film to date.
Rohmer's 22nd feature film, it is an espionage thriller with a difference, in that it consists almost entirely of characters delivering torrents of dialogue while the spy games take place off-screen and are open to several interpretations. Furthermore, the film doesn't get outdoors very much, choosing instead to situate its drama in a turbulent political context through frequent insertions of archival news footage.
The film begins in 1936, as the Popular Front is elected in France and civil war breaks out in Spain. The setting is Paris, where Fyodor (Serge Renko), a White Russian émigré lives with his Greek wife, Arsinoe (Katerina Disaskalou), a painter. Made a general when he was 20, he had a short-lived career in the army because he refused to "turn Red" and he now works at the Russian Army Veterans' Federation, where he is in charge of intelligence.
The émigré couple live in an environment populated by heavily politicised characters caught up in heated debates. Fyodor notes that their new neighbour is a communist because he has seen him reading L'Humanité in the street. Arsinoe is the least politically engaged character, being preoccupied with exactly what her husband does when he leaves their apartment.
At one point he admits to her that he is a double agent and even a triple agent, and she grows more concerned when she learns that he has been in Berlin when he said he would be in Brussels. The shadow of the imminent world war hangs heavily over this scenario of allegiances, prejudices, loyalties and betrayal as the protagonists are faced, as ever in a Rohmer film, with moral dilemmas.
An introductory caption explains that Triple Agent tells a fictional story inspired by a real-life, unsolved mystery, offering narrative inventions that may or not illuminate or explain its poignant outcome. One of Rohmer's rare ventures into historical cinema, it is neither as dramatically engaging or as powerful as his superb previous film, the French Revolution drama The Lady and the Duke, but it is gracefully and thoughtfully composed and for those prepared to remain alert and attentive to its dense dialogue, it proves ultimately rewarding. - Michael Dwyer
KOKTEBEL
Directed by Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky Starring Igor Chernevich, Gleb Puskepalis, Vladimir Kucherenko, Agrippina Steklova, Alexander Ilyin, Evgeniy Sytyi
Club, IFI, Dublin, 105 min
The first shot of this beautifully made Russian picture establishes the ground rules very efficiently. A car passes across a road over a tunnel from which a father and son emerge and make their way towards the camera. The sequence is so lengthy that the sky has time to change from almost complete darkness to promising twilight and that glacial pace is maintained throughout the picture. This is a rather lovely contribution to a genre of film-making - particularly popular in Russia and eastern Europe - that might be described as High Ponderousness. Unfortunately for Koktebel's young directors, Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky, a similarly themed Russian film from the same school, Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Return, may still be fresh in viewers' minds. Decent though Koktebel is, it does not compare with that masterpiece.
The boy (Gleb Puskepalis) and his dad (Igor Chernevich), broke and apparently homeless, are making their way from Moscow to the Crimean town of Koktebel. They meet up with a solitary nutter who offers them money to repair his roof and then, following a drunken disagreement, unloads a shotgun at the father.
Fortuitously, the two travellers happen upon a female doctor who cares for the injured man. When a faltering romance begins, the boy, jealous and confused, decides to head off for Koktebel on his own.
Khlebnikov and Popogrebsky allow their two heroes' back stories to emerge slowly and with great subtlety. It seems that the father's alcoholism, aggravated by the death of his wife, led to his dismissal from his job as an aeronautical engineer. Guilt, suspicion and blame hang over the picture like the consistently murky skies.
There are too many clumsy allusions to flight and more than enough contemplative silences, but the images are stunningly assembled throughout. The final, eccentrically composed shot is both reminiscent and worthy of Andrei Tarkovsky, though its content will remind many of François Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups. - Donald Clarke
The Ticket is back next Friday
