Can we afford the rich? You don’t have to watch a 90-minute film to answer this question. Here’s another one: is there any hope left? I mean, for the humankind, in general? The last Swedish documentary I saw left me very much doubtful about it. It also left me angry. Is it a bad thing?
I can’t say that I’ve learned an awful lot from Breaking Social. But I enjoyed it all the same, thanks to the beautiful people appearing in it.
In English and (Chilean) Spanish — I wish those parts were also subtitled!
Lucas Pereyra is a moderately successful writer in his mid-forties, married, with a son, and right in the middle of a stereotypical mid-life crisis. He gets infatuated with a much younger woman, the titular “girl from Uruguay” named Guerra. A series of mildly comic mishaps ensue.
The main problem of this film for me is that I don’t find Lucas “mid is his middle name” either likeable or funny or intriguing — quite unlike his romantic interest. Now I didn’t read novel of the same name by Pedro Mairal on which the film is based. I don’t know whether Pereyra is supposed to be that mediocre. If the answer is yes, Sebastián Arzeno does a splendid job portraying him. Luckily, there is no judging or moralising of any sort in the film; still, I couldn’t care less about Pereyra. Which is a shame. Fiorella Bottaioli shines as Guerra: both down-to-earth and full of mystery.
музыкальный суп / супец: гороховый суп // literally, “musical soup”; pea soup
набивать себе цену: to push or bid up one’s price; typically said of somebody who refuses or hesitates to stay for dinner, take another helping, accept a gift and so on ♦ «бери ещё, не набивай себе цену»
навести марафет, наводить марафет: put something or oneself in order
не продохну́ть: can’t get a break, there’s no respite
невпроворот: bags of (things to do) ♦ «у вас у самих небось дел невпроворот»
Truth was not stranger than fiction, just a little faster.
David Schickele
Is it a biopic? Docudrama? Docufiction? Mockumentary? That’s what I was thinking while watching this 1971 movie starring Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam and Elaine Featherstone for whom, as for most of actors here, Bushman was their only cinematic appearance. I don’t want to give any spoilers. Please don’t read reviews beforehand; go and see this “lost and found”, newly restored feature and discover for yourself.
Didn’t I write years ago what I think about classical ballet? Yes, I did, and yes, it was years ago, so it’s time to reiterate. To say ballet isn’t pretty is an understatement. It’s a sadomasochistic art form we can live without. I almost wrote “we all can live without” but the tragic truth is that some people can not — or act as if they can not — live without ballet.
Which apparently is the case of the titular Darling (Danica Curcic, Lang historie kort). Not content with destroying her own body, she is bent on inflicting the same suffering on the others, primarily on her substitute Polly (Astrid Grarup Elbo, who is a real ballet dancer) but also, at least potentially, on her future students. And so, the abused becomes the abuser herself. As Darling’s partner Frans (Gustaf Skarsgård) tells her, “your hip is your least problem”.
Incidentally, Frans the choreographer seems to be a reasonable guy who is not buying all this “no pain, no gain”, “a dancer must suffer”, “in my days,” — in my flipping days, says the woman in her early 30s, but wait for it — “I danced the whole act with a broken leg” bullshit.
Another incidentally: I didn’t realise until now what a weird story that of Giselle is.
After breaking up with her lover Olga (married, with two children), Elia escapes to a small village in Galicia. Which immediately reminded me of Un amor, and brought about the same thought: moving from the city to the arse end of nowhere in a hope to remake one’s life is the worst idea ever.
In this graphic novel Fermín Solís tackles difficult topics with sensitivity and — shall I say it? — love. The monochrome drawings are simple and expressive; just wait till the page where another colour appears! There are plenty of humourous episodes too. My favourite is the airplane game that Elia and her friend Luis play in the car: taking Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper off that fateful plane and shoving there instead all the singers and bands they hate.
To the modern-day viewer, Fragment of an Empire should have a reverse Good Bye, Lenin! feel. Indeed, the whole sequence of Filimonov (Fyodor Nikitin) returning to unrecognisable St. Petersburg, rebranded as Leningrad, fully deserves to be named Hello, Lenin! The way Filimonov reacts and adapts to the new realities looks pretty comical now but it also must have been so to the Soviet viewers, albeit for different reasons. You’d think that Ermler was taking the mickey, and perhaps he was, for in 1929 it was still permitted. (Ilf and Petrov just started to work on The Little Golden Calf.) Ermler’s satire is at its sharpest in the portrayal of Natasha’s new husband, a “culture worker” and a petty tyrant (Valeri Solovtsov). More subtly and way more subversively, the film shows, through the eyes of Filimonov, the astounding emptiness and inhumanity of “brave new world”.
Some curiosities. Filimonov sees his ex-wife, Natasha (Lyudmila Semyonova), in the window of the express train «Одеса—Харків» (Odesa—Kharkiv). A tram in “Leningrad” carries a warning in Ukranian: «виходити під час руху заборонено», “it’s forbidden to get off while (the tram is) moving”. A constructivist skyscraper in “Leningrad” in fact is the freshly completed Derzhprom building in Kharkiv.
What was different this time is that, at about 21:45, they run out of electricity, or the generator run out of gas and then they run out of electricity. So the lights and projector went off and we missed the last ten or so minutes of Pay Day. The pianist did his best to play the coda, and that was it. I think this added authenticity to the whole show.
This documentary takes us to the biodynamic farm of Niels Stokholm (1933—2022). It’s beautifully shot, the music is angelic, and you’d be forgiven to think this farm is a paradise. Probably it is, in summer.
While I don’t buy the pseudoscience of biodynamics (no, plant growth doesn’t depend on lunar phases, not to mention the position of Mars), it’s nice to see a guy who genuinely cares about the living beings in his charge, including those to be slaughtered next day. Harmless, in Pauli’s sense. Is it?
For all Niels’s talk about sustainability, organic farming (which subsumes biodynamic farming) is anything but sustainable. Stokholm’s farm may supply their produce (“100% natural” and “chemical-free”, whatever that means) to a handful of posh restaurants. Good for them. Good for Niels. But that’s about it. To quote Jay Rayner,
We need to keep reminding ourselves just how difficult it is to keep a mass population fed, and what a brilliant job large-scale agriculture does.
Niels’s opinion, surprise surprise, is that there is a capitalist conspiracy of chemical companies who just want to sell more fertiliser. On the third hand (provided we had one), if you want to be, or to keep being, certified as an organic or even biodynamic farmer, you’ve got to follow certain rules, and Niels seems to be determined to break them. Maybe, as Tamara suggested, he’s just taking the piss.
