The Trap (Klopka)
2007 (Serbia)
Director: Srdan Golubovic
Srdan Golubovic’s The Trap never hits the rattling neo-noir sweet spot that it aims for, partly because the director never proceeds beyond the story’s descriptive aspects. His themes laze on the surface, stated but not completely explored. Mladen (Nebojsa Glogovac), an engineer with an ailing young son, is offered a devil’s deal by a sinister stranger: murder a man I designate, and I will pay for your child’s operation. Glogovac delivers a scrawled, tormented performance, but Golubovic directs an unfortunate clinical gaze on Mladen’s plight, an odd choice given that The Trap’s most engaging potential angle is an excavation of the conflicted man’s headspace. Instead, Golubovic seems overly enamored with the tale’s twists–most uninspired, a few downright thrilling–and with conjuring the particular despair of Serbian class and cultural anxieties. There’s nothing particularly unpleasant about The Trap: It’s an entertaining thriller, and doesn’t engage in any hackneyed tricks to arrive at its destination. It’s also refreshingly free of stylized anxiousness, a gray, gritty breeze in the wake of Tornatore’s mesmerizing but exhausting The Unknown Woman. Still, it feels like a missed opportunity, a straightforward examination of criminality and economic hardship lacking the electricity of a denser thematic work.
O’Horten
2008 (Norway)
Director: Bent Hamer
If Ingmar Bergman and Wes Anderson had a love child, it might look something like Bent Hamer’s O’Horten, a compelling portrait of a life in transition, daubed with bits of illuminating strangeness. With a watchable blend of staid crispness and humorous insight, Baard Owe portrays Odd Horten, a taciturn, no-nonense train engineer on the cusp of retirement. The film follows Horten through a series of set pieces that can only loosely be termed a plot: a retirement party, selling his boat, purchasing a smoking pipe, meeting a drunk on the street. The film’s essence lies in its moments and gestures, rather than in the narrative inertia of linked scenes. In short, nothing really happens, but it’s a credit to Owe’s comforting performance and director Hamer’s unhurried empathy that it still engages. Uncanny sights pass us and Horten by–a man being arrested at a restaurant, a prone motorcyclist sliding past on an icy street–with Owe providing a subtle reaction and Hamer establishing a thematic context. Melancholy and determinedly gradual, it’s not the sort of film for everyone. Its potency lies in its slow discovery of a distinctively Scandinavian mood and its gentle probing of abstracts such as dignity and contentment.
The Class (Entre les murs)
2008 (France)
Director: Laurent Cantet
The humanistic power of Laurent Cantet’s wrenching, glorious The Class is undeniable. Its naturalistic cinematic language, serviceable and modest, never truly sizzles, but it doesn’t need to. Here is a film whose strength lies almost entirely in its vivid recreation of the intoxicating, dreadful humming of adolescence. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by François Bégaudeau, the film features Bégaudeau himself as a French instructor in inner-city Paris. François’ class is like a boat constantly on the verge of tipping over. His students are multi-cultural, rowdy, insolent, aggravated, and fiercely intelligent in staccato bursts. Yet Cantet and Bégaudeau eschew the feel-good moralizing of countless classroom dramas for electric realism, permitting the essential conflicts modern of French society (or any society for that matter) to swirl and surface naturally. In long, mesmerizing scenes of Bégaudeau herding his class through conjugation and composition, The Class conveys the cultural minefield and Sisyphean misery that its secondary education. Cantet refuses to simplify teachers as heroes, just as he resists painting every student as a potential convert to academic success. Ferocious and yet fragile, The Class is an astonishing work of social realism, one that caught my breath time and again.