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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
"Daybreak": Not much winter light from Sweden
Speaking of European angst, the portrait of the decaying Swedish welfare state in Björn Runge's wrenching "Daybreak" won't be any too comforting to traumatized blue-state Americans dreaming of an idyllic refuge elsewhere. Runge's films, not often seen in the United States, come out of the Ingmar Bergman school of cathartic emotional drama, but the 21st century Swedes in "Daybreak" are less concerned with the death of God or the fate of Woman than with the right combination of booze, drugs and money to get them through one long, dark night.
Again, we find ourselves in a distinctive provincial setting -- a small city in northern Sweden -- but Runge's three not quite interlinked yarns of modern anomie could probably be set in Hungary or England or Oklahoma. An older couple has lost all hope for the crime-ridden outside world and wants moonlighting bricklayer Anders (Magnus Krepper) to wall them up alive inside their suburban home. (They calculate that they have enough canned beans to survive for six years, maybe seven.) An embittered, deserted wife (Ann Petrén) stalks her ex-husband and makes money by selling her psychiatric medication to teenagers in a parking garage. Then there's a two-couple dinner party that makes the one in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" seem downright jolly, at which Agnes (Pernilla August) learns that her feckless, handsome husband Rickard (Jakob Eklund) has gotten the wife in the other couple pregnant.
If all this sounds fairly gloomy, well, I can't tell you that it isn't. But Runge is a top-notch filmmaker who deserves your attention, and if you're the kind of borderline masochist who can buckle your seatbelt and ride out the tremendous emotional turbulence, he delivers a genuine glimpse of daylight by the movie's end.
"Daybreak" is masterfully paced and constructed, and the performances are memorable. As the battling couple balanced between passion and hatred, August and Eklund (two of the leading standard-bearers in the prodigious tradition of Swedish film acting) will get the most notice, but Petrén, with tremendous effort, finally wins your sympathy for the rejected, shrill Anita, and Krepper's fundamentally decent Anders is the movie's moral anchor. When the sun comes up he's back home with his wife and daughter, planning to watch a movie and order a pizza. Life goes on, even after a night like this one.
"Daybreak" opens this week at the Film Forum in New York, with other cities to follow.
"Travellers & Magicians": Going nowhere fast, and loving it
I guess if the Kingdom of Bhutan had to wait this long for its first feature film, it might as well be as thoroughly engaging as Khyentse Norbu's "Travellers & Magicians." Going into this movie, I was thinking pretty much the same thing you're thinking now: A "village movie," as they say at film festivals, with pretty scenery, a treacle-slow plot you can't really understand, and dutiful life lessons that make the whole thing seem like eating your vegetables. Well, forget it. Norbu's dramatic debut (he also made "The Cup," which I guess was Bhutan's first feature-length documentary) is a wry, knowing comedy. It isn't going anywhere, but the journey is highly entertaining, detouring along the way into a mysterious fable out of Zhang Yimou's "Ju Dou" (or, for that matter, out of James M. Cain's "The Postman Always Rings Twice").
And hey, that pretty scenery is nothing to sneeze at. Bhutan is a landlocked country in east-central Asia, squished between India and China in the Himalayan foothills. Our hero, Dondup (Tsewang Dandup), he of the shaggy, '70s-style mane and the boombox crammed with crappy Western pop-rock, is a minor government official in a remote mountain town. When a long-awaited letter arrives from a relative or friend in America (Norbu doesn't waste time on the details), Dondup seizes on the opportunity for his big break. All he has to do is get to the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu, inside two days, and he'll be leavin' on a jet plane, bound for the land of Axl Rose and other big dreamers.
But small-talking villagers make him miss the bus, and Dondup finds himself stranded on the roadside with an assortment of other pilgrims and hitchhikers, on a light-hearted symbolic voyage that starts to resemble "The Canterbury Tales," or maybe the endlessly digressive tales of Diderot's "Jacques the Fatalist." Dondup is bound for America, dammit, and he has no time at first for the chatty Buddhist monk (Sonam Kinga), the silent apple merchant (Ap Dochu) or the elderly papermaker with a beautiful daughter (Sonam Lhamo) who become his companions.
