Reviews
When I try to find the words to praise Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?, the first thing I think of isn’t quite a compliment: it’s a scab I can’t stop picking.
The Jackal of Nahueltoro is about six murders. Five of them take place during the film’s most troubling scene, as Jose, the protagonist, beats to death a recently fatherless family who have adopted him into their fold.
Whatever reputation the film has is derived from the same logic that’s sponsored Haneke’s career, the cough syrup argument—something that tastes so bad surely has to be good for you.
Inasmuch as Blissfully Yours has a point, it is this: the quality of sunlight shining through water or filtered through a forest’s canopy, the meditative quality of sex outdoors during a perfect day, the so close, so faraway sweet sadness of lying beside someone.
Those specificities, bourgeois family and Catholic morality, are case appropriate to the movie’s provincial mid-Sixties Italian milieu, though it should be said in fairness that there’s no system of values or morality that the movie doesn’t affront.
The result is a highly personal portrait, very obviously crafted by a close friend: every interview with Crumb feels like it’s lit to lovingly caress the nerves he is unabashedly exposing for us.
Rape/revenge surely must be the most disingenuous of genres. Most can’t avoid at least hinting at titillation during the first half’s assault, while the ensuing revenge pardons the audience for any potentially worrisome jollies and offers them the one-sided righteousness of seeing the baddie justly punished.
You are what you fuck”—or how you fuck, at least—seems to be the basis of any contemporary exercise in analytical artistic truth seeking. Probably the closest equivalent to writer/ director/ star Caveh Zahedi’s fidgety new self-exposé comes from underground comix, that most purely onanistic of artistic subgenres.
Melville’s tough-guy mannerisms in movies like Le Doulos, Le Samourai, and Le Cercle rouge always strike me as impenetrable and faintly ridiculous, even though I admire the films’ visual elegance and deadpan noir rhythms.
The humane accomplishments of the film, widely praised, do not need much defending, but I think it’s been insufficiently expressed how closely the experience of the film comes wrapped with a dissatisfaction belied by this mood of critical exultation.
The Dardenne brothers’ L’Enfant has been justly hailed as a brilliant work, but for gritty observational verisimilitude The Death of Mr. Lazarescu outstrips it at every turn.
Since Paul Greengrass decided to make a crude, mechanistic schematic out of the events of 9/11 and the crash of United 93 rather than a full-bodied film with some small shred of humanity, it seemed most appropriate to build a response around a list rather than a complete review.
To say that the Dardennes never fail to deliver on their formula is hardly meant as negative criticism.