The Current Cinema - David Hare runs through his best films of 2025 - Richard Linklater and Kelly Reichardt star

 Let me start with the two best movies of last year. 

The four screens above show Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon wiping out the set with his performance of Larry Hart in Richard Linklater’s frankly dumbfounding six scene re-imagining of Larrys last Night in Sardi's to horn in for a moment on Rodger's new triumph, Oklahoma! with his new lyricist, the appalling but brilliant Oscar Hammerstein II, and Larry's loss to him. 

 

Coming as this does after watching Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague earlier this year, but made after that one, itself a totally winning and transparently affectionate song to Godard and 1960 from someone who loved and remembers it for those of us who lived through it and remember it too. 

 

With Blue Moon, I think Linklater has confected a six scene Kammerspiel in a single Sardi's set in a remembered 1943 on that night of the Oklahoma! premiere. The first fifty minutes are almost entirely a monologue in what might be the Oscar winner for the year, but it's more than a tribute from me to Ethan Hawke to characterize such a complex and paradoxical genius as Hart with so much finesse, never allowing the gloom and self-pity to overrun the brilliance, nor pure fancy free to undermine the razor sharp ear for dirty truths. His humour stands beyond everything and the delivery is up there in lights at the level of a Hildy Johnson/Ros Russell high speed soliloquy. 

 

Unlike Nouvelle Vague, in which Linklater so brilliantly and lovingly homages the cinephilia and the whole art of mise-en-scene, Blue Moon does a Dreyer-esque containment to the six movement structure of the kammerspiel and orchestrates the rivers of dialogue, all of it brilliant (because perhaps largely reported truth) with the sheer, simple grace of the cinema's most primal tools, slow diagonal tracks, tight close shots to medium close shots. Minimum resort to shot/reverse, constant and regular staging in depth to entail conversations and moveable lighting to encase and amplify the mood 

 

And of course the music. 

 

Kelly Reichardt's new movie, The Mastermind is another total surprise formally from Kelly for me if not quite at the smoothly-paced and endlessly rewarding movie about achievement, her previous Showing Up from 2023 in which the simple but painfully difficult act of creating art succeeds to give its own reward. 

 

The Mastermind spends the first half of the picture simply showing us the unravelling of a man (Josh O'Connor, above) who is both doomed to failure, but who it seems may have no other options in life. After the distinctive slow-cinema tempo of the first half the movie takes off into a catastrophic narrative disconnection for a man, by now alone without any badly needed love except for his remaining friend played by a wonderful John Magaro (with O'Connor, screen below). Magaro may be the last friend he'll ever have.

 

If you've got the patience for Kelly's pacing and quiet, clear headed and endlessly rewarding observational cinema this work satisfied me and moved me very greatly. Up there with Blue Moon for the year. 

 

Not everything in the USA is going to hell in 2025 if these two movies can come out of arthouse/studio streaming funding .

 

…and now some more.

 

Paula Beer, Miroirs No. 3

Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3. Paula Beer, as usual radiant, and joined deftly if too late in the piece by the very appealing Enno Trebs with whom she was coupled initially in Petzold’s last film Afire/Rote Himmel from 2023. That film for me is a masterpiece. If  Miroirs No. 3 doesn’t come near its emotional intensity and impact, I can only think Petzold wanted to make a return to his blurred and displaced/missing identities pictures from earlier titles like Barbara and Phoenix. Regardless, I’ll watch everything he makes.

 

And a callout for del Toro’s big, blousy Frankenstein. What can I say? Oscar Isaac gives a characterization of the doctor that puts him beyond Oscar territory. Like Ethan Hawke, albeit somewhat younger, Isaac really is a dedicated actor’s actor, peerless in appeal - the first movie I watched him in was the Coen’s very fine Inside Llewyn Davis. I also found him/find him totally babe-licious. Never hurts does it? 

 

Oscar Isaac, Frankenstein

Back to Frankenstein, is there anything more wonderful than Del Toro’s sumptuous love for and recreation of the sublime Romantic world of Gothic Horror. Is there any greater genre? And his work continues, with Universal that studio's fantastic transition of 20s Weimar Germany with all its magic and miracle then to America’s and Laemmle’s Universal Studios literally rebirthing the total UfA tradition. Del Toro’s new movie is not his best - I find a few too many gestural narrative steps that seem redundant to the pacing. But who else is doing this stuff anymore? And so well?

 

And a mention in anticipation of P.T.Anderson’s new gig, One Battle After Another which will be viewed when the UHD disc arrives next week.

 

Also running high, Ozon’s big return to seductively transgressive form with Quand Vient l’Automne. It’s as he were if in radical gay brotherhood with his younger colleague, the great Alain Guiraudie, whose hilariously subversive social undermining takes the bejesus out of French Provincial bovinity in Miséricordia in which only the old Catholic priest seems to get laid.

 

Quand Vient l’Automne

The Goddess knows the world needs all the anarchists and transgressives it can get in these terrible dying days of rotting, corrupt Western Societies.

At the MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL - Rod Bishop trawls the program

THE MYSTERIOUS GAZE OF THE FLAMINGO (Diego

Céspedes, Chile, 2025)

L’HOMME À LA VALISE (Chantal Akerman, Belgium,

1983)

MIRRORS No.3 (Christian Petzold, Germany, 2025)

PRIME MINISTER (Lindsay Utz, Michelle Walshe, 2025)

 ********************************

The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (Matías Catalan, Tamara Cortés)

This year, The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo won the Camera d’Or

at Cannes. A first feature from writer-director Diego Céspedes, it’s a

coming-of-age tale of Lidia (Tamara Cortés), a 12-year-old orphan who

lives among a drag queen community in an isolated, destitute mining

town in Chile’s Acatama Desert.

The transvestites run the local canteen (bar) where miners regularly

congregate to watch them perform. They find Lidia’s ‘mother’

Flamingo (Matías Catalán) particularly charismatic.

It’s 1982 and early days in the AIDS epidemic. Lidia is told there’s a

plague in the town, transmitted through the eyes - or the gazes - of

male and female lovers.

This mix of a misunderstood, deadly gay disease; homophobic miners

who can’t help being attracted to drag queens; and an exuberant,

unapologetic, queer ‘family’ community who dominate and disgust the

town, are the social tensions threatening to explode.

Céspedes (a guest at MIFF) creates a wholly believable world, greatly

aided by the actors, Angello Faccini’s atmospheric cinematography, the

arresting production design, and an impressive musical score from

Florencia Di Concilio.

 

It wobbles at times, unsure of some abrupt transitions from violence to

compassion and family empathy, but it’s an undeniably impressive first

feature. 

 

L’homme à la valise (Jeffrey Kime and Chantel Akerman at a wordless breakfast)

L’Homme à la valise was part of a Cinémathèque-like collection of 24

shorts and features from Chantel Akerman, and here, the writer-

director-actor returns to the domestic, daily-life-at-home scenario of

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, to make

this 61-minute, near wordless, knockabout comedy.

Playing herself, Akerman is trying to write a screenplay, but is

constantly disturbed and interrupted by Henri (Jeffrey Kime), a guest

in her small apartment. It’s Sartre’s “Hell is other people”, whether

she’s barricading herself in her bedroom, or banging senselessly on her

typewriter, or rustling paper to make Henri think she’s working, or

getting up earlier and earlier to avoid him at breakfast. Akerman gets

to channel Charlie Chaplin for an hour, and she does it with the same

effective drollery of the master.

 

Mirrors No.3 (Paula Beer)

Some recent reviews of Christian Petzold’s latest, Mirrors No.3, are

often more confusing than anything that happens in the film.

“Mellifluous”, “mysterious”, “enigmatic” have been used to describe a

film other reviewers consider too thin in plot to survive its 86-minute

length.

It’s true the tonal and abrupt narrative changes of much of Petzold’s

earlier work are muted here, in this story of a woman who survives a

car crash, is then taken in by a lonely woman, only to find herself

replacing her host’s dead daughter. Once again, Paula Beer is icily

charismatic playing the central character, and scarce as Petzold’s plot

may be, his restrained and clear-eyed direction is, as usual, gripping.

 

Prime Minister is a very serviceable documentary account of Jacinda

Ardern’s time as the New Zealand PM, making excellent use of Clarke

Gayford’s professionally shot home movie footage. This intimacy gives

a fresh view into Ardern’s well-known achievements, and her well-

known struggles, but for this viewer it’s worth the price of admission

to see the New Zealand TV footage of the protests outside Parliament

 demonstrating against her handling of Covid and the economy. Protests

that eventually prompted her resignation. There are very disturbing

similarities with the QAnon nutters who attacked the Capital in the

USA.

Dame Jacinda Ardern has been living in Cambridge, Boston for the past

two years. 

At the Sydney Film Festival - Happy family movies - WHAT DOES THAT NATURE SAY TO YOU (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2025) & MIRRORS NO. 3 (Christian Petzold, German, 2025)

Ha Song-guk, Kang So-yi, What Does That Nature Say To You

The last Hong Sang-soo film I saw was titled in water. Note no caps. The film was screened at the Sydney Film Festival in 2023 but I saw it last year at the Reflet Medicis cinema in Paris, along with a handful of others at a morning session. Hong has made over thirty features and I guess over the years I may have seen about half of them, most often as a result of Tony Rayns selecting them when he programmed the wonderful Dragons and Tigers section of the Vancouver Film Festival. 

In water is a film which requires some advance knowledge before sitting down to watch it. I didn’t have any of that advance knowledge beyond Hong’s name and thus it was that after watching it for maybe forty minutes I’d had enough and got up and left. If my French had been up to the task I would have complained to the management that the film was out of focus throughout. Close and medium shots had some clarity. Long shots were a blur. When I mentioned this to a Korean film aficionado later I was somewhat taken aback to be told that the out of focus visuals were in fact the director’s intention. Wikipedia filled in this lack of information when it advised that “Hong opted to shoot In Water mostly out of focus to reflect the main character’s creative block.” Right. How brilliant. That wasn't the explanation given by my Korean film aficionado but well...

The SFF program notes for Hong’s latest film What Does That Nature Say to You didn’t mention any similar such hurdles, describing the film as “the latest witty and incisive drama by Korean indie auteur Hong Sang Soo (in water, SFF 2023) Berlin Competition , 2025)” and “especially illuminating and rich in charming humour”. Not quite what I saw but interesting enough once you get over Hong’s slow boil of story line which leads to the fateful evening when a thirty-ish woman brings home her boyfriend of three years to finally meet her parents and the parents seemingly  effortlessly get him into a drunken shouting mood. It dissipates next day when he leaves and there is what a  critic might call an enigmatic ending involving a flat tyre.

Paula Beer, Mirrors No. 3

Christian Petzold has been a festival favourite for a decade and a half. He’s also big into enigma and never more so than in his Mirrors No.3. The program notes tell us something entirely unclear from the film itself. “Named for the third movement of a suite for solo piano composed by Maurice Ravel, Mirrors No.3 “(or as it appears on the screen, Miroirs No. 3, but wait for it) “is a beguiling exploration of loss, healing and how to confront the past to move forward, told in Petzold’s signature elegant style.” Analyse that. Actually I thought for a long stretch the film was somewhat Highsmithian – a chance introduction of two characters, one clings to the other and slowly we work out why the other is prepared to let this happen. Then in one outburst an unknown truth is revealed. But here no one gets murdered and some of the participants are happier than when the film began…and we have some musical elements to contend with. I assume, because I didn’t notice it in the credits, that the final piano recital  is the titular suite by Ravel…

Sydney Film Festival - Sydney's supercinephile Barrie Pattison puts in the hard yards to roundup his highlights of the 2021 event - Zhang Yimou, Asghar Farhadi, Paolo Sorrentino, Christian Petzold, Paul Schrader and Ildikó Enyedi

Well the Sydney Film Festival made a Covid delayed return without celebrity visitors (Paul Schrader sent a video that they played too loudly) or anyone too much worried about social distancing. Otherwise, it was pretty much the formula as before, the buzz of being force-fed a year of serious film and the old irritations - cashless box office, an image too small for most of the seats in the State.

I'd have liked to see  Jacues Audiard's Les olympiades  and Takayo Hirao's Pompo the Cinephile  but the schedule beat me. I did quite well by cherry-picking my way through it, though that's not the best way to go. The highlights have constantly proved to be unexpected. Think Larisa Shepiko’s 1963 Znoy, Richard Gordon & Carma Hinton‘s 1995 The Gate of Heavenly Peace, Ziad Doueiri’s 2017 L'insulte / The Insult. 

Zhang Yimou

Yi miao zhong/One Second  proved something of a return to form for Zhang Yimou.

Coming over the bleak dunes, Zhang Yi the ragged lead, gets into the dusty strip mall town in time to see a scruffy figure steal a reel of film from a courier’s motor bike left outside the bar. It takes a while to find out why this is so important while they fill in the back stories.

The thief is Liu Haocun, one of those “My goodness - you’re a girl” characters familiar from the Kung Fu movies and earlier and wider. She’s a companion to  Minzhi Wei in Zhang Yimou’s best film, the 1999  Yi ge dou bu neng shao/Not One Less, both children called on to carry adult responsibilities with their Cultural Revolution backgrounds a key element of the plot.

Along the way, the purloined reel gets to change hands with leads flanneling a truck driver with conflicting stories and the can with Newsreel Number 22 falls off a truck and gets dragged along a dirt road. 

The damaged reel has high significance for each of  the principals - income for the impoverished girl (lampshades made of movie films are trendy) his Mr. Movie  status and that of his tiny Unit 2 Town movie house for operator Fan Dianying and the powerful significance of one second (actually several) for Zhang Yi who proves to be on the run from a prison camp.

The film’s most memorable passages involve his district cinema where Fan involves his entire tiny community in the work of restoring the damaged film reel, preparing bowls of distilled water and drying racks to clean it while stressing to the stranger the importance of his work.

They take immense trouble with the technical stuff, finding a fifties hand joiner, applying film cement with a steel blade and wooden applicator stick and contriving a looping set up, which Fan Dianying proudly tells Zhang Yi his fellow operators are unable to do. It’s a bit concerning that after all this care the damaged reel shows negative damage rather than print wear.

The pair have to wait till the house empties after the showing of  Zhaodi Wu’s  Ying xiong er nü/Heroic Sons and Daughters  (1964) which the clips make look livelier than the few movies we get to see from this era. Dianying explains that the audience will stay watching anything he puts on the screen with a hint of pride.

The security division are on the trail of  Zhang Yi and it is the film’s most poignant moment that neither they or Haocun Liu are able to understand when Dianying slips the fugitive frames of the image.

There is another tacked-on happy ending when the now scrubbed up and freshly clothed protagonist is given his liberty and returns to the village. It has been suggested that this tampering is the cause of the delay in the film’s release. Either by oversight or intention, we may be seeing more than overseas viewers who claim the fugitive's crime is unexplained, while we saw the projection box dialogue about punching out a red guard.

Not the least appealing aspect of the piece is its place in the line of films lingering on the importance of the movie shows of the maker’s youth - obviously Cinema

Paradiso (1988) along with The Last Picture Show (1971), Ettore Scola’s  Splendor
(1989)  Australia’s 1997 The Picture Show Man or the 2007 Hong Kong Lo kong ching
chuen/Mr. Cinema.

Persian Language drama Ghahreman / A Hero is recognisably the work of Asghar Farhadi again fronting the Iranian legal scheme.

Here decorator Amir Jadidi’s business is ruined by the arrival of printed sign technology. His failure to return borrowings from a family friend, made to get him free of a loan shark, has landed him in jail. On a two day release, he mounts an unraveling scam.

Audience sympathy with Jadidi is progressively eroded, shifting to his creditor who drew on his daughter’s dowry to help. When our Hero returns gold coins his lady friend found, he is is at first lionised by the prison authorities, the press and a charity which collects to meet his debts and awards him a framed certificate which he carries in a visual irony through a later part of the film. Everything Jadidi does digs him in deeper.

In a curious and revealing exposition, the people who actually have financial skin in the game drop out - the real owner of the coins or the creditor who storms out of the meeting honoring Jadidi, though his daughter remains indignant. Jadidi articulates the film’s message that it is no longer a matter of the money but of suspect honor. The jail governor fears another scandal after a suicide incident, the charity worries that its credibility and the financial support that brings will be imperiled. Jadidi turns on  friends who rehearse his speech impeded son for a pleading video. After his deceptions, this rings false. If we are meant to see this as a comment on values of the Iranian state it is too oblique. 

There’s an irrelevant opening, showing restoring the Tomb of Xerxes in Persepolis and referencing Bamaghan, interesting enough in a touristy way but padding an already long film. Performance and staging are straightforward providing the usual attraction of Iranian film - that it shows a society like but also very different from our own. PFarhadi only finally shifts from unemphatic handling to the striking dyptych of Jadidi in the dim image, signing back into the jail he couldn't face, while a prisoner unconnected to the story is brightly lit screen right, released through a background door into the sunny exterior.

After the conspicuous run of hits including The Young Pope and the drear Il grande bellezza Paolo Sorrentino is a star of subtitles Cinema, so his new È stata la mano di Dio/The Hand of God was always going to be a movie event. It’s a clearly autobiographical account of growing up in Naples in the 1980s with the writer-director assessing the input of his extended family, movies and the world-altering transfer of Diego Maradona to the city’s soccer team.

The piece opens with the limo offering aunt, voluptuous Luisa Ranieri, a lift where she gets goosed in the presence of “The Little Monk” who will make another appearance at the film’s end. She says it was to lift the curse of impotence but her wife beater husband says she was off whoring again when the family breaks up the rough stuff. This sets the tone where the film juggles fantasy and documentary with blurred division between them. 

Young Filippo Scotti’s parents dominate, mother Teresa Saponangelo, with a nice line in juggling oranges for the family’s delight, and dad Toni Servillo without whom the film loses traction. They front a grotesque gallery of relatives where the family picnic is dominated by exhibitionist Ranieri emptying the batteries out of an aunt’s decrepit suitor’s electrolarynx voice box into the bay. 

Around them pivot neighbor Baronessa Betty Pedrazzi, a head butting cigarette smuggler and Renato Tenerezza Carpentieri, in there somewhere too. Everything else is eclipsed by the Maradona deal. One of the most striking moments is the shot of the apartment balconies full of people cheering in unison the broadcast results of his game.

The streets contribute bizarre glimpses - the uncle playing hopscotch on the pavement,
the rich sheik with his abusive whore, the family trio riding the motor bike.

Gradually movies move into the center of this tumult. The influence of Fellini is cited along with Zeferelli,  not to mention the Once Upon a Time in America cassette that sits on the player, but they intrude physically in the person of Neapolitan director Antonio Capuano, played by Ciro Capano, who Scotti finds  in a Galleria shooting the scene which the young man will watch in a theatre before he sees Capuano leap up in the stalls and humiliate the starlet Salomé on stage, before a night where Scotti walks the city in the company of the older man whose views jar with his vision of film as art. Director Capuano ends by offering Scotti work in his local Neapolitan productions but for no clear reason the last scene finds the kid pulling into Rome Trastavere.

Christian Petzold

Christian Petzold is one of the sharpest knives in the draw right now so his new Undine  is the subject of some anticipation, coming in the wake of his Nina Hoss films and Transit which was headed up with some skill by Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski  the leads of the new film.

Undine rapidly lays out the rules. Fraulein Beer who clearly has not spent hours in wardrobe and make up is facing Jacob Matschenz across their regular table in the yard coffee shop saying “If you leave me I would have to kill you.” That’s the water sprite who mates with a mortal with fatal consequences - right? 

The way we begin is the way we must go and the film keeps on throwing the spectator off balance by alternating the legend  and realistic narrative when we are getting used to the other. 

The elements are intriguing - Beer’s career lecturing on the history of Berlin using large scale table models, her abruptly appearing new lover  Franz Rogowski as a marine engineer working from an air hose in his diving gear and confronting a giant, menacing catfish near where he discovers her name painted on an under water tunnel mouth. This is plenty eerie.

It is juxtaposed by striking realistic scenes -  the fish tank that shatters round the pair,
Rogowski running the open air platform with the train bringing her to him. The police
told to hold her when it’s believed that he is brain dead from a diving accent, a logic and time-confronting recovery, the startling meeting in Matschenz’s night time, blue lit pool.

The illogicality is the film’s dominant element. It both gets attention and frustrates. There were too many phantom lovers and two year later titles in this festival but the excellence of performance and filming makes us forgive Undine’s irritations. The underwater hand is genuinely scarey

His sharp, saturated imagery and talented players (Maryam Zaree is another Petzold regular) assure us that he knows what he’s doing and if we can’t accept it, that’s too bad.

Paul Schrader

Paul Schrader is a funny animal. He seems to live in the world of Film Festivals (he wrote a thesis on Bresson, Dreyer and Ozu) but he uses the frame of reference and personnel of popular Hollywood given a push towards the deep end - the sex workers of American Gigolo  and Hard Core, the low lifes of Taxi Driver or for that matter Mishima. I can’t think of a Paul Schrader movie character I’d like to introduce to mother and his work is becoming increasingly difficult to find.  The new Card Counter has proved indigestible for its Streaming producer and is headed to theatres in an inversion of the old scenario. I homed in on it with some enthusiasm.

It’s encouragingly, recognisably Schrader - first-person narration from the social reject lead’s journal which provides narration, like the ones from the country priest, Travis Bickel and Willem Dafoe in Light Sleeper along with his American  underbelly setting and distinctive throbbing music like Blue Collar. 

Opening image of the cards on the green playing surface with loner Oscar Isaac’s voice-over laying out the values of cards in a blackjack deal, a skill acquired during his time in military prison, (“Red and black roulette is the only smart bet for a beginner”) and his modest goals which make his ability to beat the game inconspicuous. (“poker’s all about waiting”)

We see him move into his new hotel room and cover the furniture with his sheets. 

This is all compulsive viewing. Concentration isn’t  broken till young Tye Sheridan (Ready Player One) gives Isaac his room number after Veteran Military Expert William Dafoe’s Casino Security lecture, introducing the ABU Ghraib back story. The two elements never satisfactorily blend.

Sheridan is on a personal vendetta and knows that Isaac is one of the Abu Ghraib guards (“Nothing - nothing can justify what we did.”) who did time for the atrocities that none of their superiors were indicted for. We get a couple of distorting wide angle travelings through the violence and humiliation of the occupation prison cf. the cellar corridor depravities of Last Night in Soho.  Turns out that both Isaac and Sheridan want Dafoe (who we will only see one more time) to atone. “... the weight created by his last actions. “It is a weight that can never be removed.” The pair set out on a road trip through the country’s gambling resorts.

Previously comic performer, appealing Tiffany Haddish comes on for Isaac who recognises her as a recruiter for her stable of players financed by an off-screen banker on a percentage of the winnings but Isaac sees future indebtedness and declines. The trio become the focus for our sympathies contrasted to Alexander Babara’s loudmouth player, “Mr. America” who gets about in a stars and Stripes outfit supported by “U.S.A.” chanting supporters, with Isaac contemptuous of him never having served a day in the military. Things funnel down to the World Poker Tournament in Las Vegas where the players face off after Isaac has made a serious attempt to resolve Sheridan's situation.

Throw in Google Earth, TV News and a characteristic violent ending, with its coda of hands either side of the glass partition providing mood rather than resolution.

Strong performances, subdued colour, effective setting and atmospheric music all contribute but this one stands or falls on its script and the presentation of its subject.

Whatever its faults, The Card Counter is far more involving than most of both the
trival and earnest films competing in its market. Schrader’s fans among whom I count
myself will be rewarded.

 Ildikó Enyedi

It’s hard to imagine Ildikó Enyedi’s The Story of My Wife/A feleségem története existing outside a film festival. We get a near three-hour piece relying on dialogue written by someone for whom English is a foreign language - “What peace do you find in living with me?” “You must accommodate life. Otherwise it will smash you.” “Fire! We’re burning.” 

The opening, with the narration over the underwater shots of a gliding whale, sets the eerie tone which the film would like to sustain and we are into the story of stoic Sea Captain, Dutch TV actor Gijs Naber in charge of a freighter where the multi-married cook tells him that the answer to his stomach problems is one or more women. The Captain takes this seriously and tells shady associate Sergio Rubini that he’s going to marry the next woman who comes through the door of the nicely decorated cafe. After a near miss, this turns out to be the always delectable Léa Seydoux. She inexplicably agrees.

For a while, it looks as if we are in for diluted Joseph Conrad with the plot of Captain Naber joining classy passenger ship Marietta and refusing to send out distress signals,  incuring salvage costs, when a fire breaks out, despite the concern of his first officer - relying on steaming into a rain storm to put out the embers.

However when Naber goes onshore, non-sequiturs accumulate. What awful truth did the police want to conceal from him? We have to take for granted a mining scam which is supposed to make Haber rich, though it will impoverish the current owners. I’ll admit it is encouraging to see Rubini speaking expert English there. 

Narrative developments endlessly contradict one another What do we make of the Luna Wedler romance when our hero is enamored with Mlle Sedoux? When he distrusts Louis Garrel so profoundly why does Naber go into the rescue business on his suggestion? To sustain interest, we have to rely on the work of the celebrity cast and Miss Enyedi’s Hungarian associates, cameraman Marcell Rév’s subdued lighting and designer Imola Láng’s simulation of early Twentieth Century Hamburg complete
with nicely decorated real streets. 

After punching out Garrel, Naber looks like he’s got things sorted but we get an inexplicable betrayal and ghost romance ending. The film shifts from Joseph Conrad to George DuMaurier - leaving me sorry I’d persisted through its 169 Minutes to get there. 

Enyedi must be remarkably persuasive. She previously got a sixty grand award out of the festival, managed to marshall resources on this scale and have the result sent out for our benefit.

Streaming on SBS On Demand and on MUBI - Janice Tong admires TRANSIT (Christian Petzold, Germany, 2019) and RADIANCE (Naomi Kawase, Japan, 2017)

Christian Petzold is getting a lot of airplay on #mubi at the moment, and rightly so too; his films have the quality of a fever dream: urgent, political punctuated with moments of languid poetry to bring it all together. I saw Barbara (2012) and Phoenix (2014) at festivals on the big screen years ago and their stories and images have stayed with me to this day. The brilliant Nina Hoss worked with Petzold across five of his films. 

Christian Petzold

In Transit, Petzold pairs Franz Rogowski - whom you may remember from Haneke’s Happy End (2017) as the patriarch's somewhat wayward son - with the wonderful Paula Beer as Marie. Beer possesses a haunting quality which she brings to almost all her roles, she’s both fragile and tender and yet, resilient and strong; think Ozon’s Frantz (2016) my review of it is here; or Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away (2018). 

Rogowski's character reminded  me of Antonioni’s
The Passenger

 

Rogowski is Georg, a political refugee who was looking for a passage out of a besieged Paris. He agreed to deliver a letter to a famous leftist writer, before he soon realised the writer had taken his own life. Before leaving the hotel where the writer was staying; Georg decided to keep the letter (from the writer’s wife), his last manuscript, passport and other documents including a letter from the Mexican consulate offering a safe passage to Mexico from Marseille. Georg decides to travel there. Once at the seaport, a woman who was unknown to him approaches him; mistaking Georg for another man. They exchange glances but the moment passes. This happens again outside the Mexican consulate. The woman is Marie. The two seem to pass each other as ghosts do: seen but not really seeing each other. Days drag on, Georg takes on the identity of the writer, or does he? Perhaps he has become a kind of substitute instead; for a boy whose father died in Georg’s company, a companion for Marie’s lover, Richard, who is a kindly doctor; and for Marie too. When in transit, one learns that there are no coincidences, and friendships can’t help but grow.

 

In transit…Beer and Rogowski

 

Identity and truth. The reason for loving someone needs neither of these things. And perhaps that’s why Petzold’s film is so affecting.

 

Although based on Anna Segher’s novel, which was set in Nazi Germany, Petzold’s sombre and sensitve film is set in the present day; it’s a story that resonates without the need for any period references. 

 

Naomi Kawase’s film Radiance is also a sombre and evenly-paced tale of shared love and respect for another person. I recognised the handsome face of Masatoshi Nagase straight away, but it took almost the entire film before I was able to place him; as the young Japanese protagonist in both the 1995 film Cold Fever (Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, one of my favourite films during the 90s) and also in Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989). 

To see the world, to frame the world

Ayame Misaki is Misako, a translator of films for the vision impaired, where she translates not the dialogue but the mise-en-scène. Her voiceover heard over the screening of a film describes the scene, the setting, the actor’s gestures too, to create the mood that is imparted in the film. Currently she is working on a film about an elderly husband and wife and the wife’s departure from the world. Her work requires patience as well as the ability to take on criticisms from a panel of men and women who are blind. One of the panelists is a famous vision-impaired photographer Masaya Nakamori played by Nagase. 

Evocative story of friendship and love,
Misaki and Nagase make an unlikely pair

 

Masaya is struggling with his depleting eye sight; he is reserved but cutting when he speaks. We see him working on some computer coding through a screen and magnifying devices, the codes are displayed in the largest font size possible (think 200+ pt) and each character is voiced by the computer as he types it onto his keypad. (I would have thought this a difficult way to work, but he had obviously adapted). It seems that Masaya likes to see the world through his other eye - that of the camera lens; it is as though the world can only be viewed through the eye of another; not because his own eyes fail him, but this other eye frames the world, (perhaps his internal world too) so that it becomes manageable, able to be understood. Nagase plays his character so convincingly that you don’t doubt that he was in fact, blind.

 

Juxtaposed with Misaki’s Misako, who has a purity of spirit, Misaki has a beautiful face too, which lights up the screen with each close-up. The unlikely pair discover a shared language and become friends.

The moment before twilight; before the
light fades into darkness.

 

The dance of friendship between these two main characters is one of beauty; as it speaks of the play between the seen and the unseen. Kawase’s film explores the essence of things, what should be named and what should be left unsaid. And how the ‘spirit’ of a person or a thing emerges, evoked by the partially-sighted that a full-sighted person may take for granted. These moments are alluring, lyrical, song-like. 

 

Transit is currently showing on SBS on Demand and Radiance is available on Mubi.