Film reviews: European Union Film Festival travels from Helsinki karaoke lounges to an Austrian detention centre
Finland’s Karaoke Paradise, Poland’s I Never Cry, and Austria’s Fox in a Hole are standouts
Finland’s Karaoke Paradise reminds us that every region seems to have its own canon of weird and saccharine pop.
The Cinematheque presents the European Union Film Festival in-person from November 17 to December 1 and online from November 18 to December 10
IT’S BACK—at least in hybrid form: After a two-year hiatus as an in-theatre event, the European Union Film Festival will host in-person screenings at The Cinematheque from each of the 27 European Union countries. The majority of titles will then become available to rent online.
In other words, you can travel from Iberia to Scandinavia to the Balkans from the comfort of a theatre seat—or even your couch.
Here’s a look at just five of the offerings, all brand new films from across the Atlantic.
KARAOKE PARADISE
Finland
Okay, hear me out: in a technocratic world robbed of its rituals, karaoke is a magical conduit for the crying of the human soul. Lots of filmmakers agree, among them Vancouver’s Charles Wilkinson (Oil Sands Karaoke) and the team behind this lovely effort, which pursues a number of characters who ardently love to belt one out in front of an audience. Eventually we learn that each is burdened by greater or lesser sorrows, whether it's an aging widower trying to navigate the world of Tinder, a cripplingly introverted youth, or a middle-aged mom battling Parkinson’s. As we hear from one participant, Evi—an older woman who doggedly hosts karaoke events as if on a mission to purge herself of too much empathy—“There are a lot of lonely people in Finland.” Karaoke Paradise also reminds us that every region seems to have its own canon of weird and saccharine pop (“Rock and Roll Sausage”, anyone?), so there’s very little familiar here, musically, although a spirited run through “Should I Stay or Should I Go” brings our wheelchair-bound mother to her feet, prompting, if I didn’t lose count, my third bout of tears while viewing. >AM
I NEVER CRY
Poland
This compelling slice of grim Polish reality (with a side trip to Ireland) starts out as a bitingly amusing tale of teen rebellion—helped by the singular performance of Zofia Stafiej as “almost-18” Ola. It ends up being much, much more, from a deep lament for migrant workers to a moving look at the lasting effects of parental estrangement. When we first meet Ola, she’s in the midst of failing her third driving test—leading to her kicking the living crap out of the fender of the poor guy who cut her off with his car. Her feistiness does soften over the course of the movie, as she travels from Poland to Ireland to retrieve her dead dockworker father’s body, and the small inheritance her mother and disabled brother so desperately need. She also holds out a naive dream that her dad put away money to buy her a car—a long-ago promise from a man she thinks abandoned her. Stafiej brings a perfect edge to her character, with just enough sadness and kindness behind her tough front to make you root for her. Punctuating the film with plenty of sardonic humour as Ola interacts with the Irish, director Piotr Domalewski beautifully captures that painful tipping point between the world we know as teens, and the world we come to understand as adults. >JS
FOX IN A HOLE
Austria
There’s lots to like in this drama, chiefly the charismatic performances by leads Maria Hofstätter and Aleksandar Petrovic (as the film’s Fox, or Fuchs.) They play two art teachers thrown uncomfortably together inside a juvenile detention facility, where they battle skeptical authorities, out-of-control adolescents, and each other. The film’s bluntness is a strength, sitting somewhere between Stand and Deliver and SCUM but leaning closer to the latter in its honest portrayal of the inmates, an ethnically and religiously mixed group of powder-keg kids who hurl exuberantly racist slurs and sexual threats at each other. Fuchs turns his attention to an explosive Bosnian girl who’s seemingly beyond hope, hoping to absolve himself of a personal tragedy signalled in the film’s opening scenes. That subplot doesn’t really wash, and neither do a few other things (the depiction of Fuchs’s extracurricular musician’s life is laughably square), but none of it’s fatal. Contrary to so much Hollywood product, this is a movie that actually earns its feelgood climax. >AM
HAVEL
Czech Republic
Slávek Horák’s film embodies all the virtues and all the sins of a prestige biopic. It’s undeniably well-made, absorbing, and benefits from a lead performance (from Viktor Dvorák) uncannily close to the real thing, if that matters. But reducing a world figure to a collection of psychological struggles turns everything into high-gloss soap opera. Unless you’re already familiar with his Letters to Olga, Havel wants you to know that the former Czech president and acclaimed playwright was also a self-loathing womanizer battling lifelong shame over his feelings of cowardice. Havel might have dramatized his own story no differently, so fair enough, but we’re left with a naggingly superficial view of the larger political meaning of the Velvet Revolution™ ®. Havel does a good job of conveying the discomforts of dissident life under Soviet-style communism, especially when you’re too much of a big deal for a quick and easy assassination. But a post-credit sequence showing us the real President Vaclev Havel with various Thatchers, Clintons, Bushes, Popes, and, er, Rolling Stones isn’t a great advertisement for the neoliberal regime that followed. >AM
REDEMPTION OF A ROGUE
Ireland
Last week filmmaker Paul Schrader declared on his (very amusing) Facebook page that the attitude he loathes most in cinema is whimsy. Mr. Schrader would not care for Redemption of a Rogue, a film that strains very hard to keep you amused with its droll Irish attempt at magical realism. Still, this tale of a curse that befalls a small town in the wake of an old bastard’s death will find its audience of hibernophiles and anyone else with a taste for musical profanity and deadpan surrealism. Sexy stone-faced Aaron Monaghan stars as Jimmy Cullen, returning to his hometown after a shameful affair involving a soccer championship many years earlier. There are other past sins yet to be discovered, though nothing all that surprising for a Catholic. More to the point, Jimmy shows up just in time to watch his abusive father finally kick the bucket, interfering with his plan to commit suicide while plunging his rural village into an endless downpour—and worse. Written and directed by Philip Doherty, the film’s central question about faith and miracles feels less like sincere artistic inquiry than it does a conceit from which to hang its cartoonish visual gags and other quirks, including a cameo from the Virgin Mother who, naturally, begs Jimmy for a smoke. Yes, it’s that kind of movie. >AM
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