REVIEWS PANORAMA
US. 2010. 120mins Director Braden King Production companies Truckstop Media, Parts and Labor, Reale Dingeman Productions International sales K5 International, www.
k5international.com Producers Braden King, Lars Knudsen, Jay Van Hoy Executive producer Julia King Screenplay Braden King, Dani Valent Cinematography Lol Crawley Editors Andrew Hafitz, Paul Zucker, David Barker Music Michael Krassner, Boxhead Ensemble Main cast Ben Foster, Lubna Azabal, Narek Nersisyan, Yuri Kostanyan, Sofik Sarkisyan
HERE REVIEWED BY DAVID D’ARCY
The road-movie genre enters new territory with HERE, heading into the cyber-space of cartography and into Armenia, a nation which has rarely had the freedom to map out its own history. Like so many road movies, this one is also a love story, in this
case between the cartographer and an émigré returning to her country and family. HERE is a self-consciously cerebral film about images and memory, and how the refinements of map- making can obscure or ignore the ground truth of a given place. Often the film’s characters are submerged in Braden King’s
conceptual probing of these questions, but its audience beyond the obvious festival and arthouse circuits could be museums (HERE showed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last autumn), as well as the multiplying outlets of new media. The road in HERE begins in Yerevan, Armenia, where Will
(Foster) embarks on map-making research funded by the gov- ernment. In a hotel restaurant, where he cannot communicate, he is helped by Gadarine (Azabal), an ex-patriate photographer who is now back home. Gadarine’s portfolio looks like frag- ments from an archaeological work-in-progress. Their brief encounter ranges through a territory which is a
nation in flux — green hills, jagged mountains and lush gorges, and roads where new businesses seem constructed in neon. Ben Foster plays Will as a restless wanderer caught between
the certainty of Google mapping and the places which rarely let foreigners get to know them. As Gadarine, Lubna Azabal is the errant daughter fleeing from yet drawn to her traditional family, and she is also an ex-pat reconstructing a heritage she left behind. When the couple gets too close to a war area, mythology has a reality check. In HERE, the landscape does not become a character, as the
PANORAMA
Bra. 2010. 116mins Director/screenplay Jose Padilha Production companies Zazen Producoes, Globo Filmes, Feijao Filmes, Claro International sales IM Global, www.
imglobalfilm.com Producers Marcos Prado, Jose Padilha Executive producers Leonardo Edde, James D’Arcy Cinematography Lula Carvalho Editor Daniel Rezende Production designer Tiago Marques Teixeira Main cast Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Pedro Van-Held, Maria Ribeiro, Sandro Rocha, Milhem Cortaz, Taina Müller, Seu Jorge
Elite Squad 2 REVIEWED BY TOM PHILLIPS
Jose Padilha’s Elite Squad (Tropa De Elite) in 2007 was one of the highest-grossing films in Brazilian history and picked up the Golden Bear in Berlin. The sequel, which went on general release in Brazil in October, managed to blow its predecessor out of the water, in Brazil at least. With a Brazilian gross $70m, the film also surpassed Avatar
(with $43.4m), and topped the Brazil chart for 2010. Elite Squad 2 (Tropa De Elite 2) — which acquired the fuller
title of Elite Squad 2 — The Enemy Within subsequent to its Brazil release — continues the story of Nascimento (Moura), a Special Forces police operative who has now been promoted to intelligence chief in Rio’s security ministry. Nascimento’s promotion brings him a new set of problems as
he morphs from a gun-toting street warrior battling Rio’s drug gangs into a heroic police bureaucrat who stumbles into the city’s brutal mafia underworld through a series of (at times unlikely) coincidences, including his ex-wife’s marriage to Fraga (Santos), a leading human-rights activist. As the film progresses, Nascimento heads into the bowels of
Rio’s most dangerous favelas and deals with the city’s deadly mafia death squads, with explosive and tragic consequences, all of which are beautifully documented by Brazil’s young, but revered, cinematographer Lula Carvalho and complemented by an equally strong soundtrack. For those familiar with Rio politics, the film is an exhilarating
and at times tear-jerking ride through the city’s prisons, slums, hospitals and parliament which cuts dangerously close to the bone, with two major local figures making brief cameo appear- ances, a reminder of Padilha’s past in documentaries. For foreign audiences, Elite Squad 2 should hold a different
appeal — a relentless, roller-coaster ride through South Ameri- ca’s mafia heartlands in which the lead character brings a touch of James Bond and Jack Bauer to the slums of Rio.
n 20 Screen International in Berlin February 11, 2011
boilerplate cliché would have it, but the brief-encounter romance becomes a proto-documentary, with cinematographer Lol Crawley’s camera ranging omnivorously and Gadarine’s photographs cataloguing the country. You risk becoming more interested in the fate of Armenia, which lacks a road map for the future, than in the bond between Will and Gadarine, which veers toward dramatic recipes serving up measures of family, destiny and freedom. Punctuating the film are interludes in which the musing of
explorers are read, as images flash on the screen and film burns or spools out. In road movies, characters always share space with the sur-
roundings. In this novel approach to the genre, King’s inter- ludes exit the journey and offer the viewers moments of meditation. Like a bus on its way somewhere, he will probably lose some of his public, and gain part of a new one.
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