Films Films Films - Part 4

Finally, here is the last installment of my Film Festival posts.  Thought I'd better finish it before we take the yellow-brick road to Oz in a couple of days.

First up of the last set of films is the quirky Swedish vampire film, Let the Right One In, which was set, for no apparent reason, in the early 1980s.  Maybe I don't know my Swedish history well enough and there is an extra level to the film's being set then.  I just thought it gave the wardrobe person something to do, and explained the use of a Rubik's cube (remember them? one of the weird crazes kids had before computers...).  Setting aside, I thought it was pretty brave to try and breathe life (ha ha) into the vampire genre, which seems to have passed into the territory of witty one-liners and vampire-slayers ('not that there's anything wrong with that').  Apart from a couple of moments that just seemed a bit silly (e.g. woman being attacked by lots of snarling felines), this vampire film managed to be both creepy and frightening.  The main character, Oskar, is a bit of an outsider at school and is bullied by some frankly horrible young boys.  He befriends a new 'girl' who has moved in next door with what appears to be her father.  Mysteriously, she only appears at night and seems to have some hair and make-up issues.  She also dispatches her 'father' to slay hapless victims serial-killer style, drain them of their blood, and bring it back to her for a snack.  When he messes this up, she is forced to do this herself, leading to community fears of a killer on the loose. Unsurprisingly, though not necessarily predictably, she exacts pay-back from the bullies on Oskar's behalf.  This film had the same bleak Scandinavian quality about it that the brilliant Show Me Love did.  Only with vampires and senseless killings.  And a Rubik's cube. 

Next up was The Wave.  This German film is based on the book The Wave, which in turn is based on events at an American high school in the late 1960s.  As in the book, the film tells the story of a high-school teacher who takes the concept of 'show don't tell' teaching to a whole new level by engaging his students in an experiment in totalitarianism.  The difference is that this film is set in contemporary Germany.  Here, the students are disengaged from their studies, their parents' liberal ideals and are initially sceptical about their classes on 'totalitarianism'.  Much to their 'alternative' down-with-the-kids (you can tell this because he has a shaved head, a ripped T-shirt and plays really loud music on the way to work) teacher's dismay, they apathetically dismiss his comparisons with the Third Reich. Determined to show them how people could be swayed to fall into line with totalitarian regimes, the teacher establishes a classroom policy of order, politeness, obeying commands and not questioning authority that comes to be known as The Wave.  Initially, he gets positive results: the class bond with each other, take a pride in their appearance, have some discipline. Some of the parents and teachers are impressed. Apart from a couple of dissident students who leave the class, so are the kids.  And then it all goes out of control. The positive group atmosphere, which also includes former outcasts and instills a sense of pride and loyalty in the group, turns to bullying, loutish behaviour and a chilling willingness to dispense critical thought for shouty slogans and uniformity.  Needless to say it all ends in tears. An interesting and thought-provoking choice to transplant this experiment to Germany, but I'm not quite sure they pulled it off.  For example, it rather overlooked the question of creating an external other with which to define the group. This just seemed to be 'anyone who wasn't in the Wave', which may be an analogue for non-Nazi Germans, but doesn't equate with the demonising and scapegoating of Jewish people.  Indeed, the film was careful to include the son of Turkish immigrants in the group.  Also, the only alternative apparently on offer to totalitarianism was anarchism, or dropping out, which seemed to me a real cop-out.  The question being dodged, and I realise this might be asking quite a lot of the film, is how to do you engage people who are disenfranchised without resorting to authoritarianism or a kind of 'anything-goes' nihilism?  And another question, why ruin a perfectly good Ramones song by having a horrible German rock band re-record it? 

The last film of the festival was Waltz With Bashir, a comic-book style animated quasi-documentary, concerning Israel's war with Lebanon in the early 1980s. In particular, it traced the film-maker's attempts to remember what had happened during a massacre of Palestinian refugees.  The film-maker, a character in the film, could only remember one image associated with the events - the one depicted in the picture - and sets out to try and fill in the blanks.  As such, the film is a very interesting meditation on violence, repression and the unreliability of memory.  The animation has a distancing effect both for the audience and the film-maker, which is then brutally brought up short at the end, when the crying, screaming survivors of the massacre shift from 2-d line drawings to TV footage of actual people.  A manipulative tactic but one that certainly packed a punch.  

In short, all of the films we saw over the three weeks were enjoyable and/or thought-provoking and I'm glad we made the effort to get along to them.  Hope you enjoyed my rambling thoughts about them!