Fate, Fascination, and Fortitude

The renowned British playwright Tom Stoppard had once remarked: ‘A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar—you pretend it's not there.’ In Le Fils  a.k.a. The Son (2002), a film by the Belgian director-writer duo, brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, the camera is more like the gaze of a smitten lover—unflinching and unwavering to the point of being almost unbearable.

With their grounding in documentary filmmaking, in the hands of the brothers, the camera seems to have taken a life of its own—prodding, prying, and perceiving the dreary, day-to-day dealings of Olivier (a role that fetched Olivier Gourmet, the perennial favourite of the Dardenne siblings, the Best Actor award at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival), a carpentry instructor at a vocational rehabilitation establishment in Liège, Belgium.

However, even though the Dardennes have filmed Le Fils using a handheld camera, their approach is not that of the ‘queasy-cam’; nor is it the point-of-view style, which is the current fad among filmmakers. Instead, the shots are mostly over-the-shoulder of Olivier, so that the camera sees what Olivier does, rather than acting as an expository element.

At the beginning of the film, during the few occasions that we get to see his face, we find the bespectacled Olivier to be an expressionless and sullen individual. Meticulous in his craft, as all good carpenters should be, he gruffly reprimands his four students—Raoul, Steve, Omar, and Philippo—whenever they fail to stick to the basic tenets of carpentry. The hammering of nails, whirring of power tools, and other ambient sounds of a carpentry workshop fill up our ears from the moment the film opens. To accentuate Olivier’s dull existence, the Dardennes have completely done away with a background score. It is as if to signify that like the unseen camera that hovers around his back or the wooden beams that he is sometimes seen balancing on his shoulder, Olivier is carrying a burden—a burden that has the potential to completely mess up the life of this otherwise careful, meticulous man.

While Olivier checks the measurements taken by his students, instructs them to plug gaps between pieces of wood, and shows them how to use the various tools of the trade, one gets the feeling that this ever-watchful individual is equally fastidious about not letting his guard down. One cannot but help think that the attention to detail is but a façade, cultivated to keep in place a secret simmering deep inside.

Always in motion, keeping his hands busy forever, Olivier’s continuous movement is quite akin to that of an animal in captivity. His only way of letting out steam is to do pushups within the confines of the four walls of his dingy apartment. But then again, that act might not be to alleviate the pain he feels deep within, but to soothe the muscles of his lower back.

A man who does not reveal an iota of emotion when his estranged wife arrives at his doorstep to tell him that she is getting remarried and is also carrying a child in her womb, suddenly springs to action when he is handed the file of a young boy, Francis (Morgan Marinne) who wants to join his carpentry section. Initially reluctant and dismissive, soon Olivier starts following Francis, both inside the vocational facility, and out of it. He steals his keys, breaks into his room, and even lies down on his bed. Little by little, we learn about the blow fate has dealt to Olivier. Slowly, but surely, we also fathom the reason behind the man’s growing fascination about who the boy is and what he does.

It is precisely then that every movement of this cautious carpenter takes on a completely different dimension. Contrary to the pre-determined method that determines how two pieces of wood fall in place, we, the viewer—now privy to Olivier’s secret—are left to wonder what the outcome of each of his moves will be. The total lack of any expository dialogue and the absence of any back story make the task all the more difficult for us.

Francis, though, is completely oblivious of how his life is connected to that of Olivier. This uneven equation is made even more apparent by the symmetry that is such an inherent aspect of the profession of carpentry. Francis is, however, in awe of Olivier’s acumen of using his eyes as a measuring tape. Even though Olivier is barely civil towards the sixteen-year-old—he refuses to pay for his food, nor does he shake his hand—an unspoken understanding starts growing between these two equally quiet individuals, step by step, in sync with the carpenter’s character.

Then, one day, Olivier extends an invitation to Francis to accompany him during the weekend on a long drive to a timber yard. The objective is to understand various types of wood, he says. But we, the viewer, because of what we know and Francis does not, fear for him. And we pray that for once this man, who has an innate ability to make the correct decision when it comes to a dead piece of wood, displays the same judgment in the case of life, as well.

A film that says as much with an actor’s body as one blow of a carpenter talks of his talent, Le Fils, while staying true to the ‘Belgian lower-class life’ template that the Dardenne brothers are famous for, has at its core a simple truth with universal appeal.  Inevitably, most of us will not miss the obvious comparison between Olivier and the most revered carpenter of all, but the essence of this truly minimalist film lies in the carpenter’s rule: ‘Measure twice; cut once.' 

Perception, Pretension, and Prevarication

 Filmmakers’ predilection towards exotic ailments has quite a long history. From Alfred Hitchcock (the eponymous Vertigo, 1958), Christopher Nolan (short-term memory loss in Memento, 2000) to our very own R Balki (progeria in Paa, 2009) various directors have portrayed mysterious maladies in movies with varying results. At first glance, Eugenio Mira’s second full-length feature, the Spanish film Agnosia (2010)—a similar bizarre medical condition in which an individual’s brain loses the ability to process visual, aural, and olfactory stimuli—seems to be a mere addition to this fascination of filmmakers. But curiously enough, drawing that conclusion would be a perceptual error on the part of the viewer. Because Agnosia treats the travail and trauma of a character suffering from the titular affliction merely as a plot point to drive the story forward. As a film it is a period piece, costume drama, triangular romance, and an espionage thriller rolled into one.

Even though the genre-mashing characteristic of Agnosia will become evident to the viewer when s/he is well into its 106-minute running time, the opening sequence makes it amply clear in an instant that what is about to unfold on screen is a sumptuous treat for the eyes. As the story comes to life, Unax Mendía’s (who was also the cinematographer for Mira’s debut feature The Birthday in 2004) camera opens on a valley enveloped within the Great Pyrenees mountains. The year, we are informed, is 1892. The setting, replete with a stage with curtains drawn, a ramp, and vacant chairs arranged in rows gives the impression of a performance about to commence—auguring an important element of the tale.

As the guests, all military officers, arrive in horse-drawn carriages, we find that they have been invited to witness the working of a new invention by an engineer, Artur Prats (Sergi Mateu), employed with the Holbien industries, which has been manufacturing ‘the best weapons’ for many years. The item on display is a catadioptric lens (a mirror lens known for its focusing capabilities) that can be used as a sniper scope. Helping Prats is his little daughter, Joana, who has been entrusted with the responsibility of releasing a bunch of black balloons, which the military officials shoot as targets while looking through the sniper scope.

A visibly distressed Joana becomes even more distraught at the cracks of the rifle, her anguish amplified by the neighing of a horse, which bolts at the sound of the gunshots. When one of the officials shifts his focus and shoots down the animal instead, Joana faints, hitting her head as she falls. As Prats’ assistant Carles Lardin (Eduardo Noriega, nicknamed the ‘Spanish Brad Pitt’, who has acted in films by Alejandro Amenábar, Brad Anderson, and Guillermo del Toro) comes to her rescue, to his utter dismay, he finds that Joana is having trouble distinguishing him from her father. This, coupled with the stage-drama like setting, are nothing but a foretelling of the tale that is about to unfold. If the bursting of the black balloons portended to the dark world Joana will be plunged into, the breaking of the glass of the sniper scope symbolised the shattering of Artur’s dream—both as a parent and a professional.

Seven years pass by. In the meantime, Artur has parted ways with his employer, Lucille Prevert (the prolific German actress Martina Gedeck, whose filmography includes The Good Shepherd and the Academy Award winner The Lives of Others—both in 2006; and The Baader Meinhof Complex in 2008) and has set up his own company, Joana Lenses, with Carles.

Artur treats Carles more as a son than a business partner, and has even promised Joana’s hand to him in marriage. When we first meet the adult Joana (Bárbara Goenaga), we hear her saying she is not comfortable wearing her mother’s clothes. It seems discomfiture has become a way of her life since that tragic incident at the valley. Fate has played a cruel game on Artur as well. A man who manufactures lenses for a living has been left behind with a daughter who cannot even perceive the faces of her close ones, even when they are at an arm’s length. The guilt-ridden Artur, disregarding the fact that his business is going through a rough patch, has employed a doctor, Meissner (Jack Taylor) to cure Joana, on whose methods Carles has very little faith.

The two ways in which we, humans, react to a disorder as strange as the one Joana is suffering from are expressed by two different sets of individuals in Joana’s household. While Carles, though outwardly devoted to Joana, is inwardly aloof; the servants, especially one individual named Mariano—begrudged by the fact that they have to wear different-coloured rosettes, because colour is one of the few stimuli Joana still reacts to—make fun of her.

But, Carles, Artur, and Joana are all unaware that a nefarious ploy is afoot, that will very soon engulf all three lives. It is a plan set in motion by Artur’s former employer, the ruthless Prevert, to extract the formula of the sniper scope—a secret, she believes, is in Joana’s possession. To attain her objective, Prevert plants a spy, Vicent (Félix Gómez), in the guise of a man servant in Artur’s residence. But when Vicent gets inadvertently fired from his job, he is sent back on his mission. Only this time, the plan is to exploit Joana’s malady in a manner reminiscent of Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980).

Three days are all that Vicent has at his disposal to coax the formula out of Joana—the period during which Joana will be completely isolated from all stimuli, while being cocooned inside a dark, sound-proofed room, as part of Dr Meissner’s last-ditch attempt to heal her.

But just like the darkest hour is always before dawn, a ray of light will invigorate Joana during those three days. She will, for the first time in a long time, feel as if those distant stars in the sky—the only thing in the world she could see in the same manner as any other individual—have landed inside that dark room, while being ignorant of the fact that she is, in reality, becoming a pawn in a game of deception.

Even though the perpetrators of this reprehensible charade take every precaution, they find themselves completely unprepared by the opposition they come face-to-face with. The adversary in this case is nothing but love—passion that arises from completely unexpected quarters and threatens to jeopardise their elaborate sham. 

In an interview, Mira had stated that the reason he chose nineteenth-century Spain as the setting for his film is because modern technology has nullified many of the problems that Joana faces in the film as a result of her ailment. But it is quite apparent that there are certain aspects of human nature that is not bound by any era, period or millennium. Each one of us harbours a secret; our love for another individual is not holistic and all-encompassing, but pigeon-holed to a specific aspect of him or her; and that in the end true love is all about sacrifice—putting the other’s happiness before that of our own. 

Love in the Life of a Lugubrious Loner

 The title of the young Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino’s second feature film, Le Conseguenze Dell’Amore (The Consequences of Love), released in 2004, does have a Bergman-like feel to it. But the ethereally beautiful opening shot is more Kubrick-ish, Tarkovsky-esque, and a la Leone.

In a sterile white interior, a lone figure appears on screen, in extreme long shot, riding a travelator moving in a snail’s pace, with a suitcase beside him. Even though we are yet to meet the film’s protagonist, that single long take presages a lot about him. In one deft touch, Sorrentino tells us we are about to encounter loneliness, an ascetic existence, and a life that appears to have transformed into an automaton so much so that it needs external assistance even in moving along.

When we do meet the protagonist, Titta di Girolamo (a brilliantly understated and restrained performance by the noted Italian theatre director and actor, Toni Servillo), seated at the lobby of a plush hotel in Lugano, Switzerland, a voice-over tells us ‘I am not a frivolous man’. That declaration can be considered redundant. For one glance at this stoic, scowling, sartorially elegant bespectacled and balding man, cigarette in hand, with his back half turned towards us and towards life, is all that it takes to make us realise the same.

Sorrentino also introduces us to Sofia (played by Olivia Magnani, granddaughter of the legendary Italian actress Anna Magnani, who had starred in films by Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others), who works as a maid at the hotel’s bar. When we first lay our eyes on the young Sofia, she has a shaker in her hand, symbolising that soon she will be shaking up someone’s placid personality.

For one brief moment, we believe that these two character’s eyes have met—thereby materialising a connection that we can feel palpably—only to find that she is staring at a horse-drawn hearse through the lobby window. While the shot at the travelator set the scene for the film, the hearse, as we shall find out, portends to its conclusion.

Titta seems to have little regard for the saying: ‘Solitude is a good place to visit, but a bad place to stay in’. While to most of us, a hotel is our temporary abode, for this non-descript, taciturn, insomniac from Salerno in south-western Italy, a hotel room has been his home for eight long years.

His routine is as unwavering as his suits are impeccable. For six days a week, he sits at a corner table in the hotel lobby, observing the various guests at the hotel, ignoring interaction with any other individual, except when forced to do so. Titta is a man who has become so unaccustomed to living that when he is forced to converse with someone else, he peppers his sentences with philosophical ditties, while avoiding any reply that would throw light on his life by stating ‘The truth, my friend, is boring.’ Only for a day every week, does he leave his gilded cage, carrying with him a bag full of money to the bank. Ironically, for a man who steers clear of all sort of human interaction, at the bank he insists that the money be counted by hand, and not by a machine, stating that ‘We must never lose faith in our fellow men’.

Rude to the point of brushing aside a chambermaid’s polite queries with stern silence, we find Titta in others’ company only when he is sharing the table with hotel hermits like him, playing a game of cards. Two of his fellow players are Carlo (Raffaele Pisu) and his wife Isabella (Angela Goodwin)—the former owners of the same hotel. Due to Carlo’s gambling habits they have lost it all and have now been relegated to only a room in the establishment.

Like every man, Titta, too, has a few ‘unmentionable secrets’ in his life. One secret is that every night he eavesdrops on the conversations of Carlo and Isabella—by placing a stethoscope on their common door—hearing Carlo lamenting the spectacular life they once led and wishing for a spectacular death. There are two more secrets—one regarding the origin of the suitcase full of money and the other about a particular habit that Titta has cultivated for more than two decades.

Titta’s monotonous, meticulous, and morbid non-life is shaken to the core the day a visibly upset Sofia approaches his table and demands an answer as to why for two long years he has refrained from responding to her ‘Arrivederci’s (goodbye). The question whether he even acknowledges the fact that she exists seems to rattle Titta’s own existence of anonymity. That is when we see a faint smile on his face for the first time. Later, when he perches himself on a bar stool and tells Sofia that it is one of the most ‘dangerous’ things he has ever done, we, too, like her cannot suppress a smile.

The two go out shopping, he buys her an extravagant gift with the sole purpose of taking their relationship to the next level, and they even have a lovers’ tiff. A man who firmly believes in the saying that once someone knows a secret, it isn’t a secret any more finds himself spilling his darkest secrets to Sofia without even batting an eyelid. As he and Sofia seem to be coming closer, we find Carlo and Isabella drifting apart after Titta catches him cheating at cards.

But like all great love stories, fate will intervene in Titta’s tale. In a turn of events that will involve a missing suitcase containing nine million dollars, the Mafia, and hit men, Titta transforms himself from a man devoid of any imagination to one who can outwit even a seasoned Mafia boss.

Though the preceding paragraph seems to indicate that Le Conseguenze Dell’Amore ultimately ends up being a clichéd Italian film full of stereotypical characters and scenario, it actually avoids any such pitfalls.

It is in fact, an existential tragedy, encapsulated by that shot of Titta looking through his hotel room window at a passerby below, who, while engrossed at staring at a female runs straight into a lamppost. It is also, as the title suggests a story of love. Not the usual ‘romantic love’ that we are spoon fed by soppy Hollywood romances, but the love ‘The Fab Four’ from Liverpool spoke about in their song called ‘The End’—‘…and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make’.

Interrogation, Investigation, and Impressions

In one of his many interviews, Alfred Hitchcock had famously stated, ‘I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.’ The maestro would have loved the tune composed by the Australian film director Craig Monahan in his debut feature, The Interview (1998).

The film begins with a Kafkaesque nightmarish situation, with Eddie Rodney Fleming (Hugo Weaving, who played Keanu Reeves’ nemesis, Agent Smith, in the path breaking The Matrix, a year later), an out-on-the-dole individual, who has lost both his job and family, is rudely awakened from his slumber at five in the morning, when two armed policemen barge through the door of his unkempt, one-room apartment. Disoriented, dumbfounded, and distraught, Fleming’s repeated pleas of innocence fall into deaf ears as the cops ransack his apartment, physically and verbally humiliate him, and then at gunpoint, against his will, take him to the station for the eponymous interview (the Australian equivalent of a police interrogation, where questions are asked in order to find out the truth about an incident).

One of the cops who forcibly take Fleming into custody is Detective Sergeant John Steele (Tony Martin), who has been called in ‘to get results’. He is an official with a penchant for throwing away the rulebook—a habit, which has led to his having several run-ins with the Ethics Standard Department (the Australian equivalent of the US’ Internal Affairs) over the past few years. His younger aide is Detective Senior Constable Wayne Prior (Aaron Jeffrey, who portrayed the character of Thomas Logan in 2009’s damp squib X-Men Origins: Wolverine), who has a tendency to burst into unprovoked violence.

The clueless Fleming is shoved inside a dank, dingy room filled only with a couple of chairs and a table with a tape recorder on it—a fishbowl scenario portended by the very first shot of the film. As the interview commences, to his utter amazement, he finds he has been charged with stealing a car and forging documents. With Steele frequently interrupting the interview, making the fidgety Fleming sweat even more, the situation looks grimmer with every passing minute. Knowing fully well that the police department are within their rights to detain him for a ‘reasonable time’, which can extend to five to six hours, the famished Fleming pleads, prods, and tries to pursue the two nattily dressed policemen in vain about his lack of knowledge and role in the events he is being accused of.

As the interview proceeds, the allegations start piling up and Fleming finds himself facing questions on crimes much more serious than merely a stolen vehicle. While the two cops fish for answers, playing the ‘good cop bad cop’ routine, a reporter is on the prowl inside the station, brought in by ‘the hierarchy’, supposedly to gather material for a story on crime squads. But Steele is too world-weary to know the real reason behind this presence. As pressure mounts on him to conclude the interview, we, the viewer, find ourselves right in the centre of a cat-and-mouse game, with enough twists, turns, spirals, and snares to make us realise that nothing is quite as it seems.

Of late, the term ‘Hitchcockian’ has been used so copiously that the essence of the term is at the risk of getting diluted. Rarely does a film come along that does justice to the term. This little-known, rarely-seen, hardly talked about film from Australia falls into that miniscule category that goes by the name ‘The best films Hitchcock never made’.

The opening sequence of The Interview, when the police break into Fleming’s apartment, clearly plays on our innate disdain for men in uniform and harks back to the ‘wrong man’ trope, which Hitchcock borrowed from the Scottish author John Buchan, while filming his thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935). Theoretically speaking, the theme of a man accused of a crime he did not commit was present even in one of Hitchcock’s earliest films, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), and prominently featured in many of his subsequent films like Saboteur (1942), I Confess (1953), The Wrong Man (1956), and North by Northwest (1959).

A solitary incident during Hitchcock’s childhood, when he had to spend a night in jail, had led to a life-long aversion towards the police—an aspect that we find him revisiting time and again by portraying law enforcement officials as incompetent individuals (Young and Innocent, 1937). In The Interview, too, we find that in their eagerness to elicit a confession from Fleming, Steele and Prior made at least one crucial mistake that could jeopardise their entire investigation.

Possibly, one of the foremost examples of audience manipulation (‘playing them like a piano’) occurs during a pivotal scene in Psycho (1960), the film Hitchcock is most famous for. There, during a conversation over dinner, we find our sympathies gradually swaying from Marion Crane towards the bumbling, stuttering Norman Bates. Similarly, in The Interview, when after repeated requests Fleming is granted a meal, Monahan deftly fiddles with our feelings to an extent that we start questioning on whose side we should be on.

One of the biggest gambles Hitchcock took professionally was when he released Rope (1948). An experiment in single-setting, single-shot moviemaking, initially it did not go down well with either the critics or the audience. He did venture into a single-setting endeavour on a previous occasion (Lifeboat, 1944) and would revisit it in Rear Window (1954). What makes Monahan’s efforts—of structuring his film almost completely within the confines of a police station, and, in turn, within the four walls of a room—laudable is the fact that unlike Hitchcock, who had almost two decades of filmmaking experience under his belt before he embarked on this experiment, The Interview was the Aussie’s first feature!

Besides these obvious references, The Interview is also replete with other nods to the ace director. Monahan refers to Hitchcock’s fascination with staircases, which frequently symbolises impending danger (Psycho, 1960) in the opening sequence of his film, when he focuses on the feet of two men climbing up a flight of stairs, guns in hand. In Stage Fright (1950) Hitchcock had taken the element of the unreliable narrator a step further by presenting a flashback as a lie—a decision he later regretted. Here also, we find us facing a narrator whose reliability can be questioned; and a flashback, whose authenticity is in doubt. The leit motif of a platinum blonde, too, makes an appearance in The Interview, in the form of Fleming’s solicitor.

A true disciple of Hitchcock, Monahan knew a tribute to the master would be incomplete without a Mcguffin (an element that drives the plot). In this case, the alleged crime for which Fleming is brought in is the Mcguffin, created with the sole intention of pointing out our propensity towards attaining closure or as Fleming so eloquently states: ‘Just goes to show how the mind works.’

For a film that depends solely on a question-answer format to propel it forward, Monahan’s masterstroke comes in the form of a freeze-frame shot—where via a single gesture, he speaks volumes and initiates conversations and dialogues among viewers that would last long after the lights have dimmed in the theatre.

An ending that reminds us of that of The Birds (1963) but impressive in its ingenuity—Hitchcock would have smiled.

Rejection, Responsibility, and Redemption

For fans of world cinema, the radar seems to be hovering around South Korea a lot these days. And for a very good reason, too. It will not be an exaggeration to state that over the last decade or so not only has the country given us some exciting new talents, who have turned many a genre on their head by rewriting the rules, but has also given birth to a few new genres of filmmaking, as well. The ever-growing list of luminaries that include Chan-wook Park (The Vengeance Trilogy), Joon-ho Bong (Memories of Murder), Jee-woon Kim (I Saw the Devil), and Hong-jin Na (The Chaser) now includes the name of Jeong-Beom Lee.

Lee burst into the scene in 2006 with Cruel Winter Blues, a slow-burn, bleak, gangster-flick-meets-revenge-drama. Those who were impressed with his directorial debut had to wait four long years for Lee’s next: Ajeossi (a.k.a. The Man from Nowhere).

These two offerings from this young director share a lot in common, but are also quite dissimilar in certain other respects. Both have two central characters between whom an unlikely relationship develops; a large dollop of gangsters; and an underlying theme of revenge. However, while the action in Cruel Winter Blues was subdued, it got ratcheted up quite a few notches in Ajeossi. If the element of revenge in the former was low key, it explodes in the latter. And, if the crime bit in his first feature was understated, Lee more than made up for it in his second outing.

At its core, Ajeossi is about a bond that ties two individuals—Cha Tae-Sik (Bin Won, who in 2009 played the role of the simpleton son in Joon-ho Bong’s brilliant Mother), a pawnshop owner, who has rejected society because of a tragic incident that occurred three years ago, which left him both physically wounded and mentally shattered; and his neighbour, a little girl So-Mi Jeon (Kim Sae-ron), who is nicknamed ‘Garbage’ and is treated likewise by her schoolmates. Like a flicker of a lit cigarette in darkness, So-Mi brings light into Tae-Sik’s bleak existence. Like the cactus plant that Tae-Sik waters everyday, So-Mi seems to have seen through the thorns of his gruff exterior. Tae-Sik, too, responds to So-Mi, but in his own subtle way. Aware of her fondness for sausages he buys a roll and then keeps it near his pawnshop window so that when So-Mi arrives to borrow a portable music player from him, she can spot the roll.

When we are introduced to Tae-Sik, we see his ragged knuckles first, foreshadowing a struggle that is forthcoming. Similarly, we get the first glimpse of So-Mi as she emerges from the darkness underneath a flight of stairs, when Tae-Sik calls out to her. This, too, is nothing but portending to the dark world that the little girl will be thrown into as the film progresses, and presaging the fact that it will be in Tae-Sik’s hand to rescue her from a murky fate.

Ignored by her drug addict mother, Hyo-Jeong (Kim Hyo-Seo) who works as a dancer in a nightclub, So-Mi spends as much time as she can with Tae-Sik, the only person in this world who she confesses to like; turning a deaf ear both to the gossiping neighbours who think Tae-Sik is in hiding because he had done something bad, and the warnings of her own mother, who believes the pawnshop owner is a child molester. Desperate to attract attention, the little girl, who used to steal things before now seems to be slowly stealing the brooding man’s heart by leaving behind notes and doing nail art on his finger while he is asleep.

But when Hyo-Jeong steals a consignment of drugs that belongs to a ruthless gang and puts it under Tae-Sik’s safekeeping without his knowledge, things get from bad to worse. The gang tracks her down, kidnaps both mother and daughter, and tells Tae-Sik that if he wants to see So-Mi alive he must do the gang a favour first. Although, earlier Tae-Sik had refused to play along when So-Mi had wanted her to don the role of her father to get out of a sticky situation, this time round Tae-Sik assumes the responsibility of a father figure and relents to the gangsters’ request only to find himself turned into a pawn in a feud between a gang leader and one of his scorned associates.

Pushed into a corner, as the secret behind Tae-Sik’s real identity comes tumbling out, the police chase after him as he embarks on a mission to save little So-Mi from drug peddlers, organ-traffickers, and a Vietnamese assassin, in whom Tae-Sik finds a formidable adversary.

Intermixing dark humour with awesomely choreographed action scenes (the climactic knife fight between Tae-Sik and the aforementioned assassin is an instant classic) and some brilliant camerawork (a particular shot of a jump through the window would have put a smile on Stanley Kubrick’s face), the crux of Ajeossi does remind us of films like Leon: The Professional (1994) and Man on Fire (2004), but it desists from being derivative. Lee has interwoven a lot of Oriental tradition and culture in his second feature—and by that one does not imply portraying Filipino martial arts, though it is present, but the depiction of a sense of respect that one individual has towards another with a better skill set and the notion of instilling a desire to excel in the upbringing of individuals.

Korea’s highest grossing film of 2010, Ajeossi is much more than a vehicle for a handsome leading man, who has shaken off his soap opera roots. It goes beyond being just another tale of retribution by showing not once, but twice, that an effort made towards redemption is never a lost cause no matter when it is attempted. 

Injustice, Imprisonment, and Intent

Way back in the 1940s, inspired by the American film noir, the French developed a genre of crime thrillers of their own. They called it films policier. Just like the central character of noir is a morally ambiguous, skeptical, and disillusioned male; films policier, more often than not, revolves around a similar cynical male’s struggle against a stronger opponent. With time, like every other genre, films policier, too, has evolved and has even branched out into several sub-genres such as the daintily named polar (policier with a dash of mystery), neo-polar, and post-noir.

Recent French filmmakers, like Fred Cavayé, in his debut feature film Pour Elle (2008), a.k.a. Anything for Her, have added to the broad policier template by intermixing the thriller elements with an in-depth character study—that of a man on a mission against an act of injustice. The relentless ‘no-time-to-lose’ element that characterises a thriller is set in motion immediately with Pour Elle beginning to unfold even before the opening credits start flashing on the screen.

Divided into the classic three-act structure, the first of which is ‘The last three years’, the film introduces us to Julien Auclert (played by Vincent Lindon), a high-school French teacher, and his small family comprising his diabetic wife Lisa (Diane Kruger) and their toddler son Oscar (Lancelot Roch). Theirs is an idyllic life, which is turned on its head in an instant one morning when the police barge into their apartment and take Lisa into custody, on charges of murder—an accusation that astounds Lisa as much as it baffles Julien. Even though a detective is assigned to the case, and Julien believes wholeheartedly in Lisa’s innocence, as days pass by chances of Lisa’s acquittal become as distant as the mental gulf broadens between her and Oscar.

Then, the day of reckoning arrives. With not enough new evidence that could prove Lisa’s innocence, accompanied by the considerable amount of old evidence that was stacked against her, the lawyer informs the dumbfounded Julien that Lisa has been sentenced to twenty years in prison. With that pronouncement, the unassuming French teacher finds the flicker of hope that he had harboured for three long years get smothered.

Like any other common man, initially, Julien sees no other option but to accept the court’s verdict. But when news reaches that Lisa had attempted to commit suicide, he decides to take matters in his own hands and attempt the apparently impossible— snatch his wife from the clutches of law.

At this juncture, one would expect the evolution of an individual into a hero, armed with an outrageous plan and an arsenal at his disposal to boot. But Cavayé’s (he co-wrote the screenplay) protagonist is anything but an action hero. He is the quintessential ‘average man’, who, when facing extraordinary odds does not perform a volte-face character-wise, but reacts the way any other man-on-the-street would. And in this he is helped by Henri Pasquet (portrayed by Olivier Marchal, director of the superlative films policier of 2004, 36 Quai des Orfèvres)—an ex-convict who had escaped from prison as many as seven times, and is now the author of a bestselling book My Life on the Run.

While laying down the ground rules of engineering an escape from prison, Pasquet underlines the basic tenet: ‘Escaping is easy. The hard part is staying free’. He also warns Julien that those who do succeed in the attempt are born criminals. Since there is no chance of improvisation, others, like Julien himself, are advised not to walk that path simply because they will end up getting ‘burned bad’.

In the second act of the film, titled ‘The last three months’, we find that Julien has already progressed so far down the path Pasquet had warned him about that there is no turning back for him. Always distant from his father, he has now grown even more detached not only from him, but also from the other members of his family, including his brother Pascal (Thierry Godard) and even Oscar. His life now has only one focal point—that of trying to devise a plan of his own to get Lisa out of prison. Knowing fully well that he will not be able to share his secret with his pragmatic wife, Julien carries the burden quietly, not succumbing even when Lisa misinterprets his growing aloofness. Meanwhile, little Oscar tries in his own way to reach out to his Dad, by imitating his father’s actions, which mainly involves converting his apartment into an operations room, replete with maps, photos, newspaper clippings, graphs, schedules, and numerous notes. 

‘The last three days’ is the dénouement of Pour Elle when an unforeseen event threatens to jeopardise the plan that Julien had so meticulously drawn up over the past few months. Not only that, a violent act committed by him puts the police hot on his trail, which leads to an edge-of-the-seat climax.

Prison film itself is one of the most clichéd of all film genres. Within its sub-genres, wrongful imprisonment and planning an escape rank quite high. Pour Elle could easily have just been one more entry into this seemingly endless churning of old wine in an old bottle, but for one important difference. It emphasises more on the planner than the ingenuity of the plan itself.

In fact, in hindsight, irrespective of the time and effort that Julien spends on hatching a way to get Lisa out, his plot has nothing innovative in it. And this is exactly where those of us expecting an action-packed ‘rescue mission’ will be sorely disappointed. In all probability, this lack of action, except in the last quarter of an hour of the film, must have been the reason Hollywood decided to remake Pour Elle into The Next Three Days (2010), starring Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks in the lead, and directed by the Academy Award winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis.

However, if one is not averse to shift focus in a film belonging to a done-to-death genre and ponder more on the psyche of an average-Joe, who wants to right the wrong done to someone he cares for not by transforming himself into a one-man army or masterminding a complex plot; or if one is open to a film where emotions are underplayed, reactions to adversity are subtle and not of the chest-thumping variety, and the protagonist is most of the time clueless of his next move than being a know-it-all—then Pour Elle is pour vous. 

The Penalty, the Profession, and the Pain

In her book Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean, one of the foremost American proponents for the abolition of the death penalty, wrote: ‘Government ... can’t be trusted to control its own bureaucrats or collect taxes equitably or fill a pothole, much less decide which of its citizens to kill.’ But in the 1960s, under the feared dictator Francisco Franco’s regime, capital punishment was very much in vogue in Spain, as we learn from the opening sequence of the acclaimed Spanish director and screenwriter Luis García Berlanga’s criminally underrated and unfairly under-viewed tragicomedy masterpiece El Verdugo (1963) a.k.a. The Executioner a.k.a. Not on Your Life.

As the film begins, a prison guard has his breakfast interrupted with the arrival of a mortician and his assistant, the latter carrying a coffin on his shoulders. Through a second door emerge a handful of government officials, including the counsel of defence, and an aged, affable man, carrying with him a case. He is, the mortician tells his assistant, the eponymous executioner. The duo and the coffin now enter through the same door, only to re-emerge a moment later. Only this time, they are holding the casket up at both ends, indicating there is a body inside. Thus, subtly, the spectre of death enters the frame, and will hover around the main characters throughout the film. However, like the morbid act of the execution itself, it will never really come out in the open.

The elderly, genteel executioner is Amadeo (played brilliantly by the renowned Spanish actor José Isbert). As the mortician’s assistant, José Luis (portrayed by the Italian actor Nino Manfredi) tells his boss, ‘…he looks like a normal person’, the first of the many wrong impressions that we harbour about an executioner gets snuffed out.  A veteran of forty years in the gruesome profession of garroting, Amadeo has a long time ago come to terms with the reality that ‘executioners are misunderstood people’. That is why, he does not take it as an affront when the prison guard looks distastefully at his case containing the tools of his trade that he had mistakenly placed on the same desk where the guard was having his breakfast. Nor is he shaken by the obvious irritation his innocuous query about when the first streetcar arrives is met with.

A chance visit to Amadeo’s residence reveals to José Luis that he is not really popular among his neighbours, either, who consider themselves ‘respectable people’. But when the young undertaker meets Amadeo’s spinster daughter Carmen (Emma Penella), something starts brewing between the two hearts, and it is not just the coffee that Carmen dutifully offers him.

As the two start coming closer, they find that they share something in common. Carmen confides to José Luis that all her fiancés have run away the moment they had learnt that she was an executioner’s daughter. José Luis tells her in return that every girl has left him when they had realised that he earns his bread by working as an undertaker. While death parts other couples, in this particular case, it brought two hearts together.

Coaxed by his boss, who is also Amadeo’ friend, and browbeaten by being unfortunately caught in bed with Carmen when Amadeo had barged into the house unannounced, the unassuming undertaker has no other option but to abandon his dream of going to Germany and become a mechanic, and get married to Carmen, instead. But surely, there is no place in his own house for his new bride, which is already bursting at its seams as a result of the presence of José Luis’s younger brother Antonio (curiously played by an actor named José Luis López Vázquez)—a tailor by profession—his shrewish wife, and their two children. Moreover, on the day of the wedding, disgusted that his brother had taken an executioner’s daughter as a bride, Antonio had proclaimed that he would be parting ways with his elder brother.

But good news arrives in the form of a missive that declares that in recognition of his four-decade-long service, Amadeo has been granted a three-bedroom flat. However, as fate would have it, the soon-to-be-retired executioner is told that he will lose the flat the moment he is out of work. Hence, the future of the family, which is on the verge of welcoming a new addition, seems to hang on whether an individual, who is an expert at interring, can now become equally proficient at garroting.

The very idea of earning his livelihood by taking someone’s life is unimaginable to José Luis. But his feeble protests stand no chance while facing the incessant haranguing of his father-in-law, who keeps insisting that he take the job and make the flat theirs simply because ‘…they sentence people, but, in the last moment, they're going to pardon them!’ Begrudgingly, the undertaker, who has always believed that ‘People should die in their own beds’ accedes to Amadeo’s request, while dreading the day when he will be called to ‘work’. To his utter dismay, his fear soon becomes reality, when he is summoned to Mallorca to execute a condemned convict.

A close scrutiny of all timeless comedies will reveal a common thread. If one scratches their funny, frothy façade, one will invariably find pain and pathos running deep. Berlanga’s El Verdugo is no exception.

The film is full of both wry, satiric humour as well as laugh-out-loud moments. Take for example, the scene when José Luis visits Amadeo’s house for the first time. On the wall, he spies a framed photograph. Noticing his gaze, a nonchalant Amadeo tells the young undertaker that it is one of his ‘clients’, and then goes on to show him the wristwatch that the man had gifted the executioner. A horrified José Luis now turns his attention to another wall, this time adorned with more than one portraits. Pre-empting the unasked query, the aged man replies, in an equally casual manner: ‘No, those are just my relatives!’ Or the scene when Carmen wants to buy a new shirt for José Luis., and Amadeo takes one look at his son-in-law’s neck to announce: ‘It’s a size forty-one!’

While peppering his film with such smile-inducing moments (the wedding scene is uproariously funny), maestro Berlanga and his frequent collaborator, co-writer Rafael Azcona, have not, for a moment, allowed the subliminal anti-capital punishment message of their film to get diluted. By condemning the duplicity of governments that proclaim they want to protect the lives of citizens, and at the same time sentence them to their deaths, Berlanga and Azcona state their message aloud through Amadeo, when he suddenly grasps the hand of his would-be son-in-law and brings it near a lamp socket to say: ‘ That is only 250 volts! They make me laugh when they say public garroting is inhuman. Is the guillotine better then? Do you think it’s fair to bury a man in pieces?....The Americans they use the electric chair, which leaves them carbonised, scorched’.

The director-screenwriter duo also delivers the same message subtly, in the unforgettable penultimate sequence of the film, by raising the all-important question: Who really dies and who gets killed at the garrote, gallows or guillotine?