SPARE PARTS (Damjan Kozole, 2003)

Absent any analysis of causes for recent refugeeism in Europe, writer-director Damjan Kozole’s Rezervni deli is more unpleasant to watch than it is edifying. This drama about the clandestine transportation of illegal refugees, for 1,000 euros a head, from Croatia, through Slovenia, and across Italy’s border, and the toll this takes on both refugees and transporters, is facile—and in rich though restrained color, irrelevantly lovely to the eye. Somehow a film in which there are multiple deaths, including an entire family that had been stuffed into the trunk of a car, should not seem so aesthetically contrived. From Slovenia, the film won in seven categories at the Slovene Film Festival, including best film, director, cinematographer (Radoslav Jovanov).
     The two main characters man one of the vans. Pot-bellied Ludvik, an alcoholic whose cancer-ridden wife committed suicide, has taken young Rudi under his wing, giving him a beating when the boy’s actions are “unprofessional.” Ludvik, a former speedway racer, asks Rudi only one question before taking him on: “Can you drive?” At film’s end, Rudi, who has taken Ludvik’s place, asks the same sole question of a new boy. By then, the same setting, with competitors racing around the track, has passed fully into metaphor. The process goes on and on, with death the only “out.”
     The title refers to a recurrent fate of the refugees. In Italy they are slaughtered for their organs, which are then sold: “One kidney,” Ludvik tells Rudi, “is worth 15,000 euros.”
     One of the refugees, a Macedonian girl who exchanges sex for medicine for her deathly ill companion, commits suicide. Nastily, Kozole, a former punk rocker, has Rudi wake up just following the reporting of this news on his television.
     The film, exploitive, lurid and self-congratulatory, is another Schindler’s List.

WATCH ON THE RHINE (Herman Shumlin, 1943)

Mostly relying on Lillian Hellman’s expanded stage melodrama and some terrific performances, Watch on the Rhine is a stirring entertainment. Herman Shumlin’s first film—Shumlin had directed the Broadway production—has me crying so hard I can barely breathe whenever I watch it.
     On the train to Washington, D.C., Sara Muller, who has been in Europe for eighteen years, is accompanied by her very ill German husband, Kurt, and their three children. Another passenger asks Kurt what his trade is. His stirring—and honest—response: “I fight against fascism.” Also visiting Sara’s mother, Fanny Farrelly, are Marthe and Marthe’s husband, Teck de Brancovis, a former Rumanian diplomat who, prying into Kurt’s activities and identity, hopes to ingratiate himself with Nazis at the German Embassy. This is April 1940, and one European nation after another has fallen to invading Germans.
     The New York critics named Watch on the Rhine the year’s best film. Repeating his stage role, Paul Lukas won best actor accolades from A.M.P.A.S., the New York critics and the National Board of Review. While I prefer the brilliant actor in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), in which he plays a surgeon and urbane Nazi, and George Cukor’s Little Women (1933), he is wonderful as Kurt Muller. Despite a few naggingly sentimental moments, Bette Davis is superb as Sara, Kurt’s ideal life-partner, who has traded in her childhood wealth to dedicate herself to the cause of humanity. George Coulouris, however, is best of all as Teck, who mirror-images Kurt as a refugee with secrets. Ruthless and reckless beneath a calm, polite exterior, Teck wants only to find a way back to Europe. Only Lucile Watson is a washout; as Fanny, her few authentic notes are drowned in a swamp of dismal theatricality.

GOMORRA (Matteo Garrone, 2008)

The Camorra is an actual criminal mob whose base of operations is Naples, Italy. Matteo Garrone’s sober, unblinking, coolly observant Gomorra is pulsatingly contemporary, riveting, unsentimental and, cumulatively, massively moving. It is based on the 2006 book by 26-year-old journalist Roberto Saviano; since its publication Saviano has needed constant police protection. We learn at film’s end that the Camorra, a money-making colossus, has invested in the rebuilding of New York’s World Trade Center.
     The film juggles five plot-lines, two of which remain unresolved, the others testifying to gangland’s decisive spirit of retribution. In the latter group is a haunting, powerful plot-line revolving around 13-year-old Totò, a grocery store delivery boy whose acceptance into the Camorra leads to disaster: first, one-time playmate Simone’s becoming his “enemy” after Simone joins a rival gang; secondly, after a street killing, his reluctant set-up of Maria, his customer and Simone’s mother, for a response-kill. Yet even here there’s a loose end: Totò’s immediate group has acted thusly without official instruction.
     The Camorra “manages” industrial toxic waste by illegally dumping it. Franco, the gang’s agent, bullies educated Roberto, his increasingly distressed young apprentice. When some of the waste spills on one of the transportation crew, Franco refuses to call an ambulance and the men in turn refuse to work. Franco exits the scene, leaving Roberto in charge; when he returns, he brings with him the new crew: children. Roberto’s conscience churns.
     Whereas Totò turns in to the gang drugs and gun dropped by dealers in a police pursuit, two reckless older teenagers horde a stash of arms and are dealt a death sentence.
     Garrone’s camera moves deliberately, often very briefly. No violence titillates here; it is all dreadful.
     Grand Prix, Cannes; best film, director, script, European Film Awards, David di Donatello Awards.

THE CITADEL (King Vidor, 1938)

Robert Donat gives a brilliant performance—leagues beyond his Oscar-winning one the next year in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Sam Wood, 1939)—as Andrew Manson, an idealistic young doctor who, investigating the linkage between silica inhalation and lung disease, is opposed by miner-patients and mining board members. After his research laboratory is deliberately destroyed, Andrew and wife Christine relocate to London, where the private practice he opens struggles until Andrew falls in with a crowd of mercenary doctors who minister to the self-indulgent rich, who cultivate hypochondria to make themselves the center of attention. On his way up, Andrew leaves more and more of his humanity behind. Whereas after he delivered his first baby, who seemed doomed but under his care survived, he said, aloud to himself alone in the street, “I’m a doctor,” his eventual career poses this question: What is a doctor?
     Intelligently written by Ian Dalrymple, Frank Wead, Elizabeth Hill and Emlyn Williams (who also enacts an important role), The Citadel (best film, New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review) is based on A. J. Cronin’s popular 1937 novel, which in turn was partially based on Cronin’s own experiences as a medical doctor beginning in his twenties. In 1924, Cronin was appointed Britain’s medical inspector of mines, in which capacity he published research such as Manson pursues.
     King Vidor directs—in spots, with bravura skill. Memorable indeed are Andrew’s soul-searching walk at night, interrupted by piercing slivers of flashback, following the death in surgery of a dear friend, and Andrew’s stirring speech before the medical board, both of which contribute to a coda of reintegration following a fissured narrative structure correlative to Andrew’s moral disintegration.
     The heart-walloping close consists of Andrew and Christine—a couple—walking toward us and their future.

THE LAST TRAIN (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1973)

Based on the 1965 novel by Georges Simenon, Pierre Granier-Deferre’s Le train is an exceptionally powerful extramarital love story beginning in May 1940 during the German invasion of France. Attempting with countless others to flee the Germans, radio repairman Julien Maroyeur (Jean-Louis Trintignant, excellent) is in a freight car of “the last train,” where he meets, bonds and eventually makes love with Anna Kupfer, a German Jew, while his nine-month-pregnant wife, somewhat glibly also named Anna, and their young daughter, are in a passenger car. Held for the duration of an extra heartbeat, the subjective shot showing Julien’s first glimpse of Anna Kupfer, who is on the floor of the “cattle car” in the dark, persuasively communicates two things: that Julien will indeed fall in love with this almost painfully beautiful woman; and why he could scarcely do otherwise. Among other things, Anna is intensely mysterious, her long-held silence encapsulating her mysteriousness, which—pardon; I don’t know how else to express this—corrects the mundaneness of Julien’s life thus far, in effect completing the upheaval of this life that the invasion and his flight from near the Belgian border began. In La Rochelle, while his wife is at hospital giving birth to their son, Julien identifies the other Anna as his wife in order to protect her, in answer to the silent plea in her eyes. While he momentarily leaves her to find out about his wife, Anna Kupfer slips away. Three years later, she reappears as a captured Resistance fighter in an office of the French police, an extension by this time of the Gestapo. Will the summoned Julien acknowledge his connection to this woman at the cost of his life?
     Romy Schneider brilliantly plays Anna Kupfer, who is both strong and heartbreaking.