WHITE MATERIAL (Claire Denis, 2009)

Somewhere in Africa that was formerly, or is currently, colonized by the French, war rages. Both the government and the rebels have ordered Maria to vacate ex-husband André’s coffee plantation, which she has been running with perseverence and an iron grip. French soldiers in an overhead helicopter have beseeched her to evacuate the country immediately. Maria herself makes a futile attempt to convince her workers to return to work as they abandon the plantation on the open road. Interested in their own safety, these native Africans are determined to leave. Maria claims she will leave within a week. But she is, plainly, home, entrenched, as it were, in a vast graveyard. Although certain shots—for instance, outdoor long-shots with her back to the camera—make her seem childlike, little, perhaps nothing, lies before her. Like her marriage, her life, dust swept up by tumultuous history, is in the past.
     From France and Cameroon, White Material is a calm, contemplative film; thoroughly absorbing, it delivers a number of bloody shocks along the way. Isabelle Huppert’s fine performance as Maria Vial anchors it; but its brilliance is principally generated by Claire Denis’s elliptical, enigmatic filmmaking.
     Why does Maria, near the end of the film, out of the blue bludgeon to death Henri, her half-naked ex-father-in-law? Has the sight of her teenaged son Manuel’s charred corpse driven her mad? Is she fixing Henri in place so that he, already sick, dies in the one place, like her, where he wanted to live? Is she therefore striking out at him to certify her own end? Do all these explanations apply?
     Africa’s betrayal of its independence is matched by the lingering affliction of prior colonialism. The title refers to a lighter. The film is full of destruction, including by fire.

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THE KING’S SPEECH (Tom Hooper, 2010)

Since childhood, Albert—“Bertie”—has stammered and stuttered. Engaged by his wife, Elizabeth, Australian-born therapist Lionel Logue endeavors to correct this, over time, in idiosyncratic sessions with the royal client, who is second in line of succession. In 1936, his father dies; when his brother abdicates to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson, Bertie becomes Britain’s King George VI. The title of The King’s Speech refers generally to the protagonist’s impeded speech and, specifically, to his speech—the 1939 radio address—informing his nation they are at war with Hitler’s Germany.
     Early on suggesting Shaw’s Pygmalion and, later, at least the atmospherics of Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), with also an indefinable echo of Anastasia (Anatole Litvak, 1956), The King’s Speech was directed without distinction by television’s Tom Hooper, who nevertheless won an Oscar—as indeed did the film itself, despite its being old-fashioned, stilted, uninteresting. Paradoxically, the whole thing is garishly underlit; a musty dimness challenges the viewer’s sight both indoors and out-. (The color cinematographer is Danny Cohen.) The original screenplay is by David Seidler, himself a boyhood stutterer. Seidler also won an Oscar, and other prizes, for his minimal effort.
     But nobody else won as many prizes, again including an Oscar, than the film’s star, Colin Firth. The arrogant, frustrated, cruelly quick-tempered character that Firth plays requires great acting to show, as Firth does not, how this could co-exist with the appreciative spouse and adoring father that the role also reveals. (A little daughter is the future Elizabeth II.) Firth’s blatant performance is a hodge-podge, not a delicately gauged, fully integrated thing. However, Geoffrey Rush, not normally among my favorites, is splendid as Lionel Logue.
     Goodness knows why this film trashes Wallis Simpson. Let’s hope it isn’t because she is an American.

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HEREAFTER (Clint Eastwood, 2010)

Clint Eastwood is a cold, distant, crabby man who, as director, makes cold, distant, crabby films. One scarcely associates charm with Eastwood. However, the final five minutes or so of his Hereafter are indeed charming, full of the quiet, soulful spark of budding romance. For the most part, the film is tedious, morose, repressed; but those five minutes redeem the whole, creating a tender, hopeful final impression. This is Eastwood’s most humane and appealing film.
     Peter Morgan, the Brit who wrote The Queen (2006) and Frost/Nixon (2008), has concocted a Kieślowskian script involving three persons who have had a brush with death; in due course, these characters stray beyond the boundaries of their individual rotating episodes and cross paths. Marie Lelay, a Parisian television journalist, nearly dies in Thailand as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In San Francisco, George Lonnegan (Matt Damon, wonderful), a genuine one-time professional psychic, can communicate with the dead; he considers this a “curse,” but now that George has lost his factory job his brother wants him to resume giving readings, ostensibly to help others, but really to make them both rich. In London is another pair of brothers, 12-year-old twins Jason and Marcus; when pedestrian Jason is fatally caught in traffic, Marcus is left on his own, without his dearest friend and guide through life. All three experience contact with the afterlife. Meanwhile, Morgan has publicly stated he doesn’t believe in the “hereafter.”
     Eastwood has scored the film in a sad, plaintive, minimalist style. He and Tom Stern, his cinematographer, have artily and laboriously devised a frustrating number of underlit shots. Perhaps they feel that light kicks in on the “other side.” Cupided by Marcus, the closing romantic encounter between Marie and George, outdoors, is calmly, beautifully lit.

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THE UNDYING MONSTER (John Brahm, 1942)

The financial success of Universal’s The Wolf Man the previous year prompted 20th Century-Fox to put out its own werewolf movie. Alas, German-born John Brahm’s The Undying Monster, from a novel by Jessie Douglas Kerruish, is among the worst films ever made: a mere hour that seems like 2¼ hours in the watching. There must be a Grunes family curse that I should ever have been subjected to such a thing.
     Actually, the Hammonds are the family one or another of whose members, through the years, has been clawed to death by a nasty werewolf—although Helga Hammond (Heather Angel, giving the one good performance) pooh-poohs such nonsense. Scotland Yard investigates assaults by the werewolf on the fog-drenched, secluded grounds of the Hammond mansion in the late Victorian or early Edwardian era. The atmosphere reeks of Baskervillainy.
     The police investigation is a shambles, with Inspector Curtis shouting every single stupid thing he says, including his misogynistic mockery of sidekick Christy’s “female intuition.”
     The opening scene inside the mansion at night, with seeming corpses turning out to be two dozing Hammonds, one of them a dog, is ridiculously overwrought, with the camera zigzagging from one to another feature of the décor to the ominous beat of the stately grandfather’s clock that hints ancestral/genetic mayhem. After this sculpted splash of Brahm’s visual extravagance, the insipid script kicks in. By comparison, The Wolf Man had benefitted from Curt Siodmak’s meritorious script, which director George Waggner did his best to mangle.
     Ultimately, the Hammond family “mystery” admits a simple, cornball solution—one that is pretentiously slow to arrive.
     Brahm proceeded to direct two far better films: The Lodger (1944), about Jack the Ripper, and his masterpiece, The Locket (1946), with the performance of a lifetime by Laraine Day.

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KILOMETER ZERO (Hiner Saleem, 2005)

Writer-director Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurd. Writer-director Hiner Saleem is an Iraqi Kurd, and his trenchant, deliriously lovely tragicomedy Kilomètre zéro, like so many of Ghobadi’s films, is a “road picture.” The film is from Iraq, France and Finland.
     In the 1980s, Ako, an electrician from the village of Amedi in Kurdistan, is impressed into war service against Iran in Basra, ripping him from wife Selma and family, including his blind, bedridden father-in-law, to whom Selma is devoted but whom he treats as the bane of his existence. Someone else now occupies that role: the Arab driver with whom he is escorting a corpse back to the fallen soldier’s home. Long-shots including the flag-draped coffin on top of the van continually reiterate war’s assault on families.
     All ends happily, with Ako and Selma’s reunion, in a Parisian coda.
     Saleem is a visual ironist. The hypnotic beauty of the countryside as the two men ride through implies the horrors of war at a distance, the assault on Nature, much as the coffin is a constant reminder of war’s assault on humanity. Saleem and color cinematographer Robert Alazraki collaborate on exquisite landscapes: a sensual dream cloaking a nightmare. One recalls the ending of Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece Ugetsu monogatari (1953), where we know that war kills just beyond the peaceful village we see.
     The absurdist bickering between Kurd and Arab—Ako and the driver—projects the precarious unity and stability of Iraq. The coffin evolves into a mordant symbol of this as well.
     Considerable visual wit is generated by an army of full-body sculptures of Saddam Hussein in an authoritative, presumably inspirational pose, but the most brilliant image of all is that of a winding, seemingly endless caravan of transports each with a flag-draped coffin on top.

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