The Act of Killing

Six beautiful women shimmy their way out of the mouth of a giant rusting metal fish. Ahead of them, an old man in a black robe leads the way, followed by another woman—okay, an overweight man in drag, but never mind that—dressed in splendid pink. The group stands before a waterfall, the sunlit mist giving each figure a faint, ethereal glow. The familiar cloying melody of “Born Free” blankets everything in a haze of faded MOR schlock. The dance is interrupted when two people approach the black-robed man. Their own necks tangled in strangling wires, the pair hangs a medal on the old man. “Thank you for sending us to heaven,” they tell the man who murdered them.

This scene serves as the centerpiece of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, a remarkable documentary in which mass murderers stage surreal fantasias of their own crimes, mutilating reality until their culpability is deformed beyond all recognition. The old man, Anwar Congo, is but one killer among many. As a self-described gangster, he took part in the mass killings of communists, ethnic Chinese and other marginalized groups in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. The total death count varies, but 500,000 seems a modest estimate; one person in the film suggests Anwar’s share of the bloodshed is likely around 1,000.

What makes this particularly horrifying—and also what fuels Oppenheimer’s penetrating study of guilt—is the fact that Indonesia has barely begun to acknowledge this brutality, never mind make amends to the survivors. The winners wrote history here, and even burnt the history books for good measure (as was the case with a sanitized 2004 textbook version of the events). Anwar and his cohorts don’t just walk free, but are seemingly celebrated for their crimes. When he appears on a talk show, the host introduces him as the man who devised a more effective method for killing communists—wrapping wire around their necks and yanking really hard, apparently—as if he were some celebrity promoting his latest film on The Tonight Show. A viewer walking in unprepared might mistake this for a richly imagined political satire, and not a particularly subtle one at that.

Anwar hardly fits the part of murderous thug. Jovial and easy-going, he gently scolds his grandson for mistreating a duckling and delights in teasing his sidekick Herman (the aforementioned man in drag during the music video). But when he sits around drinking with his gangster buddies, the horrors come bubbling up. One man reminisces about raping women during the burning of a village, sighing like a lovesick romantic as he recalls what he did to a 14-year-old girl. The men gloat while the survivors and their families can only look on with pained smiles, unable to speak out, reduced to bowing and scraping before the thugs. The brutality from over 40 years ago still lingers in the air. When the men decide to immortalize their youthful escapades in film, they struggle to find anyone willing to even play the part of communist.

Anwar and his buddies are still eager to play the part of killer, so why would anyone jump at the chance to play victim? Oppenheimer plays with this sense of performance in the re-creations by often mirroring the Hollywood films that inspired Anwar—gangster and war films, in specific. During the staged destruction of a village, a government minister on hand is acutely aware of the value of image management. As he leads the militia in a fiery kill-the-communists chant, he suddenly turns self-conscious and admonishes the director not to show the group as totally bloodthirsty. But, he continues, they also must not be shown as weak. Herman wryly captures these contradictions with his observation that the entire country is like a soap opera. Everyone is an actor, from the corrupt politicians to the indifferent citizens faking enthusiasm at political rallies for money. (Naturally, Herman wants to get in on the action and runs for office himself. He loses, thus depriving the world of yet another mid-level plutocrat with a sideline in embezzlement, mass murder, and cross-dressing.) 

Amid this maze of self-deceptions, popular delusions, and false histories, the barrier erected between killer and victim is almost the only thing maintaining the brittle peace. Those who died were vilified as foreigners and radicals, an infection of the body politic to be purged through the time-honoured medical treatment of bloodletting. It is only once Anwar plays the role of victim in the re-creation that all of his carefully crafted self-defence mechanisms crumble. Early in the film, he takes the director to a little patio where he did much of his so-called “work.” He fondly recalls his youth; he dances the cha-cha on the tiles where he shed blood. But his earlier bravado is drained away when he returns at the end. “This is one of the easiest ways to take a human life,” he says of the wire, and his voice trails off. His body shakes and shudders with the sounds of retching, while his shoulder blades jut out like fists trying to punch through his skin. Whatever composure the years have bought him vanishes in a moment, and he verges on physically tearing himself apart. One can only wonder at what tremors will shake the rest of the nation when it one day sees itself as clearly.

The Flowers of St. Francis

As ascetic in style as in subject, The Flowers of St. Francis depicts monkish life with radical simplicity. This pastoral hymn, at once comical and reverent, pays tribute to the uncommon devotion of these divine dimwits, who caper about their ramshackle monastery with all the giddiness of children (small surprise the original Italian title translates as Francis, God’s Jester). Indeed, the film is so confoundingly free of guile viewers may suspect director Roberto Rossellini of mocking the men’s innocence. Ginepro, the holiest fool of them all, maims a pig and mistakes the tortured squeals of “Brother Pig” for heavenly praise; a later scene where the village poor fight over scraps of charity from the monks could easily have been taken from Bunuel. Only a religious iconoclast like Rossellini, so ill at ease with institutional authority, could craft a work of such spiritual impiety. (Rather tellingly, the fiercest tyrant in the film rules with an iron fist so heavy he can’t even lift it, while Francis grows in power the more he denies his own strength.) The film carries a whiff of the didactic about it, but these parables of virtue and faith are always firmly planted in the stuff of life: cooking food, gathering flowers, building a home. When Francis lays weeping in a dusky meadow after an encounter with a leper, the camera tilts skyward towards the unblemished heavens, but such transcendent gestures are hardly characteristic of the film. Rossellini, much like the monks, is happier down in the mud.

The Gatekeepers

Six past and present leaders of Israeli defence organization Shin Bet submit themselves to questioning in The Gatekeepers, and the provocative documentary that results serves as a living monument to doublethink. Director Dror Moreh steadily pushes the group on matters of morality; the men gamely push back while often adding their own criticisms of Israel’s treatment of Palestine. A particularly sharp indictment of the Israeli occupation prompts agreement from one of the men, who arches his eyebrows in self-satisfaction, as if to say, “Didn’t expect that, did you?” Political schizophrenia pervades many of the interviews. Referencing the 1984 killing of two captured bus hijackers, Avraham Shalom acknowledges giving the order to kill the men, but denies its immorality—it’s only wrong because the public found out, he explains. (The ensuing controversy precipitated his resignation as head of Shin Bet in 1986.) Everyone in the group has knowingly played a key role in the very same military occupation they now attack, and all seem helpless to change a system uniformly loathed. Even Shalom scornfully dismisses the Israeli government’s handling of the Palestinians as “tactics, not strategy” and compares his country to Germany occupying Poland during the Second World War. All tools of brute authority, the men resent the stupidity of those that wield them.

A New Leaf

A New Leaf, Elaine May’s debut feature as writer-director, drowns the modern romantic comedy in a swamp of bad feeling and savage disdain. May plays Henrietta, a wealthy, clutzy botanist sporting oversized glasses and undersized personality. Her suitor is freshly pauperized playboy Henry, played with a droll sneer by Walter Matthau. Repulsed by women—and most of the human race, actually—the dedicated bachelor aims to marry his way back into money. Add a dash of arsenic, and Henry can live happily ever after as a wealthy widower. Reportedly recut from May’s much darker three-hour original, the film makes for a bracingly black vision of love. So many romantic comedies are built around a desperate woman enduring countless humiliations just to earn the affections of an indifferent man, but few take the premise this far. Subjecting her character to scorn and ridicule in pursuit of a murderer—played not by a dashing leading man, but the eternally rumpled Matthau—May turns movie romance into an extended act of self-flagellation. The film laces the usual bromides of the genre with enough poison to flatten a small elephant.

Artless and stylized all at once, the film suggests a live-action cartoon. The director indulges in grotesque closeups (more for shock than laughs), and buries gags inside carefully cluttered scenes. But she also shoots much of the film on real locations around New York, wedding a rough-hewn realism to a farcical plot. Such contradictions sit comfortably alongside the jarringly dissonant characters, who are pushed to extremes of cruelty and idiocy, yet viewed with bemused affection. This being called A New Leaf, it should come as no surprise that the film turns away from the abyss in the end. Both characters recognize that they complete each other, and the helplessness that Henry scorns in Henrietta is revealed to be a mirror of his own. But even during his big change of heart, Henry still tosses his wife about like a ragdoll, and he submits to domestic bliss the way some people succumb to cancer. Barbed to the very end, the film is both an autocritique of romantic comedy and exemplar of the genre. Can you become the thing you hate? Sure, and you can marry it too.

Amour

Michael Haneke, cinematic sadist extraordinaire, may have crafted his ultimate iron maiden in Amour. After years of random brutality, films filled with mutilations of the self and the other, the director has at last discovered the greatest horror show of them all: time and our own crumbling bodies. Not that there aren’t signs of a newfound tenderness occasionally breaking through the misanthropic gloom of Haneke’s world. When Jean-Louis Trintignant dodders around an apartment trying to capture a pigeon, one reflexively cringes at the inevitable violence to come (visions of a dead bird a la The White Ribbon flutter around the imagination). Instead the old man simply holds the creature, caressing it sadly before later setting it free—and unless he released it into a turbine, the bird may be one of the first animals to survive a cameo in a Haneke film. Elsewhere, the director’s clinical touch is evident, bolstered by two superbly considered performances from his octogenarian all-stars, Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva. When Riva looks through a photo album and declares life to be beautiful, the moment is so drained of sentimentality it makes the weather report seem overwrought. Too bad all of the fine efforts of the actors are torpedoed by Haneke’s predictable fondness for sudden, shocking bursts of violence. As always, he confuses surprise for genuine emotion and assumes making people squirm is the same as making them think. Even in his supposed humanist crowd-pleaser, Haneke can’t resist sucker-punching the audience.

The End of Time

A free-associative epic, The End of Time allows Peter Mettler to fulfill his apparent ambition to make a film that is simultaneously about nothing and everything. This is harder than it sounds, and much more satisfying an experience than you would imagine. The trick is to reduce all reality to abstractions, at which point abstractions become real, and then the world turns into the acid-freak section of 2001: A Space Odyssey and you lunge towards the doors of perception only to realize they were painted on the wall all along. “What is time?” the film asks, and then answers, by showing five minutes of lava footage. “What is time?” the film asks of a physicist, who would love to answer, except that he has a call he really has to answer, can you hold on a minute? “What is time?” the film asks again, this time of the director’s mother. Oh, it’s mother’s day. Well, now I feel foolish for even asking in the first place.

Mettler’s skill as a cinematographer is well established at this point, but The End of Time offers ample evidence of his talent as a sculptor of sound and image. He mines a series of far-flung locales—Hawaiian volcanoes, Swiss scientific complex, holy sites in India, devastated Detroit slums—for strange and illuminating juxtapositions. Stars fall like snow and the metal circles of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are no less mystical than mandalas found at a Buddhist shrine in India. An Indian funeral procession provides the soundtrack to an army of ants pulling at the towering corpse of a grasshopper. The omnipresence of cellphones becomes a running gag, with the devices multiplying like little rodents devouring the now. Visual motifs disappear and resurface like whales breaching the surface of the ocean, while sounds form a thread stitching together images in unexpected ways. Something as innocuous as the tin-coated song of an ice cream truck can transform the sprawling ruins of Detroit in a single neighbourhood. Beyond its exploration of time, the film is a monument to the incidental.

La Terra Trema

Merging decadent style with revolutionary content, La Terra Trema is very much a product of the contradictions of director Luchino Visconti, aristocrat by birth and communist by choice. Rarely has any film purporting neo-realism—natural settings, unprofessional actors, documentary-style voiceover—contained such rampant aestheticism. (Even when filming dirty, decaying hovels, Visconti can’t stop himself from scattering mirrors on seemingly every wall.) However, the film’s immaculate compositions and sumptuous camera movements lend grandeur to the Valastros, a Sicilian fishing family that tries—and fails, disastrously—to overthrow the wholesalers exploiting them to the very last lire. Reducing poverty to aesthetics risks condescending to the disadvantaged by suggesting they have somehow been ennobled by suffering. Visconti elevates his characters to the state of tragic heroes while never denying their own hubris and folly, which only compounds the injustices inflicted upon them. The whole world seems arrayed against the defiant family: the cackling wholesalers, the villagers who sneer at any attempt to destroy the crushing old order, and even the absurdly cartoonish smuggler (one can easily imagine him opening his trenchcoat to reveal a line of fine imitation Rolexes). Assaulted from without and betrayed from within, the Valastros flail through their erstwhile revolt until falling prey to their own weaknesses, whether pride, lust, greed or simple human frailty. The family ends humbled and devastated, discovering themselves to be naked beneath the chains they have thrown off.