Historical fiction is what’s happening at the movies this week, with a side serving of current events in two more features. The big, plush beach-read epic among them is The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas’ adventure classic being given an extravagant new three-hour visualization by the French writing-directing team of Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patelliere. Pierre Niney of Frantz and Yves Saint Laurent plays Edmond Dantes, a sailor of humble origin made good, until a jealous rival has him framed as an agent of the exiled Napoleon. Years later, he escapes an island prison and poses as a wealthy foreigner to insinuate himself into the worlds of the three men (Bastien Bouillon, Laurent Lafitte, Patrick Mille) who’d orchestrated his fate—and have profited from more crimes since.
Even with its narrative somewhat altered and compacted from Dumas’ sprawling original (which was first published as a serial between 1844-46), this remains a flamboyantly old-fashioned tale of credulity-stretching intrigue and coincidence. We seldom see its like on the big screen anymore—or maybe we do, but these days it’s more likely to take the overtly fantastical form of a Batman movie or the like. This lavish production does not shy from going over-the-top in its ostentatious settings, flashy drone shots or bombastic orchestral score. Still, it all pretty much works, particularly once the elaborate revenge scheme kicks in around mid-point.
It’s period popcorn entertainment on a grand scale, no less enjoyable for being more than a bit theatrically shameless. The Count of Monte Cristo begins opening around the Bay Area on January 3; likely SF venues (not yet confirmed at presstime) were the AMC Kabuki and Metreon.
As strikingly bleak in its handsome B&W austerity as The Count is eye-candy colorful, The Girl With the Needle from Danish director Magnus von Horn (whose prior Sweat we reviewed here) weaves fictional elements around a shocking criminal case from a century ago. In 1919 Copenhagen, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a clothing-factory seamstress whose husband hasn’t come back from WWI service, and may well be dead. She is seduced by her wealthy boss (Jorgen Fjelstrup), but any dreams of a wealthy, stable future with him get squelched by a first/last meeting with his imperious mother.
Now pregnant and desperate, with legal abortion not an option, Karoline finds herself aided by a stranger met by chance. Middle-aged Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) seems to be in the business of helping just such poor young women, and placing their unwanted children in “good homes.” But it is not until she’s become an integral part of Dagmar’s ongoing operation that Karoline realizes her benefactress is secretly a monster—a sort of matricidal equivalent to Sweeney Todd. It is that figure who’s based on a real-life one, her trial leading to major changes in child-protective laws; and the formidable Dyrholm is impressive as always in the role.
But primary focus here is on fictive Karoline, who is not very interesting or even terribly sympathetic. The facts on record are so much more powerful than what von Horn chooses to portray, his choices end up seeming rather inscrutable, despite the film’s compelling atmosphere and aesthetics. It’s an arresting exercise in many respects that nonetheless proves somewhat frustrating. Girl opens Fri/3 at SF’s Roxie, with other Bay Area venues to follow.
Taking place a few years earlier on the far opposite ends of Eurasia is Harbin from South Korean writer-director Woo Min-ho, of prior hit political thrillers Inside Men and The Man Standing Next. It’s set in 1909, four years after a multinational treaty forced Korea to basically become a colony of Japan following the latter’s winning the Russo-Japanese War. Abandoned by allies (including the US), nationalists formed resistance groups to combat the encroachment of further Japanese imperialism, among them the Korean Independence Army. Ahn (Hyun Bin) is fighting in their ranks when they score a combat victory over some surprised Nippon troops. But he insists on honoring international war-crimes rules by not executing some captured personnel, despite his own men’s objections. That turns out to be a bitterly regretted decision, because spared high-ranking officer Mori (Park Hoon) soon seizes an opportunity to massacre nearly all Ahn’s comrades.
To redeem himself, Ahn decides he’ll make it his mission to assassinate Japan’s Prime Minister as he travels across China to meet with Russian diplomats, orchestrating deals that will secure Korea’s subjugation. This involves a labyrinth of undercover intrigue, arms acquisition, betrayal, shootouts, and so forth, with a mole conveying most of these planned guerrilla actions to the relentless Mori before they can occur.
Dense with background details and explication that may be somewhat daunting to non-Korean audiences, Harbin nonetheless maintains interest with a somber, tense mood spiked by occasional outbursts of violence. It’s handsomely produced on impressive locations, from spectacular mountain and desert landscapes to myriad interiors whose dark look amplifies the surreptitious nature of the characters’ activities. A history lesson framed as heroic action-suspense tale, Harbin may for Western viewers recall starry big-budget WW2 espionage epics of the 1960s like Where Eagles Dare and Von Ryan’s Express—though it’s a bit less heavy on the swaggering machismo. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/3.
Another fact-inspired new drama has gotten a divisive response, with raves and awards from some quarters, while others have found it curiously alienating. I’m sorry to say I landed on the debit side of that divide—sorrier still because the source material seemed such a natural for the screen. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys provided a succinctly powerful portrait of slavery long after the official end of slavery, via abuses visited on boys at a very long-running fictive Florida boys’ reform school (in real life the now-shuttered Dozier School). Its protagonist gets sent there unjustly as a juvenile in the early 1960s, and is lucky to survive the experience. Much later, he lives to see the institution investigated, uncovering decades of brutality including rape, beatings, and the unmarked graves of former wards who supposedly “ran away” or simply “disappeared.”
Nickel Boys (the “the” has been dropped) is a first narrative feature for RaMell Ross, who previously had turned his sojourn teaching photography in rural Alabama into a fine poetical documentary of life there. Hale County This Morning, This Evening was oblique but evocative, offering little in the way of concrete storytelling yet providing heady, lyrical insight into a place and culture.
But Whitehead’s book is full of vivid incident, character dynamics, and historical context; it’s not the sort of thing that lends itself to flavorful abstraction. Whatever led Ross to make the decisions he makes, they didn’t work for me: He has shot this intensely dramatic story entirely in the first-person, initially limited to the perspective of teenaged Elmwood (Ethan Herisse), then also that of Turner (Brandon Wilson), who becomes his only real friend at the dreaded “Nickel Academy.”
Their travails rendered murky by a POV in which we see the abuser, but not the abused (Ross and Joslyn Barnes’ screenplay tends to leave those acts to our imagination anyway), this is a movie whose high-minded experimentalism ends up only muffling the impact of its material. The effect is rather like reading a novel entirely written in the second person: It’s a gimmick that can be pulled off, yes, but why would you want to? The performers (also including Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, and Jimmie Fails) are good, albeit handicapped by the alienating technique. Some, like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother, succumb to overstatement when repeatedly asked to play entire scenes directly to the camera, rather than a fellow actor.
The external threads Ross weaves in (often utilizing archival footage) involving the concurrent Civil Rights movement, “space race” etc. do ultimately pay off in making this long sit achieve a kind of complex, essayistic dimensionality. But those 15 minutes or so of Chris Marker-like montage succeed at the cost of The Nickel Boys, which will have to wait for a more straightforward future translation to realize the impact that fairly leapt off Whitehead’s pages, and which should have provided no obstacle to replication in this medium. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/3.
More direct depictions of grave present-tense injustices are on display in two more new films. Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War centers on three Ukrainian artists living in the vicinity of devastated Kharkiv, very near the Russian border. Originally they’d all lived in Crimea, yet another “life stolen from us by Russia’s occupation.” Finding themselves in a new war zone, they maintain their disciplines as a form of protest: Cinematographer Andrey Stefanov keeps filming, including the mines and IUD’s now littering their countryside, while married couple Leontyev and Anya Stasenko continue creating ceramic miniatures that now offer commentary on this nation’s appalling day-to-day reality.
Occasionally bringing those whimsical figures to “life” via animation, Porcelain War can seem a bit twee, particularly when compared to the many more bluntly powerful documentaries about Ukraine the last couple years. But in its second half, the film acquires some power of its own, as we watch Slava train as a weapons expert for the Ukrainian Special Forces, and Andrey must cope with sending his children into exile for their own safety. There’s even gritty you-are-there footage of combat missions. Ultimately, the film’s strength lies in showing how art can retain its relevance, and artists their artistry, under the most antagonistic circumstances.
Likewise, From Ground Zero: Stories From Gaza is not the most hard-hitting of recent features about Palestinians’ plight, but it benefits from a diversity of approach to a grim subject. Conceived by Rashid Masharawi, the project brings together 22 filmmakers for as many individual contributions to a nearly two-hour omnibus reflecting everyday life in Gaza. As amply demonstrated here, that life is to a large degree now spent in refugee camps, or combing through the debris of homes newly bombed to rubble—sometimes still hoping to find survivors buried beneath.
There are sequences that are straight documentary reportage, others more in the realm of personal essay, plus a fair number of dramatized vignettes. In lighter moments, we see a standup comedian provide some escapist relief for refugees; animation and marionettes are utilized elsewhere.
Not everything here is good, with a wince-worthy moment or two, as during a bit that’s like a tacky amateur music video on YouTube. But the immediacy of so many voices in front of and behind the cameras does generate considerable insight. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved when at one point various children are interviewed, and one notes that her baby brother hasn’t yet acquired the power of speech—his experience to date has only taught him to imitate the sound of an ambulance siren.
Porcelain War and From Ground Zero both open Fri/3 at SF’s Roxie Theater, the former also at the Rafael Film Center in Marin.
