We live in violent times, people say, though outside of biblical Eden I'm not sure if there ever was a point in human history when that statement would not have been factual. Human societies were built on violence, after all, which allowed us to take possession of more land, better living spaces, and more livestock, all at the whims of the warlords who directed their people into such a moral abyss. Violence is hot-wired in our DNA, programmed into our genomes like so much other human frailty and mutation.
It would make sense, then, that the subject is so often considered and contemplated in our higher cinema. The Toronto International Film Festival draws its fare, as the name would imply, from all over the cinematic landscape -- this year, for example, there's a special showcase of films from Lagos -- but from whatever country these films hail, the violent song remains the same. You want connective tissue among all races, creeds, colors and tribes? Let the poets take love and hope for the best; the rest of us have no choice but to assume the worst.
THE UNKNOWN GIRL
DIRECTORS: LUC & JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNES
One such rumination comes to us by way of Belgium, from the fantastically talented social-realists, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardennes. Their new film, The Unknown Girl, takes as its protagonist, the dedicated Dr. Jenny Davin (Adele Haenel), who runs a small clinic in a not very good neighborhood in Liege. One night, haggling with her intern, Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), after hours, she refuses to let him answer the door buzzer for a late straggling patient, only to find out to her horror the next day that the woman was actually trying to escape from some form of menace and was murdered in the night. Guilty and remorseful, Dr. Jenny becomes ever more obsessed with tracking down information about the girl, who carried no identification at the time of her death. She doesn't care to solve the crime, she leaves that to the inspectors, but she can't rest until she can at least learn the girl's name, notify her family and give her a decent burial.
The Dardennes work in subtle strokes, their single camera setups providing relentlessly concentrated activity, following their characters about as they interact and collide with one another. When Dr. Jenny makes a connection to the crime with one of her patients, a sullen teen named Bryan (Louka Minnelli), the entire family takes exception, leading to more and more violent encounters. Through it all, with thugs terrifying her, families threatening her, and one angered party who almost strikes her down, Dr. Jenny remains steadfast and steely, never giving in to anger or retribution at their actions, until it's clear that everyone but she is acting out of denial. The film suggests that guilt needs to be addressed directly or will forever leave you emotionally hobbled and miserable.
THE SALESMAN
DIRECTOR: ASGHAR FARHADI
No such absolution is present in The Salesman, at least at first, though its story, too, hinges on the buzz of an intercom. Here, a married pair of thespians living in Tehran -- performing in a nonprofessional production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman -- have their easy camaraderie and carefree life rocked by another kind of assault. Late one night, the wife, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti), thinking her husband is coming up the stairs to their apartment, leaves the door open as she goes to take a shower. The next thing we see, she's at the hospital with a nasty cut on her head, and the terrifying memory of a strange man coming in to the bathroom to grab her.
Enraged, and denied the ability to go to the police by the humiliated Rana, the once-genial husband Emad (Shahab Hosseni) tries to piece together clues left behind in their apartment to identify the scoundrel and force him to apologize for his affront. That the film provides no easy answers or simple motives is a testament to the manner in which Iranian master Asghar Farhadi operates. Never one to take obvious routes, Farhadi's films work in a sort of narrative spiral, starting out with a small pinpoint and turning slowly ever more outward until the full range of his tableau is revealed. His films are mystery stories, less concerned with whodunit than what collection of factors set it in motion. By the time we finally learn what happened to Rana, the scope of it has touched nearly everybody, all while Farhadi somehow magically connects them thematically to Miller's best-known work.
GRADUATION
DIRECTOR: CRISTIAN MUNGIU
Yet another violent act in another part of the world powers Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's Graduation, a meditation on ethical purity, among other things. Dr. Romeo (Adrian Titieni), an amiable, largely honest fellow, is nevertheless having an affair with the much younger Sandra (Malina Manovici), a teacher at the school of his extremely bright daughter, Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus), who is just about to take her final exams. One morning after getting dropped off at school by her father, Eliza is attacked and nearly raped by an assailant on a construction site. Largely unhurt but badly shaken, Eliza still has to take her all-important final exams that same week, which Dr. Romeo hopes above all other things she will do well enough on to earn a scholarship to Cambridge, leaving the failed country of her parents behind. When the assault proves understandably distracting to her testing, Dr. Romeo, in a moment of panic, resorts to graft and favoritism with various higher-up officials in order to ensure her grade will sufficiently improve.
Through it all, his property is repeatedly vandalized -- the film opens with a rock being thrown through the family's living room window -- and his affair becomes fully revealed to his daughter, which causes the simmering tension between his wife and him to boil over. Mungiu, too, is uninterested in easy answers and fully explicable motives. He gives Dr. Romeo a dilemma that cuts very deeply into his soul, which forces us to consider how we would respond under similar circumstances. By the end of the film, it's clear that he won't get away with it, both from the authorities tracking the corruption, and his daughter, who sees all too clearly the moral failing her father took on her behalf, but you're not so sure he made the wrong choice anyway.
FREE FIRE
DIRECTOR: BEN WHEATLEY
For a much-needed change of pace from the social realists, however -- not all on-screen violence needs to carry such hefty ethical weight -- director Ben Wheatley's wildly fun shoot-'em-up Free Fire gives us 90 minutes of pure, bullet-riddled fun. The setup is as basic as the bullets are plentiful: Two groups converge in an old warehouse somewhere in Boston in the late 1970s to consecrate a major weapons buy for the IRA. When one member of the seller's posse recognizes one of the buyers with whom he has a major beef, all sides dive for cover and start peppering each other with gunfire.
What makes the film so much fun, beyond the stylized, often wry gun play, is its sharp characterization -- piloted by a great cast including Cillian Murphy, Armie Hammer, and Oscar-winner Brie Larson -- created by Wheatley and longtime writing partner Amy Jump. The dialogue pops like the bullet casings that scatter on the dirt floor of the warehouse (one highly amusing character, a madcap South African played by Sharlto Copley, is described as "misdiagnosed as a child genius"; "I'm not dead, I'm just regrouping," yells out one would-be corpse), and the film never lets up long enough for you to catch your breath. Imagine a movie where you know few, if any, of the characters will live long enough to walk out of the muck and blood spatter of the warehouse to breathe in the evening air. Violence certainly begets, but at least in this film, you wouldn't want it any other way.
MovieStyle on 09/16/2016