The Breakthrough

 The Breakthrough (Netflix 2025) is a Swedish limited series that dramatizes, apparently with great fidelity to actual facts, the investigation of a double murder on the streets of Linkoping. a small city in southeastern Sweden.  The four episode series is an extremely elegant docu-drama account of the aftermath of the killings, an event that seems to have ruined many lives, including those of the police detectives involved in the investigation.  The show is sober, understated, and precise with respect to its effects, themes, and the details that it presents.  It is also very economical and modest in scope.  The investigation following the double murders was the second largest and longest proceeding of this sort in Swedish history, lasting more than 16 years.  But the show makes its points effectively and with powerful emotional resonance in only four episodes none of them longer than 45 minutes.  The program is lean, perhaps, even skeletal -- but it doesn't feel diminished or hasty in its presentation of the facts and evidence.  (The show directed by Lisa Siwe is similar to an equally ascetic limited series involving far more lurid facts, a torture-murder on a home-made submarine, the subject of the very gloomy and elegant The Investigation, broadcast in Denmark//Sweden in September 2020 and shown in this country on HBO in 2021.) The Breakthrough is a police procedural -- it contains no violence of any kind except for a glimpse of the killings filmed from a remote vantage, and, indeed, scarcely any debate or argument of any sort.  No one speaks with raised voices.  Everyone is exquisitely polite and civilized.  Even the mad killer is muted, taciturn, and well-mannered.  The lack of overt drama in the series is necessary because, in fact, the subject matter is so highly charged that any more exploitational approach to the investigation would be either unbearably painful or unwatchably maudlin.  The horror of the murders is emphasized by the stillness of the milieu in which they are shown, by the grey monochrome landscapes, and the wan winter light in which most of the events are bathed.

The Breakthrough starts with a gentle Lebanese immigrant, a father discussing the nature of time with his son Adnan. The little boy wants to know how to read the watch that his father has given him and whether time ever comes to a stop.  A few minutes later, the little boy is stabbed to death on the way to school by an unknown person on a nondescript residential lane in town.  A woman who happens to be out sees the killing and intervenes -- her name is Gunilla.  She is also knifed to death.  The murderer flees past a woman on a bicycle who clearly sees his face but can't remember what he looks like.  (She is later hypnotized, recalls the young man's face, and an identikit image of the killer is produced.)  A detective named John is assigned to the case.  He meets with the families of the victims and promises that the murderer will be swiftly brought to justice.  The Lebanese family is bereft and embittered.  The widower of the murdered Gunilla is also devastated.  The survivors are mired in grief that they can't overcome.  John is something of a local celebrity -- he's a Olympic medalist speedwalker and shown, sometimes, exercising along the river-front and on the streets in town.  John's wife is pregnant and the exertions of the investigation destroy his marriage -- he almost misses the birth of his son.  A divorce ensues and John later become estranged from his son who blames him for the collapse of the marriage.  The investigation stalls.  There are no leads at all.  We see John putting a single three-ring binder on a shelf in the "war room" at the station where the investigation is underway.  A little later, the entire wall is covered in binders, hundreds of them, containing clues and evidence, none of which have led to the identification of the killer.  

After 16 years, the officials in the police force decide that in a couple of weeks the investigation will be halted and the murders will be treated as a "cold case."  John has learned that a technique involving DNA evidence coupled with genealogical research yielded an arrest in the so-called "Golden State Killer" case in California.  He tracks down a DNA and genealogy expert named Per who lives somewhere in rural Sweden,  possibly in the woods several hundred miles north of Linkoping.  Per is a chubby intense guy who spends his time giving lectures to local genealogy societies, mostly old people meeting in libraries and church basements.  He is obsessed with building an universal DNA data base and takes cheek swabs of everyone who attends his programs.  Per has personal problems of his own.  His daughter is skipping school, apparently terribly depressed, and spends time sitting in the snow in the dark woods.  (He is also divorced, it seems, or a widower and lives in a rustic cabin with a woman whom we see schussing about with a rifle packed on her shoulder.)  Per is recruited by John and with only a few days before the case is closed, they work continuously to build a genetic profile as to the killer -- the concept is to find DNA matches in previous generations and, then, use genealogy to trace the lineage of the murderer.  Per is convinced that this process will always work so long as the DNA sample is reasonably good and there are enough DNA studies in existence from collateral relatives.  There are several complications -- initially, the DNA sample is compromised and, further, the entire project is illegal:  Swedish law prohibits the use of genetic analysis with respect to persons who are not the immediate subject of an investigation.  A journalist is reporting on the investigation and she suspects that it is illegal.  Ultimately, with the assistance and complicity (as to bending the law) of several other cops, the investigation yields a suspect.  A man is arrested and immediately confesses to the homicides.  He is said to be "a very lonely person" with contact only with his brother.  By a remarkable, and, apparently actual ,coincidence, he is a cousin to the female journalist, a character who resolves to write a book about the investigation at the end of the film -- this is the source for the movie.  John meets with Gunilla's husband and tells him that the crime has been solved.  He visits the Lebanese parents and, also, advises that the killer is in custody.  The immigrants have had another child, a teenage girl at the time of the solution of the crime -- she is named "Gunilla" after the middle-aged woman who tried to save Adnan.  Adnan's father gives John the watch that he had explained to the little boy in the opening scene.  

The theme of the movie is stated by Per:  all human beings are related; in effect, we are all one family.  This makes murder and violence all the more horrific because it always occurs within the human family and is, in effect, fratricidal.  Per's utopian vision of a world in which all people are treated as family members, of course, stands in sharp contrast to hatred that caused the homicides.  The series is intensely moving, conjuring powerful emotion out of a very minimalist premise.  There is a bit of "red herring" that feels slightly contrived -- this sort of misdirection seems "beneath," as it were, the noble themes expressed in the show.  The direction is superlative, building up a chilly, precise picture of the investigation from small, but telling, details.  In one scene, Per, angry about a lack of police cooperation, storms out of the police station carrying too many books and documents in his hands.  He drops a document in a puddle of standing water in a basement garage and this shot has almost visceral effect of chaos and violation on the viewer.  In one scene, we see Gunilla's bereft husband lying in bed -- he continues to sleep on his side of the bed and there's a couple books, magazines, a sweater, and his glasses in the place where his wife used to sleep.  This is a fine program about crime and punishment; it's deeply humane, avoids sensationalism, and, despite its austerity, very suspenseful and engaging.    

Do not expect too much from the end of the World

 Film criticism can involve different types of "spoilers."  A critic can "spoil" a movie by revealing a surprising plot twist or disclosing the fate of a character.  Revealing the ending to a film can be considered a "spoiler" and bad form in certain contexts.  And it's possible to "spoil" a movie by summarizing its content in such a way that violates carefully contrived narrative effects.  This latter problem inevitably arises when describing Radu Jude's2022 film Do not expect too much from the end of the World, a movie should be experienced, perhaps, without any advance explication.  Jude's picture reveals itself only gradually and, in fact, its full premise isn't really visible until the last half hour of a movie that runs about two hours and 45 minutes.  The viewer experiences this Romanian film as confusing, chaotic, and, even, pointless for much of its duration -- however, this effect is carefully devised.  In fact, the picture makes perfect sense and, indeed, is rather profoundly meaningful when considered in retrospect.  But, in real time, Do not expect... is shot and edited in such a way that we have to work out what is happening on-screen from hints that are distributed throughout the frenetic action that the film portrays.  The effect is to precipitate the viewer into the world of the film's female protagonist in a way that requires us to piece together what we are seeing from fragmentary clues.  Be assured -- all the clues are present and the film coheres nicely, but Jude's mise-en-scene is intended to dramatize the dissolution of rational meaning that carries the apocalyptic weight encoded in the movie's title.  Things don't fit together at first and the center can't hold -- this sense of chaos and fragmentation is integral to the film's point of view.  Therefore, if you intend to see this movie (it's available for rent on Amazon Prime on the MUBI platform), I encourage you to stop reading right here and simply buy the movie (it costs $4.99).  The picture is excellent and I encourage you to see it. But if you desire additional information persist in your reading.  You have been warned.

Angela rises early in the morning.  We see her naked, arms covered with tattoos.  She puts on a sequin dress that seems inappropriate for the activities in which we see her involved.  She drives to various appointments, interviewing people who have been badly injured in industrial accidents.  The traffic in Bucharest is hellish -- it seems that she is stuck in traffic for about half of the film.  When Angela reaches the people she is scheduled to interview, she films the conversation on her cell-phone and sends it somewhere. From time-to-time, she talks on the phone.  It's evident that she has some sort of important appointment scheduled for late afternoon.  She's so exhausted, however, that she is afraid she'll fall asleep at the wheel and crash.  In fact, in several scenes she seems about to drift off into sleep and, at least, on one occasion people honk at her furiously when she falls asleep at a red light.  She pulls over to sleep for a few minutes and, also, apparently naps a little during her important meeting at 4 pm.  She meets a lover around 10:00 at night and has frenetic sex in her little car.  She, then, hurries to the airport where she picks up an Austrian woman (played by Nina Hoss) who is a film producer.  This summarizes the first two hours of the movie although only imperfectly.  

Complicating Angela's nightmarish and harried transit through Bucharest and its suburbs are several other factors:  Angela's grandparents are buried in a cemetery that is claimed to encroach on a building development.  She goes to the cemetery with her mother.  Construction work is underway and graves are about tobe exhumed and moved.  Angela visits the corporate headquarters for the developer and discusses the situation with an executive there -- he offers reburial of the remains supervised "by an elite funeral director."  On the wall of the office, there is a portrait from a burial in Fayum, a 2000 year-old artifact from the Roman-Egyptian world.  About every ten minutes, Angela takes time (although often while driving) to record on her phone bits in which she appears as a obscene thug, a gangster with a bald head and uni-brow.  She uses a filter to depict herself in the form of this caricature thug; in the form of this alter-ego, she makes all sorts of wildly racist and misogynistic remarks that she posts on-line.  Her intimidating alter-ego is called something like Bobitzka -- he describes himself as a religious nationalist with a Dostoevskyan persona.  Angela's adventures are intercut with excerpts from a 1981 Romanian movie about a female taxi-driver, also named Angela.  These excerpts are shot in somewhat hazy color; the scenes of Angela hurrying to her appointments are filmed in icy and analytical black and white.  The 1981 movie is mined, as it were, for shots of people on the street staring at the camera, or weird moments of stasis on screen -- the film is sometimes frozen or blurred.  As it turns out, the film about the female taxi-driver, whose struggles parallel Angela's hurrying here and there in Bucharest, derives from some sort of documentary premise.  At one point, Angela,who is going to interview a man who was badly hurt when a barrier gate was flung into his head and in a coma for a year (he woke, as he tells us, with his back raw and red with bedsores).  This man's neighbor, or, perhaps, roommate is the taxi-driver who is now an old woman.  We see Angela parking her car near the rather ruinous apartment building where Angela, the taxi-driver, now lives.  The patch of grass on which Angela parks her car is an abandoned railroad right-of-way.  In the 1981 movie, we see trains transporting the wretched little cars on a flatbed moving on the railroad that was, apparently, operating at that time.  Taxi-driver Angela's story in the 1981 film is about how she met her husband, an ethnic Hungarian is first shown passed-out dead drunk in the back of her hack.  Angela, our harried heroine, learns that Angela the taxi-driver married the ethnic Hungarian, but he continued to drink and so the romance leached-out of their marriage.  Angela, our protagonist, asks about when the Hungarian husband died, but we are surprised to learn that the man is still very much alive --  just in another room in the apartment.  The husband introduces himself to Angela and praises Viktor Orban as a great man.  About ninety minutes into the film, we come to understand that Angela is an overworked PA (Production Assistant); she is filming  interviews that are auditions for a short film that a Vienna company wants to produce. The movie is supposed to dramatize the company's concern for the safety and well-being of its employees and, further, warn about the hazards of not properly using personal protective gear, that is, things like safety helmets.  It's in pursuit of casting someone to dramatize the company's alleged safety concerns that Angela has been driving madly around town, interviewing people in wheelchairs or disfigured by industrial accidents.  At a studio, somewhere in the country, Angela tries to nap during a ZOOM call.  The call is between an elegant-looking Austrian woman who is the great, great, great granddaughter of Johann  Wolfgang Goethe and the Romanian production company in a chalet near Bucharest.  The Austrian woman, Fraulein Goethe in turn works for the CEO of the company in Vienna, a firm that has outsourced its manufacturing functions to the cheaper labor market in Romania -- hence, the concern about workers compensation accidents.  The plan is to film the announcement about plant safety and the consequences of industrial injuries on the morrow; the Romanian director figures out what lenses he is going to use and observes that he will shoot the scene in a single take using a filter to produce "golden light."  The Austrian woman takes a red-eye flight to Bucharest where she is met at the airport by PA Angela.

This part of the film is frantic and elliptical, cutting frequently between the somewhat romantic and soft-focus 1981 film, apparently an actual movie that Jude uses in his  own film, the obscene tirades of Angela's Bobitzka, and the nightmarish traffic jams and near-miss accidents in Bucharest. There is a remarkable sequence in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas in which the hero Henry Hill has to do some errands, commit a few crimes, and, also, pick up ingredients for an elaborate Italian meal that he is making at home.  The camera follows his increasingly desperate and rushed efforts to accomplish these tasks while inhaling huge amounts of cocaine and trying to hide from a police helicopter hovering overhead.  The entire first two hours of Do not expect too much... has the same frantic tone as the Scorsese episode -- Angela is exhausted and keeps on encountering vicious and aggressive drivers who call her names and threaten her while she rushes from one dispiriting location to another in an overcrowded and polluted Bucharest.  (This part of the film also bears some resemblance to Murakova's The Asthenic Syndrome and similar films and, also invokes, Alexei German's pictures.)  It's exhausting to watch Angela's exertions -- there's simply not enough time in the day to accomplish everything that she is trying to do, including her rushed sexual encounter with her lover in the car under a freeway overpass.  Angela is ambitious, extremely intelligent -- you have the sense that everyone in Romania is enormously overeducated for the jobs that they perform -- and shockingly hardworking.  But she's been set up to fail.  Nonetheless, she fits her obscene postings as the viciously misanthropic Bobitzka into her day as well.  (Angela is not particularly attractive -- no one in Romanian "New Wave" pictures looks like they are a movie star; these just seem to be normal folks picked up on the street.)

The last forty minutes is extremely funny.  It is, in fact, a single shot sequence with the man in wheelchair who's skull was bashed in by a barrier attempting to speak his lines about his accident and the need to make proper use of personal protective gear (in his case a helmet).  The camera takes up a vantage so that it can survey the ugly alley where the accident occurred, the metal barrier that wounded the man visible in the back of the shot, together with a big dog house and big dog prowling around.  The man in the wheelchair sits next to Angela, the lady taxi-driver who is robust and seems to be about eighty years old.  Two of the man's daughters stand behind him.  The shot doesn't go well.  The director isn't really interested in anything that the injured man has to say and, ultimately, decides to cut his account down to nearly nothing.  The Viennese company doesn't want to admit that the man was working 17 hours a shift and exhausted from his labors when he was injured; furthermore, because of the war in Ukraine, the accident victim's account of making chairs for the Russian market has to be excised from the interview.  In the end, it becomes apparent that the accident victim really can't be successfully controlled and that his interview will devolve into his own concerns about low pay, overtime, and the negligence of the driver who smashed through the barrier and, so, ultimately not be useful as a public service announcement about workplace safety.  The barrier is dismantled and hidden.  Someone hits on the expedient of filming the sequence like the Bob Dylan video (shot by D. A. Pennebaker, I think) of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" -- that is, the guy in the wheelchair flipping through cards on which the words that he is speaking have been written.  The cards used in the Romanian alley are "green,"  that is, for "green screen" and have nothing written on them.  The titles will be added by computer in post-production.  Now and then, it rains.  The accident victim becomes increasingly frustrated.  Some gypsies have to be rousted from the alley -- everyone in this movie openly despises gypsies except the PA Angela who may have Romany blood herself and who, in one scene, gives some money to gypsy beggar.  Angela, who is mostly offscreen in this scene, keeps sneaking off to the side of the alley to record on her cell-phone rants and harangues by Bobitzka.  Ultimately, the shot is completed with the injured man saying nothing, just flipping through the title cards.  In the middle of conversation, the movie just shuts off; the screen goes black.  

The film's major point is that Romania has been colonized for its cheap labor force by the rest of Europe.  (The Romanians admit that they are primitive and poor but take pride in the fact the Albanians have it even worse.)  The Germans act in a hypocritically solicitous manner but they are part of system that mercilessly exploits the Romanians.  Romania's complex and tragic history is the subject of allusions -- we see the vast imperial palace built by Ceaucescu (it now seems to be a Marriott Hotel where the Austrian woman spends the night  -- she doesn't make it to the shoot in the alley because she is hungover from drinking with some "guys" in the hotel bar.)  The economy in Romania is collapsing due to inflation in fuel prices caused by the War in Ukraine.  There is a subtext about American and Western films being made in Romania -- and, indeed, the credits of just about every big-budget Hollywood picture will attest that the film was mostly made in Hungary and Romania.  Of course, the Romanians who are desperate for Western dollars and euros collude in their own humiliation.  They are willing to work like slaves to please their German and American masters.  And everyone is embittered, filled with rage, on the verge of homicide over parking spaces and traffic jams.  In broader terms, the film depicts a world that is, in effect, post-human.  Bobitzka stands as the paradigm character for this brave new world, someone (who is no one) who unleashes vitriolic rants and insults on everyone around him.  But there is no Bobitzka:  the grotesque figure represents, I suppose, Angela's displaced anger at how she is misused by the system.  Things have always been problematic in Romania.  The taxi-driver lives in a quaint part of 1981 Romania called Uranus, a neighborhood that was razed so that Ceaucescu's palace could be built in its place.  The dead aren't resting serenely in their graves.  In Bucharest, even corpses are perambulating around the landscape.  Heartless Capitalism, now the rule for 33 years, has proven to be just as bad as the heartless and kleptocratic communism that it has replaced.  The film is purposefully perverse -- Angela mentions a road that is so dangerous that there are 600 roadside crosses to accident victims along a distance 260 kilometers.  The movie, then, spends about ten minutes showing us these roadside shrines, one after another.  The last forty minutes, conceived as a single take, also represents an alarming formal choice -- it's the hardest way to do things and to make the film's point, but we are engaged and can't look away.

The film's title is, perhaps, explained by an anecdote told by Angela, I think.  A porno movie was being made.  But the middle of one of the sex scenes, the leading man lost his erection.  He had to retreat from the shot and watch a dirty movie on PornHub to get it up again.  "This is the end of the world," Angela says.  

No Good Deed and Carry-on

No Good Deed is a series streaming on Netflix.  It exemplifies state-of-the-art limited series narrative on cable.  The six episode show gestures a bit toward comedy but, in effect, is a melodrama involving family secrets, unresolved trauma, and, ultimately, reconciliation.  It's warmly acted by Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano as a married couple in the throes of selling their family home, a mansion by Midwest standards located in an upscale neighborhood in Los Angeles.  The asking price for the home is a million dollars, although because of a housing shortage, some buyers are willing to offer as much as an additional $200,000 above the listing.  There are really two concurrent narratives in play -- the show's mild and satirical comedy involves the antics of couple's gay realtor and the various people who bid on the home:  there's a soap opera star with trophy wife, a lesbian couple, and a worthy Black family.  The show's melodrama involves a family tragedy -- three years before the house was put on the market, the couple's college-age daughter accidentally shot and killed her own brother (she thought he was a burglar).  The young man was stealing baubles from his father's construction sites (Romano plays a contractor) and was killed while  wearing a ski mask and entering his own home.  (In fact, this homicide turns out to be the result of other factors not involving the young woman.)  The couple have covered-up the shooting, albeit unsuccessfully, by enlisting the aid of the contractor-husband's ne'er-do-well brother, a penny-ante criminal. The show begins well with some sharply observed and witty vignettes involving the real estate market and potential prospective buyers.  Lisa Kudrow's character is a former concert pianist whose hands now shake and who is unable to play, mostly, it seems, from her grief relating the death of her son. The pianist thinks her son is communicating with her through some faulty wiring in the house that causes a light to flicker when she addresses questions to it.  There's a shocking moment of bloody violence near the end of the first episode that is very well-staged, unexpected, and raises the stakes for the whole enterprise.  

The show features some impressive if ultimately pointless scenes in the home's infrastructure -- the camera careening through electrical conduits, or heating vents, or, in one scene, the plumbing system.  I think this showy effect is supposed to demonstrate that the house is a sort of entity that is alive, a character, as it were, in the program.  It may be that the agitated camera movement signifies the perspective of the ghost, that is, the dead son.  Many shots in the show are made from idiosyncratic camera-angles suggesting that the characters are being spied-upon -- this gives parts of the show a sort of horror film vibe.  The plotting is ingeniously and, by and large, plausible; in fact, the narrative is carefully designed and the story is well-organized, if anything too well-organized:  nothing is left to chance and the story feels plotted with within an inch of its life.

Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano are excellent.  Old-style sit-com actors of this sort excel in telegraphing their emotions in a readily legible manner and, because the audience bears some affection for them, they are compelling and their plight seems poignant.  The soap opera actor, in a Gehry-style post-modern house, and his scheming wife are roles also expertly acted -- these parts are played by Luke Wilson and Lia Cardenelli respectively.  Wilson seems well-meaning but befuddled -- he's not too bright.  His vicious wife deploys her breasts like weapons of war; she's scary and effective as a venomous narcissist who will not be denied.  (In true sit-com didactic style, she gets her comeuppance in a spectacular way).  No Good Deed is reasonably entertaining, sharply written, and effectively produced -- it's economically made and not too long for the subject matter.  The plot seems to flow organically from the materials.  There's nothing special about this limited series and it's not distinctive in any real way, but it's a diverting entertainment.  

Carry-on is a Netflix movie about one-hour and fifty minutes long.  It's also handsomely produced, with good production values, and a good cast -- Justin Bateman is excellent as a blandly murderous terrorist; he acts like a nice guy and speaks in a reasonable way in a conversational tone of voice but, unfortunately, he's scheming to implement mass murder. (The part requires some athletic exertions, lots of wrestling and boxing, and Bateman to put it bluntly seems too old to accomplish this stuff; the hero played by Taron Edgerton also spends about half of the movie running at high-speed through jetways, parking lots, and corridors in the airport -- it's exhausting just to watch this guy sprinting around.) The story involves a mild-mannered low energy TSA agent (Edgerton) working to screen passengers at the security gates at LAX.  This TSA agent, the show's every man hero, gets swept into an intricate plot to unleash Russian nerve-gas on a passenger plane bound for Washington D.C.  The movie's breakneck pace is interrupted about 2/3rds of the way through the story to explain the rationale for the plot -- this is completely unnecessary and a waste of time:  the valise containing the nerve agent in canisters attached to some sort of detonator is what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin, just an instrument to put the plot in motion and we really don't give a hoot about why the bad guys are scheming to kill a bunch of people.  (An overfastidious approach to narrative requiring elucidation of the bad guys' motives was a feature of Black Doves as well and weighed down the plot with pointless exposition.)  In Carry-on, the villains are those all-purpose go-to bad guys, American defense contractors who want to protect their profit margins by triggering an all-out war with Russia or some other belligerent power.  The villains' have contrived an immensely elaborate and overly intricate plot to plant the nerve agent on a plane.  The scheme involves holding innocents hostage, all sorts of surveillance, and, at least, two additional armed confederates who have to be disposed-of as the story advances.  There are also a number of hapless minor characters who end up as collateral damage.  When a villain with a massive sniper-rifle has to shoot people or threaten to shoot them, he always immediately finds  his targets among the many thousands of people hustling through the jetways and terminals -- how he accomplishes this is not explained

Carry-on exploits the traveling public's anxiety about airplanes and terrorism and purports to provide its viewers with an inside look at the functioning of both an major airport (with its back corridors and labyrinthine luggage handling equipment) and TSA.  These detail are interesting and provide some neat locations for the various fistfights and shoot-outs required by the plot.  The action takes place, more or less, in real-time on Christmas Eve with the terminal crowded with nervous and petulant travelers.  The film's pace is accelerated and breathless.  This fast-pace is necessary to keep the audience from considering the film's various manifest improbabilities,  You can't suspend your disbelief high enough to avoid suspicions that the film's plot is fundamentally contrived, ludicrous, and implausible.  However, violent events succeed one another so swiftly and with so little respite that the viewer perceives generally that none of this makes any sense, but doesn't have time to reject these absurdities outright or work out objections to the narrative -- you are still brooding on previous blunders even as new ones follow in fast succession.

There are two stand-out sequences in Carry-on -- the first is a violent, no-holds-barred fight between an FBI agent and a killer in a car speeding along the highway.  The action is filmed entirely within the car with our perspective on the traffic whizzing by and adjacent crashes on the highway glimpsed through the windshield of the vehicle -- it's an interesting approach to a pretty standard action-film trope (the hand-to-hand fight in a vehicle knocked out of control  by the desperate combat.)  The second bravura sequence is a big chase and battle among the gloomy chutes and ladders of the airport's vast luggage-handling system --there are multi-layers of conveyors connected by ladders and side chutes and the fighting takes place across this hellish maze.  The movie is good mindless entertainment, pushes all the right buttons, but it's ultimately just a popcorn movie with no aspirations to anything othersthan providing a quick, if highly unlikely, thrill to the audience -- the equivalent, in other words, of junk food.    

The Teachers' Lounge

 The German title for The Teachers' Lounge (Ilkar Catak, 2022) is Die Lehrerzimmer, that is, "the teacher's room."  The film takes place in a school in Hamburg and, apparently, in German education, teachers don't do much in the way of "lounging."  The room where the faculty gathers is a cheerless open hall where the teaching staff sit at what appear to be cafeteria tables, heaps of paper and curriculum materials at their assigned places.  The room seems set up for the teachers to all face in one direction. It's obviously a place for preparation and grading papers (and other tasks of that sort) and casual conversation/ lounging, if not verboten seems to be discouraged.  German high school teachers appear to be ferociously disciplined. They don't engage in small talk and seem to be always working even when not engaged in teaching in the nearby classrooms.  The movie is similarly disciplined:  it's action takes place in one place, the school (apparently the Albert Schweitzer Gymnasium in Hamburg, mothballed at the time the movie was shot) and we don't know anything about the personal lives of the instructors at the school -- they don't have love affairs or any sort of home life shown in the movie and the film never depicts them in any place other than at the Gymnasium.  The movie is austere, economical, and well-acted -- the children are convincingly nasty, opportunistic, and belligerent.  The teachers seem harried, afflicted, like most post-War Germans with too much social conscience -- a significant part of the film depicts wrangling about the civil rights of the students.  The administration and teaching staff at the school want to have things both ways -- they want the students to enjoy a civilized, non-hierarchical learning experience while, at the same time, attempting to enforce an iron law of duty, obligation and hard work on the hapless kids.  Of course, the conflict between enlightened progressive values and the need to supervise and manage a school packed with bright and rebellious adolescents leads to the film's understated tragedy.  You can't boss teenagers and, at the same time, try to grant them the autonomy of reasoning, adult German citizens.  Notwithstanding everyone's best efforts at being civil and liberal, everything goes to Hell.

Carla Nowak  (Leonie Benesch) is an Ossie, that is, a German from the far East.  We learn that she speaks Polish, possibly as her Mother Tongue, although in the German school-system everyone is supposed to communicate in Deutsch -- she also is fluent in English.  Someone mentions that Carla grew up in the 80's in a small town near Gdansk (Danzig).  I think it is implied that her earnestly held egalitarian principles may be consequence of being raised in an environment previously dominated by the ruthless and monolithic East German Communist-regime.  In any event, Carla teaches mathematics to a class of what seem to 12 to 13 year old kids; she also works as phy-ed instructor.  Carla is enthusiastic and hard-working.  She gets her kids attention by clapping her hands and having them respond by rhythmically and percussively clapping back at her.  (She shouts "Guten Morgan" to her students and they shout back at her in singsong chant.)  Someone has been stealing from the teacher's wallets in the Lehrerzimmer and a couple of the more aggressive male teachers (phy-ed types themselves) try to coerce a couple of boy in the class to act as snitches.  Carla opposes this as being unfair and unreasonably invasive of the student's personal autonomy.  Then, after another theft, the athletic male teachers invade Carla's class, dismiss all of the girls, and search the boy's wallets -- this also is very offensive to Carla who remonstrates with men conducting this investigation.  A student of Turkish background is discovered to be carrying a lot of cash and so he's accused of the thefts.  It turns out that he's innocent and the mere fact that an ethnic minority was wrongfully accused of theft causes much soul-searching among the instructors and administration -- were they showing "systemic racism" in making the accusation?  Carla decides to set up a trap.  She leaves her purse containing some cash in her jacket, tells everyone that she is departing the room for awhile, but has set up her laptop computer to film anyone monkeying with her garment.  The thief strikes and is caught on film, although only the sleeve of her blouse marked with a pattern of red stars is visible in the digital imagery.  Carla observes that a woman named Friederike Kuhn is wearing a blouse that matches the garment of the thief.  She accuses Frau Kuhn who vehemently and tearfully denies committing the theft, throwing her wallet at Carla.  Frau Kuhn is some sort of secretary employed at the school and, unfortunately, her son, Oskar, is a gifted student in Carla's math class -- indeed, possibly her best and most promising student.  Frau Kuhn is suspended while an investigation is commenced.  Carla also finds herself under investigation for setting the trap and filming her colleagues without their permission and consent.  

Oskar reacts with rage to the accusations against his mother.  Carla begins to doubt herself.  She has a panic-attack when the incident comes up for discussion at an ill-advised parent-teacher conference.  Oskar is influential, with many friends, and he turns the students in the class against Carla.  Naively, Carla agrees to tell her side of the story to a student newspaper -- these being gifted German kids, the newspaper's motto printed on the wall is Veritatis omnia vincet vincola (Truth overcomes all fetters.)     . The article turns out to be a hatchet-job and Carla is further accused of being a tyrant and poor teacher, assertions made to her face by the students in her class who refuse now to clap on command and won't sing "Guten Morgan" to her.  Carla confronts Oskar and he snatches her laptop computer containing the evidence incriminating his mother, punching the young teacher in the eye, and, then, running out of the school to one of the many canals in Hamburg where he deep-sixes the laptop.  For this, Oskar is expelled or, at least, suspended from attending school.  Carla conducts a primal scream session with her kids, all of them bellowing at the top of their lungs and, it seems, that the tension is about to relax.  But, then, Oskar shows up, takes his seat in the classroom, and when confronted by Carla mimes shooting everyone down with a pointed finger.  This terrifies Carla and she flees the room, summoning a couple burly male teachers to assist her in the classroom where chaos has erupted.  The other kids are dismissed.  Carla, who feels the need to make peace with Oskar, locks herself in the room with him; this sets up the final confrontation between teacher and student.  (As will be observed, the plot has the characteristics of a three or four act stage-play -- it observes unity of location and takes place across a period of about four or five days.)

The movie is fascinating and thought-provoking as well. The Gymnasium is imagined to be haven for reason, tolerance, and enlightenment, but there's a fundamental contradiction in the way it is operated -- it's a school and the teachers, notwithstanding their non-hierarchical ideology, are required to exercise authority, indeed, arbitrary and coercive authority over the students.  Everything that can go wrong does go wrong.  Carla's kindly and liberal approach to education leads to the alarming conflict that ruins her relationship with her most promising student.  Oskar is similarly moved from being a compliant, intelligent student to a radicalized rebel and rabble-rouser.  His mother never admits theft and, as the film progresses, Carla comes to believe that she has caused all of this trouble and that the catastrophes that befall her and Oskar are all her fault.  The film's final sequence is striking.  We see the empty rooms, basketball courts, playgrounds, and corridors of the big Gymnasium.  Everyone seems to have fled.  Two big men carry Oskar out of the school as if enthroned -- he sits in a chair that they hold over their shoulders.  Oskar has become some kind of King, a noble figure and royalty -- but the men carrying him wear vests labeled Polizei and they are taking him to jail.  This is a fine film and one that will haunt you for several days after seeing this picture.   

Sophie Calle (at the Walker Art Center)

 My heart sank when I ascended the steps into the first gallery of the large Sophie Calle retrospective at the Walker Art Center.  (My visit was on January 5, 2025).  The walls of the room displayed nondescript black and white pictures in daunting arrays, 12 to 20 photos per group surrounded by oceans of text.  The effect was like entering an earnest Berlin or Hamburg history museum with a few embattled relics besieged by a dozens of placards of densely printed information.  You don't typically go to an art museum for the purpose of reading labels for several hours.  But this exercise is required by the conceptual art-works made (or written I should say) by the French artist, Sophie Calle.  Of course, no one could possibly read every word of the voluminous printed materials covering the gallery walls.  It's enough, I think, to get the gist of the works.  

In the first gallery, Calle records several experiments involving spying on people.  In the early eighties, she hired herself out as a chambermaid, cleaned rooms in a Venetian hotel, and took pictures of people's soiled garments, their beds, cigarette butts and pajamas and reading material.  In one case, her pictures show items left in the room by honeymooners.  The labels are duplicative of the pictures -- they simply itemize the materials photographed in the rooms.  In another experiment, Calle selected a man at random and stalked him for a day.  The art object consists of photographs and a detailed itinerary of the man's perambulations and encounters during the time he was under surveillance.  In a third work, Calle persuaded people to sleep in her bed under surveillance by her still camera.  The fourth work is a video about money in which Calle asks people on the street how much they make and interviews bankers about their work and favorite jokes.  None of these experiments yields anything of the slightest interest at all.  In fact, it's remarkable how dull these quotidian events turn out to be.  (It's as if Calle has an unerring eye for the mundane and uninteresting).  Things improve a little in the next couple galleries in which the artist documents her marriage to someone named Greg, undertaken on a whim in a Vegas wedding chapel, and lasting only a couple of years.  Again, there's nothing remarkable about Calle's brief and unhappy marriage and the relics that are preserved from that experience are things like bottles, pieces of cheap furniture, postcards, and pictures.  (Apparently, Calle had the endearing habit of holding Greg's penis when he urinated -- there's a good picture of that activity in the show.)  Calle carefully documented the deaths of both her parents, recording their last words, and mentioning some events in the last weeks in their lives.  In one video installation, she apparently shows the death of her mother, a dignified figure lying supine in a bed with a little stuffed dog next to her -- the woman is inert; sometimes, a hand enters the frame to check her pulse or breathing.  At last, the bystander is convinced the woman is dead and, then, moves the little stuffed doll closer to her face, pulling the covers up to the corpse's chin.  (The label for this disheartening video states a date, 2007, and the words 'Impossible to Catch Death"; in handwriting, scribbled on the white wall in pencil, the words appear "Please do not make any photographs or film in this room, Thanks S.C." (This is the most poignant and meaningful thing in the show and, yet, the naive effect of the handwritten note penciled on the wall, seems unintentional.)  In an alcove, two safes are displayed.  Calle persuaded a married couple to write a secret never shared with the other person on a piece of paper and, then, locked the papers away in the two small safes.  The art work consists of an elaborate contract prepared between the husband and wife (and Sophie Calle and the Fraenkel Gallery) documenting the agreement, considering contingencies such divorce or death, and providing that the safes, whose combinations are known only to Calle, will never be unlocked.  It's interesting enough but a gimmick without any real pay-off.  In a final huge gallery, there are five screens showing people who have never seen the sea standing in front of waves stretching to the horizon -- these are classical Rueckenfiguren, figures seen from behind.  Then, the people turn to the camera which slowly advances into a close-up of their eyes.  Of course, there is no discernible reaction -- whether these people (they are Istanbul) are moved or frightened or astonished can not be read from their bland expression.

Calle manages to surveil people, watch them die, and expose them to transcendent experiences without discovering anything of interest in the spectacle.  We go to art museums to see ideas embodied or people and things ennobled or rendered meaningful.  Calle's work does the opposite -- she flattens everything down to a piece of wholly uninteresting reportage.  It's astonishing to me that she was able to create this work without happening on anything worth seeing.  Anyone who has lived a little knows about unhappy marriages, parents on their deathbed, strangers walking around foreign cities, and hotel rooms.  Calle doesn't defamiliarize these aspects of life -- she doesn't dramatize them or make them have any significance; these things aren't illumined in any way.  It's an irritating and arduous show, made all the more difficult by the enormous amounts of writing on the walls, none of which is even slightly interesting.  There's a dispiriting nihilistic aspect to the show --if this is all that life holds, what's the purpose of living.  The paradigm work is the video shot on the shores of a grey, featureless ocean -- people are looking into the vastness of the sea for the first time, but we can't read anything on their faces -- their bland expressions remind us of why we need art:  in real life, people don't emote, don't act, and conceal both their emotions and thoughts.  Art exists to repair this deficit in reality.  I suppose there's some value in pointing out the enormous and disheartening gap between art and life -- but, ultimately, the fact that life always disappoints us is pretty clear to just about everyone.

You can cleanse your palate by looking at the new hang of paintings and objects in the permanent collection -- it's called "This Must be the Place."  At last, the "Large Blue Horses" by Franz Marc is displayed prominently and, without the implicit apology for the beauty and drama of the thing that has characterized its exhibition for the last thirty years.  The huge muscular horses are hung at eye-level and they strain, pressing toward you out of the frame.  In the context of Calle's uninspiring show, Marc's horses remind you why you might spend an afternoon at an art museum as opposed shopping or watching football on TV.  Nearby, there are several interesting small works on paper, including a ghostly lithograph by Louise Bourgeois of some sort of floating angel and a dark conspiratorial engraving by Kaethe Kollwitz -- both beautiful works that deserve  your attention.  There are some political works by Edgar Heap of Birds (about the 38 Sioux hanged in Mankato after the Dakota War) and a few large images by Kara Walker with her trademark mammies and picaninnies cavorting in front of lithograph images from the Civil War.  A lapidary work (or works) by Yuji Agematsu exposes, by contrast, the failure of Calle's work.  Agematsu walks the city streets in New York, picking up small pieces of  trash (he calls this stuff "detritus").  The fragments of paper, metal, small badges, and foil are, then, carefully arranged in clear plastic pouches in which cartons of cigarettes are sold.  The art is like flower arranging or the Japanese art of Ikebana.  The little displays each about two by three inches are gemlike and extremely beautiful  Agematsu has figured out a way to transmute garbage into gorgeous, tiny displays that seem either floral or, in some ways, narrative -- some of the little bits of debris are figurative and look like fish or personages or flower blossoms.  Agematsu collects the kind of trash that you don't even see as you walk a city street and, by some kind of alchemy, transmutes it into art, and beautiful art as well.  Calle takes the moments of our lives, aspects of reality that are intrinsically meaningful, leaches them of meaning and beauty and puts them up on the walls as diagrams of futility. 

  

The Night Clerk

 The Night Clerk is a 2022 psychological thriller.  The movie is handsomely made, fluent, and contains some startling performances.  However, the film is so elliptical and intentionally understated, that it has almost no narrative pulse, and generates no suspense.  In fact, the conventions of the crime thriller are invoked only to be casually disregarded.  For instance, a cop played by John Leguizamo investigates the murder that is central to the movie's story.  He interrogates suspects and gathers evidence and, even, tries to intimidate the protagonist into a confession -- but it's all very low-key, tentative, and goes nowhere.  The cop doesn't solve the crime; instead it's solved for him.

The titular night clerk is a handsome young man named Bart Bromley.  He suffers from Asperger's Syndrome and, although very intelligent (possibly a genius), he is socially inept and presents to others with an uncanny, robotic indifference.  At his job, he has rigged the hotel rooms with cameras so that he can spy on customers.  In the course of this surveillance, he witnesses a man killing a woman in one of the hotel rooms, watching the footage at home in his basement room.  It turns out that he lives nearby and, when he sees the feed showing the homicide, he rushes to the hotel, encounters the dead woman, and dips his fingers in her blood. Although he's an obvious suspect, and, of course, can't reveal how he observed the murder, the cops rule him out and continue searching for the suspect.  After the killing, Bart is assigned to another smaller hotel.  At that place, a young woman checks-in. She's fantastically beautiful (played by Ana de Armes) and tells Bart that she had a brother, now deceased, who was on the autism spectrum, but more severely impaired than Bart.  She begins to flirt with Bart.  As it turns out, the woman has an ulterior motive -- she's the girlfriend of the murderer and has been charged with stealing from Bart his video evidence of the killing.  Bart, who is confused by the young woman's flirtatious behavior, falls in love with her.  This leads to the film's climax which occurs after the young woman has slept with Bart to take from him the thumbdrive (or something on that order) containing the recording of the homicide.  

From a logical and narrative perspective, the film makes no sense.  We don't understand the technology that Bart uses to somehow be privy to the remote feed from the motel in his basement room where he views footage on about nine large monitors.  Bart's mother, played by a gaunt Helen Hunt, is intensely protective of her son, but, somehow, seems unaware that he is spying on the customers in the motel where he works -- notwithstanding the huge array of screens in the basement of her house.  Furthermore, she seems somehow indifferent (or unaware) of the sexual encounter between her son and the beautiful young woman (who apparently spends the night in her house).  Helen Hunt's role is underwritten to the point of vanishing -- she doesn't get to do much of anything and, remarkably, doesn't call a lawyer when the cops interrogate Bart.  The beautiful young woman is appealing but plays the part of the film noir femme fatale, also a role that is underwritten.  Tye Sheridan is so convincing as the kid with Asperger's syndrome that I wondered whether the actor was someone who, in fact, suffers from this condition.  (Sheridan has played lots of superhero roles, apparently is a well-known movie star, and, of course, is merely acting.)  The movie is pretty much completely implausible -- I worked as a night clerk and its a job that requires almost constant interaction with a wide variety of people, many of them peculiar and, even, half-criminal.  I'm not able to suspend my disbelief as to the premise that a person with this sort of condition could work in this job.  And the technological aspects of the movie make no sense.  The film is an odd vehicle starring some prestigious actors; it feels to me like it was made as a tax-dodge or something on that order.  It's strangely indifferent, inhuman, and remote, as if directed by its autistic hero.  

Laid (Australian series)

 Australia is one version of the future.  Laid, an Australian TV comedy that ran for two seasons around 2012 (twelve half-hour episodes), illustrates this proposition.  A raunchy sex-comedy, the show's casual amorality and explicit content are features that American TV producers have come to only belatedly, more than 10 years after the Australian show was canceled.  I haven't seen the American version of Laid, a brand-new program that apparently adopts the previous show's premise and so can't comment as to how that series differs from its predecessor.  But my point is that the Australians and their media are culturally more progressive than television in this country.  Laid is blithely nonchalant about its heroines promiscuity -- in her early thirties, the heroine has had 22 lovers, all of them dropping dead in the sequence in which she had sex with them.  She has no regrets except the fatal consequences of her sexual encounters.  And, in fact, the demise of her former lovers seems more of an inconvenience to her than a matter of actual tragedy.  Everyone is wholly non-judgmental.  The older generation of Aussies, men and women in their fifties seem to accept casual sex with equanimity, even enthusiasm.  The show is full of new age gurus and frauds.  This sophisticated urban world is completely secular.  When one of the characters dies briefly and is, then, revived, he imagines himself to be Jesus.  But his problem is that neither he nor any of his comrades know enough about the Bible to provide him with a convincing account of how he should act or think as the Savior of the World. The terrain in Laid is resolutely sunny, mild, and hedonistic -- even when it is raining, the skies are bright and the world is luminous.  Laid imagines a world without real consequence to sex -- at least, this is how everyone views the situation until the heroine's former lovers start dying in bloody and grotesque ways.  The noncommittal non-judgmental ambience to the dire events in the show, all played for comedy, is necessary to keep the tone of Laid from becoming unbearably grim and unpleasant.  The program is bawdy in the manner of old Elizabethan comedies -- it abounds in dirty puns and unseemly double entendres -- but the show is weirdly family friendly; everyone's in on the joke and its amusing to all concerned.  

Roo McVie, the show's protagonist, works in marketing research.  She lives with a female roommate E. J.  She's close to her parents.  (In this show, there's no generation gap. Parents and children understand one another perfectly, have the same tastes, and are happy to spend time together -- if anything, the parents, who are all aging hippies, are more progressive than their children.)  Roo discovers that the men with whom she has had sex are all dying, in fact, in the order of her encounters with them.  This is established in the first three shows which involve accidental deaths, funerals, and Roo's discovery that she (or her vagina) seems to be the cause of the young men's deaths.  The situation becomes complicated when Roo meets a young man whom she genuinely loves -- her dilemma (and his) is that if she consummates the relationship, her lover will die.  People in the show drink a lot and Roo ends up in bed with her roommate E.J.'s boyfriend, a feckless fellow who is dim-witted but charming.  Of course, Roo's sex with the E.J.'s boyfriend leads to a rift with her roommate.  But this is Australia and everyone is laid-back and forgiving and Roo reconciles with E.J. after some initial unpleasantness.  Roo consults her gynecologist, a flaky new-age physician and endures some rituals involving bathing in epsom salts conducted by a self-proclaimed shaman (no one knows how to pronounce the word).  Her love-interest's mother conducts a sort of cheery seance in which Roo apologizes to the young men (all 22 of them) that she has killed.  This seems to free her from the curse and she sleeps with the young man with whom she has fallen in love.  All goes well, except in the morning, the poor kid is in a coma.  This sets up the second season's six episodes.  

In the 2012 season, Roo encounters a nasty, cynical, and unattractive man whose penis cures all illnesses.  Roo decides to sleep with this man to rid herself of the curse.  The show's premise has run out of steam by this point and, although the first three shows are funny, the program deteriorates, becoming increasingly vulgar and coarse.  The unseemly guy with the healing penis is a funny character -- he's hideous with greasy hair, blemishes on face and lips, and has a deeply furrowed, comically large forehead.  His personality neatly matches his physical shortcomings -- he's openly exploiting his clients, all needy women of various ages and descriptions who are cured by his embraces:  he heals psoriasis, hemorrhoids, diabetes, and several other ailments (including some said to be terminal) in the course of the series.  Marcus, the sex-healer, falls in love with Roo creating more problems.  Roo and E.J. have concluded that ejaculation is the source of both the poison and the balm -- if the "deal isn't sealed", then, Roo's vagina doesn't kill and Marcus' penis is without efficacy.  Roo and E.J. drug Marcus and try to rape him, but he's flaccid and they can't get the healing semen out of him.  This leads to them rigging a splint for his penis so they can extract the ejaculate which Roo injects into herself with a turkey baster.  To simply detail these plot elements, which on paper sound fantastically unpleasant and lurid, is to misrepresent the show.  Despite the program's obscene subject matter, somehow, the program remains amusing and cheerful, even, somehow wholesome.  (This is particularly peculiar since the program's premise necessarily suggests ideas involving sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV-AIDS.)  By the end of the second series, the show has become so profoundly obscene that it really has no place to go -- outrage is piled on outrage, although it all remains judgement-free and cheerful, and, at last, the show peters out.  

The characters, even the unpleasant Marcus, are all jovial and engaging.  It's a sit-com on the order of Friends in the sense that the viewer likes everyone in the show and wishes them well.  The dire premise doesn't interfere with the comedy although exactly how this is accomplished is unclear to me, a sort of alchemy.  It's a world without gravity, with butterflies copulating and fluttering about in relationships that are as light as a feather and that have no consequence at all.  I have said that Laid represents the future with respect to sexual relations and friendship and the supernatural in the developed world -- but it's just one version of the future.  The other version is represented by the resurgence of radical right wing politics in the world; in the coming decades, I think, it's either Australia or the Taliban.  You choose.  I prefer "down under."

(The show's theme is an old music-hall ditty called by My Girl's Pussy, based on obvious double entendre and performed with primitive, smirking efficiency by the American cartoonist, Robert Crumb with what sounds like a string and jug band.  The show is penetrating with respect to male sexuality -- it develops along the lines of a bit mimed by Richard Pryor in one of his seventies filmed comedy concerts:  there's a woman whose vagina kills those who ejaculate in her.  Pryor mimics a long line of men waiting nervously to have sex with the woman, sometimes, looking anxiously ahead to those who have gone before, but no one wanting to lose his place in the fatal queue.)