The Week in Cinema: 22.07 -- 28.07

-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films watched this week --

Decalogue, “Dekalog: The Ten Commandments” (dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1988)

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Premiere: 10^thDecember, 1989

Written by: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Starring: Artur Barciś, Aleksander Bardini, Krystyna Janda, and others

Ten commandments. Ten episodes. Ten lives whose metropolitan stories are conceived out of a Krakow housing project – occasionally coinciding in doorways, lift shafts – whilst searching for greater purpose beyond their locality (even if, with time, they do return to their dwellings once again). Each episode is as fragile as the human lives they sculpt, glass-like objects whose value does not solely reside in transparency or sequence, but rather in their independence from one another; almost as if, alike to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, each are to be murmured by wayward pilgrims, separately, on the course of some holy journey. Kieslowski orientates each episode around the breaking of a scriptural commandment. Over the course of the series, however, such examples of trespass are borrowed or gifted from one episode to another, each fragment aligning themselves to multiple rules, multiple voices. Interpretation is therefore fluid – Kieslowski has never openly discussed the recurring presence of the solemn onlooker, for example, a patient, pained witness to all that unfolds – with the intersection between sense and meaning once again vulnerable, as if the Decalogue itself might fall apart if viewed out of order. It is inevitable that what holds Kieslowski’s cycle together is in fact the people whose lives are observed, the men, women and children who are innocently watched by the camera – whether beautiful or unbeautiful, their faults are open to our judgement and inspection. Natural performances are guided by the naturalism of their lives, an aspect of its writing commended by Kubrick in a foreword to the published screenplay, remarking that “they [Kieslowski and Piesiewicz] have the very rare ability to dramatizetheir ideas rather than just talk about them.” Episodes 5 and 6 were later adapted into theatrical-length cuts – A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love – but, like with their eight counterparts, the series perfectly inhabits the short form allocated by television. Aside from the ordinariness and simplicity of each story, they closely engage with the nature of small-screen entertainment, neither too grand or verbose as cinema might demand, only small, precious, and measured works. Decalogue is undoubtedly Kieslowski’s magnum opus, the closest life could ever come to art without brushing flakes of its paint from its surface. Television everyone must watch in their lifetime.

Jurassic Park (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993)

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Opening one of the most profitable franchises ever conceived, Jurassic Parkconfirmed the talents of its director, Steven Spielberg – who in the same year delivered Holocaust-drama Schindler’s List– whilst lifting a relatively standard script to unimaginable, ever-inspired heights. Spielberg himself inevitably resembles the billionaire philanthropist John Hamond (played by Richard Attenborough), whose dream island of dinosaurs is at once, for audience of the 90s and of today, “something real, something that wasn’t an illusion, something they could see and feel.” A breathtaking classic of 90’s blockbuster cinema.

The Dead Don’t Die (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2019)

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Jim Jarmusch delivers zombified opera with his latest picture, The Dead Don’t Die, flitting loosely between the oddball townsfolk of fictional US town ‘Centreville’ on the dawn of apocalypse. George A. Romero’s cult classic Night of the Living Deadis acutely remembered in Jarmusch’s addition to the genre, but also somewhat recast, and painfully so, as glacial storytelling dredges up well-used motifs to unoriginal effect. Zombies burst from the ground in the wake of a disturbance to the planetary axis – an act of environmental revolt, perhaps – stirring up the comfortable existence of a relatively bored community; in particular, that of the useless, laconic police squad (a triad played by Bill Murray, Adam Driver and Chloë Sevigny). Like their past selves, the Zombies gravitate to what they previously knew – whether sports activities, WIFI, or coffee (as witnessed by Iggy Pop’s corpse) – whilst feasting on the flesh of whosoever they come across. Jarmusch’s film is peppered with glorious moments, (the sight of Farmer Miller’s (Steve Buscemi) cows galloping into the distance, or Tilda Swinton’s morbid antics) but they are short and far between. Self-conscious irony becomes increasingly painful as scenes repeat, characters circle one another, and the infrequent and tedious allusion are made by Adam Driver to the fictitious narrative. An incredible ensemble cast is unable to resurrect a half-hearted effort.

Benjamin (dir. Simon Amstell, 2018)

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Simon Amstell writes and directs a bittersweet, measured story of faltering love affairs and toppling male youths. Colin Morgan (of Merlin, The Happy Prince) stars as Benjamin, a talented film director struggling to deliver his second feature, whose relationship with men on and off set complicates his own uncertainties and groundings in life. It is a film for and by contemporary masculinity, yet one that offers no solution to its own fallibilities and errors in judgment. Comedy is weighted against thoughtful dourness, a scale that doesn’t allow one quality to slip and overwhelm the other, at least not entirely. Benjaminfelt like a collection of scenes without any apparent cohesiveness, which is likely the desired effect, but ultimately does little to reward its slow viewing and half-way pretentious script.

The Great Hack (dir. Karim Amer, 2019)

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Another ambitious, Netflix-produced documentary is launched with The Great Hack, one that will undoubtedly generate Oscar buzz at the close of the year. Amer boldly confronts what is potentially the most considerable threat to 21^st-century democratic policy, the systematic harvest of online data – virtual residue of our online behaviour preyed upon by companies such as Cambridge Analytica, who also supply resources for political campaigns such as Leave.EU and Trump’s presidential team. The Great Hack is in many ways an unredemptive tale, even with its effort to expose the legal and moral corruption of Cambridge Analytica and others, its Orwellian visions all too real and all too repeatable for the next generation.