Harmony Lessons (Uroki garmonii)

HARMONY LESSONS (Uroki garmonii)        B+                  

Kazakhstan  France  Germany  (115 mi)  2013  d:  Emir Baigazin          Website

Much in the same vein as other darkly disturbing films that expose the deadly effects of systematic violence and corruption, like the Mexican film Heli (2013) or the Russian film The Major (Mayor) (2013), all are brutal films that unleash a horrific price on what are otherwise innocent bystanders who happen to be pulled into this viciously dirty business.  While there don’t seem to be as many mafia movies these days, in their place are a multitude of films about swarming gangs of thugs that control a highly specialized marketplace, as they’re each one a loose commentary on black market capitalism that lives by its own rules, like the Wild West, answering to no law but their own.  Each one survives by inflicting enormous violence, which generates an accompanying fear associated with it, allowing them to continue to operate with impunity.  Until another gang moves in that’s bigger or stronger, they each feed, like vultures on a carcass, within their own established turf.  What could be more localized than the rural regions of Kazakhstan?  Beautifully set in a landscape of mountains and snow, where a vast emptiness seems to dwarf the inhabitants living in the small town, the harshness of survival in these lonely outskirts is expressed early on when young 13-year old Aslan (Timur Aidarbekov, who was discovered in an orphanage) first has to catch a slippery sheep and then slaughter and skin it under the supervision of his grandmother.  Written, directed, and edited by this first time director, he already exhibits a mature style, making a strikingly realist film with nonprofessional actors, yet he uses an interesting technique of skipping past major incidents, where we only learn what happens by the repercussions afterwards, leaving much of what happens in a permanent state of ambiguity. 

Aslan is a quiet and studious farm kid that keeps pretty much to himself, having few social skills and no friends, the kind of kid that doesn’t speak unless spoken to, where he takes his schoolwork seriously and seems to have a talent for science, where he collects cockroaches, tying them on strings and feeding them to his lizards living in a fishbowl, while at the same time he’s learning about survival of the fittest from Darwinism.  When they teach him electricity, he concocts his own tiny electric chair and fries a poor unfortunate roach.  But his reserved, anti-social behavior makes him a popular target for schoolyard bullies, who are little more than extortion artists led by the lead thug Bolat (Aslan Anarbayev), threatening to beat up anyone who is seen talking or befriending Aslan, who quickly becomes isolated and even more of a social outcast.  We soon learn Bolat collects money from lower classmen, which is then handed over to upper classmen, who are in turn extorted by local gangsters, where the money is used to support their members in prison.  This social hierarchy is thoroughly in place, where anyone who doesn’t play by the rules gets attacked and beat up by several of Bolat’s sidekicks.  Another kid that recently moved from the city, Mirsayan (Mukhtar Andassov), isn’t really afraid to stand up to bullies, as he’s not impressed, but he takes his lumps.  There’s also a side story about an attractive young Muslim girl, Akzhan (Anelya Adilbekova), who insists upon wearing a headscarf, even in gym class, as otherwise boys spend too much time leering at her, actions that she feels violates the Koran.  She wants nothing to do with stirring up that kind of desecrating behavior, even though the school officials urge her to remove it.  One of the more curious moments finds Aslan spying on her when she’s performing a modern dance routine, which may all be happening inside his head.     

There’s constant head-butting against authority in this film, as teachers are quick to lecture kids who challenge their authority, which means they’re not listening to the concerns raised by the kids, who often provide them with information they need to hear, but instead they get punished for it.  Similarly, if they go against the grain with Bolat, they’ll be brutalized for anything outside the norm.  Meanwhile both Mirsayan and Aslan have aspirations to defy Bolat, choosing different methods, where Mirsayan is willing to fight him one on one, while Aslan resorts to more devious means.  When Bolat is found dead, an act we never see, they are the prime suspects, where the police instantly fill the void of the schoolyard brutalizers, literally torturing the two kids to force them to talk, but both insist they had nothing to do with it, even after extensive beatings.  At one point one of the cops turns to the other asking what if they’re telling the truth?  But they quickly put those thoughts aside, as they’re paid to get the results the commander is looking for.  Every level of society is bullying whoever is directly below them on the food chain, creating a horrific picture of rampant corruption and brutality in the education, police, and criminal justice systems, where Mirsayan and Aslan are their current victims.  Because the film is told in such a realist style, it comes as a complete surprise when the director uses dream states for Aslan, which only becomes evident by the out-of-character events unfolding, expressed through an exaggerated state of mind.  This method is even more effective by leaving out so much of the significant material, where the audience and the police are only privy to theories and unproven allegations, relying instead upon motive and established character traits, yet it remains something of an elusive puzzle for everyone to comprehend.  Bolat and his gang could only operate with teachers continually turning a blind eye, while the police and their henchmen brutalize suspects with no community oversight.  In this manner, the police have no established credibility with the audience, as we’re not likely to believe their questionable results, leaving the finale in a mysterious state of psychological disbelief, where truth is often difficult to obtain, clouded by the murky methods of operation.  The cinematography by Aziz Zhambakiyev is often stunning, giving the film a grimly poetic yet continually gripping feeling of austerity and despair.       

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.

Stolen Seas

STOLEN SEAS                       C+                  

USA  Canada  Somalia  Denmark  Philippines  Estonia  (88 mi)  2012  d:  Thymaya Payne Official site

Much of this plays out like a journalistic exposé, where this feels like an in-depth television news piece rather than a feature length documentary movie, as this has a History Channel feel throughout in what is mostly a historical analysis of a particular event in time, the November 2008 hijacking of the CEC Future, a Danish cargo ship traveling through the Gulf of Aden by heavily armed Somali pirates, an event 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.  A necessary passageway between the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden is subject to heavy commercial traffic, estimated in the billions of dollars each year.  The film does quickly get the audience’s attention in the pre-opening credit sequence by playing the actual audio recording of the ship’s captain alerting authorities that his ship is taking incoming bazooka fire, attacked by a high speed vessel with about a dozen men armed with Kalashnikov rifles who are outracing his ship, eventually boarding his vessel.  All of this happens literally within seconds, where the real drama begins when his voice cuts off, setting in motion a strange sequence of events that ends up with a hostage negotiations crisis.  The film takes us through the process where the ship immediately veers off course steered into a safe Somalia port city, and once there, the Danish CEO of the ship, Per Gullestrup, receives a ransom call asking for $7 million dollars.  What follows is a reenactment of a series of phone calls that initiates the negotiations in order to obtain the release of the 13 crew members, while the film takes a deeper look at the root causes of why Somalia is in such desperate straights, a poverty stricken country that hasn’t had a ruling government or any acting court since a Civil War broke out in 1991 with no resolution, turning instead into a nation of warlords, reminiscent of Japan’s 19th century feudal history when rival clans used samurai warriors for protection.

One of the significant aspects of the film is tracking down both Gullestrup and his counterpart Somali negotiator Ishmael Ali, as each are operating on decisively different points of view, becoming a window into their respective cultures.  Gullestrup is pretty much what you’d expect, a conservative, tight-lipped European businessman who’s used to seeing the world strictly in dollar signs, where driving a hard bargain, streamlining costs, and weighing financial options is what he does for a living, surrounded by lawyers, and plenty of advice from police and hired consultants.  In fact, he quickly hires a disinterested spokesperson to handle all the negotiations, a professional in dealing with extortion demands, which typically takes its time, as they are subject to various threats to hopefully bring about a quick resolution, but when these tactics don’t work, the pirates tend to grow increasingly frustrated.  Ishmael Ali, on the other hand, is a unique figure, educated and fluent in English, he’s seen living an upscale life in Somalia where he nonchalantly flaunts his wealth, owning about 75 camels, claiming owning camels in Somalia is equivalent to joining an exclusive country club in America.  Having lived in the United States for 20 years, leaving due to the frenetic pace of life, he’s the lone voice that has had a chance to experience both worlds, proudly proclaiming one can live like a king in Somalia for about a thousand dollars a year.  While the filmmakers trot out American and European journalists, historians, terrorism experts, and even Noam Chomsky, supposedly an expert on everything, but none provide the rare insight of Ali, who is himself the central figure in the movie, both during the negotiations and afterwards as he assesses what it’s like living in Somalia, usually seen relaxed, dressed in flowing robes, sitting before an electric fan.  While he was not one of the hijacking pirates, he was hired by them as a translator/negotiator due to his proficient language skills, where he openly acknowledges he needed the money to give his 2-year old son the possibility of having a future.  

While piracy still holds a romantic swashbuckling notion from Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn in films like THE BLACK PIRATE (1926), CAPTAIN BLOOD (1935), THE SEA HAWK (1940), or the recent PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN (2003 – 2015 and still counting) series, the more intriguing aspect of the film is what it unearths about the nearly unfathomable nation of Somalia itself.  Somalia is unlike anywhere else in the world, a communist state aligned with the Russians before the fall of the Soviet empire, they were left adrift with no one to sponsor their interests, becoming a bloody battleground in a senseless Civil War that resolved nothing, leaving half a million dead Somali’s in the wake and no acting government.  When the Americans attempted to lead a United Nations mission in 1992 to bring food to a starving nation, where 300,000 had already died from famine, they got caught up in the nation’s Civil War, attempting to arrest one of the brutally corrupt war lords who was guilty of massive human rights abuses and stealing much of the incoming food, but they paid a heavy price in doing so, as depicted in typical Hollywood style in Ridley Scott’s BLACK HAWK DOWN (2001).  Since that failed debacle, Somalia has been left alone to fend for themselves with little to no help from the outside world, where toxic chemicals wash up on their shores from discarded shipping waste, effectively destroying the shoreline fishing industry, which was once the nation’s leading source of income.  From the Somali point of view, the passing ships are simply sitting targets, potential sources of income in a nation nearly destroyed with a shattered and depleted economy.  But all evidence suggests there is no trickle down effect from the multi-million dollar ransoms paid, as a few get enormously rich, while there is no foreseeable dent in the nation’s poverty.  While the filmmakers intermix Ali’s discerning thoughts about Somalia with the increasingly frustrating, drawn out pace of the negotiations, they perhaps believe they are building interest.  But the film is more a stream of facts and information, serving more as a lecture on the tactics of Somali hijacking several years ago, never bringing the viewers up to date, so by the end we feel the filmmakers have somehow missed the point.  Due to increased policing from European Union and NATO countries, there has been a significant drop off in piracy incidents in 2012, where these days, seen from a strictly economic viewpoint, financial backers are less inclined to finance pirating expeditions due to the low rate of success.