Image: M. Demir
31/01/2011
Review: The Mill and the Cross (2011, Poland / Sweden) - European Premiere
Image: Courtesy of International Film Festival Rotterdam
Don’t expect a conventional biopic about Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Don’t expect a conventional film anyhow. Lech Majewski, Polish artist, poet, writer and director pays a visual tribute to one of his favourite works of art by Bruegel. The procession to Calvary, painted in 1564.
Majewski first saw the works of the Flemish Master in a museum in Vienna where he was confronted with the artist’s Weltanschauung. A view of the world that sucked him right in and transported him to the landscapes of long by gone eras filled with people and their daily routines.
And that is exactly the ambitious layout of The Mill and the Cross. To give the viewer that same sensation, sucking them into the painting. During the big talk before the European premiere of the picture at the International Film Festival Rotterdam Majewski stated he always had the feeling he could live in Bruegel’s landscapes.
Using state of the art technology he succeeds to give the audience the feeling to live for a mere 90 minutes in the landscape of the painting. The images are of a dream like quality, with intense bright colors like the ruby red tunics of the mercenaries to the deep ochres disappearing into the sfumato on the horizon. This picture would no doubt amaze Bruegel on seeing the seamless overlapping moving image and his original painting. Layer after layer achieved this effect, one shot in particular consists of a staggering 143 layers! Real locations to match the landscape in the painting were scouted all over the globe, from the land of the Czech Republic to the clouds of New Zealand. The composition is explained by voice-over of Bruegel himself, portrayed by Rutger Hauer, moving through his own painted arena. Short story lines are used to introduce some essential figures in the painting, like the mother, played by Charlotte Rampling, of the condemned son, while Michael York portrays a wealthy banker and art collector.
The culmination of the film lies in the freeze moment in which all figures are halted by a gesture of Bruegel’s hand followed by another hand gesture performed by the miller high above in his mill on the jagged rock overlooking the spectacle, stopping the vanes in a Bruegelian metaphor of God stopping time. He just makes bread and looks on. Subsequently the camera glides the audience through the painting during a dazzling scene covering multiple points of view of the canvas. The audience was clearly holding its breath in the old Luxor theatre during this piece of bravado.
Majewski makes the painting come to life and what guts to make a feature about it! He goes to great lengths explaining the philosophy of Bruegel in which everyday life is more important than the bigger than life events in the Bible. Jesus is even obscured by Spanish soldiers and Flemish peasants. After the crucifixion life goes on and children playing replace the cruel acts filling the landscape in the painting.
The Mill and the Cross is of invaluable educational importance, even tough too theoretical to get carried away by. A fascinating experiment drenched in love for painting that will inform you better about Pieter Bruegel the Elder than any documentary you’ll ever see.
Rating: ****
30/01/2011
Review: Bleak Night (2010, South Korea - International Premiere)
Image: Courtesy of International Film Festival Rotterdam
High school can be very traumatic for boys. This is the case in every nation in the world, but maybe even more so in South Korea. Bleak Night by debuting Korean director Yoon Sung-hyun starts out as a classic whodunit. The saddened father of a boy whose death is shrouded in mystery goes looking for the deceased boy’s best friends searching for some answers. One of them had suddenly moved prior to the death and the other had not attended the funeral. Shady circumstances causing the father to suspect foul play.
The ingenious flashforward-structure used in the film confuses the audience. The film doesn’t start out with the death of Gi-Tae, a marvelous performance of Lee-Je-hoon, but we see him as the school bully whose only ambition in life is to terrorize his classmates and his best friends in particular. A classic interpretation of ‘we hurt the ones we love the most’. Especially kind-hearted Becky portrayed by Park Jeong-min-I is a favorite and easy prey for Gi-Tae.
The only one who has the guts to stand up to this near borderline case is the third member of the trio, Dong-yoon, played by Seo Joon-yeong. The three of them also have their good times. To illustrate their fragile friendship the director shows us beautiful dreamy shots of late afternoon sun filled baseball games on the railroad tracks alongside the grey suburbs of the big city. The unbearable lightness of being a teenager in suburbia is interrupted by sudden violence. Bleak Night deals with the world of boys only. Girls are just extras. In that regard there is even a hint of gay feelings in Gi-Tae’s persistence of harassing Becky. Every time he pleads for forgiveness like a lover does when he’s been unfaithful. The three actors are astonishingly realistic in their approach and are completely credible as a tight knitted tough emotional explosive group of friends. The many hand-held close-ups of the boys give a good impression of the internal conflicts tearing them apart. When I asked the talented young director during the Q&A how he achieved this interplay amongst inexperienced young actors (Park Jeong-min-I debuts as an actor), he answered that he gave them the difficult task of really listening to the other actor during dialogues instead of focusing, like young actors often do, on their own lines and to react instead of recite.
As the structure of the narrative gets closer and closer to the resolution of the question of who and how, the fabric of the film changes from a whodunit in to a social drama in which there are only victims and perpetrators. Everybody is innocent and everybody is guilty.
The emotional warfare in Bleak Night is, according Yoon Sung-hyun, a metaphor for the current state of South Korea, where people hurt each other because like Gi-Tae, they are weak on the inside. Weak, because people don’t live for themselves and are defined by their work. They suffer from peer pressure, just like everybody has experienced at one time or another at school.
The result is a complex, well-crafted, emotional gem of a film. It’s been only the third Tiger feature I’ve seen this year, but I already dare to state that Bleak Night, the winner of the Pusan New Current Award, is a serious contender for winning the Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Rating: ***+
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