SFF 2013 Day 3 Pt. 1: Period Pieces and the Problems of Pacing and Passion -"In The Fog" & "Therese Desqueyroux"

     On Sunday, Day 3 of the festival, I saw four different films. My busiest day to date, I was especially looking forward to its last two movies. Period pieces with good production values, they each seemed ripe contenders to be some of the best films of the festival. But my first two ended up surprising me -both turning out to be rather good (and after introducing myself, I slipped Nothing Without You's award-winning director my card... so hopefully my posting of an email interview will be forthcoming). Unfortunately my final two disappointed though. They communally suffered from problems of pacing and a lack of passion (I thankfully got my "period film" fix though with last night's superb Renoir) . The first of the final two (In The Fog) was so slow in fact that after it ended I turned to my friend Jillian and joked, "I can't keep up with these fast paced action thrillers!" to which she retorted, "It was like Mission Impossible in [Russia]!". This morning I'll post my reviews on Sunday's back two, but keep an eye out for the soon-to-come reviews of my earlier Day 3 films: Nothing Without You and Still Mine.

In The Fog * *

     Last year's Sarasota Film Festival's Narrative Feature winner Elena is a masterpiece whose pacing exists on par with the intentionally subdued unspooling of Psycho's first 40 minutes. This year another Russian film whose tension depends on its pacing is playing the festival (also briefly starring Elena's lead Nadezhda Markina in a flashback as a wounded soldier's mother). Unfortunately In The Fog's similarities to Elena end with their country of origin, employment of the same actress, and recurrent use of black crows as a motif...

     It is said that war changes people. In The Fog questions whether anyone can change so quickly or to the extent that they do in wartime if certain latent tendencies aren't already lying dormant in their natures though. In a reflective conversation, a cowardly and self-preserving partisan soldier makes the statement, "People are unstable by nature, especially when they want to survive." And human "nature" is indeed what this film is all about. Utilizing a story template that pauses the plot's forward-moving action with three extended "nature"-defining flashbacks for each of its protagonists, In The Fog tells the WWII tale of two partisan soldiers and a man they believe to be a traitor as they travel through sprawling German-infested Russian forests.

     Opening with a long, uncut tracking-shot (which combined with Reality's officially qualifies this as a trend at this year's festival) similar to Atonement's seamless shot of a war-torn beach, the camera follows condemned men to their hanging. Russian rail-workers who attempted to derail a German train, they are practically regarded as martyrs by the townspeople. Although four men were arrested by the Germans for their involvement, only three are hung. In flashback the fourth man, Sushenya, is offered clemency by the Germans subject to his agreement to act as a spy for them. Faced with the choice of "spy or die", Sushenya chooses death, but the officer maniacally declines his sacrifice, saying, "I will arrange another sort of death for you." By not hanging Sushenya with the others, the Germans ensure that though he is not actually their spy, he will be seen as such by the townspeople: death by perception.

     Branded a "traitor", Sushenya is visited by Burov, a man who he's known from childhood, who he grew up with on the same street  -now a partisan soldier, he and his comrade Voitik take Sushenya into the forest to kill him for his supposed treachery. The film's initial pacing strikes the right tone as the constant threat of violence infuses each passing second with palpable tension just like in the first chapter of Tarantino's Inglourious Bast*rds. With gun cocked and aimed at Sushenya's head, Burov is shot by German military forces in the forest. Thus tension is released, no longer making each moment worth waiting through and a slow story is set up where a good man's decency compels him to carry a man who tried to kill him to safety. Without Voitik's trust, knowing that he would kill him in a heartbeat, Sushenya presses on... even if he got away, they would retrieve him from his home just as before. As the arduous trek through forests slowly creeps along, the aforementioned flashbacks serve to illuminate each man's character.

     Hunkered down in the forest, Sushenya says to a wounded Burov, "They freed me as bait" almost as though the Germans employed the biblical passage "brother will betray bother to death, and a father his child" (Matthew 10:21a) as a war tactic. Philosophical and brimming with challenging psychoanalytical concepts, In The Fog could have been a challenging dissertation on the morality of war. Instead, its unnecessarily slow pacing produces long stretches of "nothingness", during which the audience has no meat from a previous scene to chew on. These silent (the movie's lack of a soundtrack doesn't help matters), action-less sequences run together as they go on and on to the point where when a man is seen sleeping in a corner, all one can feel is jealousy.

Therese Desqueyroux * * ½

 

     There is a long-standing cinematic tradition of films based on literary affairs. From Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary, the bored, rich, sex-hungry, free-thinking wife is an archetypal character staple. Set in 1922, slightly more modern times than most literary tales of indiscretion, Therese Desqueyroux has all the ingredients for a great extra-marital affair film: Opening shots of innocent French girls at the height of their youth, running through fields of green and luxuriating in canoes on a pond, wearing thin sensuous fabrics that barely provide a barrier between flesh and open air seemingly foreshadow a passionate tryst to come. Audrey Tautou (though far too old to play the part of a dissatisfied teenager and then 20-something) as Therese says all the right things that a bored wife who thinks her marriage will satisfy her longings and is disappointed when it doesn't should, telling her fiance that "...its up to you to destroy them..." in reference to to her bad ideas and saying things like, "When I'm married all of my ideas will go back in order." Her borderline homoerotic intimacy with her fiance's sister (who she spends nights with and confides that she never thinks of sleeping with her brother in) and the rogue-ishly handsome foreigner she meets after being wed (who shares, "I don't remember having been pure" along with Therese's love of knowledge and ideas) each seem to contribute to the set up for a standard affair movie.

     Though they exist in varying degrees of quality, literary affair films can typically be counted on to provide a sweeping orchestral score, lush production design, and most importantly a passionate though rarely lasting love story. Therese Desqueyoux's slow pacing, dim color palette, sloppy fade-out edits, and peculiar lack of score for the majority of the film are early signals that something is awry, but all can be forgiven in anticipation of the inevitably bold romance to come. Pretentious and privileged costumed characters, an intellectually emancipated heroine with a disdain for religion and establishment, and an unattractive husband figure who asserts himself through bursts of anger... the stage is perfectly set! And then... no affair! Without the love affair, literary tales of adultery would just be about bored wives in loveless marriages. And so goes the plot of Therese Desqueyroux. Populated with unlikable characters (and not in the interest of creating realistic psychological portraits or making a social statement) and with a plot that goes nowhere and even has the indignance to beg the audience's sympathies for a woman who attempts to give her husband an arsenic overdose... out of boredom! Though passably acted and competently filmed, Therese Desqueyroux isn't anyone worth meeting.