Chico & Rita

Jazz is all about the rough edges. It’s smooth, seductive music but comes from the body, not from the mind, revealing color, improvisation and imagination.

So I should to be kinder to “Chico and Rita,” an Oscar nominee and animated musical that has all the style and class of a good jazz number but plays all the wrong notes.

It’s about a piano player and a nightclub singer in Havana who fall in love, work together briefly, but then split up as they make the big time in New York. The problem is that Chico (Eman Xor Ona) is a womanizing scamp and Rita (Limara Meneses) is an empty-headed broad with a great voice. They’re constantly on-again, off-again as these one-dimensional figures can’t go 10 minutes without cheating on each other, getting jealous and leaving in a huff. It’s the only real thing providing drama throughout the story, and all the political and racial discourse is shoed into the movie at the last minute.

The movie’s style has that jagged, amateurish aesthetic to it as well. It’s very simple cel shading, hard lines and no figurative depth within the frame, looking very colorful but very simplistic. You wish the whole movie looked like the stencil drawn dream sequence that references “Casablanca” and “On the Town.”

So the music is what drives the excitement, and “Chico and Rita” takes great pains at capturing the authentic Havana sound of the ‘40s, even paying attention to tiny cultural details to provide a little more life.

But if you wanted a fun musical that didn’t wallow in romantic clichés and melodrama, you could try something like “Sita Sings the Blues” and really learn a thing or two about culture. This is just more like elevator music.

2 ½ stars

Note: The movie is distributed by GKids, but this is not a kids movie, as it features drug use, swearing and nudity. Cartoon nudity, admittedly, but full frontal, sexually charged cartoon nudity all the same.

Rapid Response: Bananas

Most great artists need a few films to come into form. One of the great examples is the extremely prolific Woody Allen, whose early films like “Sleeper” and “Love and Death” were leaps and bounds goofier than “Annie Hall” and his later masterpieces.

But then even before those was “Bananas.” The immediate difference is the lack of the classic Allen typeface, Windsor, to open the credits of the film. These big bubble letters alone show a more animated, musical film than the sophisticated wordplay of the later ones. Allen actually proves himself to be a very gifted slapstick comic here, but he’s definitely not at home quite yet, and “Bananas” lacks some of his other films’ narrative elegance.

Allen plays an unhappy product tester who one day starts dating a political activist (Louise Lasser, one of Allen’s wives) going door to door for petition signatures. Unlike in “Annie Hall,” Allen is not the smartest person in the relationship. In fact, he’s a putz, and she breaks up with him claiming that he could never be a daring leader.

But prior to them breaking up, he booked tickets to a fake Latin American nation currently in a state of political upheaval. The government plans to murder Allen and blame the rebels, but he’s rescued by the rebels and lives with them until the dictator is overthrown. When the new leader proves to be mad with power as well, Allen himself steps in as the dictator of the nation, donning a fake beard and military garb. Hilarity ensues.

Most of this is pretty dumb. Gags like a harp player actually being in the closet when the emotional music kicks in is an old hat bit that someone like Mel Brooks did a lot better at around the same time. There’s also the joke where the clerk yells in front of an embarrassed Allen buying a porn magazine, “What’s the price of Orgasm?”

But then there’s the opening scene, which is as daring as anything Allen’s ever done. He gets Howard Kossel to provide play-by-play commentary for the assassination of the Latin nation’s current president, asking him questions like “How do you feel,” just as he’s at his last breath. Movies today aren’t this knowingly cartoonish and cynically upfront about death and the media.

If nothing else, we can see some great style and bravura in all of Allen’s dopey gags. His movies always looked like art house productions, with careful framing in the Academy aspect ratio and not like sketch comedy routines in a Mel Brooks movie. This is not a great film of his, but it arguably has more innovative flair than movies he’s made in the last 20 years.

CIFF Review: Something in the Air

“Something in the Air” is a rousing coming of age drama set in a time when personal rebellion took a back seat to all the political upheaval in the world. It’s 1971 in France, and for these kids its politics meets teen angst. It’s about finding yourself and what you believe in as the global stage itself, not just the lunch room table, asks you to pick a side.

Gilles (Clement Metayer) is a young outspoken political activist selling underground newspapers by day and vandalizing the high school by night. He and his classmates have honest lives and talents, but perhaps because of social pressure, they’ve wrapped themselves in these political conspiracies.

He begins exploring books and poetry, and yet he has beatniks telling him to watch what he reads. He is a talented and growing artist, and yet he has American hippies his age spewing philosophy about how he needs to find convictions. He starts a lovely relationship with the equally adventurous Christine (Lola Creton), but she thinks he’s more in love with his ex, Laure (Carole Combes), another free-spirit and drug addict who has more “freedom.”

What we see in Gilles is that his art, his love and his interests are all more noble and sincere than his politics. Without bending to melodrama or genre clichés, “Something in the Air” is a film about how this kid juggles all these conflicting ideas, finds his passion and maintains his voice.

It’s masterfully directed by Olivier Assayas (“Summer Hours,” “Carlos”), who has a way of capturing the energy, sexuality and mystique of the time period without dipping into a pop culture playbook. Usually he does it in long takes that don’t reveal themselves thanks to the film’s colorful and animated aesthetic. One of the best scenes takes place inside a rambunctious villa house party, with Assayas surveying elegantly. The motion of the camera and the activity on screen are on fire, and before long the scene quite literally ignites. It’s just one of the film’s many beautiful moments out of time.

3 ½ stars

CIFF Review: Like Someone in Love

There seem to be a lot of times in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in Love” that the characters ignore their phone. When they do answer, there’s something lost in translation.

I point out this minute detail because at times it seems to be the only thing to hold our attention in this film about communication between people. The film follows a narrative structure so stripped down that it is at once baffling, boring and beautiful.

It starts inside a bar of people talking and having fun, but the voice we hear is Akiko’s (Rin Takanashi) arguing with her boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase). Akiko is a call girl in Tokyo about to be sent out of town to spend the night with Takashi, an elderly, lonely and retired college professor (Tadashi Okuno). Takashi’s interest in her isn’t sexual, instead looking only for an evening of romance. But he doesn’t make that completely clear, and she falls asleep in his bed.

The next day, Noriaki mistakes Takashi to be Akiko’s grandfather and asks for his blessing in marriage. Suddenly the focus seems to shift to Noriaki and how he struggles to keep his fractured relationship built on lies together. He doesn’t know Akiko is a call girl, and when someone suggests that a photo in an ad looks a lot like her, he lashes out. He’s a scrawny kid capable of intense violence and anger.

Like Ozu, Kiarostami’s films have always been a modern example of deeply personal, slow cinema. And now this Iranian auteur completes his transformation by taking this trip to Japan for “Like Someone in Love.” Unlike his most recent masterpiece “Certified Copy,” Kiarostami is exploring mismatched relationships, philosophy and human nature not through a jumbled, experimental narrative, but a movie that bucks narrative altogether.

It is at times a maddeningly empty film. We sit and watch characters sleep in cars or wait on doorsteps, but Kiarostami surprises us with the new interactions and the new hints at backstory that come from nowhere, something that becomes even more obvious in the film’s captivating and undeniably abrupt ending.

One of the film’s finest scenes shows Akiko listening to voicemails in the backseat of a cab. They’re messages from her grandmother, who has come into town to see her but has been neglected and waiting all day. Now as Akiko is forcefully sent out on a job without time for her to rectify her mistake, we get an understanding of just how lonely her day has been. In her last message, she says she’ll wait patiently in front of a statue before the last train home departs. The cab circles a roundabout at the station at that moment, and there waiting under a streetlamp just as she said is a little old lady holding a suitcase. The image is sad enough, but Akiko asks the driver to go around once more so she can get another look.

It’s a heartbreaking moment, and one that just hints at the many flaws and depths of these characters. And yet it is perhaps a film I’ll have to see twice, one that is regrettably unclear about its intentions and its structure, requiring picking up on nuance on a second pass.

Perhaps that’s why Akiko asked to drive around again; we just need a better look.

3 stars

Off the Red Carpet – Week of 10/10 – 10/17

With “Argo” now in tow (my 3.5 star review), the Oscar race is starting to flesh out. Only a handful of films that will be major contenders for any awards have not yet been screened at festivals or to the press, those being “Les Miserables,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Django Unchained,” “The Hobbit,” “Hitchcock” and “Promised Land.” The question will be if “Argo” has the legs to go all the way given its somewhat middling performance at the box office (it earned about $19 million and was #2 behind “Taken 2”). It’ll surely get a Best Picture nomination and likely more, but only time will tell.

Here then is an updated look at some of the news of the week and a slightly tweaked list of predictions.

 “Flight” premieres at NYFF closing night

Robert Zemeckis’s first live action film since “Cast Away” is already being celebrated as great, complex studio filmmaking. Its strong outing practically cements Denzel Washington as a serious contender for Lead Actor and also has put John Goodman in the supporting conversation thanks to his other appearance this week in “Argo.”

Documentary Shorts Category has shortlist revealed

Eight short films have been selected as the potential five Oscar nominees from a list of 31 eligible titles. The list is as follows: (via Indiewire)

“The Education of Mohammad Hussein,” Loki Films
“Inocente,” Shine Global, Inc.
“Kings Point,” Kings Point Documentary, Inc.
“Mondays at Racine,” Cynthia Wade Productions
“Open Heart,” Urban Landscapes Inc.
“ParaÍso,” The Strangebird Company
“The Perfect Fit,” SDI Productions Ltd.
“Redemption,” Downtown Docs

“The Dark Knight Rises” in the hunt

Warner Bros. announced their For Your Consideration campaign this week, with the big surprise being the campaign for Anne Hathaway and “The Dark Knight Rises.” Hathaway’s role as Catwoman is being sold as a lead performance, which means she could find a spot in a slim field and be poised to not compete with herself in the supporting ranks for “Les Miserables.” See the whole Warner Bros. campaign.

James Gandolfini has secret part in “Zero Dark Thirty”

I’ll just leave this here. (via Entertainment Weekly)

Michael Moore comments further on controversial documentary branch

Michael Moore, never one to usually be opinionated and vocal (cough, cough), made further criticisms/explanations about his expectations regarding the new rules for nominating films in the Best Documentary category of the Oscars. He was a proponent for the new rules that make the nominating process more inclusive, but he feels certain films have taken advantage of these possibilities, leaving for a crop of films, 160 roughly, that is just too big a mountain to conquer. At the same time, he hopes to expand the number of voting members in the documentary branch for next year’s awards season. (via Indiewire)

Week 2 Oscar Predictions

Continue reading “Off the Red Carpet – Week of 10/10 – 10/17”

The Apartment (1960)

“And the girl…?”

The romantic comedy changed with those three little words in “The Apartment.” Shirley MacLaine played “the other woman,” the scandalous character who always broke up the true love. But here, she was the lonely girl forgotten by the love of her life, cast out, neglected and contemplating suicide. How did we miss her?

Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” is one of the groundbreaking comedies of all Old Hollywood. It gave the screwball comedy severity. Its characters were lonely, depressed and scummy, and it found a funny color amidst all the blue, proving to be heartwarming and filled with emotional pathos.

Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, an office drone in a movie that would inspire the image of the working man for decades to come. The desks stretching to infinity was inspired by King Vidor’s silent film “The Crowd,” but Wilder’s numerical facts of a singular employee in a massive insurance company seem to paint a broader picture of his workforce servitude.

To move up in the world, Baxter has agreed to a deal with the executives. They can use his apartment as a haven to take their mistresses. The company’s head-honcho, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray), promotes Baxter for the same reason, but his mistress is the lovely Fran Kubelik (MacLaine), the spritely elevator girl with the short haircut Baxter has a crush on.

The interesting thing about Baxter is that he’s living a lie that he’s not actually living. His neighbors and his landlady both think he’s a rambunctious party animal bedding a new girl each night and polishing off several bottles of liquor as well. He does need to wake up and smell the coffee, but for different reasons than his neighbors believe. We see him living completely mundanely, changing the channels on TV in the hopes of watching “Grand Hotel” only to be teased with more commercials. And in the short time he earns these new promotions, he earns none of the extra money, still straining pasta with a tennis racket and washing martini glasses by hand. When he takes another lonely woman home from a bar on Christmas Eve, he’s doing so out of complete depression. He’s like the guy not invited to the party but forced to clean up afterwards. Continue reading “The Apartment (1960)”

CIFF Review: Holy Motors

There’s a photographer in “Holy Motors” shooting pictures rapidly and blindly of a lifeless model dressed in gold as played by Eva Mendes. “Beauty! Beauty! Beauty,” he says in complete cartoonish astonishment.

At that moment, a hideous man dressed in a green leprechaun’s suit and no undershirt pushes his way to the front of the crowd and stands silently biting his decrepit fingernails. The man has long red hair plastered to the side of his head and speaks only gibberish. He’s made a scene.

The photographer turns to him and starts shooting photos of him. “Weird, weird. Weird!”

Is this how one should watch “Holy Motors,” the absurdist French drama by the cult French director Leos Carax? It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year and wowed audiences by being completely nutzo and was heralded as an underappreciated cult film because this year’s particular jury led by Nanni Moretti couldn’t possibly “get it.”

I saw it in a sold out screening at the Chicago International Film Festival Sunday night, where it was received by an audience that was half stunned and confused and half ecstatic.

I found myself in neither crowd, frustrated by this repugnant mishmash of a film that either has no point or all too much of one. If you’re going to make a surrealist masterpiece, my advice would be to not be disingenuous about it.

Luis Bunuel or David Lynch Carax is not, try as he might to put his star in a wig that shares the bizarre Lynchian swoosh. He’s made a film that revels in its own spontaneous style, modeling its half-baked ideas and genre spoofs only for us to gawk. The result is a series of avant-garde and art house shorts that have no commonalities, with the exception that its hero seems to smoke in every one. For every moment of “Holy Motors” that is tearful, erotic, giddy, suspenseful or chilling, Carax almost always has a way of ending each with a cheap visual gag. For all its visual flair and profundity, these segments resound as little more than stylized forgeries.

The film does not have a conventional narrative, if any at all, but it does have a protagonist, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant). We first see him walking out of a mansion and into a limo where he is followed by bodyguards in black sedans. His driver, Celine (Edith Scob), informs him he has nine appointments today.

In preparation for these, he dons wigs, face putty and makeup in front of a brightly lit dressing room mirror. When he steps out of the car, he has made a complete transformation into another person.

First we see him as a hobbled street beggar, unrecognizable and hopeless. Next he dons a black motion capture suit and performs martial arts for a dark, empty room full of infrared lasers. A tall, slender, faceless woman walks out and is bathed in red by the lights, and the two slide across each other’s bodies in sexual acrobatics. The resulting animation is two snake-like monsters having sex. In another segment we meet the leprechaun, who kidnaps Eva Mendes and takes her to a cave, gouges at flowers and her hair, tears her clothes to make a gold burka, then strips down himself to reveal a full on boner and falls asleep to the sound of her lullaby.

Now after all this, is there any part of you that could believe a segment with Oscar picking up his daughter from a party and driving her home in disappointment could be considered genuine?

Don’t all these dramatic segments, like when he’s talking to his daughter on his death bed, or when he’s dragging himself helpless to the limo after being stabbed in the neck, feel like a lie? Maybe all movies are kind of a lie, which leads to what I think “Holy Motors” is actually about.

Now, let me preface this analysis by saying that “Holy Motors” may not be about anything. If watching Bunuel has taught me anything, it’s that two images back to back might not have anything to do with the other, and that anyone tying their brains into a pretzel to figure it out is either embarrassing themselves or projecting.

What I gathered is that this is a movie about performances. It’s about cinema and actors, and Denis Lavant should be applauded for tackling and embodying so many roles so convincingly. Here we have a guy who is such a method actor that for a moment he quite literally becomes someone else. If he were the same person when he got in and out of that limo, then each appointment would be impacted by the one that came before it. He’d be tired, if not dead several times over.

But that’s a plot analysis. The film’s opening shot is of a darkened movie theater audience, acting almost as a mirror looking back at us. This immediately makes us consider our own voyeurism and establishes the implication that it’s all a movie where anything can happen. Carax also includes glimpses of footage from the birth of cinema, like a naked man stretching or a hand clapping, to reference a time when the camera was so omnipresent that actors were aware of their performance, enabling them to embody anything on screen because there was no clear definition for what cinema was.

There are more subtle hints as well. One segment references names like Theo and Vogan, both of which are used in earlier appointments, suggesting that Oscar is an actor who has past traits seep in to his work. Each segment also seems to reference a particular genre, be it character drama, melodrama, gangster, art house or musical.

Maybe I’ve unlocked the film’s riddles and its brilliance, but it doesn’t excuse quite a lot. It doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s a mean spirited movie where violence and sex seem to occur without reason. It doesn’t lend for future viewing where more details can be unlocked because certain moments like the accordion ensemble, Celine’s green mask or the film’s final shot, are nothing more than one-off absurdist jokes, if not just Easter eggs. And it neglects the fact that directors like Bunuel and Lynch have a much stronger control over the tone of the audience. You know if you’re being duped, you know if a moment is supposed to be heartbreaking or beautiful and you know how you feel even if you don’t know what you’re seeing.

Carax’s film misses these marks. It often puts more exotic things on screen than actually compose them in a dynamic way, and Lavant’s performances should not be overstated because the film doesn’t give us much of a base ground from which to gauge his transformation.

I think claims that Carax’s film will be remembered as a classic years from now are exaggerated. It’s a movie that stands out only for its weirdness and little else.

1 ½ stars

CIFF Review: The Central Park Five

In 1989 five black teenage boys were convicted of raping a white woman while she was jogging at night in Central Park in New York. Their trial achieved national attention, and the boys were put in jail for the maximum time allowed to juvenile offenders. But the case was a farce, the boys were innocent, and in 2001, a man came forward and admitted his guilt. The boys, now grown, have since been cleared of all charges, but the state of New York has not recognized their own wrong doing by way of compensation.

The documentary “The Central Park Five” does so much more than exonerate these five people. It holds a scathing light up to our system of justice and our society.

“The Central Park Five” screened Sunday at the Chicago International Film Festival and was followed by a brief Q&A with the directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon, as well as one of the five subjects involved in the case, Raymond Santana. The three of them explained how they are still fighting, how this film has prompted New York State to subpoena the film’s footage to further prolong the Five’s deserved trial and how this film must be seen to allow society to reconsider their human nature. The film opens in Chicago in December at the Music Box.

The film starts by animating 1980s New York, a place filled with rampant racism and crime, with the same anger and frustration as “Do the Right Thing.” Hatred, death, violence and drugs were a part of daily life. “We were supposed to be afraid,” one historian says. “It would’ve been irrational to not be.”

In this town, society had dictated unspoken safe havens. Central Park was one of them. For this to have happened there changed the realm of our mental security, and society needed a way to rationalize this intrusion.

We assigned a label to the crime, “Wilding,” to help define this act of aggression. We diverted to defensive instincts, calling for the Death Penalty and demanding revenge in the way we did in the time of Jim Crow laws. We ignored evidence and rationality because we so believed in our outrage. This was not a war for justice but a fight for our subconscious peace of mind.

Directors Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon make a point to recreate all the details of the case with vivid accuracy. By splicing together and even repeating similar points by each of the five men interviewed, we get a broad picture of the events of those days, one even more stirring thanks to the metaphorical images on display here.

It shows how the police interrogation system is flawed. It shows how the news media behaved with massive oversight. It shows how a parole board can doom the innocent.

But more importantly, “The Central Park Five” gets at the human nature that caused these kids to condemn themselves, that caused society to persecute them with vitriol and that still prevents the police force from admitting their wrong doing.

For all these people, they too were acting out of defense and confusion. They confessed because they were told it would help. They just wanted to go home. They had no clue of the severity of their actions. After full days of interrogation, they caved. They admitted to something they did not believe in because the broader society did. The culture has enabled an inability for them to succeed.

One kid, Korey Wise, displayed the worst case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When the cops came for his friend Yusef Salaam, they said his own name was not on the list, but he could come down to the precinct if he wanted to stay with his friend. Because he was 16, he got upwards of 25 years in prison.

When the film turns to the trial, it speaks to Juror #5. He kept the jury sequestered for days because he didn’t believe their guilt with a lack of hard evidence. Eventually he too caved under the pressure of the other jurors who had enough in seeing the video confessions. He just wanted to go home.

Upon seeing this film I questioned my own actions. When was I so convinced of something that I called for blood? What did I miss and could not be told out of my own rage? For me to say the cops should now be held responsible misses the film’s point, that we look for an easy villain, a scapegoat, to put our own mind at ease. Justice is more complex than that.

It’s hard to call “The Central Park Five” inspirational. I left the film vindicated at the Five’s freedom, but broken at the sight of our oppressive culture.

4 stars

Argo

“Argo’s” images of people rioting in Iranian streets look startlingly similar to the ones we see coming out of the Middle East today. The fact that this movie’s opening scene is an attack on an American embassy gives it an even more disturbing modern day resonance.

Ben Affleck’s film speaks to the power of images and the strength of Hollywood movies to impact the culture around the world.

Thankfully, “Argo” is exactly the arresting genre picture a movie about movie making (even fake movie making) deserves. It’s a multi-layered thriller laced in Hollywood bravura and whip smart cynicism, and it does this remarkably true story proud by letting its heroes and storytelling shine.

“Argo” is based on a recently declassified CIA mission from 1979 to 1980 in which six American diplomats hiding out in the Canadian embassy were snuck out of Iran during a several month long American hostage crisis. The plan to make their escape was organized by Tony Mendez (Affleck), who admits that this was the best bad idea they had. That’s because it does move into that ever-so-common movie territory of “too good to be true.”

We’ll set up alibis for the six Americans as a Canadian film crew making a science fiction movie named Argo. The script is a sprawling “Star Wars” ripoff set in an exotic location, and Iran just might be the perfect place to shoot. We’ll sell ad space in Variety, attach producers and make this fake movie a fake hit.

Well there’s your movie right there.

Affleck takes this farfetched story that would only be good enough for movie magic and makes it a true-to-life reality. It’s an accurate account of how Mendez enlisted help from an Oscar winning make up artist, John Chambers (John Goodman), got a curmudgeonly producer, Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), and established an elaborate cover story.

What makes “Argo” such delicious catnip to movie lovers is its strong insider mentality. Every idea brainstormed is a hopelessly bad one, no one has any faith in the plan or even this movie that actual Hollywood execs think to be real, and yet the movie magic pluck that the good guys will make it in the end always seems to win out.

It does so in the last minute chases at the Iranian airport or the cynical sparring battle between Arkin and a producer over what project he’s going to finance next, and it happens when two Iranian border agents are struck silly by storyboards for even the idea of this fake movie.

And yet Affleck acknowledges that the movies only work because of their images, not their words. So much of his story is told through TV screens and archive footage, and the rest is captured in grippingly immersive suspense scenes often free of score or even much dialogue.

His subtle way of explaining how much images matter come when an American protester quotes “Network” in saying he’s mad as hell, or when the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber) says to Mendez, “I expected more of a G-Man look.”

These are moments and ideas that come from the movies, and in this way “Argo” is a powerful zeitgeist movie that is set in the early ‘80s but can resonate in our modern, media driven world.

3 ½ stars

CIFF Review: Beyond the Hills

“Beyond the Hills” attacks religion in a draining film that explains how faith and commitments can be destructive. It’s an interesting film in pointing out that sometimes the most damaging words are “we were only trying to help,” but over the top depressing when we realize those helpers are never going to learn.

The Romanian film by Palme D’Or winning director Cristian Mungiu (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”) premiered at this year’s Cannes, taking home acting prizes for its two female leads and a Best Screenplay award, but it made its Chicago debut Friday night here at the Chicago International Film Festival. The movie will have a second screening Monday, October 15 at 8:30 at the AMC River East.

The film begins with the reunion of two best friends who once lived together in an orphanage. In the years that they’ve been separated, one remained in Romania and joined a monastery while the other went to Germany to work. The nun, Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), has invited her friend Alina (Cristina Flutur) to stay at the monastery for a few days, but Alina intends to return to Germany and this time have Voichita come with her.

Alina has an intense attachment to her friend, a commitment to remain with her always and an inability to function without her. But Voichita no longer feels the same. Her love belongs to God now, and no one else.

This is the strict culture established in Voichita’s monastery by her orthodox priest (Valeriu Andriuta). “One must forget one’s love for other people to allow room only for Him. Other desires are sins,” he says, and Alina realizes that Voichita now seems to parrot the Priest’s every sentiment blindly.

What “Beyond the Hills” ultimately concerns is how this woman who can never fully give herself to God will try regardless in an attempt to win back her friend, only to be destroyed in the process.

It’s all told as a subdued character drama, staged with a cinematic simplicity and narrative authenticity that’s common to many Romanian films. You’ll notice how the film has no internal edits within scenes. Each shot takes us to a new location, and the extended long takes that remain affixed in a room reveal the film’s layers, scenes within scenes of out of focus characters animating the frame to provide an elegant subtext.

Take one of the film’s most jaw dropping scenes. A nun is reading aloud a list of over 400 sins for Alina to copy down so she can confess them later. She rattles them off furiously, and all the while, another nun sits quietly and knits as though this were a daily routine.

These are the sorts of cinematic gifts that elevate Mungiu’s work, but the film’s tone comes back to bite him when watching this blunt, bleak third act becomes absolutely torturous.

The scary thing about this monastery is that they’ll never see that there are more problems to life than God. If Alina is acting disturbed, surely it must be because there is a sin she has not yet confessed. The devil is still inside her. In a panicked moment Alina contemplates suicide, but just as the nuns calm her down, one waves a cross in her face and she goes berserk in a nervous fit.

It becomes clear from virtually the film’s onset that Alina’s deep problem with her relationship with Voichita is one that will never be matched by the church’s spiritual solutions. At first “Beyond the Hills” sets up more and more tests of faith for Alina to face, despite the pitiful realization that she’ll never get closer to the monastery’s strict standards. And before long, we’re forced to endure Alina’s pain at the church’s attempt at an exorcism. These people will never grow because they were acting on the will of God, and time and time again Mungiu makes this more than abundantly clear.

In a way then, “Beyond the Hills” exists as an extended shriek of pain. Over its 150 minutes the snow mounts and the subdued tension gets ever more uncomfortable. Perhaps the film would work better if it operated more as a genre horror film, one that clearly delineated these priests and nuns as truly nothing more than monstrous.

2 ½ stars