Yuma

YUMA                        B-                   

Poland  Czech Republic  (113 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Piotr Mularuk

There’s a back story to this film, well known in Poland and Germany, but not the outside world.  Set in a small Polish border town of what was Soviet occupied East Germany, where the Soviets built a factory on the Polish side filled with Russian workers who purchased Polish goods, which was a welcomed and thriving business arrangement, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire, the Russians just up and left, abandoning all businesses and commercial trades, leaving the Polish side destitute, without any money or commerce.  A kind of chaos and Wild West lawlessness intervened, where police presence was all but absent, so gangsters took over, stealing hordes of commercial goods from Germany, which was the only side that had anything of value, and redistributed them across the border in Poland for black market barter, trade, drugs, weapons, or money, a practice known as “Yuma.”  Today, neither country acknowledges this complicit arrangement between the two nations, as it was completely illegal, especially the blind eye shown by the border guards, who often got a hefty portion of the take, a practice that lasted for several years until security measures improved in Germany.  The director spent years attempting to finance his film, but the Germans felt the subject was “anti-Polish,” while the Polish financiers balked at the portrayal of Poles as black market thieves and profiteers, considering it a taboo subject, where the director claimed “Officials in Poland said I’d never make this film.”  In fact, two weeks before the shoot, the Polish Film Institute backed out, so in desperation they called the Polish owner of the Las Vegas Power Energy Drink, today a respectable businessman, but who engaged in yuma during the early 1990s, recalling it as his early “glory years.”  Amusingly the film opens with a blatant product placement ad, again recurring throughout the film, which is how the film was financed.  They were also fortunate to receive money from the Czech Film Fund, where the film premiered at the Czech Karlovy Vary Film Festival. 

When the director first met Jakub Gierszal as his lead, he was too young to play the part.  But after years of searching for money to make the film, he was finally old enough for the role, where today, according to the director, he is the hottest actor in Poland.  The film opens with a brief 1987 preface, where with nothing better to do, best friends Zyga (Gierszal) and Rysio (Kazimierz Mazur) assist an East German (Tomasz Schuchardt) successfully escape over to the Polish side, but in doing so both friends are subject to a horrifically devastating ordeal by the chasing military troops.  The film jumps ahead a few years where Zyga is little more than a layabout, an aimless kid with no job, no prospects, and no future.  With an eye on western symbols, Zyga watches B-movie western 3:10 TO YUMA (1957) playing to a near empty theater that may be forced to close, where the rousing song by Frankie Laine is heard 3.10 TO YUMA. 1957. YouTube (4:52).  Ironically, with the encouragement of his sexually charged aunt Halina (Katarzyna Figura, Polish Playboy calendar girl from May, 1994, nearly two decades ago), who secretly runs a brothel, he amusingly takes the 3:10 train from Yuma to Frankfurt, finding it ridiculously easy to shoplift, starting with small items, like cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, but eventually with two friends, and the cooperation of Polish border guards, he is returning truckloads worth of merchandise, literally delivering the land of plenty to a tiny Polish town that previously had nothing, becoming immensely popular, like a local Robin Hood handing out Adidas to everyone, plundering the shopping malls and jewelry stores of their more affluent neighbor, literally preening in their extravagance to the tunes of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby - YouTube (4:01).

Zyga is initially driven by his attraction to a local red-headed beauty, Majka (Karolina Chapko), who remains unimpressed but shelters the East German in the opening scene, reuniting with him again later in the film, which draws the ire of Zyga and his friends, now little more than thugs themselves, venting their hatred against this otherwise decent man, blaming him and the Germans for actually having the material wealth that they don’t.  Of course this practice escalates until it draws the attention of bona fide gangsters, complete with a small army, first wanting in on the action, but soon wanting to take it all for themselves.  This portrait of greed grows ridiculously excessive, as Zyga makes the obvious mistake of flaunting his wealth and power, literally drawing attention to himself, changing the entire tone of the film from stark realism to exaggerated caricature.  By the end, this has blown up into a B-movie gangster western, where without a sheriff the town isn’t big enough for two criminal enterprises that never learn to share the wealth, eventually fighting between themselves for the town’s profits.  The criminalization of the town is complete, not only including Zyga’s family and friends, but also the church which sanctions this activity, as everyone in town benefits from having access to things otherwise unavailable to them.  This exaggerated excess is reminiscent of the exhilarating anarchy of an Emir Kusterica movie, like Black Cat, White Cat (1998), a rollicking black comedy with outrageous wall-to-wall, gypsy party music from Goran Bregović, where Halina’s brothel becomes the local watering hole of the young punks who like to drink and party themselves, literally basking in the glow of their self-styled heroism until things start spiraling out of control.  The film was shot in Poland, Frankfurt, Germany and the Czech Republic, where the initial allure of capitalism evokes the “glory years,” a consumer bonanza depicted as a momentary reverie when life was a free for all of dreams and opportunities before reality intervenes.

Carnival Scenes (De Ce Trag Clopotele, Mitică?)

CARNIVAL SCENES (De Ce Trag Clopotele, Mitică?)          B                   

aka:  Why Are the Bells Ringing, Mitică?

Romania (132 mi)  1979  d:  Lucian Pintilie

Lucian Pintilie is a Romanian-born director whose career began in Bucharest in the 50’s, graduating from the Bucharest Drama and Cinema Art Institute in 1965, when he began working in Romanian Television, but was released for “lack of talent.”  In 1958 he staged at different Bucharest theaters Max Frisch’s The Firebugs, Gorky’s Children of the Sun, Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and Caragiale’s Carnival Scenes.  With this last one, staged in 1969 in Paris at the National Theater, he became internationally known.  In 1965, he directed his debut film, SUNDAY AT SIX (1965), a film that so upset Romanian censors that he could not make his second film REENACTMENT (1969) until four years later.  Although it was initially banned, REENACTMENT had its international premiere at Cannes in 1970 and the filmmaker was lauded in absentia, while today it is considered a seminal work of the New Romanian Cinema.  Forced into exile, Pintilie fled the Ceausescu regime in 1972 for Paris and had to shoot his third film WAR NO. 6 (1973) in Yugoslavia.  He returned home to make his fourth, CARNIVAL SCENES (1979), but when that film was also banned for the entire decade of the 80’s due to its strong subversive content, he left Romania for France.  Throughout his work he has explored questions of tyranny and remorse—often relating directly or allegorically to the history of his own country.  For twenty years he lived and worked in France and the United States, directing plays, television films and operas.  He served as artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.  In 1990, after the collapse of Communism and the advent of democracy in Romania, Pintilie returned to filmmaking creating a series of no-holds-barred dramas and dark comedies about life and its absurdities.  Virtually unknown in the U.S., Pintilie has observed about his own work, “What is the survival strategy of a community in a state of perpetual catastrophe?... And when does making fun—the assumed irresponsibility, the dark humor that we, Romanians, are so proud of—stop being an impenetrable shield?  This is the number one matter in all my movies.”

Based on a darkly absurdist play by Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912), that is interestingly framed at beginning and end by the filming on a movie set, literally a killer beginning and ending, where in between it turns into a deliriously ribald farce, an overblown, frenetically paced, madcap comedy that is so completely over-the-top in maniacal energy that only films of Emir Kusterica match this kind of former Eastern bloc Balkan intensity.  The orgiastic wildness has such a sarcastically mocking tone of absurdity, but also an inherently bleak nature, where the setting is a tiny settlement on the edge of “civilization,” where many structures remain in an incomplete state of construction.  These makeshift buildings sit alongside an almost empty, garbage-filled lake, suggesting all are part of a toxic existence.  The film is full of nasty and vulgar characters that intentionally lie and deceive one another, often taking on assumed roles in order to carry out their deceit, where the central character, Gheorge Dinica as Nae Girimea, is a barber and the town lothario who continually eludes Pampon (Victor Rebengiuc), who ends up hopelessly searching for him throughout the entire movie, discovering early on that the man has been sleeping with his own kept woman, Didina (Tora Vasilescu), believing all along that Mitica (Stefan Iordache) is the conniving culprit.  The story turns into a free-for all of mistaken identities, where Nae continues to elude what’s coming to him by playing a kind of Pagliacci character, a clownish rake who cowardly and deviously slips into various disguises.  The real comic talent is displayed by Miriana Mihut as Mita, the Rubenesque and bosomy woman who thought she had Nae all to herself (while belonging to Mitica), who continually reveals her furious discontent by swinging an axe around.  This shocking portrait of whiners, backstabbers, gossipers, and all around general lowlifes fill the screen with their screaming mania, as characters rarely talk, instead they shout, each one louder than the next, often all at the same time in a display of utter buffoonery. 

While the dialog is non-stop and can get overwhelming after awhile, the comic timing of the actors couldn’t be more in synch, where the performances, as well as the endless delirium onscreen, is unlike the stripped-down realism of Romanian films today, as it’s a unique example of unstoppable anarchy, which under an overly controlled, totalitarian Soviet system must have felt like the supreme liberation.  The sexual betrayal unearthed in the opening few minutes of the film drives the entire action, as Pampon has the ferocity of a Russian Cossack, always in attack mode, where he has to decipher who the conniver is in a Turkish bath filled with naked men, any one of whom could be who he’s looking for, eventually settling for Mitica, who’s paralyzed with humiliation to discover his wife is deceiving him, all too willing to accept punishment meant for someone else, as Pampon and Mitica are both deceived by the same man.  The search for the backstabbing womanizer reaches epic proportions at an extended costume ball where everyone is disguised, where Nae continually changes costumes to keep away from trouble, where out of nowhere Didina breaks out into a French Cancan, leading the audience in a rousing version of La Marsellaise La Marseillaise YouTube (3:08) followed by The Internationale THE INTERNATIONALE (in Russian) YouTube (3:51).  This carnival party sequence couldn’t be more outlandishly liberated, as the no-holds-barred revelers are scandalously inebriated, where any sense of balance has been lost, all leading to what has to be the most infamous dog scene in the history of film, where two poodles walk exclusively on their hind legs wearing army hats, one with a gun in its mouth, where the narrator describes them as “Romanian trained dogs, as they go back into their cages on their own afterwards,” before getting carried away with dog theatrics, recreating a Turkish massacre taking place on what resembles a puppet show set, where in their state of aroused frenzy, the audience starts beating another dog, leaving it lying outside as a corpse, where one performing dog, still on his hind legs, stops to examine his fallen comrade, as the other looks forlornly out the window, while the crowd of spectators wanders away and disperses into the bowels of the backwater town, disappearing into the movie set of smoke and fog, to the suddenly disquieting music of Mozart’s Requiem Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Requiem K. 626 YouTube (53:28). 

Loverboy

LOVERBOY – video               B                     

Romania  Sweden  (94 mi)  2011  d:  Catalin Mitulescu             Official Facebook

This starts out as perhaps the ugliest looking film seen in years, dirty, brownish, washed out video, where it appears they used the cheapest film stock available, as the focus is slightly blurred throughout, creating what amounts to a horrible-to-look-at film.  Other Romanian films have a similar washed out color palette, but they depict a certain Eastern European realism, a throwback to the days of the Soviets when the entrenched Kafkaesque bureaucracy reflected bland and soulless times.  But this isn’t like that, as this movie quickly displays a French New Wave sensibility in terms of a breakout, free wheeling film style, hot looking guys and sexy women on motorcycles drinking and hanging out at the beach, cavorting like there’s no tomorrow, but set in a grim Eastern European miserablism, as we soon learn the guys are brutes, treating women like scum, reflecting the Serbian or Russian gangster sensibility where these men are thugs.  Actually, as it turns out, the style this most closely resembles is that of Emir Kusterica in his more low key moments of humiliating devastation, as this expresses a kind of outlaw Eastern European art, where these violent criminals are all outside the law and the original Balkan music by Pablo Malaurie is simply outstanding, perhaps the best thing in the film, as it perfectly describes the essential lowlife character of these men who like to drink, have sex, and party all night long with girls for sale who work for them, whose lives are defined by being treated like shit, while the guys sit around on the beach and rake in all the money they earn. 

No matter what films you see, nowhere is there an economic abyss on display like the former Soviet Bloc black market reality, where they thrive on sex trafficking of teenage girls, kept in line by the excessive use of violence, where lies, deceit, rape, drugs and murder are an everyday reality.  Once hooked these girls don’t stand a chance.  This movie is a kind of behind the scenes exposé of the methods they use to find the girls, the broken promises they make pretending to be something they’re not with macho behavior, sunglasses, fast cars, and sex, where those girls that stick around pay the price while those that choose initially to leave by their own accord, often quite by chance, are surprisingly saved from this debasement.  The hook is the use of cute guys who express an air of indifference, like Luca (George Pistereanu), a Brando or James Dean like figure who is all sexual presence, a kind of prized stable boy owned by the bosses whose job is to lure in the girls, where they know these are bad boys, but they can’t help themselves, and by the time they figure out what’s happening it’s too late.  Luca even works on motorbikes, like a Romanian THE WILD ONE (1953), used to impress the women with his cool demeanor and sexually liberated lifestyle where he’s quick to seduce them.  The twist here is when he meets Veli (Ada Condeescu), a cute country girl that Luca appears to protect from the more edgy and raucous behavior of the lowlife brutes on display, whose thoroughly noxious treatment of women should tell anyone all they need to know, but Veli finds Luca as a kind of chivalrous thug, a guy who will stand up to the others, making her feel safe in his arms.  This apparently works, as Veli’s feelings are inexplicably reciprocated by the kindness of Luca, actually penetrating that emotional armor, but just barely, as he remains ambivalent and standoffish, but loath to release her to the bosses. 

The rest of the film plays out like a couple on the run, even though they inhabit Luca’s own private domain, a small family owned café by the side of the road and a garage where he can work on bikes.  Their sexual chemistry onscreen sizzles and is potent medicine, as they grow increasingly affectionate, though Luca continues to struggle with what this is costing him.  He and Veli become an item, where the others come by to visit and party and check out the merchandise, making little snide comments about the lovebirds in the making, suggesting Luca has finally met his match, but all they are really doing is reporting back to the boss what’s going on with the girl, because Luca keeping the girl to himself is costing the business money.  Keeping her around is only increasing his debt, like interest on a loan, until eventually he can’t afford to keep her.  She volunteers to work off his debt, believing in him so strongly that she would do anything.  He knows just exactly what would happen to her, as these guys wear women out quick, crushing their confidence and destroying all that is beautiful about them, continually having to replenish the business with new girls.  While the movie highlights the actions and behavior of the young attractive couple, the real story behind it all is the harsh realism of the criminal thugs running the operation, whose nightmarish sex slave ring defies comprehension, but provides a perfect backdrop for the current mafia-style business model developing in Eastern Europe.