Domino

Director Brian de Palma

 

de Palma with actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau

 

de Palma with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and actress Carice van Houten

 






DOMINO                   D                    

Denmark  France  Italy  Belgium  Netherlands (89 mi)  2019 d:  Brian de Palma

Kind of a throwback film from an earlier era, feeding into the global paranoia about Islamic terrorism, like the cheapo exploitation flicks pumped out by your typical Golan-Globus production, founded by Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, which in the mid-80’s were cranking out more than a dozen films per year, coinciding with the VHS boom of the late 70’s and early 80’s, literally packing the shelves of local video stores, when the company had an insatiable appetite for high octane B-movies, where the secret was their embrace of the international market, something Hollywood was slow to comprehend.  Enter Brian de Palma, a shlock movie specialist with an affinity for films from that era, where this is only his second film in more than a decade, seemingly making this film on the fly.  Shot in Spain and Denmark with an international cast and crew, it couldn’t be more confusing, spoken in English instead of Danish, where the sound’s not in synch with the words being spoken, feeling like it was hastily completed.  As it turns out, de Palma had an additional hour that has been excised from the final version, with the release delayed for a year, with the director removed from the final product.  Completely frustrated with the process, de Palma is quoted a year ago as saying, “I had a lot of problems in financing [the film].  I never experienced such a horrible movie set.  A large part of our team has not even been paid yet by the Danish producers.  The film is finished and ready to go out, but I have no idea what its future will hold, it is currently in the hands of the producers.  This was my first experience in Denmark and most likely my last.”  Rife with stereotypes, exactly like all his earlier films, this is not exactly a picture of taste and refinement, using crude exploitive imagery that is not for the meek, revitalizing ISIS beheadings and suicide bombers, creating propaganda imagery as recruiting material, which this film is more than happy to recreate, emulating their style, suggesting de Palma actually finds cinematic aspects of ISIS propaganda intriguing, perhaps admiring the way (befitting of the age of selfies) terrorists love to document their own atrocities, using a lead character to speak the director’s mind, “Even the way they shoot it, it's like they're professionals.  I mean, the use of graphics, slow-motion, even a drone shot.”  If that’s not disgusting enough, less of an action thriller, this is really a threadbare romance taking place in a murky world of international terrorism, though there’s barely a pulse that registers, as the man in question is actually dead, killed off early in the film, yet the pangs of love survive.  There’s something silly and passé about the storyline, like recalling a bad dream, but it doesn’t have to make sense, though it’s an attempt to be topical.  

Set in Denmark, with a pan of the sleek architecture of Copenhagen reminding viewers where they are, we follow a pair of hard-nosed cops, the more flamboyant Christian (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and the older, internally repressed Lars (Søren Malling), who seems lost on a different wavelength, cynical and downbeat, as if uncomfortable in his own skin.  While Christian obsesses about food and sex, Lars is moody and inherently disinterested all the time, though he’s punctual, picking up his partner the next morning, but his female sex partner in bed doesn’t want to let him go, allowing himself to get distracted, actually forgetting his gun, an act for which consequences invariably ensue.  Responding to a routine call, described as a domestic dispute (altogether missing a van parked out front in plain view), they encounter a man on the elevator with blood on the tips of his shoes, Ezra Tarzi, Eriq Ebouaney, never better than portraying Patrice Lumumba in LUMUMBA (2000), also appearing in de Palma’s own FEMME FATALE (2002), but here he goes through the motions as the angry black man, arrested on the spot, handcuffed and apprehended, with Christian borrowing his partner’s gun to take a look upstairs while Lars awaits a patrol van to take their prisoner.  What he discovers is revolting, as Tarzi has been torturing a victim with a knife, but by the time he runs back downstairs, Tarzi has escaped the cuffs and stabbed his partner in the neck (without his gun to defend himself), making a break out the window onto the roof.  Unsure of what to do, but at the urging of his partner, he bolts out the window giving chase, where the steepness of the roof gives each of them problems, with both perilously hanging from a dangling gutter overlooking the street down below in an homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), eventually falling into a crate of tomatoes.  While Christian is momentarily dazed, men in suits apprehend Tarzi, taking him away, leaving Christian to ponder what just happened.  But this sets the wheels in motion, as Lars lies unconscious in a hospital bed while Christian unravels the dark past of Tarzi, a former special forces Libyan whose patriotic father was beheaded by a terrorist mastermind Salah al-Din (Mohammed Azaay), who as it turns out spent 12 years in Guantánamo as a model prisoner without incident, but literally hours after his release he goes underground completely undetected, currently seen prepping a young female suicide bomber on her next mission, which will send fear into the hearts of the West while bringing glory to God and Islam (“Ending the lives of infidels is a great thing.  Scaring the millions of others who see it live on TV is something even greater!”), with de Palma in split screen capturing the face of the assassin mixed with the horrified faces of the victims as she machine guns actors, models, and photographers on the red carpet runway of the Netherlands Film Festival (an homage to his own film Femme Fatale shot on the Cannes red carpet), causing sheer pandemonium, but also utter jubilation when viewed from al-Din’s perspective. 

With underwritten characters that never come alive and a tepid orchestral score that falls flat, this borders on the banal, where easily the silliest thread in the film is the portrayal of the CIA, given comical stature from none other than Guy Pearce (in a bad accent) playing Agent Joe Martin, who has no redeeming moral values, so corrupt that he may as well be a criminal himself, essentially blackmailing Tarzi, who he kidnaps at the crime scene (while imprisoning his children), to do the dirty work that the CIA is hamstrung to do due to legal restraints, basically encouraging Tarzi to be a mad dog on the loose, operating with impunity, free to torture, murder, or rough up potential suspects as he pleases, hell-bent on revenge for the death of his father, ferociously targeting al-Din, with Agent Martin sitting on the sidelines casually taking credit for it all.  Meanwhile Christian joins forces with the detective assigned to investigate the case, Alex (Carice van Houten), who has a secret romantic history with his partner, a revelation that leaves Christian completely flummoxed, incapable of believing his partner kept secrets from him, but may explain his reticent behavior of late.  This romantic storyline is simply Hollywood overkill, as they love to express romance in the backdrop of war or some other tragic event, supposedly accentuating the power of love, but since Lars dies in the hospital while Christian and Alex are on the road in search of Tarzi, there is no love affair to speak of, as it all happened in a hermetically sealed universe, becoming more of a memorial tribute.  With all events converging in Almería, Spain, we discover a tomato motif used throughout the film is the means for weapons trafficking, smuggled while concealed in tomato crates onto ferries crossing the sea into Morocco, easily transporting weapons into Libya or Mali or the sites of other ISIS uprisings.  If it weren’t so comically simplistic, especially the coincidence of recognizing the terrorist leader in the front seat of a produce truck, following him to a bullring in the center of town where another planned attack is to take place, which must have lured de Palma, known for creating dynamic set pieces in real life locations, but this one kind of fizzles out instead.  Apparently they had funding difficulties, unable to find extras to fill the stadium to capacity, so the shot never materialized as intended.  Nonetheless, there are few memorable movie scenes shot in bullrings, so this has an air of anticipation, with all the forces converging at one dramatic point in time, a powderkeg about to explode, with de Palma mixing a modern era drone viewpoint with old-fashioned binocular shots, but few will likely find this resolution appealing, reduced to a one-liner from Agent Martin, explaining how he figured out what was going on, “We’re Americans, we read your emails.”  In the end, however, international terrorism has been reduced to a personal revenge saga, bathed in an unseen romance, with plenty of revolting propaganda footage taking center stage. 

A Hijacking (Kapringen)

A HIJACKING (Kapringen)       B            
Denmark  (103 mi)  2012  d:  Tobias Lindholm             Official site

The Danish put their own characteristic spin on everything, from the moody and melancholy tone of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to the national support the country provides through a system of public grants provided to artists, funding theater, museums, and various film projects like this one.  The nation itself is a country of 5 million people populating a small collection of about 50 islands, where the national economy is built upon a huge commercial shipping fleet, where nearly every family has someone employed in the industry, including the director’s own father.  So in 2007 when a Danish cargo ship was hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean, it became a personal story that nearly everyone in the country could intimately relate to, as someone from their family could be sitting out there in the middle of the ocean subject to the wild whims of heavily armed pirates.  The film is something of a follow-up of an earlier American documentary Stolen Seas (2012), which examines the impact of an actual November 2008 hijacking of the CEC Future, a Danish cargo ship traveling through the Gulf of Aden, events that alerted the world to the revival of this seemingly barbaric 18th century practice, becoming commonplace in the modern era along the East African coast of Somalia.  While that documentary does an excellent job recreating the hostage negotiations process, where much of what’s revelatory is gleaning insight into the little known Somali culture through the eyes and ears of the American educated Somali negotiator, who was not one of the original hijackers, but was hired exclusively due to his language proficiency.  In contrast, this film is a fictionalized recreation of real events that examines the impact that piracy has on the effected Danish families back home and the company executives in Copenhagen that must eventually come to terms with the pirate’s outrageous ransom demands, originally requesting $15 million dollars.   

Largely seen through the differing eyes of two individuals, Mikkel (Pilou Asbæck), the hijacked ship’s cook, spending most of his time at gunpoint in isolation with two other crew members, separated throughout from the rest of the crew, and Peter Ludvigsen (Søren Malling), the wealthy CEO of the shipping company, constantly seen in a cramped executive boardroom with the other major players, where what’s interesting is that both men are intentionally kept as much in the dark as possible, offering no clues that might in any way be considered helpful.  Instead the crew is continually bullied and intimidated, where they’re not even allowed to use the bathroom for the first month, forced to live in their own putrid stink in sweltering heat with no air circulation.  Meanwhile the suited executives have to deal with Omar (Abdihakin Asgar), often heard on the phone, but never seen, where they refuse to provide information about the crew, insisting they speak exclusively about money.  The company hires an expert on hijacking, but Peter refuses the advice to hire an impartial negotiator, insisting that he carry out his chief executive duties, which includes working in the best interests of the company and the crew.  What might surprise some is the polite and overly courteous language displayed between Peter and Omar, where neither wants to convey any hint of weakness, both crunching numbers, behaving as if they are dealing in the world of high finance.  While this is Peter’s specialty, he’s never before been threatened by the execution of his crew members if he doesn’t produce a high enough number.  At times, both sides crumble under the pressure, made worse by not knowing what to expect, often quickly cutting off phone lines to elevate the dramatic suspense.  While these death threats are typical piracy maneuvers and practiced techniques, one still never knows just what they’re dealing with on the other end of the phone line, where like police hostage negotiations, the important thing is to maintain regular contact and make use of what little trust can be established.

Time drags on and days turn into weeks, where the growing frustration eventually turns into months, where the families live in a state of hysteria, never knowing if their loved one is living or dead, where the company cannot provide any information, as they don’t want anything getting into the newspapers or television reports where it can be used against them.  The impact grows typically unrealistic, as the board can’t understand why negotiations can’t be wrapped up like any other high stakes deal, and family members are shunned from the excruciating pressure that falls on the shoulders of Peter, who really has to shut out all outside conditions to be able to stand what he’s doing, which is prolonging the agony of men’s lives and obliterating the hopes of the families that have lived for months without them.  Onboard, the ship quickly runs out of food and psychological tensions only escalate, where the hijackers finally allow Mikkel to call his wife, but interrupt the call screaming at the wife to demand that the shipping owner pay the ransom money, and then quickly hang up.  The effect is brutal, as are the lingering conditions onboard, which resemble the unbearable treatment of POW’s in Vietnam, thrown into the empty storage shell of the vessel, like living in a cave with no light whatsoever, losing whatever shred of humanity they have left.  In the end, both sides behave like animals, stripping themselves of that same humanity, showing literally no mercy whatsoever, as these are the terms of the game.  What sets this version apart is the understated minimalism, stripped down to the bare essentials, providing as little as possible, using a cinéma vérité style to show a wrenching documentary style realism, where brief moments of crippling emotional violence fill the screen, followed by an interminable silence, where one waits, but time needlessly drags on, turning this into a brooding and morbid exercise of prolonged misery and doom, where a feeling of helplessness prevails, as all tactics fail, yet both sides continue to wear down and eventually exhaust the other into submission.  This is a particularly gloomy film with ominous reverberations, exposing a tiresome and damaging process that may alter the lives of those who pay the ultimate price, like any soldier returning from the particularly catastrophic conditions of war, where the haunting ferociousness of the experience has the capacity to extinguish the human spirit.