There Is No Evil (2020)

(film 150 minutes)

Directed by: Mohammad Rasoulof
Language: Persian

Rating: 3/10 | Yaser Tohidi
September 25, 2020

The movie relates four stories in four episodes about people executing the death penalty and the moral responsibility they feel for that. First is Heshmat, a middle-aged man whose day-to-day job is to execute. He does not see the people he executes but he just presses a button for doing that. He has a wife and a daughter. He takes a good care of them and, help his aged mother. He seems silent and introvert, perhaps due to his job. He sometimes just stares at red/green lights in street as these remind him of the lights in his room at work that show him when to press the button. Then we see Kaveh. He is doing his compulsory military service at a prison and he wants to go abroad after his military service. But unfortunately, his service is to execute. He cannot convince himself to do this. So, with the help of his fellow and his girlfriend, he leaves the prison just before executing a man. The third story is about Javad. He is coming back from his military service to prepare his marriage, but he finds that his girlfriend’s family are mourning for the death of their close relative, a teacher and a dissenter, who was executed. Javad remembers that in fact he, himself, has executed the teacher during his military service when he sees his photo. This has a devastating effect on Javad and his relationship with his girlfriend. The final story is about Bahram and his daughter. She is coming from Germany to visit him. Javad is a middle-aged man living in a sort of hide-out and we understand that his life is so because he has refused to execute a death penalty. He tries to explain his daughter that the circumstances of his life is due to an important moral decision he has taken in the past. 

There Is No Evil assumes responsibility for the action even if it is a duty. The movie shows the happiness of choosing the right decision (not to execute) and the terrible consequences of following the orders blind (to execute). The movie chooses execution as an order just because following this order means taking someone’s life and something significant is at stake. So, There Is No Evil is not about whether execution is moral or not. Rather the movie advises to question the orders and law and to measure them with truth/wisdom. If not done so, it leads to emptiness of soul, like Heshmat, or to break down of lives, like Javad and his girlfriend. 

For its advice, There Is No Evil shows two happy endings by not following the orders blind and two sad ones by following them. The movie does not question the order itself and where it comes from. The moral characters do not try to change the orders. Instead they just do not obey. So, even if the two episodes are depicting two protagonists, they remain local/personal and they do not become general protagonists and the movie cannot address your expectation for creating a positive world. The world is as it is from beginning till the end and in this world, you can find some characters obeying the orders blind and the others who do not. Viewer expects conflict between these two groups and later resolution but nothing of that you find in There Is No Evil. 

Click here for wikipedia page

Breathless (1960)
(film 87 minutes)

Directed by: Jean-Luc Godard
Language: French

Rating: 7/10 | Yaser Tohidi
May 01, 2020

Michel steals a car, murders a policeman, just to come to Paris and meet Patricia again. He is in love with her and wants to take her to Rome. But Patricia, an American journalist does not want him because Michel is too tough for her. She is sentimental and Michel is the opposite. She wants only admiration from his side, but Michel wants much more. He wants everything or nothing. She says between grief and nothing she chooses grief, but Michel goes for nothing. Patricia is afraid of losing her opportunities in life if she goes with Michel. She is fascinated by the high-class attractions but for Michel a Dior store is only a place to telephone for free. He disgusts cowardice that unfortunately he finds that also in the girl he loves most. When the police come to question her, she does not collaborate. She helps Michel to run away. She is attracted with the excitement-in-the-moment when she is with Michel. However, her attachments to the default life of hers is just too much. Finally, she finds the only way to get rid of Michel is to leak his place to police and tell him to run away. But here also she is surprised, Michel is not running away. As he said he wants everything or nothing. 
Breathless is an experimental melodrama that against the purpose of melodrama, wants to distance the viewer from being attached to the sentiments and rather to show the beauty of an existential life and authenticity in the protagonist Michel. The pictures in the streets are taken without hiding the camera from the passers-by or to set the scene to appear so. Passers-by look at the actors and the camera as though they are also following their story, as though they are also dealing with the same dilemma. Breathless criticizes the common sense in the larger society. Breathless is a fascinating philosophical movie that shakes our presumptions in life and society not only through the story but also through the unusual editing, photographing, and dialogues.

Click here for wikipedia page

Jean de Florette (1986)
(film 120 minutes)
Manon des Sources (1986)
(film 113 minutes)

Directed by: Claude Berrie
Language: French

Rating: 7/10 | Yaser Tohidi
April 05, 2020

A drama is filmed in two parts. The story in the first part is developed around a water resource, a spring, and the relation of two neighbors together and in relation to that spring, one rich and experienced who wants the spring and its land even by committing crime and the other new and poor but full of ambition and theoretical knowledge who just want to have a good relation with his neighbor and nature around and a good life for his family. The new neighbor is Jean de Florette, a hunchback, and his wife and daughter. The old neighbor is Cesar Soubeyran and his nephew Ugolin. Cesar and Ugolin conceal the spring and hide its location from Florette family and this makes them suffer a lot to supply water to their land. Jean finally dies as a consequence of his efforts to find the spring and Soubeyran family buys their field and they immediately start to open the spring.
In the second part, the story is extended to the whole village. Manon, the daughter of the hunchback, realizes all the truth and more than that, she realizes that many in the village knew the existence of the spring but they also hide this fact because they didn’t want a hunchback, a bad fate, to be in their village. She accidentally finds the water source of the whole village. She cuts off the source. This is a disaster for the village. This makes the village agitated to find the reason and they find no shelter but in the church. Priest points to the existence of a criminal and Manon presents actually two criminals, Cesar and Ugolin. Ugolin commits a suicide as he finds out his love to Manon is one-sided and leaves his farm to Manon, the farm that they bought from her father Jean, the hunchback. Manon opens the water source. Meanwhile, Cesar realizes that Jean was his own son from his short but deep relation with Florette before he joins the French army in Africa. Also, Cesar leaves all of his property for Manon, his one and only granddaughter. 
The Movie creates a drama spanning between generations connected by water and land. The love to land and family bring immoralities and crime. However, the justice will prevail even though after many years. The movie, from the beginning, creates characters of Soubeyran and Florette families and in the second part, extends to the whole village and villagers. This extension of the story makes the second part much more entertaining to watch. Thanks to the plans taken in the village and farm lands and nature around, and the story behind, the village becomes familiar to the viewers’ eyes and remains into memories. Several villagers becomes a character; the mayor, the farmer who wants his water for which he paid, the village’s spokesman, etc. 

Despite the great pictures during the two episodes, the movie, however, suffers from poor mise en scène in some sequences for example the explosion and hunchback’s death due to that and Cesar’s death which are hard to believe. Just compare these two deaths with Ugolin’s which is perfectly convincing.

Click here for wikipedia page
Click here for wikipedia page

The Farewell (2019)
(film  100 minutes)

Directed by: Lulu Wang
Language: Mandarin, English

Rating: 6/10 | Yaser Tohidi
March 29, 2020

A Chinese-American girl Billi who moved to the US with her family when she was six year old is in the middle of crisis over missing a fellowship. Her grandmother Nai Nai is terminally ill in China. This is kept a secret from her. A wedding for Billi’s cousin is planned just as an excuse for the family to see her one last time. Billi’s uncle and his family who live in Japan bring the Japanese girlfriend of Billi’s cousin as the bride. Billi is banned from joining the family because she is unable to hide her emotions. But she travels anyways and joins the rest of the family and perfectly hides the illness though it is very hard for her to understand why her family does not tell the truth to Nai Nai and how fair that is to keep such a fact from someone. 
Even though Nai Nai coughs from time to time, she is cheerful and lively and advices everybody else to have a healthy life. She insists on organizing a big bouquet for the wedding which was not of course part of the plan. She leads the tasks and arranges for a big wedding. Wedding takes place and everybody hides the illness. 
The Farewell brings a fine comedy out of cultural differences between east and west. And through that, it frames a bright drama out of the dark tragedy of not letting someone know her illness and the time left for her. 
The movie portrays not only the gap between different generations of immigrants but also the adaptations an immigrant do, adaptations which make her everyday more far from its origins. These are all significant sources of alienation. These are Billi’s life. During the trip, she realizes how much she missed China although she is more American now. She finds strong relations with people and space around herself in China although she left there long time ago. However, she becomes the hero of rejoining these differences and proposing a way out. This is pronounced symbolically in her run to the hospital to keep the medical result secret and in the beautiful final of the movie where Billi grunts in the streets of New York the same way Nai Nai was grunting outside her house to get rid of bad toxins when she was doing some meditation/sport.  
On the down side, Billi’s aim to become an independent girl is not dramatized and thus seem a bit out of context each time it’s brought up. The Farewell also lacks creating supporting actors. Mother, father, uncle, aunt and the cousin are not built. The movie is just able to create Billi and Nai Nai. So, the feelings of others cannot be communicated with the viewer and the related scenes seem extra and useless. The Farewell’s rhythm sometimes feels lost especially in the middle where the wedding is organized.

Click here for wikipedia page

Seven Samurai (1954)
(207 minutes with intermission)

Directed by: Akira Kurosawa
Language: Japanese

Rating: 10/10 | Yaser Tohidi
March 15, 2020

To defend their village against an imminent attack by bandits, villagers decide to hire samurai. A group of seniors go to the city and luckily find a talented samurai who not only accepts the mission despite the low pay-off but also arranges further search for more samurai. A group of seven forms and enters the village. They plan the defense using also the villagers. Finally, the attack starts and the bandits are faced with strong defense by the village. Samurai and the villagers succeed to kill all the bandits although they loss some lives including four of the samurai. 
This is the simple story based upon which Seven Samurai is written. But the movie goes much deeper into the relations and life of villagers and samurai. The movie starts by showing the vulnerability of farmers to the attacks from bandits. They have bad memories of brutalities also from samurai. They have no protection against these. But there might still be some noble samurai, and this forms their only hope for living. In the search for samurai and after having little success initially, they come across a strange scene; a senior samurai, Kambei, dresses up as a monk and shaves his head to save a child from the hands of a kidnapper. He shows a great talent by saving the child with bare hands but above that he proves that noble samurai still exist. Kambei might accept this difficult mission for only a handful of rice every day. Villagers go after him to talk about their problem. There are also two junior samurai amused by Kambei’s talent, one is very descent, Katsushiro, and the other, Kikuchyo, is not. Kambei accepts the mission. He is a wise leader. He starts immediately finding more samurai together with Katsushiro. Kikuchiyo shows interest in following Kambei but he has no idea what for. Therefore, he leaves. Finding one by one talented and noble samurai and looking for the last one, they face gain Kikuchiyo. He is also a good fighter but with no discipline. Even though he is not selected, he follows them. He should have another motivation. Later we find out that he is not born a samurai but in a farmer family and he lost them in an attack by bandits. This makes him enthusiastic for this mission. Because of his background, he builds a good relationship with villagers. During the attack, he shows great bravery although his careless acts sometimes add to the cost of the mission. He dies at the end but not before he kills the head of the bandits. A deeper bond between samurai and villagers, or better to say, another significant rebellion against social traditions and cast definitions happen by love of Katsushiro and the young girl of a villager. She is dressed up as a boy by his father in the fear of samurai. Katsushiro is enjoying the nature around the village when he faces her. He first thinks he is a boy and questions her why she is not practicing with other boys. This first encounter fires a forbidden love between a farmer girl and a samurai that remains till the end and even if they try to keep it hidden, it becomes known to everybody.
Seven Samurai is full of details in setting the interior and exterior locations which camera brings into the picture and the mise en scène utilizes for deepening the story and creating a great movie. Seven Samurai is a drama about teamwork and rejoining of different casts in society when it comes to protecting a good cause. 

Click here for wikipedia page

Dekalog (1989)
(series 10 episodes 60 minutes)

Directed by: Krzysztof Kieslowski
Language: Polish

Rating: 6/10 | Yaser Tohidi
January 29, 2020

Ten independent one hour films depicting profound universal moral and ethical challenges faced by ordinary people in ordinary situations. Although you might say not so ordinary because of the cement large buildings and gloomy atmosphere of the inside and outside locations, you immediately accept the conditions as yours and ordinary following the beautiful and engaging stories depicted with slow rhythm and eye-catching angels of the camera. The ten episodes are not only collected under the name Dekalog but also the stories happen in the same housing project in which the viewer, from time to time, finds some characters of previous episodes. Also, a mysterious character appears in most of the episodes who seem to only observe the stories. These simple connections, although not directly connects the stories, brings a wholeness to the series that can be summarized as human condition. The stories are dramatized more through pictures and conditions than dialogues. The moral dilemmas are dealt with under the context and between the silences and barely you hear the characters talk directly about them. 
Of course, some episodes are more engaging than the others, e.g. Dekalog V: A Short Film About Killing. This episode puts in picture the absurdity of the capital punishment. A young boy who feels responsible for his sister’s death and does not have desire to live anymore is planning a crime as though touching the limits of brutality. The junior lawyer defending him cannot do anything, and finally we see a detailed setting and step-by-step procedure of an execution though, through slow rhythm of the film, we can have enough time between each step for reflection. Another beautiful episode of the series is Dekalog VI: A Short Film About Love where a lonely teenage boy spies on a lonely woman and her sex life. He loves the woman and tells this to her. But the woman who does not believe in love invites him to her apartment to humiliate his sexual inexperience. After that, the boy suicides and the woman feels not only guilty about that but also feels the love given to her from this lonely boy.

Click here for wikipedia page