Short Cuts: Week of 3/31-4/6

Sorcerer (1977, dir. William Friedkin)

William Friedkin’s Sorcerer is the tale of four men’s slow descent into Hell. Or maybe purgatory is more accurate. Enigmatic hitman Nilo (Francisco Rabal), Palestinian freedom fighter Kassem (Amidou), embezzling French businessman Victor Manzon (Bruno Cremer), and on-the-run Irish gangster Jackie Scanlon (Roy Scheider) are the men, all living in exile in a tiny Colombian village; the safe transport of a shipment of dynamite, which is slowly leaking the volatile explosive chemical nitroglycerin, is their sentence. If any one of the containers receives the slightest jolt then its contents will set off a fiery, fatal chain reaction- so of course the shipment must be made across hundreds of miles of hazardous terrain in two ramshackle trucks. It’s an adaptation of Georges Arnaud’s novel The Wages of Fear and a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s French thriller of the same name. Like Friedkin’s earlier The Exorcist, it’s a quasi-religious diagnosis of 70s sociopolitical moral retrograde, and like The French Connection it adopts a kinetic handheld style informed by Friedkin’s background as a documentarian. But that documentary style slowly bleeds into something more hallucinatory and maddening as the film goes along. In a terrifically suspenseful scene, Victor and Kassem must find a way to get their truck across a dilapidated rope bridge in a thunderstorm. Kassem is out front guiding the truck along while Victor drives. As the bridge creaks and swings in the wind and under the truck’s weight, Kassem trips and falls through a broken plank; Victor, unable to see him, cautiously, slowly drives along; the truck’s wench is gradually pulling the tree it’s tied to precariously out of place; the bridge’s rope supports are slowly snapping under the pressure; and the dynamite sits in wait, ready to go off at any minute. It’s great, nail bitingly suspenseful fun. We’re introduced to our four principals one by one in a series of short vignettes showing how they end up in Colombia. Yet the film isn’t interested in showing us why these characters would take on such a dangerous task. Their motivation is simple enough as it is: money talks. Rather, the film is showing us how their fate was set in stone right from the beginning. Because in Friedkin’s vision of the world, we are all bound to each other whether by a cosmic force like fate or the more secular machinery of global capitalism. In either case, hell is other people. With Ramon Bieri and Karl John in supporting roles; screenplay by Walon Green; music by Tangerine Dream; 121 minutes; in English, French, Spanish, and German. Still sourced from [FILMGRAB] (https://film-grab.com/2014/07/24/sorcerer/).

The Settlers (2023, dir. Felipe Gálvez)

This revisionist western traces Chile’s bloody colonial past in a scribbled, harried style, though it would make an interesting double bill with Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon or Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, the latter of which I reviewed last week. The film opens on a particularly bloody episode. A group of workers in Chilean Patagonia, overseen by the brutal Lieutenant MacLennan (Mark Stanley), are erecting a fence on some cold, barren land granted to Spanish businessman José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). One worker loses an arm in a freak accident. Begging for his life, he’s promptly shot by an unsympathetic MacLennan. The camera rests upon an image of the vast, miles-long fence stretching off into the distance; man’s quest to divide and categorize the natural is predicated on his insatiable bloodlust. The bulk of the film focuses on three horsemen- mestizo Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), Texan Bill (Benjamín Westfall), and MacLennan -hired by Menéndez to scope out a viable path to the Atlantic Ocean. Of course, such a path would require the extermination of the indigenous people of the Tierra del Fuego, and the Selk’nam genocide, perpetrated against the Ona people, takes narrative prominence. It’s a beautifully shot, characteristically violent Western that unfortunately fails to make the most of its fascinating historical setting and clear knowledge of genre conventions. The film isn’t as incisive as it should be; its muddled, half-conceived scenes of unflinching violence come off less as scathing commentary than they do as a series of increasingly tired shocks. And the pacing is all over the place, especially in the rushed third act, which abrasively jumps forward in time to a mostly new set of characters. Yet there’s something in the mix that the film occasionally hits upon. Early on in the film, the three riders stop at a military encampment at the border of Chile and Argentina, whose commanding officer, Captain Ambrosio (Augustín Rittano), remarks that the same man- Menéndez – owns the land on both sides. In the bloody struggle for nation, all sides are united in grotesque harmony by the machinations of capital. With Mishell Guaña in a brief, sympathetic role as the Ona woman Kiepja and Sam Spruell as Colonel Martin; 101 minutes; in Spanish and English. Still sourced from MUBI (https://images.mubicdn.net/images/film/376083/cache-927433-1701832513/image-w1280.jpg).

Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987, dir. Abbas Kiarostami)

Poetic and contemplative, Where Is the Friend’s House? is a quiet and sustained presentation of adolescent woes. Ahmad (Babak Ahmadpour) is a young boy living in the rural village of Koker, Iran. During school, he sees his teacher (Khodabaksh Defai) berate his friend Mohammad Reza (Ahmed Ahmadpour) for having lost his notebook, which he was supposed to use for homework, threatening the youngster with expulsion. In an opening scene reminiscent of that of The 400 Blows, the teacher carefully explains the reason why his students have to use a notebook for their work: it’s an ordered, comprehensive progress tracker, and everything within it can be neatly cross referenced for posterity’s sake. But when Ahmad returns home and finds that he accidentally took Mohammad Reza’s notebook, he sets off to find his friend’s home in the neighboring village and discovers that the world is not as precise and ordered as his teacher would have him believe. Kiarostami’s simple, unfettered style fits the material brilliantly; you really do see the world clearly as if through the eyes of a child not yet encumbered by the weight of existence. And the film’s editing gives it a winding, amiable pace in spite of the seemingly grand stakes. Kiarostami opts for primarily long takes with sparse, but exacting, cuts, which greatly heightens Ahmad’s labyrinthine journey through the unfamiliar neighboring village. But the film might be too quiet for its own good. The dialogue verges on repetitious, especially when Ahmad is trying to explain his situation to the adults he encounters. That’s somewhat the point- adults are generally insensitive to or unaware of how hard kids’ lives can feel- but there’s nothing that breaks that repetition, nothing that further heightens the poetry of the image. Kiarostami’s films remind me somewhat of Satyajit Ray’s in their poetically humanist outlook, yet unlike Ray he typically keeps you at a bit more of a distance from his scenarios. That contemplativeness is both Kiarostami’s biggest strength as well his weakness. I would love to be more emotionally involved in this film, but it seems to be actively resisting my intrusion. Kiarostami’s sensitivity appears as labored. Still, Where Is the Friend’s House? is more than agreeable; when Ahmad arrives late to class the next day having completed Mohammad Reza’s homework for him in his notebook, you can’t help but feel like a great weight has been lifted from your shoulders as their teacher praises the boy’s work. 83 minutes; in Persian. Still sourced from MUBI (https://assets.mubicdn.net/images/film/3062/image-w1280.jpg?1622045897).