SLIFF 2008 Coverage Part 8

Title: The Trap
Director: Srdan Golubovic
Country: Serbia
Score: 8.0
Review:
Even if I live to be a hundred, I’ll probably never get tired of noirs featuring an essentially good man who tries to do the right thing, but makes one wrong decision that sends his soul spiraling towards damnation. “The Trap” is an excellent example and superb companion piece for Wim Wenders’ similar “The American Friend.”

Mladen is a state engineer who can’t possibly afford the 26,000 Euros price tag when he discovers that his son will die without a rare operation. In spite of his pride, Mladen’s wife puts a help ad in the paper. Eventually there’s a response… from a man who wants Mladen to assassinate in exchange for the money.

“The Trap” tries a little too hard to justify Mladen’s actions, when it’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll accept the assignment (since otherwise this would be a different kind of movie). I think Golubovic is a bit too insistent when he tries to convince us that we would do the same thing in the same circumstances. Still, at least the motivations are realistic enough and it leads us to the consequences, which is where the film really comes alive.

Every goes wrong, of course. The victim turns out to be a husband and father. Mladen likes (and maybe even has a crush on?) the wife. Meanwhile, the stress and secrecy causes Mladen’s own marriage to fall apart. The criminals don’t come through with the money. The police don’t buy his story. And all the while his son is still dying.

The shift from dealing with tough decision to tough consequences is pessimistic, but uncompromising. One finds it irresistible to get caught up in Mladen’s plight and to share his frustration and despair. There’s a sense that his tale is a metaphor for the way individuals are crushed by fate, society, economy and other forces beyond their control, but it’s never too blunt to distract from the personal crisis.

A lot of the symbolism is handled in interesting ways. Mladen’s son, for instance, draws countless pictures that are brightly-colored and full of fantastic imagery in contrast to Mladen’s increasingly bleak reality. I particularly liked that the night before Mladen agrees to do the hit he sits in the rain at an empty intersection and eventually runs a red light (confirming, on an infinitely smaller scale, that he is ready to break the law). Later, he will remain stopped in front of a green light as he comes to accept that his life is at a dead-end.

The acting is really quite well done, never crossing over the line into excessive histrionics. The worst part may have been the makeup, which is inexplicably overly purple all the time (cold lips, tired eyes, bruises) and takes away some of the attention from Glogovac’s (as Mladen) highly facial performance. The film also make good use of shallow focus, dirty locations and bad weather to give off a sullen noir atmosphere.


Title: Yesterday Was a Lie
Director: James Kerwin
Country: USA
Score: 5.0
Review:
Note: After several responses noting the conspicuously personal tone I took in my original review, I’ve modified it to be more in line with the type of writing that I would prefer to read and disseminate. For more details, see the discussion in the comments section.

No combination of beautiful blondes, cerebral sci-fi and hazy noir can really be all bad, but Kerwin’s pretentious, ambitious hybrid manages to be a lot worse than it should be. The film features Hoyle, a platinum-haired female detective on the hunt for a dangerous notebook that may hold the key to rearranging the universe. Her unstable ex-lover, the unfortunately-named Dudas, appears to be in on the case. A mysterious nightclub singer, played by “Star Trek: DS9” fanboy fuel, Chase Masterson, attempts to help Hoyle out. Meanwhile Hoyle’s dreams may provide a clue into the shifting realities and cycling time paradoxes that ensnare her.

“Yesterday Was a Lie” tears apart at the seams under the weight of its multifold contradictions. Some I found pleasurable, like the combination of 1940’s era cars, fedoras and locales with modern computers and cell phones. Others are just senseless mindgames, like the erratic, slippery, faux-intellectual plot. Still others are intolerable, like the attempts to seem mysterious and fluid while forcing us to listen to clunky, condescending monologues on science, literature, psychology and art.

I felt that the dialog ran closer to pop-science and pop-psychology, than the type of illuminating prose I was hoping for. The film’s references, for instance, are obvious and facile. He uses T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” as reoccurring motifs. Not only are these references achingly cliché, but the film does not indicate a particularly deep understanding of them.

Worse still are his outright incorrect claims about Jungian psychology and quantum mechanics. After “tantalizing” us with a “mysterious” reoccurring number, we are treated to painful conversations about how Planck’s constant is THE fundamental constant of the universe (I guess the speed of light and the gravitational constant are less fundamental?) and how it represent the frequency at which the whole universe vibrates. We are told other realities, like our dreams, vibrate at different frequencies. Of course, anyone who has taken physics 101 can tell you that the Planck constant is not a frequency, but a ratio between energy and frequency. If everything in the universe actually had the same frequency, we wouldn’t have many important things we know and love, like color and a distinction between light and matter.

If Kerwin had just tried to tell an engaging and clever genre hybrid rather than trying to impress audiences with the equivalent of literary and scientific buzzwords, his film could have been, for me, the thought-provoking cult sensation that lurked just out of reach. As it stands, he’s created an intriguing mess with an egotistic undertone. I would recommend better works in this vein (“Pi,” “The Following,” “Zentropa,” “Death and the Compass,” “Element of Crime” to name a few) to those who are interested. It has done well on the small-festival circuit, interestingly, and boasts an exhaustive list of prizes on the director’s Wikipedia page.

I suspect that Kerwin will go on to make a film I’m on board with. Adapting “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” the Czech play that gave us the word “robot,” is certainly a promising direction.