(M)uchenik (The Student)

(M)UCHENIK (The Student)       D-                                    

Russia  (119 mi)  2016  d:  Kirill Serebrennikov

Without a doubt the worst film of the year, bordering on hysteria, as it’s poorly constructed, increasingly pretentious, becoming little more than an overblown mouthpiece for an ill-conceived authoritarian state, a metaphor for Putin’s Russia, as it fails to deal with any of the significant issues raised, religious freedom, a separation of church and state, as they’ve merged and become one conglomerate, including an alarming rise of homophobia and anti-Semitism, instead casting blame on whoever questions the authority’s handling of affairs.  Without an ounce of subtlety, this film rams the Biblical scriptures, as exemplified by the teenage rebellion of a religious zealot still in high school, through the administrative authorities of the Russian state who have adapted religious orthodoxy into their political platform, so are too weakly divided to stop him, none of which prevent this student from denouncing his teachers and fellow students, taking over classrooms at will, dominating the discussions, and literally bullying his way through school by extended rants of quoting Biblical verse at the top of his lungs, with onscreen titles acting as footnotes, reflecting the Biblical origins of each text.  Adapted from the German play Martyr by Marius von Mayenburg, the whole thing has the feeling of sermonizing and being preached at throughout, though the school’s tepid, near comical reaction reflects a satiric condemnation of the social conservatism that defines Putin’s rule, such as the passage of anti-gay laws.  Nonetheless, while it resembles Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) in the way a single child shows such utter contempt for his simple-headed mother and the world around him, finding vengeance in the wrath of God, hoping to force them all into the flames of hell, while he and only he is the mouthpiece for the Lord.  What makes little sense is his total transformation to a religious ideologue seemingly overnight, where the school and teachers have little clue how to deal with this volcanic force of Biblical hormones out of control, though anyone else that disrupted classrooms would be singled out and thoroughly dealt with by authorities.  But not this kid, who is treated with kid gloves, as if he actually is the coming Messiah. 

With parallels to Dietrich Brüggemann’s German film Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg) (2014), another film about religious fundamentalism, it’s clear no matter what political system, liberal German or authoritarian Russian, authorities are ill-prepared to deal with overly exaggerated cases of fundamentalism, where the adherence to a single set of extremist religious beliefs, and an intolerance for anything else, overwhelms the existing societal structure, as it defies the aims of any modernized educational system, which is to provide as broad-based an education as possible.  Most schools would not tolerate any student taking over classrooms, period.  The only solution is to remove them as a disruptive force unless they can learn to behave themselves, and if not, they are free to seek alternative educational measures.  In free democratic societies, religious fundamentalists exist in small like-minded sects and aren’t integrated into mainstream society, as they would be thoroughly denounced by a majority of citizens who would not allow the manipulation of religious beliefs being forced upon them, which is why the Amish don’t run the public school systems of Pennsylvania, and al-Qaeda or Isis theocracy are not taught in schools across Europe.  But in an authoritarian state that may already be infused with religious doctrine, the idea that they would be stifled and handcuffed to do anything about it is simply ludicrous.  Nothing could be further from the truth, yet that is the premise of this film.  While dramatic enunciations might work on stage, the exaggerations onscreen clearly undermine the entire film, as audiences don’t tend to like being shouted at for two hours, unless the literary dialogue is brilliantly original, as is the case in Mike Nichols’ Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).  But there’s nothing original about this, as it plods on in purely amateurish fashion, especially the use of blaring heavy metal music, Laibach - God Is God - YouTube (3:50), which punctuates the film like a hammer to the head, making little connection to audiences.

The film pretends to be a satirical look at the dysfunction of Putin’s Russia, but most of this is so laughably bad that it’s awful, as its own narrow scope refuses common sense solutions, yet the system’s paranoid reaction is as telling as the bizarre behavior of the student himself, mirroring the major institutions in Russia that have become increasingly dominated by small-minded reactionaries and bigoted political followers, where in 2013 Putin made faith-based culture mandatory teaching in secondary schools.  The heavy-handed style, however, is its own undoing, as it’s hard to take anything seriously simply by the predictable and overly simplistic way it’s being presented, revealing little about the current state of high school education or religious orthodoxy in Russia.  Petr Skvortsov is excellent, however, as young Veniamin (Venya), the only developed character in the film, as the rest are all caricatures.  Spouting condemnation at every opportunity, where he envisions himself as the lone voice of the Holy Spirit, his spontaneous outbursts provide a literary text for the film.  After witnessing the bullying of a disabled young gay student, Grigory (Aleksandr Gorchilin, who played the role of Venya in the stage version), he takes him under his wing as his lone disciple, but is thwarted in his attempts to faith heal him by mimicking the miracles of Christ, eventually turning on him with a vengeance.  Similarly, Venya mocks his biology teacher Elena (Victoria Isakova), refuting her scientific teachings of evolution with the scripture’s view of Creation.  At an administrative hearing, the head authority (Svetlana Bragarnik) acquiesces to his demands and brings Creationism into the classroom alongside Darwin, while also caving in on his demands that girls be more modestly dressed, leaving Elena on her own as the sole voice of dissent against this young rabble rouser, yet she loses her grip as well, going off on her own deranged and often pathetic rants.  Rather than elevate the material, the Biblical scripture becomes the means to incite anti-gay and anti-Semitic rhetoric, where instead of inspirational, it serves a destructive purpose.  While there is interspersed humor throughout (as it is supposed to be a satire), not enough, apparently, as it bogs down in its own chosen rhetoric, a toxic, scorched earth, religious crusade leading to a somewhat frantic and ridiculously discombobulated ending, becoming gloomily fatalistic, as there are no forces standing in the way. 

Note

While the director has been an outspoken critic of Putin, his dissident views have landed him under house arrest, accused of corruption, making him the second director (after Iran’s Jafar Panahi) banned from attending the 2018 Cannes Film Festival due to government charges filed against them.    

Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg)

STATIONS OF THE CROSS (Kreuzweg)         D                             

Germany  (107 mi)  2014  d:  Dietrich Brüggemann 

I do adore the sadomodernist masters such as von Trier and Haneke.

—Dietrich Brüggemann interview, Dietrich Brüggemann on “Stations of the Cross”, by Matt Fagerholm from Indie Outlook, October 20, 2014

This highly acclaimed film, co-written by the director and his sister Anna, winner of a Silver Bear for Best Script as well as the Ecumenical Jury Prize at Berlin, has produced the most negative reaction of the year, right alongside Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 (2014), which was so incredibly dull and painstakingly pretentious that there was simply no desire to ever see Pt. 2.  The common theme in both is the sheer manipulation factor, where the film’s fixated obsessions are revealed through such a narrow prism that both directors literally force you to accept the movie on their terms, which for some creates an instinctive rebellion against what’s being forced down your throat.  In this case, the film is wrapped under the cloak of religion, following the drama surrounding 14-year old Maria (Lea van Acken) on the eve of her confirmation, where the strict interpretation of her fundamentalist teachings are taken literally, where there is no room for any other point of view, becoming an expression of fanaticism and intolerance, and ultimately death, yet doing so in the name of the Lord, even going so far, as the title suggests, of paralleling the film’s fictional narrative with the final 14 stages (Traditional form) of Christ leading up to the crucifixion, using a Biblical structure in similar fashion with Kieslowski’s modern parable on the Ten Commandments in The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89).  While Kieslowski’s film transcends form, Brüggemann is slavishly ruled by it, creating a brutally suffocating work that is mired in its own wretched miserablism.  Simply put, this is a movie about horrible people, where Maria’s mother (Franziska Weisz) is one of the more vile creatures ever depicted, spewing her venom as God’s will, sewing the seeds of her own daughter’s destruction (while her husband slinks in cowardly silence), and then praising God after she’s dead, one of the most horrific acts of child abuse ever depicted onscreen.  What’s missing in Brüggemann’s film is that extreme forms of intolerant behavior come from all walks of life both inside and outside the church, from the well educated as well as the uneducated, where extremism, not just religious extremism, is a societal epidemic.  How else to explain the rise of school shootings, urban neighborhood crossfire incidents, sexual abductions, or various hate crimes, where victims are targeted for a variety of reasons, none of which make rational sense, so confining this film to such meticulous order and precision is woefully misguided, as it insists upon imposing a straitjacket of logical rationale to irrational acts.  

By confining the focus of the film to a small religious sect based upon the Society of St. Pius X (where the director was confirmed and served as an altar boy ), an anti-Semitic, ultra conservative offshoot of Catholicism that adheres to its own strict rules, much like the Amish and German Mennonite communities in America that continue to abide by antiquated, old-world beliefs, Brüggemann, like Mel Gibson before him in his THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), which this film so zealously resembles, wear their mile-wide sadomasochistic streaks into the heart of the crucifixion story, playing firmly into the expectations of the ardent believers who will praise the strict formal rigidity while ignoring the obvious, where the repetitious, one-note obsessions heard throughout become another form of sanctimonious preaching.  Anyone who is raised by an unwavering doctrine of fear and absolutism, dominated by a tyrannical mother and an equally unequivocal young priest, at the expense of all other widening views, and then cast into the plague that is public school is likely to find that others will find their views preposterous and at odds with the concept of higher learning, where they will soon find themselves the subject of taunting and ridicule.  But it’s the somber, overly serious tone overriding every section of the film that borders on the ridiculous, becoming tiresome after awhile as the viewer is assaulted by ordinary meanness from the mother accompanied by fixated ideas of extremism.  While there are more tolerant views expressed in the film, such as the well-meaning gym teacher (Birge Schade) who attempts to accommodate Maria’s views that rock, gospel, and soul music are satanical expressions of the devil’s work, or a young boy she meets in a library named Christian (Moritz Knapp) who appeals to Maria to come sing in his non-satanic church choir, they are quickly overridden by the dictatorial views of her mother, who is simply a monster whose bullying overbearing voice of unreason and intolerance is the continuous thread that dominates the film.  Maria obsessively adheres to these teachings, depriving herself of all earthly pleasures with the understanding that this is how one expresses obedience to the Lord.     

While the film is a portrait of a tormented family layered in religiosity, this obfuscates the film’s prime intention of being a modern era horror film, where clearly the year’s most wicked creature is at the center, further accentuated by the strict rigidity of style, where the 14 stations are expressed in 14 shots, some lasting as long as ten minutes, most from a fixed position where the camera never moves.  While some will marvel at the technical precision of the film, reminiscent of the praise received for magnificent technical achievement in Sokurov’s RUSSIAN ARK (2002), which was a 99-minute single shot film that roamed through the Russian Hermitage Museum, but the constant chatter the viewer was forced to endure throughout from the long-winded narrator was often overlooked in all the acclaim for making a technically innovative film.  Here, while tragedy abounds, the deck is also stacked, where the contrived and pretentious nature of this film is a bit too absurd to believe, as there is an odd shift that takes place in the middle of the film where Maria changes from being a confused but serious-minded teenager to suddenly finding her ultimate purpose in life, a radical shift that seems all too convenient for the storyline that requires her to be the Christ-like figure whose modern era presence would similarly be pious but completely misunderstood in contemporary society.  With a seemingly inescapable fate, despite the interventions of social workers, police, priests, doctors, family and friends, much like THE EXORCIST (1973), the inevitable progression moves forward as Maria literally deprives herself of food, willing herself to die, believing her death will bring about the miracle needed to save her youngest brother Johannes who still hasn’t spoken his first words at the age of four.  While there are any number of solutions to this problem where society would intervene, doing nothing while allowing a mother to manipulate and browbeat her own daughter into killing herself is not one of them, making this truly one of the ugliest and most manipulative films seen this year, a psychological version of torture porn, and the most hateful film seen since Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012), where the only thing missing would be a selfie moment taken by the mother at the hour of her daughter’s death, seen beaming with delight, as she couldn’t be more proud.  What rot.