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The Courthouse Film Circle presents movies on a weekly basis using state-of-the-art DVD projection and audio equipment. These screenings are friendly, informal and intimate— a chance to see top quality art-house cinema from around the world, in friendly company. Admission is still a recession-beating €6 for Friends of the Courthouse, and Film Circle members; €8 for all others. Advance booking is not necessary. |
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To download a printable version of our Autumn 2009 Calendar of Events, click here! To download a printable version of our Winter 2009 Calendar of Events, click here! |
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... AUTUMN/WINTER 2009 SEASON ...
The Baader-Meinhof Complex
Der Baader Meinhof Komplex
The Baader Meinhof Complex reunites Downfall's producer-screenwriter Bernd Eichinger with his college friend and Christiane F and Last Exit to Brooklyn director Uli Edel. Looking very much like a further mining of the modern German political history seam which has compellingly produced both Downfall and The Lives of Others, The Baader Meinhof Complex is engrossing on many levels. Deftly relating the events that rocked Germany in the 1970s as the Baader Meinhof Gang – or the Red Army Faction – wielded its crazed mixture of ultra-left-wing ideology with vicious terrorism, The Baader Meinhof Complex will have an inbuilt audience of viewers who remember that vivid era. The RAF was born from the student protest movements of the 1960s when a highly-politicised post-war generation took to the streets, inspired by events in Vietnam and behind the "Iron curtain". In West Germany, there was understandably a strong desire not to repeat the mistakes of the recent past and a distrust of the political establishment which included former Nazi Party members. The Baader Meinhof Gang started out as a loose group of ultra-left-wing student radicals making a noise: by the end, it was an almost-aimless professional terrorist group allied to the PLO and involved in cross-border extortion, kidnapping, murder and bombings. It did not officially cease to exist until 1998.
The Baader Meinhof Complex restricts itself to the events between bloody protests against the Shah in Berlin in 1967 and the "German autumn" a decade later. The production prides itself on being historically accurate, down to using transcripts of the Gang's Stammheim prison trials and even the number of bullets used in its gruesome assassinations. This is a controversial subject in Germany, and Edel is at pains to be dispassionate. Dramatically, though, The Baader Meinhof Complex will hold very little suspense for people who lived through these times: the resolution of the German autumn was as memorable in its day as the War on Terror is now. For today's younger, politically-aware demographic (not as high now as it was then), this is a fascinating look at the birth of modern terrorism. The RAF itself may seem dated with its Marxist, Maoist rants, but as the production is at pains to point out, it does have resonance with what is happening now. Technically, this is shot up-close and personal; Edel makes heavy use of handheld, but it's not jarring. Production values are excellent - this is reportedly Germany's most expensive film ever. Music is minimal, although opening the film with Janis Joplin (Mercedes Benz) and closing it with Bob Dylan (Blowin' In The Wind) seems at odds with the spirit of what unfolds onscreen, even if the timing is roughly right. In opting to shoot the film in quasi-documentary style – moving efficiently but crisply from one event to another – Edel keeps the viewer at a distance from the people onscreen and emotionally. The Bader Meinhof Complex falters, even as it fascinates. - Screen International
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Buddha Collapsed out of Shame
Buda as sharm foru rikht Movies about young people and by very young directors are a notable feature of Iranian cinema and the latest striking picture from that country, Buddha Collapsed out of Shame, centres on a six-year-old Afghan girl searching for an education and is written and directed by 19-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf. Her father is the leading Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf, and her sister, Samira Makhmalbaf, had a feature film in competition in Cannes before she was 18. The movie begins and ends with the shocking 2001 newsreel image of the Taliban blowing up the gigantic statues of the Buddha in Bamyan and in between presents a day in the life of a girl living in the impoverished village still littered with the rubble from the explosion. Baktay, the film's little heroine, sees a boy living in the next-door cave reading a book and becomes determined to go to school. First, she has to raise the money for a notebook and a pencil by selling the eggs of the family's chicken. She only gets enough for the notebook, but takes her mother's lipstick as a writing instrument and sets out wearing a yellow scarf on her head and an ankle-length dress. On her journey, she's waylaid by a gang of boys playing a game in which they're Taliban fighting Americans. They terrorise Baktay, rip pages from her book, seize her irreligious lipstick, put a paper bag over her head and pretend to bury her alive. It's one of the most terrifying sequences of recent years. 'In God's name, let me go to school,' she pleads. When she eventually escapes, she's rejected by an open-air boys' school and finally finds the place for girls. But again she has a nasty experience with the Taliban kids on the way home. Only when she pretends to be killed does she find peace. This is a deeply affecting but wholly unaffected picture, direct, truthful and unsentimental, and Nikbakht Noruz makes an indelible impression as the brave Baktay. - Philip French / The Observer
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Identities
Director: Vittoria Colonna
Premiered at the Cork Film Festival, where it was greeted with laughter, tears and warm applause, Identities, Vittoria Colonna’s new feature-length documentary is a sensitive and compelling film that explores the multicoloured, multicultural transgender community in Ireland. Five personal stories give shape to the different but parallel worlds of transvestism, transsexualism, drag, sexual identity and gender dysphoria. Documented in series of revealing black and white interviews, each narrative is preceded by a colour performance art piece, and more abstract self-representation. At its heart, this is a film about the human spirit and overcoming stereotype and categorisation. – Irish Film Institute Brochure
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The Class 
Entre les murs There will not be a better film this year than Laurent Cantet's The Class, which focuses on a year in a schoolroom presided over by a young teacher, Marin (François Bégaudeau). The school is in a rough Parisian neighborhood and the student body is mixed racially- black, Arab, Asian. Marin's particular challenge is, as with every teacher, trying to instill a love of learning in these often recalcitrant adolescents, but the particular setting and makeup of his charges renders his situation extraordinary. Extraordinary, too, are the ways he deals with the students, never pandering to them and offering a kind of tough love as he tries to give them all a sense of self-worth, as well as proper speech in a France where traditional language is dying.
The film is based on a book by Bégaudeau, recounting his own teaching experience, and he and Cantet discovered their students in a Paris school, holding extensive workshops with them to probe their characters. This all gives The Class a near-documentary feel, making it a unique interweaving of fiction and reality, as when some real-life parents of the kids are also brought into the story. Sometimes these encounters are benignly rewarding, as when a Chinese boy (Wei Huang) receives praise for his efforts, but others are stormier, like that with a stern matron and her son, Souleymane (Franck Keita), the eternal class troublemaker, whose antics have him facing expulsion, as well as a daunting parental decision to send him back to Africa. This incident escalates when, in a fit of pique, Marin verbally attacks two girls who exhibited a lack of respect during their monitoring of a teacher's meeting to decide Souleymane's fate. In a trice, all the bonhomie Marin has worked so hard to achieve vanishes, and we are again at war, both generationally and culturally. With febrile intelligence and staggering humanity Cantet makes you truly care about his people in a blessedly unhistrionic way that harkens back to the greatest work of the Italian neorealists. - David Noh / Film Journal International Winner - Palme D’Or, Cannes Film Festival, 2008 |
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The Man From London
A Londoni férfi The renowned Hungarian film-maker Béla Tarr, who directed sepulchral masterpieces such as Werckmeister Harmonie and the colossal Satan's Tango, has now adapted a Georges Simenon thriller. He has done so in a way that I can only describe as characteristic. No concessions of any sort are made to the thriller genre. Pacy it ain't. Tarr's authorial signature is everywhere, and this signature does not herald thrills or spills - though chills are here in abundance. We get distinctively weird and halting dialogue, doomy-eerie organ chords on the soundtrack, monochrome cinematography in which daylight is only slightly brighter than the night, extreme closeups of stricken, immobile faces and glacially slow, hypnotic camera movements. There are moments of deadpan black comedy, often involving strange dancing in bars. The combined effect of all this is unsettling, sometimes bsurd, sometimes stunning, and Fred Kelemen's lighting and camerawork are always impressive. Tarr has taken a reasonably unassuming Simenon thriller, which was in fact converted into a conventional movie noir in 1943, and dispenses entirely with thrills. The plot notionally involves a cop, a caseful of stolen cash, an arrest and two killings, but you'd never know it. Everything is brought right down to a kind of fanatically concentrated, underwater slowness: it's a little like Douglas Gordon's 24-hour Psycho installation. There is, however, something intriguingly subversive about Tarr's anti-thriller. As if in some experiment, he has boiled away the excitement, to leave behind a viscous residue of existential dread. If you read Simenon's book last thing at night, then this might be the dream you would have after turning out the light. The story concerns a French harbour-master called Maloin, played by the Czech actor Miroslav Krobot, who lives in near-poverty with his wife, played by British star Tilda Swinton, and his daughter Henriette (Erika Bók). One night he witnesses a fight on the dark quayside by the boat-train terminus between two shady types: one, carrying a case, is knocked into the water and disappears; the other flees. Later, Maloin creeps out in secret to recover the floating bag, to find it contains a king's ransom in British money. He hangs on to the cash, but a hatchet-faced British police officer, Inspector Morrison - played by 87-year-old Hungarian actor István Lénárt - shows up, asking questions. The net is closing in.
Then there's the moment of truth itself. Maloin drags the stolen case back to his squalid little hut and opens it up to reveal - 60 grand in cash! In any normal film, the suitcase-full-of-stolen-cash scene is a pulse-racer, the trigger for astonishment and excitement and fear. Not here it's not. Maloin looks as if he has opened, not a staggering treasure trove, but a gas bill for an amount very slightly more than he can afford to pay. His expression of gloomy resentment never falters. Yet here again, Tarr's approach has a kind of consistency. The money is British. Maloin is trapped. He can't spend it without changing it, and this is impossible without drawing attention to himself. The stolen cash is a tantalus of longing. It is a mountain of unspendable loot. In a spasm of resentment and frustration at his pseudo-riches in sterling, he digs into his pathetic store of euros to buy a mink stole (of all the grotesque things) for his uncomprehending daughter. His wife is horrified at this destruction of their savings, and Maloin simply cannot explain what he has done. It really is very strange, and yet in concentrating on Maloin's misery, Tarr has hit on something very pertinent. So many of us scamper all our working lives on the hamster's-wheel of work, always striving for more money and some dimly imagined super payday in the future. Tarr's movie about Maloin and his sudden suitcase of meaningless cash is a satirical opera on this theme, an opera without music but with compellingly strange images, a film in which dialogue is not normal speech but rather a stylised sprechgesang. The Man from London is no conventional cop thriller. It's an arresting nightmare all the same. - Peter Bradshaw / The Guardian |
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The Visitor
Director: Thomas McCarthy
McCarthy's modest tale of friendship is a welcome alternative to the prevailing political rhetoric that promotes fear of "enemies in our midst". Concern over the mistreatment of immigrants and government abuse of the Patriot Act make The Visitor a topical film; McCarthy's heartfelt, often funny, story is the self-discovery of Connecticut widower Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins), who befriends the Syrian drummer Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and the Senegalese street vendor (Danai Jekesai Gurira) who have rented his rarely visited pied a terre through the kind of scam that victimises immigrants in New York every day. Their uneasy meeting turns into a tentative friendship and Walter, a stiff WASP who exhibits many symptoms of "white man's disease", begins playing the conga drum under Tarek's patient instruction. Anything he does requiring rhythm is an instant joke, but the academic has a crash course in immigrants' reality when Tarek is arrested rushing through a subway turnstile by cops who drag him away to an immigration jail. When Tarek's mother, Mouna (Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass), visits from Detroit, an unlikely romance is sparked between the man, who just lost his wife, and the woman who fears losing her son.
Alongside McCarthy's tender treatment of strangers who would never meet, except for chance forming a human bond, is a chilling view of life for immigrants who have the bad luck of being caught by law enforcement. Decisions seem to be made and carried out in the spirit of Franz Kafka. In McCarthy's script, everything takes place under our noses, and most citizens are unaware or indifferent. Jenkins gives a poignant performance as the awkward professor who slowly lets his feelings show, and then learns his tax dollars have paid for the deportation of a man who poses no threat. As Tarek, Haaz Sleiman has the kind of effortless warmth that Charles is drawn to, but can barely express, while Danai Gurira as his wife frowns with a distrust that is hard to shed when you have no rights in your adopted country. - David D’Arcy, Screen |
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Waveriders
Director: Joel Conroy
Joel Conroy’s Waveriders is a superb and seamless Irish documentary about extreme surfing that won the audience award at the 2008 Dublin International Film Festival. Ostensibly, it's a history of the sport and the development of fringe 'soul surfing'. But Conroy, in a stupendous final reel, achieves something unexpected and transcendental: his images of surfers riding waves in the maw of a monstrous angry ocean will linger long in your mind. Waveriders is narrated by Cillian Murphy and begins in the indigo climes of Hawaii. Here is a story not just about surfing but the unique role Ireland has had to play in it. Surfing was reportedly discovered by Captain Cook. He saw Hawaiian natives riding waves in the 1770s and was gobsmacked. (The New England missionaries that followed were harder to impress. The surfers, naked without the aid of wet suits, were quickly banned.) Surfing became what it is today thanks to the Hawaiian-Irishman George Freeth. His father, an emigrant from Ulster, married a Hawaiian woman of royalty who taught the young George to surf. Jack London watched the surfer on his travels and was mesmerised. "He is a Mercury – a brown Mercury," London wrote. "His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea." Freeth took surfing to California and with it began a modern phenomenon. Before he died of the Spanish flu in 1919 at the age of 35, he had also invented life-guarding as we know it today and so can be blamed entirely for that other worldwide phenomenon known as Pamela Anderson.
Much of Waveriders concerns itself with 'soul surfing'. The men who pursue it are like pioneers: bearded and gnarly faced, they travel the world for the most inaccessible and exciting waves. We meet eight-times world champion Kelly Slater who goes to the west of Ireland for his holidays. Soul surfer stars, the Malloy brothers, a second-generation Irish family, head out with Donegal professional surfer Richard Fitzgerald to surf Aileen's. This enormous and now famous Irish wave is set in a spectacular theatre, buffeted by the Cliffs of Moher and accessible only by jet-ski. Fitzgerald, who hails from Bundoran, is the kind of guy who cheers when the weather forecast is bad. He looks like Jake Gyllenhaal, speaks with a soft Donegal twang and is made of titanium. The last reel off the Atlantic seaboard takes you close into the minds of these frontiersmen. It begins with a forecast of storm warning and the sight of four men heading out to sea. The ocean churns like Biblical end-days. It's the kind of weather that would sink ships. The waves tower over the men like foaming giants, about the size of a four-storey house. If you come off your board in these conditions, there's a good chance you will die. The tiny men in black look like ocean snackfood. They are whizzed in front of the waves by jet-ski and let go. You wait for them to be gorged but each surfer holds steady. Miraculously they emerge safe on the other side.
The footage was shot in December 2007 and the waves were the largest ever surfed off Ireland. It's a very moving spectacle, and on a cinema screen it's staggering. It puts you back in touch with nature at its most elemental and exhilarating. Watching it, you experience what Captain Cook must have felt when he first discovered surfing. - Paul Lynch / The Sunday Tribune |
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Tokyo Sonata
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Tokyo Sonata is yet another of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's chilling portraits of micro and macro alienation, a family drama as chillingly controlled and despondent as the horror films that gained him international recognition. In Tokyo, office worker Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) is downsized and chooses to keep it a secret from his family (ŕ la Laurent Cantet's Time Out), making him part of the legion of specter-ish businessmen who roam the city during daytime, pretending to answer work calls while surreptitiously getting lunch at a free food cart. Ryuhei is humiliated by his loss of stature, though he continues futilely attempting to exert authority over wayward teen son Taka (Yu Koyanagi) and younger kid Kenji (Inowaki Kai), the latter of whom rebels against not only his father by surreptitiously taking piano lessons but also his porn-reading school teacher. Domestic conflict occurs out in the open in front of his mother Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), who patiently suffers her husband's severe parental conduct. Concealment, however, is the order of the day, with Kurosawa's characters determined to bottle up emotions and secrets even as they crave release and escape, their repressive tendencies subtly suggested by the sight of Ryuhei zipping up Kenji's backpack, and their fear of (and yearning for) liberating disruption conveyed by an opening image of Megumi longingly kneeling in front of an open door during a storm. Kurosawa's narrative is, superficially, nothing particularly unique, a deadpan depiction of modern disconnection filtered through the lens of a nuclear family's slow disintegration. But as with much of his work, it's the means to the end that are profound, his indirect aesthetics creating palpable unease, as if reality had imperceptibly, and yet fundamentally, shifted slightly to the right or left, leaving everything cockeyed and unstable.
Akiko Ashizawa's deep-focus cinematography strands characters in a labyrinth of constricting physical structures-doorways, shelves, chairs, walls-which are isolating and seemingly un-traversable. Smoothly segueing between tight medium shots and widescreen panoramas, her highly mannered compositions feel illusory, like something out of a nightmare, and as such steep (as does the director's haunting score) Kurosawa's standard story in the realm of the otherworldly. It's a fittingly shaky mood for a film concerned with familial breakdown caused by the absence of commanding paternal influence, and soon so permeates the landscape that-along with Taka's desire to join the American military (permissible under a new law)-it casts Ryuhei and family's disaffection as endemic to a culture plagued by powerlessness and the ensuing confusion, terror and anger wrought by that weakness. This dreamlike atmosphere engulfs Kurosawa's characters but his story doesn't reduce them to featureless ghosts. Ryuhei, Megumi and Kenji are drawn with sharp, telling lines, thus providing an anchor of realism amidst a story that increasingly veers into the unreal. As it allows the focus to swing from Ryuhei (and his struggles to assert head-of-the-family clout) to Megumi, this progression is welcome, allowing for a view of both familial breakdown and reconstitution that gives the story breadth. Still, having so scrupulously established his conflicts and milieu, Kurosawa seems unsure of how to resolve his narrative, eventually settling on sending his protagonists on trial-by-darkness odysseys into the pitch-black night, with Ryuhei (now working as a mall janitor) fleeing his shame, Kenji getting thrown in jail after trying to sneak aboard a bus, and Megumi being kidnapped by a lunatic (Kurosawa regular Koji Yakusho) and spending the night in a beach shack. It's the last of these that takes precedence and feels the most false, a too-obvious and straightforward bit of surrealism to underline characters' problems and transformations. Tokyo Sonata recovers from this stumble, however, in Kenji's climactic piano recital of Debussy's "Clair de Lune," a sequence that, in its tonal modulation and manipulation of light and dark to express a sense of simultaneous hope and horror, verges on awe-inspiring. - Nick Schager / Slant Magazine. Winner - Un Certain Regard Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival 2008. |
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Conversations with my Gardener
Director: Jean Becker
A successful painter leaves Paris to return to the village in central France where he was born more than 50 years ago. Since the death of his parents the unoccupied house has been surrounded by gardens that the painter has neither the will nor the know-how to cultivate. To his great surprise his ad for a gardener is answered by an old friend from primary school. A mature, friendly bond develops between the two men that is enriched by the different experiences they have had in life. The gardener’s directness and the genuine spontaneity of his worldly wisdom, in particular, captivates the metropolitan, who takes a new view of life, love, and of vegetables and funerals. The inconspicuously elegant direction of Jean Becker makes room for the meeting of two outstanding French actors, Daniel Auteuil and Jean-Pierre Darroussin, whose brilliant performances rank the story of the friendship between painter and gardener among the best rench films of the year. – Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2007. |
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Quiet Chaos
Director: Antonio Luigi Grimaldi
This tale of a recent widower learning to integrate grief into life as a single parent will inevitably be compared to The Son’s Room, not least thanks to Nanni Moretti’s presence here as lead, but the current offering is a gentler, deceptively simple drama looking at life as much as death. The screenplay co-authored by Moretti -- and the Sandro Veronesi novel it’s based on -- are welcome reminders of a thoughtful yet emotional maturity existing in Italo literature all too often absent from movie screens. Film exec Pietro (Moretti) has an eventful morning at the beach with brother Carlo (Alessandro Gassman) when he rushes into the water to save a woman, Eleonora (Isabella Ferrari), from drowning. On returning to his summer home, he finds his wife Lara has been killed in a freak falling accident. Back in Rome, Pietro discovers all the small, necessary steps required of a now-single parent to bring up 10-year-old daughter Claudia (Blu Yoshimi). When classes begin again, he takes her to school and, in a spur-of-the-moment thought, decides to wait in the park across the street until she comes out again. So begins Pietro’s new routine: he drops Claudia off, reads the newspaper and slyly exchanges glances with nubile dog-walker Jolanda (Kasia Smutniak). Moretti’s performance is refreshingly understated, even warm, yet his eyes reflect a palpable sense of emptiness until the moment he comes to terms with his loss. Other roles are equally well cast though ultimately minor, from Valeria Golino’s animalistic breeziness as Pietro’s sister-in-law to Gassman’s sexy-while-sympathetic uncle routine. Dialogue flows easily, and Grimaldi interpolates the right amount of humor. Lensing is crisp and unself-conscious, Angelo Nicolini’s editing beautifully restrained. Grimaldi displays his most sophisticated feel for music yet, organically inserting songs by Rufus Wainwright, Radiohead and Ivano Fossati to highlight emotion. Especially memorable s a sequence with Pietro waiting by a bench as scores of parents arrive in groups to pick up their children from school. His loneliness tands out, but so, too, does a sense of commonality. |
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