“Beyond the Hills”

A few years back there was a fair bit of excitement (I use that term loosely) surrounding the so-called Romanian New Wave, starting with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), then Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) and Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (2009), to name the three most prominent titles. Today, the Romanian New Wave has pretty much petered out, due partly to audience indifference (both at home and abroad) and partly to dwindling financial support from the Romanian government. (A fund for promoting Romanian films internationally was terminated last year.) Accordingly, the new Beyond the Hills, which was directed by Mungiu and which opens at the Bell Lightbox this weekend, could very well be the last Romanian film screened here for some time.

I wish I could be more outraged by this, but the truth is I’ve never much cared for the Romanian New Wave. I’d rather eat from a McDonald’s dumpster than sit through the interminable Police, Adjective again. It’s not just the funereal pace of the films that I object to–it is possible, after all, to use slowness effectively–it’s the way they slavishly follow the same limited aesthetic formula: medium shots; long, unbroken takes; non-actors (or actors who act like non-actors) engaged in mundane tasks; etc. Plus, they all feature the exact same subject: individuals caught up in the bureaucracy of various Communist or post-Communist institutions. The movies are so similar, both in style and theme, they might almost have been directed by the same person. (I always have to look up which man directed which film.) Some critics like to speak of these movies as “artfully austere” and as having a “rigorous aesthetic”; I see them as “dogmatic” and “monotonous as all get-out.”

Maybe my chief problem with the Romanian New Wave is that the films don’t really feature characters. As a rule, the people are devoid of personality–they’re just bodies designed to act or be acted upon. And the stories they act out barely qualify as stories–they might better be called “determinist procedurals.” In The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, we sit and observe as a generic Old Man slowwwly succumbs to a broken, uncaring healthcare system; in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, we watch two thinly sketched young women–one is Strong, the other Weak–get backed into an illegal abortion; etc. This distanced, “objective” approach has a certain logic: most of these films are set before the fall of Communism, and they mean to show how the Communist system rendered individuals powerless and faceless. But do the filmmakers really need to treat people the same way the Communist dictatorship did just to get the point across? Watching these movies, I can’t help but think how much more engaged I’d be if only I knew something of the people onscreen–if I were allowed, even just briefly, to feel close to them.

None of this is to say the Romanian New Wave has been worthless–just much less interesting than it could have been. Though I’ve kept up with the films mostly out of a sense of duty, I do appreciate their quasi-documentary qualities. By focusing on Romania’s broken institutions and seemingly intractable systemic problems, they provide insight into a country most North Americans (me included) know little about. Needless to say, they’re the opposite of tourist brochures–they succeed chiefly in making Romania seem the dullest place on Earth.

As for Beyond the Hills, it’s par for the course. Though not as strong as 4 Months, which stands as the most engaging film of the bunch (due, ironically, to its use of conventional suspense techniques), Beyond the Hills is still better than Police, Adjective, which won acclaim largely by withholding it’s sole interesting scene until the last five minutes. (Lesson learned: an average scene can feel like a flavor explosion if you’re famished enough.) Inspired by a tragic real-life incident, Beyond the Hills is about two young, modern women living in a decidedly un-modern Moldovan convent. (The only man around: a kind but controlling priest they call “Papa.”) One of the girls, Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), is a dedicated convert to the faith, whereas the other, Alina (Cristina Flutur), is newly arrived and interested only in being with Voichita. In the past, the two were fast friends and nascent lovers, but now, with Voichita having found God, Alina is terrified of being left behind. She tries to fit in at the convent, but her fierce, earthly love for Voichita doesn’t exactly jibe with everyone else’s monastic, spiritual love. Not surprisingly, the nuns don’t take to her so well.

Even if you know nothing of the factual incident that forms the climax of Beyond the Hills, it’s obvious early on what’s going to happen. (Think Salem in the 17th century.) Accordingly, the two-and-a-half-hour running time is spent slowwwly building a case for how it happened. To my mind, that case would be more convincing if it didn’t depend completely on the two girls being utter ciphers. Alina, in particular, is a stock type unique to art films: the passionate idiot. Over and over, she lets herself look like a complete psychopath in her single-minded devotion to Voichita; all the bad stuff that befalls her could easily have been prevented if she demonstrated just a shred of intelligence or self-awareness. To make sense at all, Alina needed to be part of some semi-mythic tale of grand passions; set down amongst the drab realism of Beyond the Hills, she’s little more than a nincompoop.
 

“Spring Breakers”

The new Spring Breakers is pretty much impervious to criticism. It’s stupidity in quotation marks, and you either want to see the shit-show or you don’t. I truly have no idea whether director Harmony Korine is an idiot savant or the ultimate put-on artist, but either way I have to admit he’s created–for better or worse–an authentic cult object. And if nothing else, it’s a step up from his rancid, serious early output. Spring Breakers is essentially Kids without the heavy-handedness; it’s far too inane to ever be taken seriously as an examination of the Youth of Today. (Not that people won’t try.)

To my mind, the first half of the movie is so oppressively stupid it’s no fun at all. (This part actually is rather heavy-handed.) Four hottie co-eds (Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Rachel Korine, the director’s wife) escape the boredom of school and the squareness of religion by embracing vacuousness: they go to keggers, cavort in their panties, snort drugs off one another’s boobs, fantasize about shooting people, have dim-bulb conversations about life while lounging in pools, etc. For a solid forty minutes or so, the movie is merely a Girls Gone Wild party montage with film-school mannerisms. So instead of just bouncing boobs, for example, we get bouncing boobs in slow-mo with distancing ambient techno. “It’s not Girls Gone Wild, bro, it’s a comment on Girls Gone Wild!”

Up until this point, the movie is frankly ugly in that it courts both the bozos in the audience, who take it as un-ironic, sexy entertainment, and the art-house aesthetes, who take it as a knowing condemnation of the bozos. It’s a nobody-wins proposition. But then James Franco comes along as the corn-rowed, grill-sporting gangster Alien, and suddenly the picture gets an infusion of authentically weird energy. In conventional leading roles, Franco is a handsome somnambulist, but when he gets to be weird, as he does here and in Pineapple Express, he’s pretty fun. You wouldn’t call his thuggish Alien a charmer, exactly, but he’s a memorably ridiculous creation. Alien loves to talk (I assume his dialogue was all improv) and everything he says is deliriously insipid. If nothing else, he’s a welcome relief from the four girls, who are just conventionally insipid.

The unqualified highlight of the movie arrives at the three-quarter mark, when Alien sits down at a white baby grand on an ocean-front terrace and lip-syncs to Britney Spears’ tinkly-tragic “Everytime.” (Better still, the song continues under a subsequent crime-spree montage.) “If ever there were an angel on earth it was Ms. Britney Spears,” Alien says by way of introduction. It’s an inexplicable, almost ecstatic moment, partly because, for the first time, the movie feels nuttily earnest rather than ironic. It’s still a put-on, to be sure, but it takes us to that zonked-out place where naïveté and irony dissolve into one another. Then again, maybe I was just losing it by that point. “Sprang Break, y’all, Sprang Breaaaak!”

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