(Reviews of The Eight Mountains; The Blue Caftan; The Dam; and Dead Shot)
THE EIGHT MOUNTAINS.
Scripted during the Coronavirus pandemic, Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch's The Eight Mountains arrives on UK screens in the week that it triumphed at the prestigious David Di Donatello Awards. Adapted from a prize-winning bestseller by Paolo Cognetti, this epic tale of friendship represents something of a departure scale-wise for the Belgian director of the Oscar-nominated The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) and the Timothée Chalamet drama, Beautiful Boy (2018). Nevertheless, with its affecting performances and visuals shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio, this elegiac saga has an embracing intimacy that should make it an enduring arthouse favourite.
In the summer of 1984, Pietro Guasti (Lupo Barbiero) befriends fellow 11 year-old Bruno Guglielmina (Cristiano Sassella) while spending the summer in a cottage in the Alpine hamlet of Grana with his mother Francesca (Elena Lietti). Bruno lives with his Aunt Sonia (Chiara Jorrioz) and is proud of the fact that he is the only child left in what was once a thriving community. He shows Pietro around and they are soon inseparable, as they tend the cows, climb roofs, dam streams, and discover the local dialect.
A year later, the Guastis return to the Aosta Valley and Pietro and Bruno take up where they left off. When the latter is sent to work for his farmer uncle, however, Pietro goes hiking with his father, Giovanni (Filippo Timi). Realising that his son is missing his friend, Giovanni takes him to the farm and Bruno comes on a walk with them. He also joins them for a trek to the glacier, which ends prematurely because Pietro gets altitude sickness and he feels ashamed.
He is also confused when Giovanni offers to pay for Bruno's education in Turin, as he hates the city and likes the fact that his friend is free to roam the Grenon mountains and make cheese. Bruno, however, is eager to leave his dying village and make something of himself. But he's denied the opportunity, as his bricklayer father insists on him coming to work abroad with him and Pietro (Andrea Palma) only briefly sees Bruno (Francesco Palombelli) again as a teenager before they are parted for 15 years.
Pietro barely saw his father during that period, as they had argued and he had gone his own way. When Giovanni died aged 62, however, Pietro (Luca Marinelli) returned to Grana to discover that Bruno (Alessandro Borghi) had promised to renovate the ruined hill dwelling of Barma Drola and Pietro reluctantly agrees to help fulfil his father's lost dream by labouring through the summer.
Francesca reveals that Bruno had sought their help after running away from his father and Giovanni had become fond of him. Pietro sees markings on the cottage map of the treks they had taken together and asks Bruno about them. But he says Giovanni never talked about him when they were together and Pietro regrets missing out on such special times. He doesn't feel jealous, however, as he blames himself for being so headstrong and mucks in with any task that Bruno sets him.
They transplant a sapling that had grown within the shack and Pietro hopes that it takes. Francesca comes to stay at the cottage and thanks him for helping Bruno, who is sleeping rough at the site while Pietro returns to the village each night with the two donkeys he loads up each morning with materials and supplies. As they get close to finishing the build, Pietro goes on one of his father's favourite hikes and calls down from Grenon to Bruno.
To celebrate finishing, they swim in the lake and cook fish on a bonfire. Bruno announces that he is going to restore his uncle's alpeggio, as he remains a mountain man at heart. He encourages Pietro to write, but he winds up working as a chef and brings friends Lara (Elisabetta Mazzullo), Barbara (Elisa Zanotto), and Massimo (Benedetto Patruno)
to Barma Drola. Bruno teases the latter pair when they explain about opening a nature retreat and he jokes that they wouldn't survive a winter.
He takes to Lara, however, and she asks if she can work at the alpeggio. Bruno calls Pietro to check he's not treading on his toes and he gives them his blessing. She adores mountain life and starts selling their cheese in the nearby towns. They have a child and Pietro feels in the way during his visits, as they are always so busy. While staying at Barma Drola, he checks on the sapling and wishes he could talk to his father about his pressing need to do something worthwhile with his life.
Needing to find himself, Pietro goes to Nepal. By the time he visits Bruno again, he has written a book and the friends drink grappa into the night pondering who is wiser, the man who visited the world's eight mountains or the one who scaled Mount Sumeru, which is situated at its centre. Recognising their journeys, Bruno claims to be the winner and they laugh.
On his return to the Himalayas, Pietro meets Asmi (Surakshya Panta) and they become an item. Bruno is pleased for him, but disappointed that Pietro won't be able to spend as many summers in the Alps, as he has another book to write and feels he must strike while he's in vogue. Such is their bond, however, that they only want the other to be content. Pietro is hurt, therefore, when he sees Lara and Bruno arguing about paying their bills. She accuses him of being a dreamer detached from reality and this hits Pietro harder having found Giovanni's entries in the visitors' book left in a keep box beneath a cross on his favourite peak.
Hearing that Bruno has lost everything, Pietro comes back from Nepal. They meet at Barma Drola and spend their time in silence. One night, Pietro asks when Bruno is going to see his daughter again and implores him not to turn out like his father. Deeply offended, Bruno orders Pietro to leave, even though it's a winter night. Next morning, he collects his things and descends to Grana. He finds Lara waitressing and sad to have fallen out of love with Bruno. But Pietro can't abandon him and returns to the hut to make his peace.
Bruno blames himself for letting the business get too big, when all he wanted was the simple life. He reassures him that he will be fine, as the mountain would never harm him. But Pietro gets a call from Laura saying that a helicopter rescue party found no sign of Bruno, even though the cabin was snowed in. She asks if Pietro thinks that Bruno would have let himself perish, but he swears he had no morbid thoughts.
In voiceover, Pietro admits he lied and he feels sad that Barma Drola will fall into disrepair because he doesn't have the heart to return and repair the roof. Instead, he returns to Asmi and the realisation that he is condemned to a lifetime of wandering between the eight mountains without his brother.
Often feeling like a compact cross between Marco Tullio Giodardana's The Best of Youth (2003) and Edgar Reitz's Heimat (1984-2004), this is an involving, moving, and occasionally frustrating chronicle of an abiding friendship. The boxiness of Ruben Impens's outstanding cinemtography reinforces the sense of affinity, but the vistas are nonetheless imposing and provide the rugged backdrop to the shifting fortunes of the city slicker with a wanderer's soul and the mountain dweller who can't resist the call of home.
Bearded for much of the time, Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi splendidly pick up the baton handed over by the excellent Lupo Barbiero and Cristiano Sassella, as the isolated tweenagers who develop a bond that remains strong over distances and decades. There are times when the screenplay takes changes in status and attitude for granted, most notably when Pietro becomes a writer and Bruno becomes a farmer with a family. It also occasionally feels odd that the pair exist in a bubble that seems unbuffeted by the social, economic, and political events of their lifetime. But Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch are so focussed on their protagonists that secondary characters are sketchily limned, with Lara particularly coming from nowhere to change the dynamic of the narrative without the audience knowing anything about her. She's fully rounded compared to Asmi, however, who is left as a smiling paragon of exotic virtue, who seems not to mind Pietro's wanderlust. Francesca similarly lacks depth, which rather undermines her pivotal role as a mother to both boys.
More might have been made of Pietro's prodigal years, although the innate trust between the pair precludes any rivalry or tension. It does, however, leave a chunk out of Pietro's development as a man and leaves him feeling a little hollow when it comes to his emotions and intellect. There's also a tendency to accept as a horny handed montanaro Bruno, when he clearly feels deeply about the mountains and his accumulated kin. Considering how much visual emphasis is placed upon the textures of the rocks, the sparseness of contextual
details seems curious.
Dotted around the soundtrack, the folky numbers by Swedish singer-songwriter Daniel Norgren enhance the melancholic tone that makes this so affecting and compelling. But, with so much happening off screen, it's left to the forbidding beauty of the mountainscapes to drive home how fragile we are and how briefly we linger.
THE BLUE CAFTAN.
Having studied journalism in London after taking her degree, Maryam Touzani returned to Morocco to direct the provocative childhood shorts, When They Slept (2012) and Aya Goes to the Beach (2015). In between, she made the prostitution documentary, Sous ma vieille peau (2014), which husband Nabil Ayouch turned into the drama, Much Loved (2015). The pair also collaborated on the screenplay for Ayouch's Razzia (2016), in which Touzani starred. Now, having made her feature bow with Adam (2019), she tackles the contentious issue of same sex desire in a notoriously homophobic society in The Blue Caftan.
Halim (Salem Bakri) is a maalem, or master tailor, with a shop in the medina of the north-western city of Salé. As the making of bespoke caftans takes time and intricate skill, the trade is dying out and Halim is unable to find an apprentice with the patience to learn. He works with his wife, Mina (Lubna Azabal), who has been battling breast cancer and is steadily becoming weaker. She is devoted to her husband, but she is also aware that he is gay and frequently slips out for anonymous encounters at the local hammam bathhouse.
Mina is concerned by the looks Halim gives new assistant Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) when he changes his shirt or shows him how to cut a pattern. However, he seems eager to learn and works diligently, whether winding threads or running errands. He even rises above Mina's accusation that he has stolen some pink fabric, as he has been working since he was eight and knows that money goes as easily as it comes.
When a customer (Mounia Lamkimel) commissions a blue caftan, Mina scolds her for suggesting that Halim uses a sewing machine to speed things along. She reminds her that her husband is a craftsman and that perfection takes time. He is amused by her snappishness and responds when she tries to arouse him in bed. Halim even takes her to the local café and laughs when she cheers a goal for the wrong team while smoking his pipe.
On the way home, however, Mina gets cross with Halim for kowtowing to a policeman who demands to see their papers. She has a relapse, but refuses to go to the hospital, as they have wasted enough money on tests and scans and she is now content to trust God. Halim opens the shop without her and annoys a woman by correcting her over the colour of the petroleum blue caftan and she storms out grumbling that he's not the only tailor in the medina.
Enjoying being alone with Youssef, Halim teaches him embroidery and needlecraft. He's almost disappointed to find Mina sufficiently recovered to have cooked rfissa as a treat and says nothing when she announces she is fit for work. While being pleased to be back, however, Mina is miffed when the fabric salesman informs her that she had returned some pink material by accident and she hides it rather than having to apologise to Youssef.
Left alone after dealing with an awkward customer, Youssef rests his head on Halim's shoulder and declares his love. However, the older man knows the risk they run and orders Youssef to pick up the threads on the floor. Hurt, he quits on the spot and Halim returns home to find Mina suffering. The doctor tells him that her fight is nearly over and Halim spends the next week nursing her. Eventually, Youssef comes to check up on them and he assures Mina that he is taking good care of the store and he exchanges a meaningful glance with Halim as he takes the keys to open up.
When he next calls, Youssef brings the caftan so Halim can keep working. He also buys Mina some tangerines and she says sorry for not having told him about the pink silk. Sitting up in bed and looking frail, she asks his forgiveness and he rushes out to sob in Halim's arms and Mina feels conflicted emotions, as she knows how lonely Halim has been because his father had never forgiven him for the fact that his mother had died giving birth.
As Youssef spends more time at the apartment, even cooking Mina's meals, she warms to him. She coaxes him into dancing with her to the radio blaring from a neighbour's shop and Halim joins in. They smile, as she entrusts Halim to Youssef's care. That night, he apologises for having been unable to control his urges and, as she rests her head on his shoulder, she assures him that he has always been a noble and dependable spouse. He washes her hair and feeds her peeled tangerine segments and she smiles gently at their sweetness and the tenderness of his gestures.
Next morning, with the caftan finished, Mina sends Halim and Youssef to the hammam. Their fingers touch, as they lie together in the steam and they kneel beside each other at the bedside after Mina passes away in the night. Having helped her undress and traced his finger along the scar on her left breast, Halim had sat with her making slight adjustments to the caftan.
He appals the mourners by dressing Mina in the magnificent garment before carrying her on a bier with Youssef through the empty streets to the vast cemetery. As the film ends, the camera roves around the café, where men of all ages are chatting. Some are holding sleeping children and, the middle of them all, Halim and Youssef drink their coffee with no one any the wiser about their friendship.
Impeccably played by Lubna Azabal and Salem Bakri, this is an intimate and deeply poignant portrait of a marriage that has survived its vicissitudes because it was firmly founded in respect. Mina takes pride in Halim's artistry and thrives on the status it bestows upon her in the community. He is grateful to her for providing the love he never experienced as a child and for turning a blind eye to those times he failed to suppress his need for male contact.
In the shop, they are a team and that's where Mina feels most threatened by Youssef, as he can assist Halim in ways she cannot. Moreover, as she begins to feel death encroaching, she craves closeness and fears that her husband is developing feelings for the handsome newcomer that go beyond the physical lust he satiates at the hammam. Such is her love, however, that she recognises that Halim will need Youssef once she's gone and gives him her blessing.
Touzani shows finesse in discussing underlying themes that she knows will raise hackles in her homeland and across the Islamic world. Halim is never seen praying, although Mina kneels each night to the service that echoes through the medina. Nassim El Mounabbih's excellent sound design captures the bustle of the enclave, as well as the silence in which Halim works under the watchful gaze of Virginie Surdej's camera, which also revels in the colours and textures of the fabrics, threads, and braids. Production designers Emmanuel De Meulemeester and Rachid El Youssfi deftly contrast the ambiance of the shop and the apartment, which is reinforced by the measured contributions of composer Kristian Eidnes Andersen and editor Nicolas Rumpl, as Touzani laments the passing of an ancient artform and advocates greater tolerance in a society edging back towards conservatism after the modernist surge provided by the Arab Spring.
THE DAM.
Born in Beirut, but based in Paris, Ali Cherri spent 2021 as artist in residence at the National Gallery in London. Intrigued by the connection between landscape, people, and politics, he launched a study of `the geography of violence' with the shorts, The Disquiet (2013) and The Digger (2015). He now completes the trilogy with his debut feature, The Dam. Set in Sudan, this densely symbolic allegory has its striking moments, as well as one disturbingly gratuitous one. Yet, for all its studiously gnomic Tarkovskyisms, it doesn't quite pack the envisaged intellectual punch.
In the shadow of the Chinese-built Merowe Dam in northern Sudan, brickmaker Maher (Maher El Khair) toils in the mud with his companions. The radio and television news is focussed on the demonstrations happening in major cities against long-standing president, Omar al-Bashir. Maher watches footage on his phone, but doesn't discuss the events with his co-workers. He declines to join them in the Nile after hours, as he doesn't trust the current once the dam sluices are open. Instead, he borrows a motorbike and strikes out across the desert to a spot where he is building a large mound out of mud. As we only see him in silhouette, it's impossible to tell what he's trying to achieve.
During the heat of the day, the boss arrives and starts paying the workers through his car window. One complains about a shortfall, so he drives off, leaving some without cash. After hours, Maher goes to borrow the bike and sets off when he can't find the owner. Midway to his site, he pauses to watch a vulture circling in the sky above him. Pressing on, he toils until nightfall on a totem similar to the Golem, only with twigs for arms and holes in its head for eyes.
The next day, news comes that the army has stepped in to restore order and remove the president from office. There's no reaction from the men, who set fires under the brick kiln and take shelter from the smoke. Afterwards, Maher washes in a nearby stream and a dog laps at the water, which discolours red from a sore that has developed on Maher's back.
Unable to sleep, Maher hears a strange noise and ventures out to investigate. Much to his amazement, he seems his mud figure towering out of the moonlight. It warns him to stop wasting his time on a perilous journey that can only end in disappointment. Having ridden into town to get his back looked at, Maher checks up on the mud creature. It has dried in the sun and started to seep liquid from a crack in its side, which Maher repairs with a bottle of water and some soothing massage.
While stacking bricks, Maher hears that the friend in a Barcelona shirt who accompanied him to town has not returned to camp. Knowing he had gone to the dam, Maher sets off to find him and hauls his body out of the water. After a purification ceremony, the burial takes place near the site and the boss shows up after darkness, with his radio blaring and coloured lights twinkling in his rear windscreen.
Returning to the totem, Maher lies beside it listening to the radio. The dog that had repeatedly tried to befriend him watches him from a rock. As it starts to rain, Maher drives phallic poles into the figure and slathers mud around them. When he wakes next morning, however, the colossus has vanished and tears trickle down Maher's face, as he sits disbelievingly on his rickety wooden scaffolding.
After a day alone in the wilderness listening to voices proclaiming a new beginning on the radio, Maher hears the dog whining as the night draws in. He offers it some food and it gently accepts, only for him impassively to bludgeon it to death. At first light, Maher trudges back across the desert, pausing only when the monolith appears and asks the source of his torment and how far he is willing to go to find release.
Returning to the site, he finds the others working by floodlight. A campfire sets light to a pair of trousers on a washing line and a blaze consumes a nearby mound of straw. The white heat is superimposed on Maher's face as he watches without emotion.
While bathing in the stream the next day, Maher notices that his lesion has healed. As he lowers himself into the water, we cut to a torrent gushing forth from the dam. In a calmer stretch, Maher bobs to the surface and smiles as his creation begins to subside in the flow. With a huge sun hanging low in a murky sky, Maher swims away, as the screen turns black - but his fate can only be guessed at, along with much else in this challenging and rarely accommodating saga.
Developed in conjunction with French director Bertrand Bonello and writer-producer Geoffroy Grison, this rumination on Sudan's past and present premiered during the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Clearly, the topic has been much on Cherri's mind, as his mixed-media installation, `Of Men and Gods and Mud', earned him the Silver Lion for Most Promising Artist at the 2022 Venice Bienniale.
In fact, he first hit upon the idea of using the brickworks after visiting Merowe in 2017. Acting on a neo-realist impulse, he cast non-professionals like Maher El Khair and started shooting just as the uprising against Omar al-Bashir began. As his crew departed to cover the situation in Khartoum, Cherri decided to incorporate the coup into his scenario. But Covid prevented him from completing the project until 2021.
Returning for his close-up was a street dog named Nimr, whose off-camera demise has earned The Dam a certain notoriety. Cherri is undecided whether the animal is sacrificed because Maher believes it is trying to temper his rebellious fervour or whether it's a figment of his febrile imagination, like the moving mud monster. Wherever the truth lies, Cherri avers that the film is about the emancipation of the imagination, as resistance to tyranny can only start when freedom is envisaged.
It's easier to deduce this from publicity interviews than from the feature itself. But, while the more enigmatic elements have an enervating effect, this is a visually arresting picture, thanks to the compositional ingenuity of Cherri and Bassem Fayad, who was his cinematographer for the entire Telluric Trilogy. As Maher floats off into the sunset (or is it a sunrise?), we're none the wiser about what the totem is supposed to represent or whether it's rooted in Sudanese mythology or symbolises the Manasir community that was evicted when its ancient homeland was commandeered for the dam.
We're also left to surmise why Maher chose such a remote ravine for his location, why he kept it from his equally oppressed colleagues, and how he managed to make so much mud in the middle of a desert during the dry season. But where would film art be without a little mystery? It's just a shame that Cherri has chosen not to make the companion pieces about earthquakes in Lebanon and the 5000 year-old necropolis in Sharjah available online, especially as the decision somewhat whiffs of cultural elitism.
DEAD SHOT.
Ronan Bennett is an acclaimed novelist, who is known to filmgoers for scripting Antonia Bird's Face (1997) and The Hamburg Cell (2004), as well as Michael Mann's Public Enemies. He also has such celebrated small-screen titles to his credit as Hidden (2011), Top Boy (2011-19), and Gunpowder (2017). When he was 19, however, Bennett was sent to Long Kesh after a juryless Diplock court convicted him of murdering Inspector William Elliott of the Royal Ulster Constabulary during a 1974 IRA-sanctioned bank robbery.
He was released the following year after the verdict was deemed unsafe. After completing his education, Bennett co-wrote the memoir of Paul Hill, a member of the Guildford Four, who were wrongfully jailed for pub bombings in Guildford and Woolwich. Bennett now returns to the 1970s to collaborate with co-directors Charles and Thomas Guard on Dead Shot, which uses the Troubles as a backdrop to a cat-and-mouse thriller.
While serving with the British Army in Armagh in 1975, Henry Tempest (Aml Ameen) accidentally kills Carol (Máiréad Tyers), the pregnant wife of IRA man, Michael O'Hara (Colin Morgan), who is wounded during the ambush. Spirited back to London by Special Branch officer, Holland (Mark Strong), Tempest lays low with singer girlfriend, Ruth (Sophia Brown). However, Keenan (Tom Vaughn-Lawlor), O'Hara's headmaster commander, stages a funeral and arranges for him to cross to Britain with sniper wingman Peadar Twomey (Dara Devaney) and stay in a safe house with compatriots Quinn (Steve Wall), Hogan (Caolan Byrne) and Lynch (Stephen McMillan), who are awaiting instructions to continue a bombing campaign.
Holland has recruited Tempest to be part of an undercover unit to seek and destroy terrorist cells. They think O'Hara is dead and are only alerted to his presence when an informer spots him at the boutique where Ruth works. He is led away from the cops by Keenan's courier, Catherine (Felicity Jones), who informs O'Hara that he will be allowed to target Tempest after he has planted a bomb at Paddington Station.
O'Hara plots with Twomey to hit the tyres of Tempest's car when he responds to the station emergency, so he can finish him off. But his cohorts ignore the 30-minute warning and the bomb goes off early and Quinn, Lynch, and Hogan are killed in a gun battle with the cops. Tempest's vehicle crashes, but he survives the hail of bullets from O'Hara's machine gun and is able to escape when the Ulsterman is hit by a car while chasing him.
Ruth wants nothing more to do with him, but Holland needs him to eliminate O'Hara. He is still bent on revenge. But Keenan wants him to hit Holland, as he had supervised the torture of prisoners, and he threatens to murder O'Hara's dairy farmer mother, Fiadh (Andrea Irvine), unless he co-operates. Catherine is disillusioned by Keenan's exploitative hatred and O'Hara is surprised to discover he is her father. However, he warns her that she stands little chance of fleeing to Boston and starting afresh, even though he plans to kill Keenan himself.
Holland tells Tempest to forget about O'Hara and return to Ireland at the head of a death squad. But he knows he will never be safe until O'Hara is dispatched and he abducts Catherine to take him to a rendezvous on the coast. She sneaks away from her car to warn O'Hara, but he decides against following her across the dunes in order to confront Tempest. Hiding behind an abandoned car on the beach, O'Hara's disarms Tempest. However, he's been wounded in the stomach and can't pull the trigger, as he slumps to his knees and admits he was as responsible for his wife's death as his nemesis.
As Catherine takes a trawler to her new life, Tempest helps Ruth decorate her new shop. As he steps out for paint, however, he is gunned down by Twomey, who has been staking him out from an overlooking rooftop. A freeze frame of Ruth kneeling beside her man slowly turns red, as the credits start to roll.
Inspired by Steven P. Moysey's book, The Road to Balcombe Street, this is a grittily effective man hunt that makes O'Hara's vendetta against Tempest the crux of the matter rather than Irish independence. That said, there's a ruthlessness about the modus operandi of both Holland and Keenan that gives this the air of a gangland showdown in which the footsoldiers are merely pawns being manoeuvred by psychopaths who enjoy their power. Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Mark Strong's restrained performances echo each other, as do those of Colin Morgan and Aml Ameen, who manage to give their hard men the hint of a soft centre through their dealings with Felicity Jones and Sophia Brown.
Production designer Tom Sayer, cinematographer Matthias Rudh, and editor Ted Guard make solid contributions, as do composer Max de Wardener and costumier Elle Wilson. The Guards direct edgily, with the use of a clip from Camberwick Green during the raid on the Kentish Town flat being as chilling as the scenes in which Twomey shoots his faithful dog in order to accompany O'Hara to the mainland and in which Keenan informs Fiadh that her son is dead. Indeed, these small moments are more notable than the more generic gunfights and chases, which smack of being cut-price Michael Mann homages. The script is more original, however, as it pits justice against political expediency in showing how dogmatic ideology and escalating violence suck in everyone involved while solving nothing.