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A Film Unfinished
Yael Hersonski
Hanna Avrutkzi, Luba Gerwisser, Jurek Plonski, Aliza Vitis-Shomron, Shula Zeder
(Oscilloscope Pictures)
10
A Film Unfinished
Again and again in A Film Unfinished, faces turn to the camera. Most belong to residents of the Warsaw ghetto, looking back at the Nazis filming them in May 1942. Preserved in a 62-minute project titled Das Ghetto, today they’re both haunted and haunting, their cheeks caved in, their skin stretched tight, and their eyes unavoidable. Like so many faces that look back in so many documentaries, these indicate the subjects’ awareness of their status as such. Their expressions are curious, They are also silent, like all of Das Ghetto, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film discovered in an East German vault during the 1950s. Yael Hersonski has reassembled much of that footage for her film—some of it observational and some staged by the German film crew—along with readings from diaries and transcripts, as well as shots of ghetto survivors watching that footage. Comprised of more faces, shadowed in a theater, these shots serve as vivid reflections of your own experience, horrified at what they see. What they see exemplifies one of the most chilling aspects of the Third Reich, “an empire infatuated with the camera,” narrates Rona Kenan, “that knew so well to document its own evil, passionately, systematically, like no other nation before it.” Das Ghetto has been used as a trustworthy document for any filmmaker or museum seeking to show what really happened, to tell the untellable. 
Cynthia Fuchs
Micmacs
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Dany Boon, Dominique Pinon , André Dussollier , Jean-Pierre Marielle, Julie Ferrier, Yolande Moreau
9
Micmacs
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest hyper-Gallic opus of overwhelming whimsy is bursting with his trademarked manic visual invention. Like the various contraptions and schemes that drive its screwball plot, Micmac is an exquisite Rube Goldberg device of a movie that impresses with its frightfully clever clockwork construction. Dany Boon (a sort of French Adam Sandler with oodles more talent) plays a Chaplinesque sad-sack adopted by an eccentric junkyard pseudo-family that helps him extract an elaborate measure of revenge from two arms contractors (and their suave chief executives) whose products have cost him both his father and his dream job at a video store. Bursting with frenzied amusements and visual wit, the latest product of Jeunet’s feverish mind is hardly his most accomplished film, but it has ample delights to offer nonetheless. Ross Langager
8
Double Take
“The word ‘MacGuffin’ comes from a conversation between two men in a railway train,” says Alfred Hitchcock’s voice. When one asks the other about “the package you have above your head on the luggage rack”, the second answers that it’s a device “for trapping lions in the Adirondacks of New York”. Informed that there are no lions in the Adirondacks, the second man answers again, “Well then, it’s not a MacGuffin.” A version of this story opens Double Take, Johan Gimonprez’s brilliant meditation on the vagaries of Hitchcock, history, and nuclear weapons. It’s possible that every story that follows is a sort of MacGuffin, from Hitchcock’s encounter with his future self to the making of The Birds, from the Kitchen Debate in 1959 to the first televised presidential debate in 1960. As each of these stories (and others) weave in and out of one another, providing layers of context, commentary, and pointed comedy. Picking at myths and truisms, spoken and not, the film makes all of them grist for questioning. You think that John Kennedy and Richard Nixon are only opposites? That commercial capitalism is the reverse of communism? That Hitchcock was singular? Think again. It’s not just that the film reflects on political motivations for inspiring dread and promising annihilation, it also ponders a kind of collective resilience, however unlikely or pathological. Both are premised on reiteration and recollection, and both are only possible by forgetting. Cynthia Fuchs
7
Mother
In the latest by Korean director Bong Joon-Ho, a mother sets out to clear her mentally challenged son’s name of a murder. Even though we as an audience were afforded the privileged position of seeing what happens very early on in the film, suspense in the narrative is crafted well enough that it’s still possible to have some doubt about the truth. Starting its run at 2009 film festivals but only seeing its limited USA release in 2010, this is the kind of film I put off watching for a while because I expected it to be “difficult” in some way, but ended up regretting the wait when I took in the truly exciting cinematographic and narrative choices as well as the deeply empathetic portrayal of the mother-in-crisis by Kim Hye-ja. Jenn Misko
Never Let Me Go
Mark Romanek
Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Sally Hawkins, Charlotte Rampling, Nathalie Richard
(Fox Searchlight Pictures)
6
Never Let Me Go
Mark Romanek’s adaptation of the acclaimed novel Never Let Me Go tugs at the heartstrings in a genuine, non-manipulative way, guiding us through the lives of three special, fragile individuals (including the phenomenal Andrew Garfield) with such grace and tranquility that it seems like a memory we can’t quite pinpoint, and so must decide was a dream of some sort. A film about so many things, including emotional maturation, Never Let Me Go never lets up, nor does it ever let the viewer go, even long after they’ve left the theatre. Each shot is almost like a painting, and Alex Garland’s script is filled with such heartbreak it’s nearly impossible to believe that this isn’t actually happening. Like King Lear, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina or Ronald Moore’s reboot of Battlestar Galactica, it begs us to be good to one another. And we should. Kevin Brettauer
