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Europe on Screen goes from high drama to the Felliniesque
The Felliniesque Italian film The Great Beauty
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The Felliniesque Italian film The Great Beauty. (Courtesy of Europe on Screen) (Courtesy of Europe on Screen)
The Felliniesque Italian film The Great Beauty. (Courtesy of Europe on Screen)
The latest work of the Danish auteur Thomas Vinterberg, known for The Celebration, one of the first feature films shot completely digitally ' and a major stepping stone for the 'Dogma 95' movement to abolish artificiality in cinema and to drag it back to its purest condition.
The Hunt, which screens on Friday as part of the Europe on Screen (EoS) film festival in Jakarta, tells the story of Lucas, a kindergarten teacher in Denmark accused of pedophilia after his student ' the daughter of his best friend Theo ' complains that Lucas showed her his genitals in class.
Lucas loses his friendship with Theo, is left by his girlfriend, and finds his son publicly ostracized. His dog is killed, a stone is thrown through his window, and he is beaten by grocery store employees when shopping.
The Hunt is a smartly written gripping drama anchored by Mads Mikkelsen from television's Hannibal, whose turn as Lucas brought him the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012.
Also on screen on Friday at EoS is The Great Beauty, winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar. It's a great Italian film that challenges the minds and senses of its audiences.
The 43-year-old Paolo Sorrentino, who helmed the film, overwhelms his audiences with meticulous details about Rome through the deeply studied protagonist Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo in a dazzling performance).
Jep is a journalist and dandy socialite who enjoys talking to intellectuals who he secretly despises, all depicted on screen with a carnivalesque sense of humor.
For example, in one scene, Jep injects himself with botox while in another, he disdains his pseudo-intellectual friends for an obsession with looking young.
The film opens in Rome in summer, following a flock of Japanese tourists as a guide provides basic facts about an architecturally complex neighborhood, which gives way to a hyperbolic party celebrating the birthday of Jep, where he demonstrates his imaginative skill as an 'experienced lace curtain'.
The first scenes mark the film's storytelling trademark, which relies on Jep's baroque gestures to bring us to unexpected corners of decayed Rome. Every gesture and textures is exaggerated.
Take the scene where Jep, while sleeping, begins to suffocate and the film literally moves him to the ocean to emphasize the feeling.
Sorrentino has been often compared Federico Fellini, who also has a baroque style and sense of humor .
The Great Beauty, evokes Fellini's masterpiece 8 ½ (1963), where the main character, a would-be filmmaker with a creative block, does little save walk the streets to explore the grotesque side of the pretentious sides of Roman art scene.
Like Guido, Jep is a flaneur, a once potentially good writer gone to seed and ennui who strolls about Rome in an exaggeratingly profound demeanor.
As the film proceeds, we come to realize that the film's title refers to the cultural decay of the Italian capital. However, unlike others who would treat the subject melancholically, Sorrentino emphasizes that decay, too, can be beautiful.
If Rome falls, let it fall spectacularly.
Meanwhile, The Past, from Asghar Farhadi, showcases the international clout that the Iranian auteur director has accumulated since he won an Oscar for A Separation (2011).
The drama begins when Ahmad, an Iranian, comes to Paris to meet his French soon-to-be-ex-wife Marie (played by Bérénice Bejo, The Artist).
Farhadi is a director of fast-paced dramas with strong details that are often not shown on the screen, but are hidden off screen so that the characters can debate them ' such as the argument about whether the wife shoved down her housemaid down the stairs in A Separation.
Farhadi fosters conflict in 'not presenting' action to the audience while allowing each character to interpret events individually.
In The Past, the source of the conflict between Ahmad and Marie is hidden off screen, in 'the past', and drama is squeezed out of the characters' own account of what happened according to their own memories.
Meanwhile, in the present, Marie is living with her soon-to-be-new husband, an Arab named Samir, adding to the multinational composition in Marie's fractured family.
From Marie's perspective, it is overwhelming to see how Farhadi separates her 'Iranian' past from her 'Arabian' future. Marie is uncomfortable when one day she finds Ahmad and Samir outside of the house, working together to look for her delinquent child who has just escaped.
After the success of A Separation, Farhadi mentioned Tennessee Williams as an inspiration in creating detail-oriented domestic drama. The Past is yet another extension of Williams' inspirational footprints.
The Past screens at 5 p.m. and The Great Beauty screens at 7:30 p.m. at the Goethe Haus, while The Hunt screens at 7:30 p.m. at the Erasmus Huis. For more information, visit europeonscreen.org.
