Film reviews: A look at the European Union Film Festival's road trips, riders, and reindeer-herding rappers
In annual event at the Cinematheque, Cyprus/Greece/Italy’s The Man With the Answers, Poland’s Leave No Traces, and a few other standouts
The Man With the Answers
The European Union Film Festival runs at the Cinematheque from November 16 to 30
THE MAN WITH THE ANSWERS
November 22
Not sure what’s going on with this very slight tale of two attractively alienated boys driving from Greece to Italy together, but I sure enjoyed it. Following the death of his grandmother, introverted Viktor sets off to reunite with his mom, who ditched Greece for another man in Germany and even has a whole new kid. On the ferry he encounters German Matthias, who’s handsome and playful and who habitually steals things. On the ride, Matthias amiably teases and prods Viktor, who in return finds multiple reasons to eject Matthias from the car, but you know where this is going, especially after a lakeside detour gives us the chance to observe their hot young torsos. Anyway, it all resolves—which is to say not at all—at the home of Viktor’s mother, who flaps about very attractively and leaves us none the wiser to anyone’s motivation. Scratch that; the last couple lines of the film orient things just enough, I suppose, but who cares, I could have enjoyed another hour of this sun-bleached travelogue with its droll compositions and gentle conflicts. What a pleasure. AM
Leave No Traces
LEAVE NO TRACES
November 27
In 1983, 18-year-old Grzegorz Przemyk, the son of activist and poet Barbara Sadowska, was beaten to death by Warsaw police. It was almost certainly a political assassination with a routine cover-up involving corrupt doctors and media, but a BBC World Service Radio leak aroused international interest and Przemyk’s funeral brought tens of thousands of people to the streets. Poland’s Internal Affairs ministry thus set about undermining the inevitable trial, smearing the victim and harassing all involved while planting informants everywhere, framing two innocent medics, and stacking the court with prosecutors friendly to the Communist regime. It can be difficult to conceive of the magnitude of such state crime against the citizenry, but this film by Jan P. Matuszynski methodically (and grippingly) shows us how it’s done, from furtive meetings inside ministry chambers to bustling war rooms where agents are directed to destroy the lives of the innocent. Leave No Traces—the title refers to a method of beating a victim without bruising them—focuses on the sole witness to the murder, Jurek Popiel, based on Przemyk’s real-life friend Cezary Filozof, whose dawning understanding of government depravity mirrors our own. It’s an exemplary performance by Tomasz Zietek, whose character must also contend with the weakness of friends and family under unthinkable pressure. The period detail is outstanding and the film’s overall quality makes a near three-hour running time feel short. It also presents some characters as outrageous grotesques, notably the putty-faced minister (later Prime Minister) General Czesław Kiszczak and the outlandishly fiendish prosecutor Wieslawa Bardon, who literally chews the scenery at one point, but that’s okay. We need some sort of emotional relief in the face of such clockwork horror. AM
Rap and Reindeer
RAP AND REINDEER
November 28
Meet Mihkku Laiti: Rap singer and reindeer herder. This slick and hugely enjoyable documentary whisks you away to the upper reaches of Finland’s Lapland region, where the 18-year-old Sámi star rocks the house—when he isn’t herding the titular livestock, fly fishing, hanging in his bedroom with his new girlfriend, and singing traditional Sámi joiks in the community library. Bespectacled Mihkku has big dreams, and the filmmaker follows him to the Finn equivalent of America’s Got Talent—where he raps in the Sámi language and proudly wears his full regalia, right down to the curly-toed boots. You’ll fall for him, for his loving family, and for this insanely remote, forested corner of Finland—shot in sweeping overhead shots, under blankets of snow and in green bursts of summer. It’s an area our energized young protagonist reminds us is farther from Helsinki than Helsinki is from Berlin. At the same time, Rap and Reindeer is also a rallying portrait of Indigenous pride—and proof that bussin rhymes know no borders. JS
Riders
RIDERS
November 29
There’s inherent comedy in the idea of two rural Slovenians setting off across country on souped-up mopeds in emulation of the film Easy Rider. A light touch is ever present in Dominik Mencej’s breezy and likeable film, but there’s darkness and tragedy too, and a good dollop of old Catholic mysticism, which is probably as far from sixties Western counterculture as you can get. When angry young Anton loses his job with the post office, he compels his lifelong friend Tomaž to join him on a trek to Ljubljana where his old flame theoretically awaits. That doesn’t go as planned but we already knew that. The point is that they pick up Anja along the way, a young Charlotte Gainsbourg lookalike who appears to be escaping from a nunnery when she jumps on the back of Anton’s toy chopper, and they also encounter a grizzled middle-aged biker who briefly presents Anton with a much needed father figure. Tomaž, meanwhile, is a good boy trying to make sense of his visions of the Virgin Mother. The parallels to Easy Rider are ironic, since Mencej’s film is really a warm reckoning with tradition after decades of western-influenced decadence (and a civil war.) In one of the film's sweetest subversions, a convoy of real bikers gather to have their hogs baptized, while Anja seems at first like an amoral rave kid but emerges as something more meaningful by the end. The film is set at the end of the ‘90s and there’s explicit mention of Y2K—a counterfeit apocalypse that was succeeded by countless real ones. Referring again to the original text, as such, maybe Riders is suggesting how to secure the immediate future and not “blow it.” AM
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