These are the releases that hit movie screens this December 27:
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
Ansa and Holappa are the two new and immediately recognizable creatures (heavenly, adorable) of the Kaurismäkian zoo that we so gladly visit periodically. She, Ansa (attention to this actress, Alma Pöysti, the Finnish answer to the Belgian Virginie Efira: the same natural charm, a similar face), works in a supermarket and is fired when one day, when leaving the establishment, she takes or intends to take expired food home. He, Holappa, works in the metal industry and is fired for his constant abuse of alcohol during working hours. They are two lonely, introverted beings, sad like a summer without a beach. One night they meet at karaoke, but they only look at each other timidly. Later they will meet again, they will begin a relationship also dominated by shyness and the almost absence of words.
As unmistakably Kaurismäkian as the characters are the spaces in which they operate. The homes are austere, extremely poor, and of considerable ugliness. The bars, where absorbed customers drink in silence, seem like funeral homes. Karaoke, in theory a place for joy, exudes a depressing atmosphere. Kaurismäki recreates again and again, like an eternal refrain, the routine and boredom of the protagonists in these spaces, he contemplates them as Jim Jarmusch contemplated Adam Driver in “Paterson”. The allusion to the American friend is not gratuitous: the communicating vessels between Kaurismäki and Jarmusch (here explicitly cited/honored) are known and both explore simple and disinherited people with similar melancholy, the Finn with a greater load of hidden irony, ultimately After all, “Fallen leaves” (a nice title if there ever was one; it could be from an Ozu or a Griffith) is still a romantic comedy, no matter how sad it may be.
Sadness is (once again) the heart of the film. The fictional world of Kaurismäki is sad because the real world is sad (the war in Ukraine can be heard), but not everything is lost, not everything is despair, because the spirit of Chaplin comes to rescue us from moral desolation and the end is a beautiful flash of optimism. Simple, humble, always formulated in a low voice, Kaurismäki's cinema clarifies the mind and lubricates the soul.
By Salvador Llopart
We are facing a journey in the absolute sense of the term. An amazing trip, an unpredictable and intense experience. From the hazardous reality of emigration, so often treated in cinema, to an unexpected moral parable in the form of a Gothic tale. Evocative like a nightmare and captivating like a ghost story. We are faced with an ethereal story, elliptical in its ultimate meaning and unpredictable in its consequences. We are looking at Disco Boy, a major film debut by its director, the Italian Giacomo Abbruzzese.
It begins as all emigration stories begin, with the story of a physical journey. From one place to another. From one reality to another. Aleksei's journey - embodied by the wonderful Frank Rogowki with his quiet gaze and restrained expression - leaves shreds of himself from a forgettable existence in Belarus to the promise of a new life in Paris. A promise, in the form of a passport, that enlists him in the army, and will take him to the jungles of the Niger Delta as a member of the Foreign Legion.
There he will fight for the reason of the West, and yet, that promise of order and measure inevitably leads him into horror and madness. With inevitable reminiscences of the journey of Apocalypse Now, where the encounter with the other - with the other -, with another life and other dreams, will drag him into a kind of ghostly possession. Where the executioner, which he has been, identifies himself - he blends in - in the victim that he has left behind.
Disco Boy advances in a game of mirrors and disco lights. An impossible combination, logic and madness enter, driven by the verve and imagination of the staging. Where wild dancing and unbridled music become the symbol of an alternative reality. Hypnotic in its narration, at times impenetrable, but extremely suggestive, Abbruzzese's unexpected film finds its music in the silence of gazes and its lyrics - its reason for being - in the lost reason of Europe.
Por Philipp Engel
It might seem that the vampire cult comedy What We Do in the Shadows (2014), co-directed with Jemaine Clement, meant a blank check for Taika Waititi: One of Thor! Another from Thor! The next Star Wars! He will even direct the adaptation of Moebius' most lysergic comic, The Incal. And, along the way, that uncomfortable fable with a fantasy Hitler to which they gave the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay: JoJo Rabbit. Well, this sought-after Made in New Zealand talent is not having his best moment in this football comedy based on the numerous goals conceded by American Samoa FC.
There are moments in which they hint at the sardonic comedy about motivational talks that it could have been, but it ends up being a very white and archetypal “feel-good movie” of improvement, including duel, that clings as best it can to the football epic. Michael Fassbender seems as lost as the character he plays, and only the magnetic Kaimana, a fa'afafine (transsexual according to local tradition, reminiscent of Pacifiction), manages to capture our attention. The unconsummated romance could be the metaphor for an endless film that remains definitively half-finished.
By J. Batlle
If we added a human figure co-star, Kina
The film by Guillaume Maidatchevsky, an expert in this business (Vivre avec les loups, Aïlo: Une odyssée en Laponia), is very conventional, but it is competently made and it is surprising how, without resorting to the useful digital effects, a performance has been achieved so bright of animals. Hitchcock, who advised never working with animals (neither with children nor with Charles Laughton), would have abandoned filming on the first day.
Por P. Engel
It could be the nice and laudable attempt to turn Gabriel Ferrater's centenary into something like a romantic comedy between a literature teacher (Ivana Miño) at a high school in Reus, the city where the fleeting poet was born in 1922, and the director ( Miguel Sitjar) from a Library in San Cugat, the town where he took his life, shortly before turning 50. The film borrows the title from the peak of his poetic trilogy, inspired by his relationship with Helena Valentí, who was then in her early 20s.
If the future writer did not like to see her intimacy reflected, like clothes abandoned in a hurry, Ferrater argued that “the emotional life of tot home or tota dona is exactly the same as that of tot altre home or tota altra dona.” Hence possibly the idea of this new couple of lyrical wounds that, although it may be sparkling at first, ends up foundering in the most dramatic moments. The originality of the proposal is very limited by a flat advertorial aesthetic, designed to take us around privileged corners of our geography, where outdoor events are held between glasses of wine, cheese cubes and a guitarist in the background. Anecdotal.
