Whiplash
“Full Metal Jazz” is the one line pitch for Damien Chazelle’s debut feature Whiplash, in which Miles Teller, first-year percussionist in a prestigious program at a New York jazz school, is taken under the brutal, abusive, semi-psychotic ‘wing’ of drill-sergeant bandleader JK Simmons. Haranguing his charges with a host of epithets — “faggot” this, “cocksucker” that — he’s an antagonist dressed top-to-toe in black, the gleam of his highly-polished shoes matching the gleam of his shaved head. In his crack Studio Band, it’s his way or the high way, and only the strong shall survive. The most harmful words you can utter a student aren’t, in his mind, “I will fuck you like a pig!”, but “good job”.
Chazelle’s film is a study of the cult-like inculcation of fresh-faced recruits into an unstoppable unit; though it leaves Simons as sage-enough counsel, and Teller as willing-enough pupil, to never make it an outright critique of overbearing teachers and/or overdriven students.
The obvious evocation of Full Metal Jacket —here, half the war is fought in the rehearsal room— leads comparisons to the armed forces; where ritual humiliation has long been a way of instilling mettle in young men. But Simmons moreso resembles the head-coach of a football team, the white man turning red in the face screeching at his largely-black players, violently prepping them for the field of battle. When word comes out that a former charge made-good —a graduate who left long ago to play in the big leagues— has committed suicide, the resemblance is obviously intentional. There may be no concussion trauma from blowing your horn, but the years of ritual abuse and hyper-masculine competition don’t leave a brain undamaged.
"You’re in for untold pain and suffering."
In turn, Chazelle depicts jazz as a sport like any other: Teller’s endless hours in the rehearsal room, practicing ’til the sweat flies and his hands bleed, are the stuff of a Rocky montage. And all this practice —we’re talkin’ bout practice— always builds towards another competition, another ‘moment’ on the battlefield waiting to be seized. The fact that this works too well —jazz as a competitive discipline practiced by macho blowhards desperately out to play faster, higher, stronger— serves as an effective commentary on the music. Which, well, be warned. Whiplash may succeed as a kind of sports-movie-turned-psychological-thriller, but if ‘106 minutes of endless frenetic double-time jazz’ sounds like your personal musical nightmare, then just like Teller himself, you’re in for untold pain and suffering.
Force Majeure
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When Ruben Östlund set out to make his fourth feature Force Majeure, he had two goals: to stage the most elaborate avalanche scene in cinema history, and — like Ingmar Bergman before him, with Scenes From A Marriage — to increase the divorce rate in Sweden with a single film.
"It's black comedy filled with familiarity, a delight for knowing audiences."
Force Majeure’s hook goes like this: a not-so-happily-married couple (Johannes Kuhnke and Lisa Loven Kongsli) have stepped off the grid for a skiing holiday with their kids (Clara and Vincent Wettergren). One morning at the hotel restaurant, one of the alps’ periodic ‘forced’ avalanches —fired off as a safety measure— picks up unplanned steam, and hurtles towards them. In an act of self-preservation reminiscent of both Gael García Bernal’s catastrophic masculinity flinch in Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet and George Costanza trampling old people whilst fleeing a fire in Seinfeld, Kuhnke grabs his iPhone and hightails it out of there, leaving parental protectiveness the sole province of Kongsli. When the mist clears, it turns out to have been a near-miss, not a direct-hit; and though Kuhnke may return with a dopey smile and a theatrical wipe-of-the-brow, his selfish flight won’t be forgotten.
Where Östlund’s previous picture, Play, was a caustic portrait of social stereotypes, power, and privilege —its tale of rogue kid-gangs steeped in the showing-you-the-artifice nastiness of Michael Haneke larks like Benny’s Video and Funny Games— with Force Majeure he plays much of his marital-disintegration for laughs. Though made with formal rigour and a fondness for long takes, even in its strung-out silences the film maintains a genuinely crowd pleasing air, its black comedy filled with familiarity, a delight for knowing audiences.
It’s a film about the clash of old genetic impulses and gender roles with the new social mores of contemporary Sweden, which means the foibles feel relatable, millennial. Before Kuhnke turned and fled, the family were happily documenting the coming avalanche on their phones; meaning the incident is there, encoded in digital video, forevermore; able to be replayed and dissected, revelled or stewed in. It’s hard to forget the past when it’s always present on your device.
Kongsli is so shaken by the incident she can’t continue with the holiday as is, can no longer play the pantomime of the happy couple. So, when they meet fellow travellers or friends from back home (including Game Of Thrones’ mightily-bearded Kristofer Hivju, in a charming comic turn), she steers talk, time and again, towards the avalanche, discussing her husband’s actions both personally and philosophically. When the pair argue, they do so in front of friends, or out in the hotel hallway, in plain sight of the taciturn staff. Östlund uses this to pull out from the family drama, and into his most favoured realm: group social dynamics; an idea that peaks on the final bus-ride out of the alps. A marriage, a family, is never an enclave from society, but a part of it; and, in an era big on hyper-capitalism’s every-man-for-himself rat-race, Force Majeure’s critique of masculinity, finally, mounts a paean for the collective and communal.
MISS VIOLENCE
The annual Greek Film Festival used to be a gruesome affair, but ever since Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 masterwork Dogtooth kickstarted the ‘Greek weird-wave’, each year’s GFF has lessened the pain of its parade of commercial-comedies-for-ex-pats with a handful of profound works. This year’s clear standout is Alexandros Avranas’s Miss Violence, a savage critique of delusional, destructive patriarchy that takes what Dogtooth made absurd comedy, and delivers it as dark tragedy.
It begins with shades of The Virgin Suicides, when Chloe Bolota —one of four kids in a house of seven— walks out of her 11th birthday party, looks deep into the camera, then leaps to her death from the family balcony. Their house is an enclave, a society-unto-itself under the rule of grandfather and patriarch Themis Panou. But something is rotten in the state of Greece, and when social services come asking questions, it soon becomes clear his concern for ‘keeping the family together’ is a way of protecting his own hide; in keeping his rule no matter the cost.
As with Dogtooth, there’s echoes of Josef Fritzl; Avranas patiently, potently mounting a horrifying portrait of patriarchal society, indoctrinated misogyny, systematic abuse, and weak-willed enabling. The film has a haunted, eerie air —somewhere between deadpan and deathly— and, in all its composed frames and unbroken takes, Avranas is out to author a provocation. Just as Bolota looked into the camera, before her death, so, too, does Panou himself stare into the lens as if through the fourth-wall, his cold, deathless gaze meeting the eyes of the viewer. But, more telling, and more troubling, are the scenes shot from his perspective; Miss Violence a film not just about inflicted horrors, but the burden of complicity.
