RAMS

In Iceland, we are told by writer/director Grímur Hákonarson, there are more sheep than people, which is a testament to the importance of sheep in Iceland. They are animals as revered as the cattle in India. 

Two estranged brothers, Gummi and Kiddi, sheep farmers who have inherited their family sheep ranch, have split the property and live in separate houses next to each other but they haven’t spoken to each other in 40 years.

Every year there’s a fierce competition for the trophy of who has raised the best sheep in the valley. And every year the same brother wins it causing a rift between them that can never be healed. But this year is different.

This is a compassionate heartwarming and somewhat absurdly comical but tragic tale of how two stubborn brothers living close to each other are actually worlds apart and communicate only grudgingly by way of written messages carried by a sheep dog.

The remote Icelandic sheep valley is breathtakingly beautiful but as barren and bleak as the distant relationship between Gummi and Kiddi. Both are preparing their ancestral breed of sheep for this year’s competition with the utmost focus and fanatical dedication. Nothing is too bizarre or outlandish when it comes to sheep breeding.

But when Gummi discovers symptoms of a deadly disease spreading among their flocks, the news, coming just after Kiddi boastes of having won the 1^st prize once again for the best Ram in the valley, is devastating to both brothers. It is determined by the community that all the sheep in the valley must be destroyed to eradicate the disease. 

They try hard to save their flocks by hiding them from the authorities but eventually realize that to save their way of life they must work together and put aside their differences. Now without their sheep, their brotherly bond, unacknowledged till now, is stronger than they ever imagined.

Rams is a cautionary tale about the extreme lengths that people will go to, to prove a point that eventually becomes insignificant next to the power of love that cannot be explained. This film is a heartfelt crowd-pleaser, a humanist drama that is the perfect antidote for our present cruelly competitive world we live in.

Our obsessions and greed for having the most or being the best are destroying the relationships we should be cultivating, not to mention the natural beauty around us as long as we continue to be so arrogant and preoccupied with accumulating wealth or prizes that we cannot acknowledge and respect as equals, others in our diverse community and those around the world who do not meet our own standards.

Rams has a deceptively deep message with large metaphorical implications for the world at large but told in a very simple disarming story. We can enjoy it as a charming local folk tale from a remote culture, or we can apply its symbolic meaning, as many of the best folk tales do, to a much larger context. 

Rams is Iceland’s official Oscar entry for 2016 Academy Awards and winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes film festival. It’s a wonderfully told, thought provoking tale that has suspense, comedy, tragedy and a great cast of characters from a culture not often portrayed in film.

JP

The Revenant

Coming out of The Revenant I felt like I had just been beaten to an emotional pulp after a relentless brutal battle against man and nature, much like the hero of this story who was mauled by a Grizzly to within an inch of his life. And that’s just the beginning of his problems as he miraculously managed to overcome his injuries despite many attempts by angry native tribes and some of his own companions to kill him off. 

The Revenant is an epic wild ride through the fur trade era’s legendary adventures of Hugh Glass, a hunting scout for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1823, based on the novel by Michael Punke of the same name, and his harrowing ordeal in the wilderness of 19^th century uncharted Upper Missouri River.

This is a prestige picture from an Oscar-winning director, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, with a big name star Leonardo DiCaprio, and an epic story based loosely on historical legend. But despite all that, The Revenant doesn’t feel like a typical Hollywood film, in fact this film is far superior to most Hollywood movies.

Director of last year’s Oscar-winning best picture Birdman (2014), Iñarritu’s obsessively demanding methods and brilliant vision have raised the bar for epic scale realism and immersive experience in today’s cinema. If you compare his film with other Hollywood depictions of this era with films like Dances with Wolves (1990) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Revenant far surpasses them in cinematic grandeur and gut wrenching suspense.

Hugh Glass who had previously been captured by Pawnee Indians and has a son by a Pawnee native woman, is working as a guide for an English company of fur trappers when they are viciously attacked by Arikara tribe warriors who are on the warpath to rescue and retrieve the kidnapped daughter of their chief. 

The few survivors of the attack which opens the film with hair-raising realism as the camera continuously moves, caught in the thick of the battle, like one of its participants, eventually escape down river but must abandon their boat and trek on foot across frozen winter landscapes back to the protection of their fort.

Filmed in breathtaking locations of rough virgin landscapes around Alberta and Argentina, The Revenant is as stunningly beautiful as its story is brutally harsh. Iñarritu pulls no punches as he graphically depicts the harrowing struggles of men against nature, carrying out their own form of frontier justice.

When Glass is attacked by a Grizzly bear protecting its cubs, he is near death with life-threatening wounds and doesn’t have long to live without any medical attention in the harsh conditions. Unable to move but still alive he is carried by the rest of the surviving trappers as he is the only one who knows the way back through the wilderness. 

Eventually they come to the conclusion that he must be abandoned if the rest of the group is to survive and they leave him and his son and two others to give him a proper burial if and when he dies. With hostile native Indians still on their trail, one of the men, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) elected to tend to the injured Glass, is not eager to fulfill his obligations and soon succumbs to his baser instincts to hasten the inevitable.

But what Fitzgerald doesn’t anticipate is Glass’s resilience and spirit of survival and justice. What follows is one of the most excruciating depictions of inexhaustible drive to fight for life that’s ever been put on screen. It gives new meaning and dimension to the power of the human spirit.

In addition to this captivating story, The Revenant also manages to accurately give us an authentic sense of what life must have been like for people who lived during this time period, and Leonardo DiCaprio gives us one of the most engaging performances of his career. It wouldn’t surprise me if this is the year he finally goes home with the Oscar.

JP

Son of Saul

Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig) a Hungarian member of the Sonderkommando has seen too much horror in the senseless deaths of men, women and children. Stripped of their dignity and unceremoniously gassed or shot to death, their naked corpses are piled like pieces of meat to be incinerated and their ashes shoveled into the river.

Son of Saul follows a single man’s perspective, a prisoner working in the hellish conditions of the death factories in Auschwitz as he methodically and mindlessly ushers thousands of Jews into the gas chambers for extermination. He is part of a special group of Jews forced to help the Nazi camp commanders to exterminate their own people knowing that they will also be subject to the same fate when the time comes.

Prisoner functionaries who were chosen to help with processing and exterminating of Jews on a daily bases as Saul is, understandably must develop an unnatural detachment as a way of coping with guilt and to preserve their sanity. Saul copes by shutting down those parts of his senses which are unable to process the insanity he is witness to. He doesn’t look at his victims any longer, he keeps his vision unfocused and he doesn’t hear their screams and confused cries for help.

The film is extremely disturbing to watch but also intensely thought-provoking. No one has ever brought us this close to the horrors of the holocaust and specifically the experience of what it must have been like inside the death factories. Director Laszlo Nemes’s first feature film provocatively breaks this cinematic taboo to confront the Nazi atrocities in the Auschwitz death camp, but in so doing leaves much of it to the imagination.

We only see and hear the atrocities from Saul’s traumatized perspective - and only peripherally and out of focus - as Saul goes about his duties mundanely ushering in crowds of people who think they are being sanitized and will have a warm bowl of soup waiting for them after they shower. We hear their screams behind the locked shower doors, after which Saul and the other workers must quickly collect all the clothes for burning and remove the freshly killed corpses, cleaning and preparing the gas chamber for the next group of victims.

Shot as if the camera is attached to Saul’s body as he moves through the camp, Son of Saul is made to look like old film stock footage that may have been smuggled out of an actual death camp, making the experience so much more immersive and shocking. As if we are catching a glimpse into highly secret and classified war crimes.

Son of Saul’s images of robotic humans in bleak inhuman factory conditions slaving endlessly in cavernous furnaces harken back to the futuristic dystopian underground factory scenes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). There’s a similar sense of a detached visual experience free of any sentiment as we try to figure out what we are seeing and hearing.

Opinions are sharply divided on this controversial film as I quickly discovered. For all the people who admired the film for its realistic and uniquely focused take, disturbing as the subject matter is, there were an equal number of people who hated it and were unimpressed by the seemingly unrealistic plot of a man trying to save a boy’s dead body from desecration while on a mission to find a Rabbi among the constant stream of Jewish arrivals to perform burial rights. 

In a place like a Nazi death camp, where thousands were being gassed, shot and burned every day, this idea seemed too improbable to many viewers. But others saw it as more symbolic than realistic; a man consumed with guilt preserving one sacred act he feels is his last and only chance on earth of salvation for the sins he’s committed.

JP