If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a police detective, investigative journalist, a parent who has to discern the degree of guilt in his children and decide how to react to it, or indeed as God, Michael Haneke graciously offers to make your dream come true. The white ribbon is a two hours and a half-long presentation of evidence, some witnessed by the narrator but most that could only originate from hearsay (the thing that I found the least convincing was probably the choice of viewpoint, which manifestly belongs to the teacher, but in effect switches from him to an omniscient author and back). Each member of the audience is recruited as part of an imaginary jury that will never deliberate and is called to pass no verdict, because the mysteries in the story are not there to be solved but to serve as an answer to the overarching question: How was it possible? How could ordinary people maim and kill other ordinary people when ideology or politics delivered the right cue?

It is not hard to put together a story that would fit the signposts provided (the steward’s son tries to kill his baby brother because he hates his violent father, then attacks Karli in retribution for the slap the midwife had given him when he had complained his new brother was a boy, or else because of the rumours about the doctor’s wife having been murdered; the doctor’s accident may come in retribution for his practising incest, or from the same rumours; Sigi receives the same punishment Clara and Martin had been forced to endure, probably in response to the death of the baron’s employee). Klara, Martin and their young brother stand for three different reactions to repression: fight back with the same bloody methods; try to hide from authority as much as possible; or accept the rules and respond with obedience and wilful self-sacrifice. In the end, regardless of distribution of culpability and of reasons, it is always the innocent who are hurt. The inescapable feeling of evil, however, comes less from the facts themselves and more from the diffuse responsibility and, perhaps even more chillingly, from the solidarity among perpetrators, even when they belong to different camps (the children do not punish Erna for trying to warn the teacher’s about their plans to attack Karli, but then, the pastor himself stands up for his children when they are accused by an outsider, despite being sadistic to them behind literally closed doors).

The black-and-white photography is predictably beautiful, picture after picture composing under our eyes and telling many stories in themselves. Despite the length and straightforward telling, the plot never loses the audience’s attention. But what endeared the film to me (a little) was its uncompromisingly slow, but still well defined, pace. Not as charming and possibly less poignant than The butterfly’s tongue, but better than X-Men, at any rate. Enjoy responsibly.

If the actors of Wells’ Julius Caesar were virtually paralysed in his absence, this film, about the making of the play and a few other bits on the side, seemed equally directionless. Which is ironical, because the direction was very much present, and pretty effective at it: the acting and the staging of the play-within-the-film are marvelous. Some of the lines were very pleasing too, along the model of classic films’ mix of pick-ups and put-downs. I liked very much the scene were Orson coaxed Richard to return for the opening night (it contained one of the truest definitions of a good actor that I can think of) and Richard’s potential for and progress towards becoming like Wells. Despite the pouches of brilliance though, i couldn’t really figure out what the film was supposed to be about. Was it about Wells? He was magnificent enough but lacked the excess energy and the opacity that would have made the slavishness believable (seems even dictators are getting smaller these days). Was it a coming-of-age film? Richard’s dabbling around looked determined enough, but didn’t mount to much effect. Was the film about good and bad people in general, about theatre, about a love for words, a period film, about possibilities? All these ideas were conspicuously announced, but ended up not even being convincingly jumbled, much less explored. Perhaps after all it was a film about not coming-of-age yet, and about the pitfalls and sadness of becoming (or as in Wells’ case, being a God-made) adult. Enjoyable film, good writing, inspiring acting… and now I really feel like watching Almost Famous for the 1938th time.

but listening. Bellow, shriek, and roar
seemed small inside their hearts. And where once
there’d scarcely been a hut to take this in,

a hidden refuge made of darkest longing
with an entranceway whose braces shook,–
you built temples for them in their hearing.

(from Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Edward Snow)

Same as immortal Dr Parnassus himself, the film about his Imaginarium doesn’t show, much less tell, but instead facilitates: musings that branch into speculations, morph into their own negations or fizzle into unfinished interpretations.

The gamble this movie takes upon itself is to succeed, or not, to lure the viewer behind the mirrors (shiny and opaque on the outside, camouflaged on the inside) guarding the part of their brain that concerns itself with stories and that one can choose to donate as battleground in the fight between right and wrong choices.

Nothing is final or permanent in Dr Parnassus’ world, apart from the immortality of temptation. This is a gentle form of non-heaven where the possibility of a choice is never exhausted, as long as it is desired: choices between imagination and safety, between good and bad, the continuous, exhausting choice between different filmmaking options (one can assume); finally the choice between choosing and not choosing. Every choice is both a chance to find the right way and the damnation of never reaching a way that leads to any end. What’s at stake is not to take the wrong path – that can always be fixed with another gamble, another twist in your personal myth, another crossroad. The true temptation lies in the act of choosing itself, at least when seen as a mean to a guaranteed end; in the attempt to sustain the world with crouches made of human stories, either as fairytales or in their more modern incarnations of scientific theories, judgements passed on one’s choice of a lifestyle or, in particular, of marketing, advertising and narratives of self-improvement. Stories are founded on a good-bad dichotomy, but to force one to listen to them is to push them to choose wrong, and to protect one from hearing alternative stories is to never allow them to grow up.

Ironically enough, the one character who is not offered the chance of redeeming himself is the only one who voices a belief in his own goodness, the shepherd who dies when his tune crumbles in his throat; and if he relies on ensnaring words to save him every time when he is in danger, it is also through the business of words (on the first page of a newspaper) that he perishes.

Through this neverending labyrinth of choices, is there any way left for a decent man to peacefully enjoy his immortality? Judging by the final scene, the rules are: not to judge, not to promise, and not to bet; in other words to submit the fun of roaming through the wonders of one’s mental ego to the unfolding of the great untold story that is the world, full of the transmittable magic of imagination.

So it comes that the final choice is handed over to the audience: to take a gamble with interpreting the filmmakers’ intentions; to applaud or damn the writing and directorial choices; or to throw away the crib and just enjoy every minute of this one hell of a story, be it good or bad.

What made Italian for Beginners and especially the wonderful Wilbur (wants to kill himself) into great films was the punctilious warmth with which Lone Scherfig observed her characters in their full, occasionally awkward but always endearing (and respectable) quirkiness. The scripts of About a boy and in particular of the almost perfect High Fidelity were great because Nick Hornby knew his characters well and fleshed out their voices and circumstances with earnest, original comments and twists.

In An education however, Hornby seems to bank on easy laughs and the occasional blood-curdling heart-to-heart, at the expense of what might have been more realistic dialogues and a more balanced, less rushed character revelation. Scherfig shoots the script well in terms of a both significant and pleasant visual impact, but doesn’t do much to make her characters any less stereotypical. We are treated with a philistine middle-class father who rates rich husbands as high as Oxford degrees in terms of life success; a wise housewife with an unfulfilled fun streak; an earnest but awkward schoolboy; bitchy but awkward schoolgirls (obligatorily much less pretty than the heroine); a pretty and worldwise but grotesquely dumb wife of a rich but shady businessman; two rich but shady businessmen; a long-suffering wife (obligatorily much less pretty than the heroine) who takes an interest in mothering her husband’s adolescent lovers; a stiff-glassed, unmarried English teacher with a Cambridge degree (obligatorily much less pretty than anybody); a school principal who takes pleasure in warning students whose lives she is about to destroy that they are about to destroy their lives (obligatorily ugly); and the heroine, who starts her journey singing along to Juliette Greco’s songs, loses her virginity to a shady businessman on a trip to Paris, and ends the film voice-overing her acceptance to a trip to Paris with her boyfriend. All these make for static characters who take no noticeable pains and seem to gain nothing much. Bouts of good acting from people like Peter Sarsgaard or Cara Seymour, Carey Mulligan’s beauty and the talent of the whole cast may add a bit of depth to the script; it is also true that the general style of the film resembles a typical flick from the 60s, so what I perceive as shallowness might be there by design (perhaps aiming to show Jenny’s view of the world, and not the world itself). Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the feeling that while Jenny ends up taking the hard but honest path to fulfilment, the script of An education, and to some extent its direction too, make the opposite choice. The result, as expected, is a film that is good fun and professionally made but doesn’t really teach its audience very much at all. (The two pre-Raphaelite paintings are extraordinary beautiful and affecting though, literally apt to turning one’s world upside-down though; I wish they were made into more than mere stage props).

Antal has raped Katalin, while Gergely has watched the scene and laughed. The rape has resulted in the birth of Katalin’s son, Orban. Katalin has lived with the secret for 12 years, out of fear that her husband would kick her out if he knew. Her husband finally finds out and he does kick out Katalin, who tells Orban that they are going to visit her sick mother. Katalin finds Gergely and kills him. When she comes across Antal, she has the surprise to find a good, hard-working man, adored by his wife and who bonds instantly with Orban. Katalin reveals her identity to Antal and sets in motion a chain of events that conclude with both the suicide of Antal’s wife and her own demise at the hands of Gergely’s brother-in-law.

This is a very powerful, fairly predictable and a little causeless drama, with sharp dialogues and impeccably carried out by the Modiglianesque Hilda Peter in the title role. The story is set in a self-policing world, where the presence of cars and mobile phones belies the traditional living and sensibilities, a static world steeped in ancestral rhythms, where eagles circle the sky above sheep herds that crowd hillsides and pool into fertile valleys, where Katalin swings for years in the grip of traumatic memories and the only sign that one is moving at all is the occasional shuddering of a horse as it pulls the wagon forward; a foreboding, unfathomable world (as revealed by weird sound effects and grainy photography) where treacherous depths lurk everywhere below the surface and old offences are never forgotten or forgiven. It is the classical ‘hill-valley’ mode of life described by writers like Blaga, Sadoveanu (Katalin reminds of Vitoria Lipan’s character in Baltagul) and in folk ballads. Whether or not such a world still exists or has ever existed, beyond legends, literary theory and an outside eye (or imagination), whether the story reveals a certain truth about the people of the land, perpetuates simplifying stereotypes or remains a fairytale set in a random exotic location… I suppose these questions are of less importance. All in all it makes for an interesting film with a handful of quite memorable scenes.

If you’re looking for a conventional cinematic triumph, The Soloist is not it. The acting is confusing and emotionally flat. Apart from the pace of the dialogues which is right on cue, the direction seems to advance mainly in chunks and bumbles, fleeting brilliance all but lost among the jumble of the glittering unclear. Has Wright meant to reflect his character’s behaviour into his actors’ performances and into his filmmaking style? Has he earnestly tried to deliver a mainstream direction, but ended up making it a bit too heavy on the non-inspiringly inspiring side? It matters little, because the memorable parts and what make the film truly important are the quasi-documentary scenes of people who are still waiting for the good circumstances that might reverse what bad circumstances have made out of them. If you’re looking for a triumph of humanness, of the respect to allow others free choice over their fates and to help them along the way, regardless of how tough the journey and how heartbreaking the moment when simply witnessing the art they had the gift to produce is seen as an achievement, then The Soloist may be a good place to find it. And I loved this film, truly loved it, not least because it was so uncompromisingly unsatisfactory from an artistic point of view, as if it meant to say that decency is not a masterpiece, but a relay crosscountry running race. Which is how life is, I suppose.

Play it frame by frame, so that it lasts longer

Mateo Blanco, a writer and director who has lost his love, whose name was Magdalena (Lena), his sight and the sense of his identity in a car accident 14 years ago, finds catharsis in telling his story to Diego, the son of his faithful friend and producer, named Judit. Mateo’s confession is prompted by having met the son of Ernesto, the ‘monster’ who had tormented Lena with his jealousy and conspired to sink the movie in which she had been directed by Mateo. Ernesto had not only despised his son for being a little severely gay, but had also used him to spy on Mateo and Lena. Once Mateo has finished telling Diego his 14 years-old story, Judit pitches in and reveals that she had helped Ernesto to butcher Mateo and Lena’s film and might have indirectly caused their accident. All these events were shot as a film-of-the-film about the film-in-the-film, which had led to Lena’s downfall and now allows Mateo to find comfort. Paternity revelations, various chemo-viscero-epithelial indispositions (do our diseases or blemishes tell something about who we are? does the medical history of those we love shape our fates?) and other more or less random MacGuffins round up (spill out of?) the plot.

This simple, cheerful tale is just the background for a glorious meditation about storytelling. If in Trolosa Bergman was discovering his heroine little by little and listening to her capricious telling of her own story, allowing both of them to painstakingly grow before his eyes, Almodovar takes a more exhaustive approach: he throws everything into the pot at once – documenting every move of his characters, shooting the same scene over and over again, bagging jumbled fragments of old photographs, expressing every idea that goes through his head – then chooses the best takes and labours to put together the pieces until something coherent emerges. Choosing the worst takes may give rise to a monster, but as long as all the information is still available, any bad story can be rewritten and the reputation of the illusion restored. In Trolosa, the heroine and her story are pulled out of the song of an old musical box; here, it is an unexpected detail in a photograph, unnoticed by Mateo at the time when he shot it and generalised to a picture composed entirely of torn photos, that suggests the existence of a secret, and possibly even the blindness of the creator; then the story is moulded and scoured in the search of its original mystery. The closest a character comes to being autonomous, to having the freedom to describe herself, is Mateo’s fling at the beginning of the movie; for the rest, the director is the one who has supreme rights to describe both his life and the making of his movie, with the movie being just a subsidiary, cherished and lovingly polished but always kept under control. The characters themselves don’t seem to exist, they are just a collection of pieces glued together to fit some kind of higher purpose that doesn’t even seem to be the wholeness of the final story, but rather the discovering journey of the author. You have to finish a movie, even blind, concludes Mateo, and indeed Broken Embraces has the air of a blind groping for a final story. I’ve always wanted to be an actress, Lena says several times; it looks like what Almodovar does is to reverse the old compliment of describing a work of fiction as ‘life-like’; for him, the best way to live is ‘movie-like’, all stories tied up together from an original mess of facts, bad takes thrown away, unsightly blemishes airbrushed, life just a subsidiary of the perfect movie that can be composed with its pieces.

These uncomplicated, lazy musings also serve as a metaphor for the theme father-son. I don’t know the secret until I have written the story, says Mateo, and comparing his and Diego’s friendship with the relationship between Ernesto and his son, it looks like the right way to go is sons guiding their fathers instead of fathers shaping their sons. Has the secret come first, or the story? Does the writer create a film, or does the film shape his writer’s life? Are stories a celebration of life, or is life just a pool of happenings that are there for no other higher purpose than that they can inspire stories?

She’s too beautiful to be funny, is how Judit describes Lena. Is it by design that Broken Embraces is less funny than other films by Almodovar? Is it just carelessness that the acting is a bit stilted sometimes, the film a bit too long and stagnant in places, as if the takes used are not exactly the best, as if the editing was perhaps less accomplished than it could have been? The slight artificiality that sometimes precludes empathy, the cobbled up feeling, the sense that life is completely superseded and mined to the last drop of naturalness to provide inspiration for the main story and for its endless branches, the untypical-for-Almodovar air combined to new-takes-on-old-mannerisms, are these just artefacts, or adornments perfectly coordinated to the themes of the movie? Where exactly is the line between good and bad, between monster and genius?

Then of course one notices that Mateo is a writer, Caine an acquaired name that supplants/kills Mateo’s true identity, that Magdalena had worked as a prostitute after her first failed attempt at acting, that Judit dislikes Magdalena and possibly causes her death, that Diego is the son of a deserted woman (and of an unaware father), that the editor betrays the writer, that Caine is pronounced as Kane and (this one definitely a coincidence) Bergman’s character in Trolosa is played by Lena Endre, not to mention other cinematic references that could certainly be mentioned if I hadn’t missed them, and all that’s left to do is to forget about making sense of things and just sit back and enjoy the story and the breathtaking angles and colours and set design and images and Penelope Cruz at her best and the fantastic soundtrack, and be a little happier afterwards for having watched perhaps not the best of Almodovar’s movies, but still a movie by Almodovar, with all the sublime and absurdness evoked by this label.

The first time when I heard ‘respect’ being hailed as an explicit value was three years ago. Since then I have had it mentioned by every other quasi-foreigner I happened to meet. Chiko seems to have found the recipe for earning respect: respect nobody. Either that, or be omnipotent. What makes this film interesting is not as much the ascension of its hero in the world of drug dealing, and not even the fact that there are seemingly no boundaries between criminal and ‘normal’ life (unlike La haine, Chiko shows a self-regulating environment, with not even one policeman in sight). The focus on the ‘formation’ of a successful criminal; the story of those who don’t make it to that stage, for whom power is just a boyish or drug-fuelled dream; the choice between what is right in terms of loyalty to old friends and what is right in terms of your own survival and progress – these are the things that make Chiko somewhat different from other films of its kind. Despite a handful of fairly memorable scenes, a tight script, good art direction, fast pace and generally good filmmaking, I had the feeling of something lacking, or perhaps something dragging – possibly just desensitizaton after seeing so many movies about criminals with a philosophical streak, as intelligent as a top chess player, as witty as their creator and who end up singing ‘all I want is love-love-love-love’. That many things are left hanging loose rather than being tied up into a suggestion of meaning can be anything between disappointing and refreshing (I lean towards the latter). All in all, an earnest effort and worth seeing.

Slapstick, comedy, chromatic fantasy, abstract study, surrealism plenty, action, drama, musical – this intelligent, shocking, moving, mercilessly funny and above all unlikely hymn to couple life has everything one could never think to wish for in a movie. Perfectly choreographed, up to the last bent of a toenail, the thinnest margin of precision in delivering a joke and the ultimate twist of a metaphoric thread, good-natured even when tragic, and guaranteed to make you feel good (or to infuriate you, if I am to judge by the leaving faces of about 80% of the audience…). Please watch.