My Five Year Plan

I have a former boss who hates the word ‘miserablism’ and the way it’s been employed in recent years to denote certain strains of international arthouse cinema that seem mired in The Sadness of the Everyday, blaming the box office failure of a certain Romanian film about a dying alcoholic on the word’s use in reviews. I tend to agree with her, though I have used the word myself at time - reductive and offputting as it is, it’s a fairly good shorthand for particular thematic and aesthetic tendencies which have announced themselves of late.

A few films in this year’s festival fall plainly within these guidelines. Of the three I saw, two lack American distribution (though, in the case of one, that might not be for long). The other, being released by IFC Films in the coming months, won the Golden Palm at Cannes.

Jar City (2007, Baltasar Kormakur)

I liked Jar City quite a bit. It’s dour, rainy, about as bleak as the Icelandic landscapes employed to great use by the filmmakers. It’s also a straight-up genre flick - a well-honed policier that never becomes too predictable, even as it does stretch the boundaries of good taste (there’s only so many shots of a corpse being eaten by rats one can take). It has a sharply political tone that, though explicitly about public genetic records in Iceland, speak to larger, more universal themes of privacy and eugenics. But what really works for this film are its incredible performances, most notably Ingvar Sigurdsson as Erlender, a morally conflicted detective with a troubled daughter and a thoroughly black sense of humor. This was a big hit at the festival, so even though it doesn’t currently have a US distributor, it might soon…

Cargo 200 (2007, Aleksei Balabanov)

Where do you even start with a film like Cargo 200? Simply, this is one of the most upsetting experiences I’ve had watching a movie. Images from this film will forever be stuck in my mind - images that could probably be argued, in and of themselves, as works of evil. Cargo 200 is from the director of Brother, probably the most noted Russian popular work of the 1990s, and it’s a horror film/political treatise about corruption and sociopathy in the declining Soviet Union. Set in and around the bleakly industrial Leninsk during the height of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, Cargo 200 features a number of stories but largely focuses on Captain Zhurov (Aleksei Polyuan, above, in one of the darkest explorations of depravity I’ve ever encountered. That he’s a dead-ringer for Vladimir Putin should not be lost on you.) and Angelika (Agniya Kuznetsova), a teenage girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. Deriving largely from 1970s American horror films (more than one has compared it to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the Telluride program explicitly mentions Wes Craven), Cargo 200 is a horrifying allegory for the birth of modern Russia, simultaneously a diagnosis and a symptom of a profoundly sick national culture. This film is morally reprehensible and crackpot genius in about equal measures - I plan to write about it in more depth at some point. It’s too important to be ignored.

Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days (2007, Cristian Mungiu)

The other flat-out masterpiece of the new movies in the festival. At this point, with a Golden Palm and an international reputation secured, there’s little I can add to the wealth of praise this movie has gotten, but here’s something, which my friend Tyson and I teased out yesterday: this really has very little to do, besides country of origin, with Puiu’s Death of Mr. Lazarescu - where that film, as achingly real a portrait of a man reduced to flesh as possible, feels at times intentionally ugly, Mungiu’s work is exhilaratingly beautiful - the Scope camerawork is magnificent, and the unbelievably tense long takes are elegantly composed. It is the story of a young woman trying to help her friend have an illegal abortion, but it is so much more than an abortion movie - it is a film about the economy and lives of a people, and about universal questions of morality. It has more to do with Rosetta or Breaking the Waves than anything else I’ve seen recently. But this might be even better - a film about a young woman’s resilient self-sacrifice in the face of a political and social culture that values and favors the greedy, the deceitful, and the false. It’s as fully-formed an aesthetic statement as I’ve ever seen, and the notion that Mungiu has more in his series of Tales from the Golden Age, a series of dramatizations of Romanian urban legends, makes me excited for the next decade’s worth of his output.