Review

Aloft

Ivan (Cillian Murphy) is a falconer who tries to reconnect with his long estranged faith healer mother in Claudia Llosa’s "Aloft."
Ivan (Cillian Murphy) is a falconer who tries to reconnect with his long estranged faith healer mother in Claudia Llosa’s "Aloft."

Before I saw Peruvian director Claudia Llosa's film Aloft at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, I'd heard that the film was "impenetrable." It had baffled audiences at the Berlin International Film Festival when it played there in February, and though it had been snapped up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics a few days later, I was told that Llosa had recut the film in advance of its North American premiere.

"It's really a different movie," a festival programmer told me. "I'll be interested to hear what you think."

Aloft

83 Cast: Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, Melanie Laurent, William Shimell, Zen McGrath, Winta McGrath, Oona Chaplin, Peter McRobbie, Ian Tracey, Andy Murray

Director: Claudia Llosa

Rating: R, for language and some sexuality

Running time: 112 minutes

What I think is that Llosa, niece of the novelist and essayist Mario Vargas Llosa, is a major filmmaker whose first English-language project is a beautiful slog, a needlessly complicated allegory that supplies us with some fraught falcon imagery and a couple of genuinely affecting moments before evaporating before our eyes, leaving us with the vague suspicion that we've missed some larger point. That said, it's not hard to parse the story.

And it is a doleful story, set mostly in Arctic blankness, a wide white land unto which we might project our fears and longings. Or something. Imagine Fargo without wit, set in a world paused on the brink of imminent apocalypse. Imagine a beat-down and grimy Jennifer Connelly, wrestling with a sow in some place an awful lot like Canada before slumping off to have joyless sex with a fellow farmer.

Working-class single mother Nana, Connelly's character, has it hard. She has two sons, work is constant and hope is fugitive. Her younger son, Gully (Winta McGrath), has a brain tumor. His older brother, intellectually restless Ivan (Zen McGrath), resents the attention his sibling receives and has the grace to feel guilty about it. When Nana hauls her kids off to see a faith-healing shaman called the Architect (William Shimell) who tends to the ailing beneath an elaborate canopy of twigs, leaves and branches, Ivan insists on bringing along his pet falcon, which, it turns out, is not reliably tame. Something goes horribly wrong, but in the aftermath, Nana discovers that her touch can also heal.

All grown up, Ivan (now played by Cillian Murphy) is a dour professional falconer who trains young birds. He lives with his wife (Oona Chaplin) and child in a sad, dim house and wants nothing to do with his mother, who has attained a certain notoriety among the wishful. His peace is disturbed by the arrival of a journalist, Jannia (Melanie Laurent), who contacts him under the pretext of making a documentary on falconry. But it soon emerges that she's more interested in contracting Nana, who operates from a compound near the Arctic Circle, insulated from society by a tribe of acolytes who vet pilgrims.

Soon Jannia and Ivan embark on a journey across the tundra to find and connect with Nana and get some answers about why she has isolated herself -- and why she couldn't save the ones closest to her.

By this time we have plenty of questions too -- and most of them never get answered. As frustrating as that can be (I recently received an email from a reader lamenting the lack of "endings" in some movies), Llosa is more interested in raising these open-ended questions than resolving them. As the movie is currently constituted, it's not difficult to tell what is happening, but the why is another matter.

For all its pretensions to literary depth, what's most impressive about Aloft is the way Llosa employs the techniques of cinema verite (hand-held cameras, abrupt jump cuts, intimate found angles) to heighten the illusion of reality. This is an austere film, but it's not an ugly one, and Llosa employs an icy blue and white palette to sometimes spectacular effect. All the performances are fine, if consistently downbeat.

It's difficult to say that any of this means much, other than it's impossible to know why anyone does anything. Llosa hasn't constructed a genuine mystery; she's told a story in a coy, roundabout fashion that seems to hint at meanings that aren't immediately graspable. Why does Nana abandon her family to share her gift with the world? Why does God allow the abuse of innocents? Why do falcons seem like such potent symbols?

God only knows. And, as imagined by Llosa, He's silent as a sphinx.

MovieStyle on 07/31/2015

Upcoming Events