Hot Docs - The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army)

 

Rating: **1/2

I don’t know if director Naeem Mohaiemen is a genius, but he’s blazed a trail for a completely new style of documentary filmmaking: the minimalist footage documentary. You see, The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army) is more the type of documentary you read than watch. Much of the film is text against a black screen transcribing the communications from a hostage crisis 35-years-ago, the rest is a limited amount of archival footage, and clips of a bizarre 6-part British spy show from the 60s.

The subject is the 1977 hijacking of flight JAL 472 by the Japanese Red Army. The drama unfolded over 80 hours, and while many were captivated to the then unprecedented 24-hour media coverage, one boy, Mohaiemen himself, tuned into his TV hoping to watch The Zoo Gang, a TV series about World War II spies reuniting to get revenge for one of their own who was killed.

The politics of this hijacking, if you don’t remember first hand the era, might require you a couple of minutes of internet research or more to get up to speed. That’s one of the problems with the film, not context; who were the Japanese Red Army? Where did they come from? Where did they go? Why is this affair important to broader history? On the other hand, I don’t think this is supposed to be a history lesson, which is fine. There’s a bizarre kind of real time aspect to the film. You’re trying to understand what’s happening and you’re going on very little information, as if watching a current event unfolding on TV, which I liked.

Mohaiemen’s chosen format is compelling, although probably not to everyone’s taste. What I think it does capture well is the kind of absurdist nature of this crisis, various conversations and the limited-English of both the hijackers and hostage negotiators is almost hilarious in places given the seriousness of the situation. I applaud Mohaiemen for stretching the bounds of what a documentary can do and how it does it, but at the same time it kind of stretches one’s patience in places too. Ultimately, you will either go with it or you won’t, and for the most part I went with it.

TIFF Review-The Front Line

Rating: ***1/2

Renato De Maria’s film The Front Line could almost be called “Terrorism: A Love Story.” But such a provocative title would probably miss the point, and the love story is but one factor that makes this film so stimulating. The Front Line, or La Prima Linea as it’s called in its native Italian, is an engaging first person story that has the benefit of being true. It tells a personal story of love and commitment set against one of the most tumultuous times in modern Italian history, and it does so with an impersonal hand that kind of distances the viewer from the true emotion of the film. Still, there are a lot of interesting things boiling about the perimeter.

Based on Sergio Segio’s own book, The Front Line is a semi-fictionalized account of a leftist group that progressed from direct action to civil disobedience to assassination over the space of a ten year period in the 70s and 80s. Segio (Riccardo Scamarcio) and Susanna Ronconi (Giovanna Mezzogiorno) were two of Prima Linea’s most influential leaders, and meeting through the movement they ultimately fell in love. The Film Fest program calls them a “Marxist Bonnie and Clyde” which seems as apt a description as any for these two who were as dedicated to furthering their leftist ideals as they were to each other. After the assassination of well-loved public official, members of Prima Linea find themselves public enemy number one, and Ronconi is captured by the authorities. Much of the film is told in flashback as Segio and other members execute a jailbreak to free Ronconi and several others.

Caught between several plot-points, The Front Line can sometimes seem a little clinical and very matter of fact. Not knowing much about the intricacies of Italian political turmoil in its historical context isn’t much of an impairment and, in fact, the film is rather easy to follow along with amongst all the players both individually and grouped together. One of things I liked was discussion about how as Prima Linea got more hardline, they were losing the support of the very people they said they were fighting for. This is where the more clinical approach to the film by director De Maria seems to make things work for him: the ideas, the history, the politics. The very era itself seems to come back to startling life again as if these events were unfolding right this minute on the streets of Italy.

The performances are where things kind of come off the sprockets. At times, I could believe the love and commitment between Scamarcio and Mezzogiorno, but at other times they come across as zombies in their own lives. Scamarcio especially feels like he’s got a distance between himself and his character, staring blankly into space and talking about the power of his commitment while having a look in his eyes that says, “Dude, I’m so bored right now.” Sometimes he finds it and sometimes he doesn’t, and fortunately the film has so much ground to cover that often Scamarcio’s inattention passes you by and you can get on with the movie. His blank stare confessionals directly into the camera that narrates the movie are more creepy than committed though.

In the end, The Front Line is more of a mixed bag, but I liked more of the mix than I disliked the rest. Even if the personal, relationship stuff doesn’t work, there are more than enough potent and provocative plot-points and ideas to make this film worth seeing. We consider terrorism now to be so cut and dry; that it’s a tool of first resort for people that are just so unrepentantly evil that they’re not even worth acknowledging as prisoners in custody. The Front Line’s focus is the wisdom and warning that the road to hell is paved in good intentions and that people with the right ideals sometimes end up making some really bad choices despite any high-minded desire to do the right thing. That’s a powerful statement, and that’s why The Front Line ultimately works in the end.

Adoration

Rating: ****

Insanely mesmerizing to watch unfurl, Adoration touches on so many pertinent issues in today’s world, it’s a wonder your head doesn’t spin off. Fascinating because of its content and how it’s presented, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan manages to out do himself again. Confusion gives way to clarity rather easy as you figure out the plot as the film moves along, but it’s the thematic material that might make you think in new ways. Terrorism, racism, technology, all offer some compelling subject matter for Egoyan to play with , but while the film is compelling, I’m not sure what message to take away from it, or even if I supposed to take away a message beyond tolerance and understanding.

Devon Bostick plays Simon, a high schooler whose French assignment takes on a life of its own. His teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian), who’s also the Drama teacher, reads aloud in class an article for translation. The article is about a man that plants a bomb in the luggage of his pregnant girlfriend while she’s flying to Israel year’s earlier. The bomb’s intended to bring down the plane and kill all 400 people on board. Simon imagines that the story is about his parents (Noam Jenkins and Rachel Blanchard) who actually died in a car crash and left Simon orphaned years earlier. Sabine encourages Simon to develop the translation into a monologue, and Simon allows it to take on a life of its own by not telling people that this is something he made up.

It’s an interesting bit of social experimentation, and certainly Simon gets some quick reaction. He posts the story online and begins having webcam discussions with first his classmates, and then the near victims of the real almost-tragedy as this thing he created becomes some a lightning rod. Simon, of course, is trying to sort out his own conflicted feelings about his parents and the contention of his recently deceased grandfather (played by Kenneth Welsh) that Simon’s father killed himself and his wife in a car crash out of some kind of spite. But that’s the reason after the fact, we learn. Egoyan, through Simon, is trying to test the visceral response to terror by analyzing the thinking of a terrorist, while the split-screen, video chat room subs for the mob.

Aside from thematic elements, the film is also an exploration of a couple of key relationships in Simon’s life. His interactions with his teacher Sabine are interesting because they form one of those great student-teacher relationships. Of course we learn later that it’s more than that (not how you’re thinking), but the reason why Sabine pushes Simon to do it is left kind of ambiguous. And while her motivations and reactions remain mysterious despite the answers we get, Arsinée Khanjian is still really captivating to watch. The real charm in this film though, surprisingly, is Scott Speedman as Simon’s uncle. Speedman, who often seems more like decoration than an engaged actor, is really good displaying the frustration and desperation of the uncle without playing it in any kind of “big” way.

The director meanwhile shows great craftsmanship and patience in how he creates the story. The narrative sort of wraps around you like pita bread rather than unfolding in a straight line and sometimes it takes a little while for something in one scene to pay off. Careful viewers are rewarded, but some of the big question marks could be perceived as plot holes rather than dangling questions for consideration later on. The truth is it could be either, and that’s okay with me. I was literally captivated and enjoyed the film’s way of leaving things unanswered. One gets the feeling that this is but a mere glimpse of the dysfunction in this family, and by the time the credits roll you hope that things might be better off from here.