Film Carew: The Zero Theorem, The Broken Circle Breakdown, And More

THE ZERO THEOREM

Calling The Zero Theorem Terry Gilliam's best movie since 12 Monkeys is a backhanded compliment; less about the quality of his 12th feature, more about the lack thereof that's marked a dire two decades of awful movies both big (2005's The Brothers Grimm) and small (2005's repellent Timeland). It's set where the filmmaker should always dwell —the not-too-distant future— and once again uses his demented-carny aesthetic to conjure a dystopia far dingier and dirtier than the regular sci-fi visions of gleaming, antiseptic futures. This is another Gilliam world of zany costumery and zanier wigs, another imaginarium in which all the world's a wacky circus.

Yet, it also has a contemporary resonance rare for the filmmaker. Christoph Waltz plays an monastic hacker toiling endlessly for a oligarchal corporation overseen by Matt Damon's chameleonic shaman (known simply, and drolly, as Management). Waltz is a man of faith: he lives in the rundown remains of an abandoned church —where it snows indoors, doves coo in the rafters, and dishes are washed in holy water— and endlessly waits for a secret-of-life phonecall from God. The more-secular Damon charges him with cracking the code for the very nature of the universe; and, yes, that means there's bad CGI of Waltz floating bald in space, with the stars swirling down the drain of a black hole. What could possibly disrupt an alpha-nerd's life of staring obsessively into the abyss? A Manic Pixie Dream Girl!

Mélanie Thierry is a French femme fatale play-acting male fantasy —a scene in a sexy-nurse outfit ain't so subtle— whilst existing, online, as virtual dreamgirl and internet-porn starlet. Whether or not their romance is real or not “doesn't matter at all”, by her estimation; the neural network and the digital network each a grid charged by electrical impulses. Waltz is a man of these times: he works from home —which means he never leaves it— and spends whole alienated days staring at a computer in his pyjamas. And when confronted with a red-blooded dame, he prefers digitised fantasy to uncomfortable reality.

All this —and some odd-couple comedy with a teenage hacker-supreme (Lucas Hedges, the ginger jerk from Moonrise Kingdom)— is watched over by the all-seeing-eye of Damon's CCTV; The Zero Theorem's drama, like 21st-century life itself, played out under surveillance. And if the broad satire doesn't tip you to where Gilliam stands on the state of digital culture, then all the scenes in which Waltz smashes a screen with a ball-peen hammer should.

THE BROKEN CIRCLE BREAKDOWN

Though set in Belgium and spoken in Flemish, The Broken Circle Breakdown is a film obsessed with Americana; with the exportation of both American pop-culture and foreign policy. It's a cathartic, epic family-drama set across the eight-year reign of George W. Bush, whose sermons on warmongering, religion, and moral 'right' sound out on televisions buzzing in the background. In the foreground, writer/star Johan Heldenbergh and starlet Veerle Baetens bond over a love of bluegrass: he drunken and droll, she inked-up and intense; the two making beautiful music together. They meet, shack up, and eventually have a daughter; their happiness rocked when the kid contracts leukaemia.

This duly tears apart their lives and tests their existential devotion to embracing chaos and musical harmony; director Felix Van Groeningen scattering the chronology to contrast the joys of first love and new parenthood with the brutal cruelties of disease, and the destructive toxicity of doubt in a relationship.

As writer, Heldenbergh is interested in the way that atheist, intellectual, anti-American Europeans can devote their lives to makin' God-fearin', All-American music. And the drama tilts on a kind of inverse crisis-of-faith: even the most devout atheists wavering in the face of a terminal illness. Throughout, the bluegrass music sounds out loud, all those tight harmonies and banjo breakdowns speaking of its heritage: as a balm against the pain, loss, and hardship of life, and as a tonic to keep on living.

CHILD'S POSE

Hell hath no fury like a mother's pride in Calin Peter Netzer's searing Child's Pose, where Luminita Gheorghiu fearlessly plays one of cinema's great unbreakable matriarchs. She's an upper-crust Bucharest housewife kept in furs and finery, whose night-at-the-opera is ruined when she gets a from-prison phonecall from a wayward son (Bodgan Dumitrache) who's just killed a pedestrian whilst drunk-driving down a rural highway. Her only child is a source of both deep-seated protectiveness and utter disappointment; mother/son having long failed to live up to each other's expectations.

"I think I might actually hate that kid."

Screenwriter Razvan Radulescu (who wrote Romanian new-wave classic The Death Of Mr. Lazarescu and the just-as-great Tuesday, After Christmas) tells the story through Gheorghiu, and so, dramatically, we 'side' with her. We see Dumitrache as an ungrateful brat afraid to stand up for himself, or for anything; he having flown the familial coop only to take shelter under the wing of new squeeze Ilinca Goia.

Every scene between Gheorghiu and Goia is a study in icy, predatory passive-aggressiveness; the pair trading possessive barbs over a man neither is particularly convinced by. At times, Gheorghiu embodies the maternal impulse turned into twisted, barbaric pantomime, but Netzer respects her fury, allows her to stand as respectable symbol. Having survived the Ceaucescu years, she has a strength the subsequent generation's coddled, Westernised youth could never dare. That becomes clear when she drags her son, against his will, back to the scene of his crime, into the rural house in which his victim once lived. The divides of race and class in these scenes aren't accidental: Radulescu's story a highly-symbolic parable about those living life large on lands laced with bloodshed, and the karmic debt they owe.

IDA

Meanwhile, in Socialist Poland, the titular character in Pawel Pawlikowski's return-to-his-homeland is a teenage nun raised in a Catholic orphanage. On the eve of her vows of Godly chastity, Ida (Agata Trzebuchowska) meets the aunt (Agata Kulesza) she never knew she had, and learns the first of a series of secrets that'll rock her previously unwavering faith: though raised Christian, she was born Jewish; her parents having been killed in World War II.

So, they head out on the road, this original odd couple, in search of the ghosts of Ida's parents. It's all fabulously symbolic stuff, a journey into the heartland of Poland being a journey into the darkest parts of its dark history. Trzebuchowska's frayed cultural identity and conflicted morality are the big symbol, but Kulesza is her own can of worms: an Independent Woman now in a drunken retirement, having served as a hanging judge for the Party. There's droll comedy minted in the stark differences between these blood relatives, but Pawlikowski largely keeps things fabulously austere. The black-and-white images are filled with deep blacks and smudged greys; as much homage to the black-and-white works of Polish cinema's post-war glory-days (to the works of Wajda, Polanski, Królikiewicz, and Skolimowski) as yet another outing photographing '60s socialism as an era dark and dreary.

MY SWEET PEPPER LAND

There's a new sheriff in town in My Sweet Pepper Land, a frontier Western set in a dustbowl Kurdish town near the Iraqi-Turkish-Iranian border, where manly men ride the range on horseback, smugglers pick through the mountains under cover of darkness, and justice comes down the barrel of a gun. Yet, for all its widescreen vistas, black-hat/big-moustache villains, and lawman one-liners (“I don't do compromises!” Korkmaz Arslan spits, then pulls the trigger), Hiner Saleem's take on the genre is hardly heaving with fidelity.

For starters, they didn't have cute umbrellas in the Old West.

It begins with a droll, blackly comic, highly symbolic opening in which, in a half-built prison, officials fumble through Kurdistan's first-ever 'democratic' execution; the criminal hanged, ad hoc, from an outdoor basketball hoop, shoved off an old 2006 Elections ballot-box. All its institutional buildings —jails, police stations, schools— are under construction; and, rather than banding together to build a new nation, its subjects still squabble over who did what in the war, who sided with whom.

Arslan is a resistance fighter-turned-cop, chief villain Tarik Akreyî a warlord who played wartime collaborator to line his own pockets. In the middle is Golshifteh Farahani, a daringly independent woman who has her own heroine's entrance: walking into town with a steel drum on her back; leaving half-a-dozen worrying, wacky brothers in her wake. A woman is in peril the moment she steps on the frontier, but Saleem gives Farahani her own strength, her own agency; the screen siren rising to the occasion both with her defiant performance, and by providing an exquisite, unexpected steel-pan score.

A CASTLE IN ITALY

Given Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's private life is already so public —her family is European high-society, her sister was once France's first-lady, and her relationship with fellow actor Louis Garrel was tabloid fodder— perhaps it's no surprise she's so unafraid of airing the personal on screen.

A Castle In Italy, her third directorial feature, again keeps things close to home: with her mother (Marisa Borini) cast as her mother; Garrel as her lover; and Filippo Timi playing a stand-in for the brother she lost to AIDS in 2006. The film housing the familial is an ambling, shambly comedy-of-manners about kooky kin contemplating selling their old Italian castle; its drama raiding Tolstoy, leaning on Woody Allen, and casually switching from French to Italian mid-sentence.

Yet, for something so personal, the emotions feel strangely muted. Similarly, its whimsy never amounts to actual comedy. When Bruni Tedeschi taps into her fidgety neuroses and middle-aged angst, as both writer and performer, A Castle In Italy has fleeting moments of vigour and life; the rest of the time its autobiography seems indulgent and easy.