Don't Married People Tell Each Other Everything?

Meh, another meh. Though it was my second Bruno Ganz film in a day, which is always exciting. I don't think I'd ever seen him in anything other than Der Untergang until I got around to watching Gillian Armstrong's 1992 Australian film The Last Days Of Chez Nous.


Vicki (Kerry Fox) returns from travelling to stay with her sister Beth (Lisa Harrow), her French husband JP (Ganz) and their daughter Annie (Miranda Otto.) They're all happy being back together again, though Vicki's 'free spirit' type attitude towards life starts to grate, though not on JP who finds himself falling for her. While Beth and her father (Bill Hunter) are out on a road trip so that Beth can confront him about why they never get along, Vicki and JP start to play, mirrored by Annie's first romantic blossomings with a lodger staying with the family.


It's very much a naturalistic film, doing away with melodrama and major dramatic plot points, climaxes or confrontations in favour of just showing it how it is. Maybe it's something to do with me and naturalism, then, after The Child. Maybe I just don't really like it in its natural form. Because I didn't find anything particularly interesting about Chez Nous. It just kind of muddled along and didn't seem to do a great deal. I didn't feel a great deal for the characters, with the possible exception of Beth, whom Harrow did a great job of adding nuance and texture to, and by the end I thought Vicki was pretty selfish. JP really gets away easily in the eyes of the viewer, playing the European card making you think it's not totally his fault, it's a matter of breeding, or some such tripe.


Helen Garner's script seemed a little bland, and then a little over the top in parts too, not fitting in with what she had already set down. The performances were actually fairly good, despite the fact that they didn't make me feel much. Fox went through fine, but it was Otto, Ganz and Harrow who sang for me. Hunter was Hunter - he always is, let's be honest. Geoffrey Simpson (who has done some terrific work - let's not talk about Glitter) lenses fine, keeping it real and natural like it's all meant to be. It's just a bit boring.


All in all, it felt like a bit of a nothing film again. Perhaps there's a feminist reading or something that I'm missing. But as it stands, it's 2 stars. Sorry Gillian.


(I also can't find a decent still of it. So it's not getting one.)

You Must Be On Stage When The Curtain Falls.

I truly and honestly believe that Bruno Ganz's portrayal of Hitler in the 2004 German film Der Untergang is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen on screen. I also think that a lot of that comes from his (and director Oliver Hirshbiegel's) courage in showing Hitler not as a maniacal monster, inhuman and something akin to the devil, but rather as a real person. They humanised Hitler, but without letting you feel sympathetic towards what he did. Rather, you leave the film recognising that, yes, he and those around him were truly awful people who committed unspeakable atrocities and who should burn in the darkest recesses of hell forever, but they were just people who inspired such fervent following amongst their people through a steadfast and passionate belief in what they were doing. That their beliefs were disgusting is irrelevant here - they were willing to die for what they stood for, and that allows comparisons to be drawn to any story where a protagonist might follow his heart and beliefs against the grain of society.

Please do realise that I am in no way trying to condone everything that Nazi Germany is responsible for. But I do think that demonising the perpetrators to a point where they lose any semblance of actually being 'ordinary' people is counterproductive to any attempts to sway people from similar beliefs. In the same way that extraordinary actions can see mere mortals lifted to the level of demi-god or near-deity, serious and prolonged damning can achieve the same thing in reverse. Rather than lifting them to the status of saints you are dropping them the world of Satan's right hand men, but you are still lifting them onto a pedestal of sorts from where it becomes feasible to worship them in much the same way if you are of the crazed persuasion that lends itself in that direction.


Der Untergang (Downfall) is the story of the last days of Hitler in his bunker in Berlin as the Allied and Soviet forces decimate his own armies and get closer and closer to bringing about the inevitable collapse of the Third Reich. Hitler and his cohorts Goebbels, Himmler et al, with families, troops, employees and cohorts, are locked in their underground home as bombs fall outside and their world comes crumbling down around them. But they hold strong to their beliefs, despite the looming deaths of almost all remaining soldiers and civilians - Hitler's stance is that they are better off dead than living in a world where he is not ruler. They occupants try to hold strong to the life they were living, keeping up appearances and obeying the Führer, even as his orders become more and more ridiculous and his grasp on the calamity fast arriving seems slippery. He is ordering battalions that do not exist or exist only in very reduced form to advance or encircle or march on a front that they can never reach. His advisers and generals live in fear of him, knowing that it is suicide for them all but unable to convince him calmly otherwise, therefore getting on with his lunatic orders for fear that they will be accused of treason and summarily executed.


As the day of defeat becomes apparent, many of the inhabitants seek refuge in suicide, with some going so far as to see that their children are also removed from the equation - something that may almost be more humane than the memory that their parents were named Goebbels and they sang for the biggest mass murderer in memory. Grueling days and trying nights end in history happening exactly as we remember (unlike the revisionist retelling from Tarantino with Inglourious Basterds), with the burning bodies of the leaders of the regime and a surrender resulting in a forty-odd year of Berlin division.

Ganz is truly phenomenal. He doesn't let up, not for a second. His afflictions and weaknesses are there on show even as he parades his power and screams for more. His supports complement him, though nothing can ever match the furious force of the marauding Hitler.


Hirschbiegel somehow manages to make the film itself feel calm as everything happens within it, limiting any serious flourishes to allow the atrocious behaviour of the Nazis and the glory of the performance to cut right through the coldly beautiful cinematography of Rainer Klausmann. Der Untergang ends as a terrifying document of terrible ideas executed so well for so long before thankfully falling in a sad and deadly heap. It is a tremendously powerful film, one that is not easily forgotten.


I remember seeing it in cinemas with my mother. She didn't really like it, though she could appreciate the technical elements. While she was not alive in WWII, both of her parents served in some capacity within it - her mother remaining in Australia and I believe working in telegraphs as the Japanese threat on Sydney became very apparent, while her father served in Africa, Asia and (I think...) a little in Europe. She said it all felt a bit close, and that the way the story was told (ie with Hitler as a person rather than a monster) made it very hard for her to watch. And I can understand that, for those close, it would be a very difficult film. But for those of us that weren't close, it is an important film, precisely to remind us that he was a person, because with all that is now written about the man and the regime, he is becoming more like folklore and myth and less like the person who once lived next door. 


5 stars.

Starving.

How lucky were we to get two incredible films by acclaimed artists in one year? Pretty damn lucky. Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon was a brilliant third film from Julian Schnabel, which I loved, but Steve McQueen's Hunger probably edges it out for me as my favourite of the two, one of my favourite films of the last decade, and rewatching it the other day confirmed it for me.

The film is about the IRA hunger strikes of the early 1980s amongst prisoners of The Maze, the notorious Northern Irish prison. Hunger starts with a new prisoner entering The Maze during a protest in which the prisoners refused to wear prison clothing and refused to wash. Beaten, tortured, searched, abused regularly, the prisoners, protesting for political prisoner status, put themselves through further hell, smearing their walls in their own shit, collecting urine and pouring it into the corridors, pouring the food they are given into corners of their cells where they grow maggot-infested and putrefy. Hardly a word is spoken as McQueen allows us to see the steadfast determination mixed with the desperation of this paramilitary subset so full of belief in themselves they will willingly create a world so despicable as to be next door to hell.


Into this prison comes Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), a leader among them, solidifying their resistance with his sanctioned hunger strike. Recognising that their current policies are not winning them any favours, he leads the men on this exercise of starvation, seeing the flaws in previous hunger strikes and working out a way to allow it succeed this time. Where before all prisoners had gone on strike simultaneously, thereby meaning a single person failing destroys the entire resolve, Sands determines that they will instead go on strike one by way, spaced apart. Therefore, one man's lack of resolve is bolstered by the support of those around him, still waiting for their turn to strike. One chink won't undermine the whole plan. Instead, others will be there to patch up the chink, to sew it up and push it forward. Yes, as pointed out by Sands' priest Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), it is effectively suicide. In order to try and make progress with the English captors, Sands and his cohorts are willing to die, to deprive themselves of food to try and show their seriousness, convinced that their show of conviction will convince those with the power, and those behind the ones with power, that is, the people, that they are so serious about their perceived status that they are willing to die for it. Not only are they willing to die for it, they're willing to commit what, as Catholics, is a cardinal sin.

Hunger is a heavy film. It is very, very heavy. It is not easy to watch these prisoners put themselves through the hell that they do. It is not easy watching them thrown naked from their cells, beaten by riot police, searched and probed by police officers. It is not easy watching Sands starve himself and slowly die (this isn't a spoiler, as I assume the story is well enough known...), watching his parents mourn at his bedside at the same time as believing in his motivation, watching his hunger-induced hallucinations as his body wastes away to nothing. But it is, somehow, beautiful. Gaspingly beautiful. In amongst the faeces and the blood and dirt and the overwhelming lack of real hope on a day by day basis, McQueen gives us momentary fragments of light and happiness, simple as they may be. While maggots crawl on the hands of his cellmate, a prisoner jerks off to a smuggled in picture of a girl. Prisoners and their families and friends smuggle in cigarettes and even a radio to allow them a glimpse of the outside world. People love and are loved and believe in their cause so strongly as to deprive themselves of everything. And as desperate as that seems, it is beautiful.


Fassbender is amazing in what was his stunning breakout role. One of the most talked about scenes is the sixteen and a half minute shot of him and Cunningham talking in a visiting room, and it is worth talking about. The two sit at a table, across from each other, and McQueen has such faith, and their performances have such strength, that when the shot ends you feel like you have been holding your breath the entire time. And then he follows on shortly after with an epic close up on Fassbender's face again, a long monologue, a powerful and bold statement of conviction. But it is as much the intimate closeups on tiny little things, on the minutiae that is probably the only focus and distraction for our protagonists that provide the humanity of the picture, the beauty. The simplicity. The intimacy. It is this as much as the drama that binds us, the audience, to these characters.

McQueen does venture into enemy territory, as it were, with a subplot concerning a prison guard Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), checking under his car for bombs, trying to maintain a normal life when his is so often under direct threat from supporters of those he is doing such cruelty to. In some ways this could be seen as similar to the treatment of Hitler in Oliver Hirshbiegel's Der Untergang, attempting to humanise him in order that you understand that this is real, this is not some two headed monster from a fairy tale but could quite easily have been your neighbour growing up. But it's also about showing the duality and the vicious senselessness of this war that wasn't a war in the sense that Hitler vs The World was a war. This is ideology, this is religion, this is so much more than politics and ego. And in a war like that there are no winners, only losers. On both sides there is so much death, so much destruction, and do Sands' troops get their demands? Not in so many words. Like all, they settle to stop the dying. It's not a win, but it's something.


5 stars and my infinite recommendations.