Category: Film Review

Who is the greatest philosophy of the Twentieth Century? 
Before reacting with answers, think about the question. The question implies there are many philosophers from whom to choose, after all ‘greatest’ is a superlative that is the third is a series: great, greater, and greatest, and before that the very good, good, and so on.  Taking the question in that light several names come immediately to mind:  Bertrand Russell for ‘Principia Mathematica’ (1910) and his other technical studies of knowledge, language, and logic;  Jean-Paul Sartre for ‘L’étre et le néant’ (Being and Nothingness’)(1943) and the essays that led up to it; or even — in the German world — Martin Heidegger for ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Being and Time) (1927).  Maybe even Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ (1979).  Remember the honour is the ‘greatest’ and that excludes both the great and the greater, like Michel Foucault, John Rawls, Roberto Unger, Martha Nussbaum, and more.
But what if we re-phrase the question? What if we ask ‘Who was the only philosopher in the Twentieth Century?’  That question requires us to think about what we mean by ‘philosopher.’
Hannah Arendt is my answer. If by ‘philosopher’ we mean someone who makes sense of life, then she is in a class by herself.  Always was, always will be.  She was the only philosopher in the Twentieth Century. This sense of the word ‘philosopher’ is what Aristotle meant by it.
It has taken two generations for the dust to settle on the story that lies at the centre of this film, for her life and works to be appraised in their own light, not against national priorities, political necessity, ethnic identity, ideology, the lust for revenge, blind emotion, crowd mentality, etc.  In this context the film, by letting her words and ideas speak for themselves, is a tour de force.  And more. Here’s a word one does not see often: magisterial. 
With clever staging and segmenting of the story, Arendt’s singular voice is heard just enough to show how penetrating her thought was, and how naively courageous she was in pursuing that thought where it led. Publish and be damned! 
She did publish and she was damned!  Lifelong friends from childhood (and as an Jewish exile émigré she had few of those left to lose), genial neighours, editors, professorial colleagues, personal friends until then, shunned her. The hate mail, obscene phone calls, attacks on her husband, and her ever loyal intern multiplied, threats from Israel’s Mossad, a deathbed denunciation by an uncle, (her only living relative thanks to the Holocaust), feces smeared on the door of her apartment, and so on (the film omits as much of this as it includes of all this, details to be found in the biographies), none of these stopped her. 
Give her the Socrates Medal for putting Truth before all else.  
In the film, her greatest sin is the passing remark (ten pages of 300 in the book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’) that in some cases some leaders of Jewish communities co-operated with the Nazis as the Final Solution was implemented. These leaders calmed their followers, tried to slow the process by working with it, took over the administration of death at its zero point, selected their fellows for transportation on those railroads run by Adolf Eichmann and his ilk. Indeed this very point was made in passing during the Eichmann trial which is why she reported it.
It is this factual observation that lit the atomic bomb that almost destroyed the ‘New Yorker’ magazine where her articles on the Eichmann trial appeared.  To wash this linen in public was the sin that had no atonement, not that she was ever about to atone. It was to blame Jews for their own destruction. It was to betray Israel. It was to blaspheme Judaism. It was ….
Her second sin was to believe her eyes. She saw Eichmann as a nobody, a nothing.  How then to reconcile the equation with on one side the unbelievable evil of the Holocaust and on the other side this insignificant nobody?  The Darkest events of Dark Times were not committed by John Milton’s magnetic Satan of ‘Paradise Lost’ (1667) nor by Johann Goethe’s breath-taking Mephistopheles from ‘Faustus’ (1808).  Instead, Eichmann was just what he appeared to be, everyman, anyman, noman.  Just a man, not the raging beast of Baal.  Evil could work through such a man. Though there is no denying, and she certainly did not deny it, that there were evil men and women in Nazism, but they worked much of their evil through everyman and anyman. A very fine, if harrowing, empirical study is Christopher Browning, ‘Ordinary Men’ (1992). But this too was unacceptable because if a nobody could destroy Jews then Jews were… weak, or should have resisted, or something…
What the film elides, though there is an early reference for the cognoscenti, is that Arendt’s ‘On Totalitarianism’ (1951) argued the unpalatable case that every means, device, and tactic used by the evil dictators Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and their many imitators in Europe, had been developed, tested, applied, refined, implemented, and perfected by the Enlightened Western European colonial powers in Asia, and most of all in Africa, and, in truth, in Australia, too.  Selective murder, denigrating humanity, rape upon rape, displacing populations, mass murder, separating families, slave labor, industrial-scale cruelty, brutality for fun, group punishments, dehumanizing victims to themselves, genocide, all of these are well documented in colonial history long before 1939. Every colonial power made use of these atrocities.  Though she is careful to distinguish between the degrees of evil among the colonial powers, while she is ruthless on the collective guilt of the peoples of those colonial powers who did not (want to) know the evils done in their names in far away places that produced the riches that we still see today in a city like Brussels.
What the Twentieth Century dictators did was to repatriate those practices to Europe. They invented nothing.  But brought to new levels the technologies of destruction perfected in the colonies. (By the way this return from the peripheries is just what Michel Foucault detected in other social institutions at a lower level.)
Even generous reviewers have found it hard to work up much enthusiasm for this film about ideas with virtually no action, though there are enough tensions to produce heart attacks, fist fights, and brain aneurisms all around, and to ruin more than one career.  Apparently this is not enough to hold the attention of even a sympathetic reviewer. Admittedly, the film also features much thinking time when Arendt broods on what she has seen and concluded, and sees how all those other journalists who were there have trumpeted the conclusions they took with them. They react; they do not think. Thinking takes time and this director respects that and expects her audience to have the attention span to cope with it. Amen!  
The film integrates black and white film footage from Eichmann’s trial and it is essential.  Because, at least to this viewer, it confirms everything Arendt said.

Adolf Eichmann
It is unmistakeable. No re-enactment, not even I suspect by the great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, could do it better, and Ganz even briefly made Hitler seem almost human in “Der Untergang‘ (Downfall) (2004).
Barbara Sukowa offers a superb performance.  She projects a laser intelligence that burns through all the irrelevancies thrown in her path.  She dominates the camera when she sits silently in a crowd watching Eichmann testify as she seems to suck out of the air his every word, twitch, tic, hesitation.  It is a remarkable sequence in which she alone seems alive to what is there before all but she alone sees him for what he is – nothing.  It is a scene that is repeated in the press room among the cynical and jaded journalist there seeking sensationalism, and finding it. They react. They are satisfied with the prejudices they came with, but she, silent and still, is not. Though she is silent and still she is more alert, alive, and active than any of them because she is thinking, and they are not. So said Plato of Socrates’s silences.
Margarethe von Trotta is a very experienced director and I found her ‘Das Versprechen’ (The Promise) (1996) which mirrored the Cold War history of Berlin in a love story memorable for its compassion.  She also made ‘Rosa Luxemborg’ (1985) and ‘Katrina Bluhm’ (1975).  Both of these I found heavy-handed.  
But for this film she deserves her own medal for taking it and conceptualizing it in a way that could be filmed, and then selling the project to those that supported it.
 
Hannah Arendt
In the film nothing is made of Arendt’s most important book ‘The Human Condition’ (1955) and most important essay ‘The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man’ (1963).  There is nothing else Iike either.
The official website for the film which is in German but there is an English translation button.
http://www.hannaharendt-derfilm.de

When Alain Resnais died a few weeks ago I stopped to think about his films, well to be exact, the ones I have seen.

Recently when browsing ‘Le Monde’ I saw another tribute to him and that prompted me to be more systematic about my own recollections. I put them in three categories: (1) compelling, (2) entertaining, and (3) undecided.
1. Compellng does not always mean comprehensible.
‘Nuit et Brouillard’ (1955)
A very short film (22m), believe it or not, a lyrical meditation on Nazi death camps from the German ‘Nacht und Nebel’ in Wagner’s Rheingold where it is magic spell, but it became a code for extermination. The many enemies of the Reich began to disappear into the ‘Night and Fog.‘ Understated and cryptic.
‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’ (1961)

Everyone tries to figure our what it all means, and like James Joyce it may mean nothing at all but it is gorgeous to look at it.
‘Muriel’ (1963)

Though not a word is said about the Algerian War (torture, genocide, coup d’état, betrayal, treason, lying, cover-ups, assassination, a putsch) and yet its shadow falls across everything. Long silences. Social dysfunction. Unspoken and unspeakable guilt and shame.
‘Providence’ (1977)

John Gielgud writes a novel which Dirk Bogarde Ellen Burstyn, and David Warner are living, or are they? An ode to the creative process of the novelist.
2. Entertaining is not always funny.
‘Le guerre est finie’ (1966)

The most acessible and explicit of his films, an absurdly romantic vision of a communist cell plotting against the Franco government, but Yves Montand burns with conviction.
‘Pas sur le bouche’ (2003)

A musical comedy is a real change of pace for the master at 81 years of age; it is fast and furious. ‘Not on the lips’ is the title.
3. Undecided.
‘Hiroshima mon amour’ (1959)

War is bad, atomic war is worse, yes, I got that much but as for the rest, it is too deep for me.
He made a lot more films, I see from the Wikipedia filmography.

Missed this film during its short theatrical release in Sydney, but noticed it in Civic Video après le gym the other day. There was only one copy on the shelf.

It is a very clever and daring film. Silent and in black-and-white, so that means 95% of those under 40 will ignore it. On the other hand, because it is silent the language barrier is lower and the title cards are far fewer and easier to read than subtitles.
The film transplants ‘Snow White’ to Seville 1925 in the milieu of bullfighting and bullfighters. The usual suspects are present: the evil step-mother, the helpless father, the seven dwarfs who are aspiring bullfighters. It all hangs together though Snow White as a bullfighter takes some getting used to.
By the way, the bullfighting sequences make it very Spanish but are filmed very carefully for an international audience, i.e., not cruel or bloody.
In addition to the step-mother, Snow White also has to deal with a corrupt and incompetent press and a manipulative and scheming promoter. It is a lot for a fairy tale to deal with, but she does well, despite the downbeat end.
The Brothers Grimm would approve.
Technical note, the black-and-white in this is not monochrome. Believe it or not monochrome film stock is far more expensive than colour these days. The technical notes on the official web site it was shot in colour and then it was developed as black-and-white, I think it says that. Some will notice this film lacks the subtly of monochrome which offers a world of greys. Whereas in this film, and perhaps it fits the story, everything is either black or it is white.

We had to see it, and see it we did. It is King Lear in worn jeans with grease under the fingernails.
For plot details see the Internet Movie Database entry at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821549/
Or the official web site: http://www.nebraskamovie.co.uk

What I liked about it included, the wonderful cinematography that made the Sandhills seem almost alive in the background of the long drive.
But even better was the slow and steady camera survey of the ruined and wrecked Woody’s face in confusion, despair, determination, loss, repose, fatigue, purpose. Bruce Dern is center stage and mostly silent while the camera follows the emotions across his face.

Viewers may remember Bruce from ‘Coming Home” (1978) or ‘Silent Running (1972). If not, they should!
Having yielded reluctantly his kingdom to age, like Lear, Woody tries to reclaim it a little of it in that lottery scam.
One of his two sons, having nothing better to do makes the futile trip with him. During the drive this son, David, learns many things, some about himself and some about his irascible, volatile, not very loving or lovable father. And he meets many very nice people and a couple not so nice. Such is life.
David sees in Woody lost opportunities, mistakes, quiet achievements that no one knows about but his wife Kate, who wants to stomp Woody more often than not but destroys those others who might criticize or take advantage of him. All in all, it gives David a lot to think about in his own life, about 40, going grey, bunking alone in a motel room.
The other son, Ross, seems completely self-centred, and yet when he is needed, he is there. Capped with a marvelous scene when the two brothers momentarily return to their youth, communicating preternaturally, and off they go to get that damned air compressor. They learn next time not to take quite so literally what is said by someone diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Well, maybe not diagnosed, for when a well-meaning stranger asks David if Woody has Alzheimer’s he replies in the payoff line of the movie: ‘No, he just believes what people say to him.’ It is such a gem I thought, in my perfect hindsight it should have come later to cap it off.
The most powerful scene? Several come to mind, but none can beat Kate, Woody’s long suffering wife, when she bellows down the ravenous relatives who think Woody has indeed won the lottery. Jane Squibb as Kate blows their hair off, and the eyes of her two adult sons pop when she does.
I could not find an image of this scene, but here she is pensive.

But even more moving is the short drive down the street with Woody at the wheel of a new truck with an air compressor in the back. Redemption without a word.
Some critics, seeking always to be critical, which is usually translated as different if not perverse, suppose the director, writer, producer Alexander Payne is mocking the people who inhabit this story. I heard that a lot regarding his earlier movie ‘About Schmidt’ (2002) and let it go through to the keeper since the very assertion betrays an incomprehension so deep no remedy applies. It is a conclusion only a critic could draw.
This is not the country of Bill ‘The-Cheaper-the-Shot-the-Better’ Bryson.
Payne shows us a world, complete unto itself. It is light and dark, and within its confines, it has good and evil, too, but they shade into and out of each other. It is life.
I did not know Hollywood still made movies about real people, living real lives. It is a pleasure to see it is. Made by adults for adults.
I have no doubt that higher being Roger Ebert would put all thumbs up for this one.

‘Casablanca’ has slipped a rung in the list of the greatest movies ever made.  ‘Backyard Ashes!’ Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’ has got nothing on it.  That chess game is dead boring by comparison. The drama! The pathos! The barbecue! The googley! It has everything!  And it has more!  
Text
‘Citizen Kane,’ move over.  This is an instant classic.  ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ is so last century. Why bother? [Confession: I thought that at the time.] But before cinema history is revised let’s go back to the beginning.
Blue ticket in hand I set out from the Ack-comedy on the 370 bus which wound about to Coogee Bay Road where I dismounted and walked around the corner to the Randwick Ritz, an Art Deco picture palace.  Leaving the wind and the rain behind I flashed the receipt on my iPhone and entered.  The password was ‘Cinema 2, on the right.’
The Best and Brightest showcase, unanswered emails, summer projects, the Machiavelli exhibit, the British International Studies Association conference paper, the remaining 400 pages of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses,’ the Prague utopian presentation PowerPoint, mysteries of the slate roof, all of these fell behind in a thrice. The lights went off and the magic started.  
After some initial stereotypes to set up the people, the place, and the tensions, time flew by all too quickly.  There was so much snorting and guffawing I am sure I missed some imperishable dialogue. A fellow nearby slid off his chair laughing.  At the end several patrons seemed unable to move, paralytic with amusement.  
Shades of Big Merv, the key in the wicket, Dennis the Mo, Richie, body line, to say nothing of the specter of BRADMAN which hangs over it all with Wilma and Mack.  Best for last, that ball from Seven-Eleven.  
Oh, and the cat!  
If only Roger Ebert could see this.  He’d love it for what it is: Warm, witty, wise, and wonderful. Just like Wagga Wagga.
I do feel sorry for the professional critics who have to find fault with it, e.g. ‘rough around the edges,’ ‘a cast that combines professionals with some amateurs inevitably…‘ Here’s a perfect example: ‘Wearing its heart and hopes on its sleeve may help patch over the repetition and derivation that monopolises the movie; however, the passion of the production can’t conceal the standard and less-so elements,’ says one reviewer on ArtsHub giving it a measly two stars from five. But wait, ‘repetition and derivation that monopolises the movie,’ what does that mean? How can ‘derivation’ ‘monopolise’ anything. Is this Monash English? Only a self-described film critic can answer that. This Einstein also finds the references to cricket in a movie about cricket to be annoying. Go figure. I know what Spock would say…. [In this case, Spock is one of the cricket players.]
Such reviews are as infantile and self-obsessed as 90% of posts on Trip Advisor. This film is a GEM.

A character study set in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) of 1980.  Understated, muted, ambiguous, spare, unadorned, and demanding. Recommended for adults.

Dr. Barbara Wolfe applies for an exit visa to leave the Workers’ Paradise that is the German Democratic Republic. Verboten! She is transferred from the prestigious East Berlin university clinic to an under-equipped small hospital on the Baltic Coast. Her visa request is denied.  We piece this together from cryptic remarks and visuals. There is no exposition. One is left to infer the meaning of what one sees. Nor is there music. Instead there are winds in the trees and the distant sea and the creak of floorboards.
Rejection and transfer confirm her desire to leave.

Meanwhile, at the provincial hospital she sees the next generation being ground down by the regime. Dr Wolfe befriends a young girl who has repeatedly escaped from a nearby Labor Camp.  Quick to apply the regime-approved label, the physicians suppose she is anti-social, seeking only to avoid work. Dr Wolfe finds that she has meningitis and sets about treating her.  She also observes the consequences of a young boy’s attempted suicide.  His attempt was born from a love affair but it becomes a crime against the state and when he recovers he, too, will go to another labor camp. Wolfe says these ‘Arbeitlagers’ are in fact ‘Sozialistische exterminaiton Lagern.’ I am sure readers can work that out.

Everything is the business of the STATE in this world.

Throughout Dr Wolfe is harassed by the police, and I mean harassed! Throughout she distrusts her new colleagues and they reciprocate.  It is a society where everyone reports on everyone else, perhaps like North Korea today.

The paramount importance of the East German state justified its totalitarianism but totalitarians will always find a paramount cause to justify telling everyone else how to live be they self-righteous Greens or God-bothering Christians. One totalitarian is pretty much like another.
In time Barbara Wolfe comes to terms with her Sisyphean existence and concentrates on her work.

There is a remarkable scene when the Stasi officer comforts his wife that shows a humanity I have never before seen credited to agents of the DDR on screen since 1989. I thought that more striking than the self-abnegation at the end, surprising as that was.  Wikipedia has it that as many as 4,000 East Germans died in the Baltic Sea trying to get to Denmark.

To find out more about life in the DDR I recommend Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (Random House, 1997). Many who have commented on this film on the Internet Movie Data Base know nothing of the DDR, it would seem.

In 1980 pin-headed intellectuals in the West routinely denounced the evils of liberal-democracy, while enjoying its fruits, and defended regimes even worse than the DDR. I have yet to hear a mea culpa from these sycophants.
By the way, the past is still with us. The Wikipedia entries on the DDR are contested. Its apologists insert and insist on its merits, denying the facts of their own lives at times, it seems, such is the power of a dream, albeit totalitarian. Perhaps the most profound judgement on the DDR lies in this fact: from 1947 to 1989 its population shrank from 19 million to 16 million. As the young girl says, in effect, in Barbara this is no place to be born.
A small quibble: Nina Hoss’s eye shadow, if I have the term right, was distracting and out of place.  I cannot imagine the exiled women in the DDR has the means, the time, the motivation to apply blue eye shadow to get that Cleopatra look.

Times are tough in her one-woman restaurant and when the offer comes to cook for a senior official in Paris for a couple of years at an incredible salary, Hortense takes the bait. I particularly liked the stunned silence when she is told that Joël Robuchon recommended her. (It is like being recommended by Zeus, a higher being.) Soon enough she realizes she is cooking for the President of France (loosely based on François Mitterand) in the Élysée Palace at 55 rue de Saint Honoré.
Recommended for adults.

There are some insights into the workings of the Building and its many thousands of employees, with some amusing, perhaps alarming scenes for taxpayers, examples of the waste caused by a ten minute delay in a departure for the airport. There is the inevitable tension between different departments within the household.

Hortense’s mission is to cook for the President in a simple way to give him a contrast to the formal, state dinners with their elaborate sauces, etc. Yet she has no way of knowing what the President likes, since she has no access to him, so she examines his plate when it is brought back from the table and infers from that.
The men in the main kitchen, they are all men, resent the existence of this small private kitchen in the residential wing do all they can to undermine it. All too believable. They would do this in any case but that the private cook is an unknown women triples their efforts.
She struggles, not always with success, to limit cost, achieve the highest quality, and stay within the dietary regime of the dying President. Meanwhile, the boys in the main kitchen carp, grudge, cheat, backbite, undermine…
It is great fun, plenty of food to drool over, and I also liked her brief excursion to the Antarctica research station to cook for the crew. There she talked to the diners, learned what they liked, enlisted their help in securing items, and enjoyed it a lot more than than the starched, constrained, combative, zero-tolerance, macho environment at Numero 55. Yes, strange though it may seem the Palace was presented as much more macho than the research station on the edge of the world, which by contrast seemed much more like a family, a large and noisy one to be sure.
While the ‘Tastes of the Palace’ makes perfectly good sense, for reasons unknown the distributor of this film have called it ‘Haute Cuisine’ in English. It is a title at odds with the major theme about food, namely that simple food is best when made from the best available produce. No doubt an advertising agency thought Haute Cuisine would appeal to some regardless of the intellectual coherence of the film.

Upon the recommendation of Jerry, guide and driver in West Arnhemland, we watched on DVD the four-part ABC documentary ‘First Footprints.‘ * * * * Highly recommended.
It is an engrossing examination of aboriginal life on Greater and Lesser Australia since time immemorial. Well, to be more specific, the 60,000 years before 1788.
It is part travelogue and part archeology with some ethnography, too, all with a light touch that lets the evidence speak for itself.
What the evidence shows is how aboriginals coped with the changing climate and the coming of the first boat people from England. They dealt with rising sea levels, epic droughts, and a changing fauna. Resilience is the word that applies.
It explores the development and transfer of technology within and among the peoples of Australia through time. A technological breakthrough in one part of Australia would be communicated to another part, three thousand kilometers away in a very few years, evidence of a continuous trade across tribal boundaries. If Joe figured out how to chip a stone tool in Sydney harbor, that knowledge would be in evidence in Geraldton within a generation.
There was so much that new and surprising to me that I cannot recount it here. We will have to watch them all again one day the better to take it in.
There is evidence of fish farming and settled agriculture in Greater Australia before the rising waters separated New Guinea and the Torres Islands. How did these primitive people do it before those advanced Europeans arrived to save their souls with gun powder and whiskey? I mimic the dreaded Erich van Däniken. The answer, Erich, is that they figured it out.
I though EvD several times on our recent tours through West Arnhemland and Kakadu because of the elongated human figures I saw in some rock art.

I could hear the egregious Swiss voice saying, ‘What else could they be but aliens!’ The answer Erich is artistic license. Check with Salvador Dali about watches!
‘First Footprints’ is also very informative about rock art, though it is never enough to satisfy me. I wanted more detail about the cosmology and less ‘Isn’t it great!’ expostulations from our guides. While I am carping, I would also have liked more about the social organization that underlay the art, the fish farming, the trade, and so on. Though perhaps we just don’t know, though surely everyone at the ABC knows how to speculate with pompous authority, or is that skill confined only to the News department.
The URL is http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firstfootprints/

An understated tale of redemption in face of the absurdity of life. Wry humour, pathos, and friendship across barriers are the motifs. Now that Roger Ebert is no longer there, I try to view movies as he would. He would like this I am sure.

Ricardo Darín is, as always, impeccable as the wary and weary Ricardo. He is subdued, defeated, grumpy, sullen, grey, grizzled, ragged, prissy…. He counts the nails in a box, in every box, delivered to his hardware store. The count is short, as frequently it is. On the telephone he complains in a tirade that seems an often repeated performance well out of proportion to the offense. When the supplier tries to make amends with some free extras in the next delivery, these he refuses and sets about counting the nails in this delivery. Take that! What is at stake is not the nails but the principle! But what principle?
When not counting nails, at the end of the day Roberto compiles newspaper cuttings into albums that demonstrate the absurdity of life. He subscribes to a lot of newspapers to find these stories. Some of the stories are hilarious, as long as it is not you. In each case Roberto pictures himself in the victim’s role. Get it? In time even the absurd opening scene is explained. (During the credits this explanation is vindicated, so keep watching.)
Maria throws herself at him but he cannot let anyone touch his emotions because, as the evidence in the albums shows, it will turn out badly, everything turns out badly, even having a shave in a barber’s chair. Then the Chinese, Jun, pops up and somehow gets inside the shell, and stays. In time Roberto learns he is not alone in his misery. In time he learns that life goes on and there is no escaping from it. He learns this from Jun’s persistence in the face of even greater adversity.
If you have no emotions then no one can hurt you, this seems to be Roberto’s approach to life. But Jun has even less than he has, so Roberto helps him, reluctantly, then for a moment the tables are turned and Jun comes to his rescue. Now Roberto has to stay the course. And there is Chinese take-away.
Some of the comic scenes are overdone like the one at the Chinese Consulate but who cares. The film oscillates from realism to parody but it does not go to either extreme.
With any and everything from Argentina I look for the Dirty War. This one refers to the Falklands War. And once again here the police are malevolent, a staple of Argentine films, and perhaps a reminder of the Dirty War. Also the newspaper that has the picture that starts the album is Italian, not Argentine because, I assume, of censorship in Argentina.
Civic Video in Newtown has one copy.

Recommended for adults.
A stranger enters a small, close-knit, inward-looking, isolated community. As the locals react to him the papers over the cracks give way and old animosities flare, pent up desires surface, suppressed hopes roil, unspoken truces are broken, irritations long ignored are scratched. The ructions spring from ambition, from dominance, from emotions, from lust, from insecurity, it matters not the origin once they are loosened.

It is a common trope in westerns. Examples include ‘Shane,’ ‘Red Harvest,’ ‘The Quiet Man,’ ‘Bad Day at Black Rock,’ ‘Bus Riley is Back,’ ‘The Wild One’, ‘Suddenly Last Summer,’ and many more, including ‘As It is in Heaven’ (2004), this delightful film from Sweden. There is much singing and dancing, but also wife-beating, shotguns, fistfights, car smashing, and a lot more.
The world renown musician Daniel has a heart attack and leaves the international music grind, buying an abandoned schoolhouse in his home town, which he left at age seven. He has long since adopted a stage name as his own, so to the locals he is a stranger, a famous stranger to be sure.
Little by little he is drawn into the local church choir where he returns to the fundamentals of music like breathing, projecting, relaxation, and so on. The choir is the reactor that leaks emotional radiation. Those who hold apart from the choir suspect demonic doings there, and a mole confirms that. Among those who participate there are old rivalries, conflicts, and trouble at home from spending so much time practicing.
Daniel has no wish to become involved in any of this but it is inescapable in such a small community. The characters are well rounded though the two villains are the least developed, the jealous and envious parson and the wife-beating truck driver. The changing Nordic seasons contribute to the story. Along the way love is explained.
Despite frictions and cross purposes the choir hangs together, shielding the wife from the thuggo, accepting the retarded Toré, matching up an elderly couple, and recruiting more young people. These successes infuriate the parson…. It is Gabriella whose courage inspires the others to persevere when the centripetal forces threaten.
It has a marvellous end that draws together the larger theme explaining why a great musician found it so satisfying to work with this village choir from the remote north of Sweden. Bicycle riding is a metaphor for facing fear for Daniel and despite his worldly successes he, too, has fears.
I could not find a review by the Dean, Roger Ebert. If he missed it that is too bad because he would have liked it.