2007 (Belgium / Netherlands)
Director: Nic Balthazar
Viewed: November 21, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema)
From its loopy credit sequence—presented as though the film were an online fantasy role-playing game—it’s apparent that Ben X relies on first-time director Nic Balthazar’s assured familiarity with its narrative elements. Based on his own novel, the film confidently tackles subjects that should be challenging to translate to cinema: video games, digital socializing, and the daily tribulations of Asberger Syndrome. Looking suspiciously twenty-something and relying too heavily on bug-eyed cowering, Greg Timmermans portrays Ben, a withdrawn kid who is only comfortable in an online RPG. Indeed, Ben approaches the real world as a game, a strategy that enables him to navigate relentless bullying and social confusion. With furious, often flailing stylization, Balthazar shows us a cruel, overwhelming world through Ben’s eyes, while snippets of grave talking heads foretell that Something Bad will happen. Although Timmermans’ cartoonish presence never quite solidifies Ben’s profound agony, Ben X searingly engages as it follows his conflict with a pair of sociopathic thugs and his quest to meet up with an online romantic prospect (Laura Verlinden). Unfortunately, the film’s novel style and potent aura of despair unravel when Balthazar starts cutting corners for a twist conclusion that’s both implausible and cheaply moralizing.
The overdue documentary response to Frank Marshall’s 1993 drama, Alive, Stranded conveys with profound respect and tremendous upwellings of emotion the story of 
The Pope’s Toilet functions as both a wild-eyed melodrama and a rather pointed anti-papal jab. Directors César Charlone and Enrique Fernández rely on an apposite bitterness for the emotional foundation of their film. And why not?: There’s nothing to suggest that this desperate, occasionally witty tale of a small-town Uruguayan smuggler and his get-rich-quick scheme—involving a pay toilet and Pope John Paul II’s 1988 visit to the region—will end happily. César Troncoso delivers an engaging turn as Beto, a grasping, defeated little man who seems incapable of thinking beyond the next week, despite his airy ambitions. However, The Pope’s Toilet calls out for a more appealing protagonist; Beto’s venality only seems mild compared to the corrupt border official who bedevils him. More interesting than their clumsy characterization is Charlone and Fernández’s ambivalence about the role of Catholicism in Uruguayan society. The pontiff’s visit is little more than a financial opportunity for Beto and his fellow villagers, one that proves ultimately hollow. The Pope’s Toilet asserts with a sharpness born of disillusionment that even the tangible blessings of Catholic faith are farcical, mere honeyed promises that do little to alleviate poverty.
The ragged comedic swagger of Sergej Stanojkovski’s marvelous Kontakt is a complement to the tragic realism of Aditya Assarat’s Wonderful Town. This fable of challenging, unlikely love in a contemporary Macedonia of slate skies and festering wounds ambles along with a soulful awareness of human misery. The avaricious schemes of a relation brings together two social castoffs: Habitual convict Janko (Nikola Kojo) grudgingly accepts a job to renovate the dilapidated villa where Zana (Labina Mitevska) convalesces after three years in a mental institution. They immediately dislike one another. However, this is not the convenient, overwrought antagonism of a screwball comedy, but a plausible defense thrown up by souls fed a diet of mistrust, anxiety, and hostility. Kontakt weaves in other narrative threads as well as Macedonian cultural and historical embellishments, but the odd relationship between Janko and Zana is at the forefront of the film. With bouts of dark chuckles and an effortless hand, Stanojkovski renders their fitful romance so gradually its believability fades away as a concern. Never mind that portly Janko is a violent misanthrope, or that skinny Zana is an emotional cripple. The first time Janko utters the word “sweetheart”—almost off-handedly—one’s heart thrills.
Richie Mehta’s fable of Delhi slums and mansions, Amal, aims quite explicitly to be a Diwali Gift of the Magi. While its Indian setting is rarely superfluous, Amal’s focus on the endurance of decency and the morally eroding nature of privilege is uncluttered and accessible. The film presents autorickshaw wallah Amal—portrayed with captivating subtlety by Rupinder Nagra—as just about the most honest, patient, and gentle soul in the world. His kindness towards a grumpy vagrant triggers an amazing destiny that rushes invisibly towards him, even as he struggles with the suffocating demands of clients, his mother, and an injured orphan under his care. Implausibility worries the edges of Amal’s character, but Nagra convinces with his tentative speech and nervous smiles. Some of the film’s characters border on cartoonish, and Mehta never quite attains a needed balance between the film’s sagging realism and its fairy tale glint. While the pacing staggers around a bit initially—Mehta seems reluctant to reach obvious conclusions and essential destinations—Amal picks up steam in its second half, when the twists and revelations quickly begin to click into place. It’s no kind of masterpiece, but it is a sweet and memorable tale.
In some respects, the war-rattled Pakistani setting of Benjamin Gilmour’s Son of a Lion is almost incidental. The film assumes the shape of a thousand other tales about a father-son conflict over values, rarely discovering novel territory. However, the contemporary relevance of its cultural specifics engage, as does its grubby dusting of authentic familial pain. Eleven-year-old Niaz (Niaz Khan Shinwari) works as an apprentice in the village gun shop owned by his harsh father (Sher Alam Miskeen Ustad), a devout, humorless veteran of the Afghani mujahideen. With sensitivity and a studious gaze, Gilmour reveals that the illiterate Niaz dreams of attending school, perhaps to study music, an aspiration encouraged by his urbane uncle in Peshawar. Sher Alam will have none of it: He thinks only of his glorious battles against the Russians, his notion of Pashtun masculinity inexorably bound up with his religiosity and lust for firearms. Gilmour eavesdrops on conversations that hint at the complexity of the mainstream street-level worldview in central Asia, one characterized by hand-to-mouth despair, political canniness, and disgust with terrorists. Yet Son of a Lion’s fundamental strengths are the heartbreaking performances from Shinwari and Ustad, who lend muscular pathos to a well-worn formula.
Evincing more canny perception for the beauty and tragedy of life than Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s mesmerizing but baffling creations, Aditya Assarat’s touching, wrenching Wonderful Town is a tearful gem of a film. A young architect, Ton (Anchalee Saisoontorn) arrives in a Thai coastal village devastated by the 2004 tsunami. For the duration of a local project, he takes a room at a run-down hotel managed by a shy young woman, Na (Supphasit Kansen). In a manner wholly natural and wracked with authentic heartache, we watch as Ton and Na slowly fall in love. Assarat positively revels in the sheer process of a tentative romance, the ballad of looks, words, and gestures that thrill something deep within the human spirit. With empathic clarity, Wonderful Town conveys the mystery of stirrings that seem beyond elucidation. However, Assarat is not satisfied with a mere joyful anecdote, and the film admittedly teeters a bit when he begins to summon a breeze that foretells calamity. Some viewers will likely walk away disgusted with Wonderful Town’s ultimately ruinous destination. I can only marvel that in the same film, Assarat is able to realize a film of such potent longing and such cold cruelty.
If Julie Taymor had been born in Jakarta, she might have created something like the surreal marathon of Opera Jawa. Garin Nugroho’s two-hour gamelan opera of the Javanese Ramayana will be wholly opaque to many Western audiences, but not due a dearth of visual spectacle or sheer cinematic novelty. Nugroho sets the tragic love triangle of Setyo, Siti, and Ludiro (that would be Rama, Sita, and Ravana for those more familiar with the Indian epic) in a contemporary rural setting. Exhibiting an eye for hallucinatory pomp and a divine patience for the operatic art form—which I found alternately dazzling and wearying—the director adds a welcome sparkle to what might otherwise be an aimless babble of exoticism to American viewers. Aimlessness is less a problem than the sharply disjointed nature of Nugroho’s storytelling; scenes dribble in without much purpose and fade away. The film is distracted, often to the point of exhaustion, with evoking tableaus and gestures rich in native semiotics, a language unfortunately lost on me. Opera Jawa has its treats, most notably a lively performance from the simian, goblin-faced Eko Supriyanto as Ludiro, but like a work from another planet, its appeal is limited.
Chao Wang’s Luxury Car strives to achieve two things: a socially relevant time capsule of China’s stumbling shift from languid rural patterns to glitzy urban rot, as well as a family melodrama about loss and secrecy. The film never quite succeeds at either, perhaps because Wang has little sense for how to effectively syncreticize these two currents. Qiming (He Huang), a schoolteacher from the countryside, comes to Wuhan to visit his urbanized daughter, Yanhong (Yuan Tian), and search for his son, missing for two years now. Unbeknown to Qiming, his daughter is working as a karaoke “escort,” and sleeping with her oily boss (He Huang). Wang studs Luxury Car with graceful moments that capture his themes with quiet assurance: Qiming gazing in bewilderment on a college campus he hasn’t seen in four decades, or Yanhong tearing away her roommate’s sex-drenched bed linens in shame. However, the film’s glacial pacing never conveys the emotional depth Wang hopes to reach, and one gets the sense that he’s slowing down to conceal his clumsy weaving of Luxury Car’s thematic elements. The result is a work too flimsy to support either its thriller twists or its endless sighs and hesitations.