MOVIE REVIEW: THE BRUTALIST

 

THIS MOVIE IS NOT FOR EVERYONE. It’s long (three-and-a-half hours long) and drags in parts, if I can put in my two-cents worth, but one thing I found interesting is its depiction of post-war America. The story centers around László Toth, a Hungarian refugee and holocaust survivor from the infamous Buchenwald concentration camp who arrives in New York in 1947 to begin a new life. An architect by trade, we see him struggle to make a living and find work commensurate with his talents. In the 1950s he worked at several jobs. One, as a product designer in a friend’s furniture factory, is where he first encounters the rich van Buren family whose patriarch, Harrison van Buren, commissions him to design a home library on his estate.

 

László’s design is so fresh and original that Harrison subsequently commissions him to design and supervise the construction of a community centre in Philadelphia in honour of Harrison’s late mother. The project will take years to complete, and we never actually see the completed building—only glimpses of foundation walls, staircases, interior walls, all made of concrete. The camera work is energetic throughout, with rapidly changing perspectives, inverted horizons,* and constant movement along and within the slowly evolving structure of the community centre, interspersed with scenes depicting László’s struggles to adapt to his life as an immigrant. The camera’s almost dizzying activity is a visual metaphor depicting the drive, energy, and vibrancy of post-war America, with its brash, ‘can do’ confidence, its roaring economy, and seemingly limitless possibilities. However, inter-woven between scenes at the construction site are László’s struggles for more funding from Harrison, and his dogged insistence that his architectural vision be made manifest in the tonnes of poured concrete and rebar. 

 

An example of Brutalist architecture 

AT ONE POINT, there is a depiction of a narrow interior stair, whose ceiling is thirty feet or more high, that reminded me of stairs inside an Egyptian pyramid. There, the cold stone echoes, millennia later, the unrelenting concrete structure of László’s ‘pyramid’, with an aesthetic as sterile and un-human as the tomb-pyramids of Giza. One of the questions the film asks is how the two are related.  

THE FILM also examines the immigrant experience and the power imbalance existing between native born Americans, who have wealth and privilege, and those, like László and his family, newly arrived and struggling to realize their dreams and ambitions. We see him as he constructs his first major project, working though his ideas of form and function to develop and promote a new architectural style and ultimately a new school of architecture called “Brutalism”.

 

👉IT IS CLEAR IN THE FILM that German fascism, under which László and his wife, Erzsébet, suffered during the war, has its correspondence in America. And it's displayed in fine fashion by Guy Pierce in his role as the multi-millionaire Harrison van Buren, someone who wields great power and control over László but wears wingtip Oxfords instead of jackboots. This inequality is laid bare for all to see after a party with the workers onsite at the growing community centre. There, Harrison rapes a drunken László who has no recourse but to bear the assault in silence or face losing the project he has spent years developing. Interestingly, it is Erzsébet who confronts van Buren during a family dinner calling him out as a “rapist”. Her accusation does not destroy László’s chances to complete the project, though delays occur amid turmoil within the van Buren family. 

 

Venice, Italy

 

 NEAR THE END of the movie is a scene where László is on a trip to Venice. There he rides in a gondola along the city’s famous canals. It is a magical, colourful excursion amid the baroque and highly decorated buildings, and in stark contrast to the Brutalist buildings he would spend his life designing and building.

 

THE STORY MOVES FORWARD in time to the 1980’s with László, now an invalid and unable to speak, attending a retrospective of his work. His grand niece speaks for him, telling the audience that his work was inspired by his experience in the Buchenwald death camp. She says he deliberately removed from the buildings he designed any form, decoration or amenity that suggested or celebrated community life. The bleakness of the death camps, their austere, unhuman, anti-life design and function he incorporated into his buildings to act as a reminder to the world about what happened during the war, and to lay down a marker for posterity, perhaps serving a function similar to the ancient pyramids of Egypt.

👉WHETHER OR NOT Brutalist architecture of the post-war era was indeed a concretization of one of the darkest periods in human history, it sure goes a long way explaining that ‘someone just walked over my grave’ feeling you sometimes get when encountering such buildings. 

👉Brutalist architecture was a relatively short-lived phenomenon¹, and frankly, give me Venice any day!  

 

 

CHEERS, JAKE. _____________________________________

 

* The scene when László first arrives in America, passing beneath the statue of liberty at the entrance to New York harbour is an example of the camerawork found throughout the film: edgy and with a jazz sountrack. An ‘inverted’ statue of liberty suggests freedom is perhaps not as universal as advertised. Freedom at the top; at the bottom, not so much.

1. Though, I am told it's making something of a comeback of late. I'm not sure whether I'm happy with this news.  

  

The Ross Building, York University, circa 1970

 

MOVIE REVIEW: CALVARY (2014)

 

 

"IT'S A STORY ABOUT FORGIVENESS, change and renewal.

In the beginning, yes, Father James meets a series of unrelentingly awful people, all of whom he suspects of wanting to kill him. None of them are worthy of Father James' comfort and he chooses to abandon his vocation.

Except he realises that the millionaire Michael is simply hurting. When Father James recognises Michael's genuine pain and asks for forgiveness from his daughter, he realises again the importance of his life, work and the power of spirituality to bring comfort to those lost and seemingly damaged.

That is why he returns. And that is why Fiona seems ready to open up and at least listen to the murderer of her father.

The film argues that salvation and forgiveness is possible for even those who themselves believe that they have crossed a moral precipice. The murderer thinks that the church is beyond redemption and needs to be destroyed. Father James believed that people are beyond lost and need to be abandoned. The film argues that both views are wrong and it is only through change that we can begin to heal and stop hurting others (and ourselves).” (Sharaz__Jek)

 

 STATEMENT OF INTENTION

 

Sharaz__Jek, in the above Reddit column, provides us with a helpful synopsis of Calvary. And, here, I would only add a couple of points: Early in the movie, Father James Lavelle, a priest in the small town of Easkey in northwest Ireland, receives a parishioner’s confession. We don’t see who it is, but what he says is shocking, detailing how, as a child, he was sexually abused by his parish priest, whose crimes were never exposed. The parishioner has harboured a deep hatred and loathing for the Catholic church and its clergy since that time. Decades later, he yearns for revenge and announces in the confessional that he will kill Father James in one week. His is not a confession, it is a statement of intent. He chose Father James because he is a “good” priest, and his revenge would be more complete, in his eyes, because of that fact. The movie chronicles the last days of Father James’s life.

I CONFESS (no pun intended) that Calvary was a bit of a surprise. I thought I would be seeing the stereotypical Irish priest we are so accustomed to see on film—brusque, a bit of a tippler, having the gift of the gab, acts as a spiritual lighting rod, and is a solver of problems big and small within his parish. Father James, on the other hand, is a recovering alcoholic. He has come to his vocation late in life following the death of his wife. He has an adult daughter, Fiona, herself plagued by a life of bad choices and relationships, and she has recently attempted suicide. The two have been estranged for years, with Father James critical of her lifestyle and her attempts at suicide which, according to church teachings, is a mortal sin. Fiona visits James during this time hoping for a reconciliation between them. At one point she says his alcoholism during her childhood alienated her, as did his later vocation which proved a barrier rather than a bridge between them.

 

IN THE MOVIE, the dialogue is rich and the banter plentiful with humorous asides, quips and witticisms from the townspeople and Father James. But there is an element of malice beneath the words. The dialogues invariably tend toward criticism, veiled and demonstrable, or ridicule, disbelief even anger with, and disparaging assessments of, the Church and Father Jame’s vocation. These last days prove to be his Calvary. I agree with Sharaz when they say Father James has lost his vocation. By this point, he sees his parishioners as irredeemable; they will do what they will with their lives despite his advice, spiritual and otherwise, and there is little he can do to change their ways. His relationship with them has become pro forma, a perfunctory gesture, formulaic, futile. And they know it. Perhaps another way of putting it is that he has lost his love for his fellow man. One example of this is when he visits a deranged murderer in prison who says he wants to confess. After listening to him, Father James tells the killer that to make a genuine confession one must be truly contrite, something he deems lacking in the killer, who he leaves to his madness without performing the Confessional rite. However, it is shortly afterwards that he has a heart-felt talk with Fiona. They reconcile after he asks her to forgive him for not understanding—for not trying to understand—the depths of her despair and for not engaging with her when she needed him most— growing up and as a young adult. In an emotionally charged scene the two express their love for the other and Father James is heartbroken when she returns to Dublin.

The final straw that breaks him is an accusation that he was attempting to ‘groom’ a young girl he met on a walk to the beach. He is undone by this experience and falls into a deepening “dark night of the soul” with his spiritual life and the secular world around him never more at loggerheads. He goes to the village pub and begins drinking. The village doctor, an ardent atheist and perhaps the most “unrelentingly awful” of all the people Father James encounters, tells Father James a horrific tale of a young patient whose prognosis post-treatment is a "living hell". The priest is shattered and asks the doctor why would he tell him such a terrible story. The doctor doesn’t answer but the subtext is clear: What kind of God would make a child suffer so? How can you believe in such a God? There is no God.What say you to that, priest?  Enraged by yet another assault on his vocation and beliefs, Father James nearly attacks the doctor. Instead, he drinks far into the night, shoots-up the bar with a revolver*, and ends battered and bloodied in a brawl with the tavern keeper.

 

FORGIVENESS

   

THE NEXT DAY, he decides he will quit the priesthood and flee from his rendezvous with death. He drives to the regional airport for a flight to Dublin. There he meets the wife of a tourist who’d died in Easkey. Earlier in the week Father James had performed the Last Rites for him as he lay comatose in hospital. Accompanying her late-husband's coffin, she says she is taking her husband “home”. The young widow had a quiet dignity and unwavering faith in God and the Church, and as devastated as she was, nevertheless she says she will “keep going on”. As they talk, the two watch from inside the terminal as her husband’s coffin is loaded by baggage handlers into the plane's cargo hold like..well, baggage. The lack of reverence, of any regard for the transcendent in the modern world, the cold, secular world filled with cynics, skeptics, unbelievers, idolaters, and haters was encapsulated in that quiet scene at the airport.

 

INSPIRED by her faith and her will to persevere, Father James returns to Easkey to resume his pastoral duties. On the morning of his death, he phones Fiona to talk to her one last time. He says there has been too much talk of sin and not enough about virtue. Asked what he thought was the greatest virtue, he replies "forgiveness". Each then forgives the other and Father James leaves the rectory for the last time and walks to his final destination.

As he walks through town he encounters Gerald, the elderly American writer, who asks if he can join him on his walk. Father James says no, given what he is about to face. Gerald takes it as a rebuff and turns to walk away, but Father James asks him if he’s finished his book. Gerald says yes but he wasn’t sure if it was any good. Father James said it will be “extraordinary” and that Gerald was a very fine writer, cheering the old man greatly. As with Fiona, Father James gives solace and affirms the Gerald’s value and sanctity in the world. 

 

HE WALKS TO THE CLIFFS overlooking the wild Atlantic and tosses the gun away; he will go unarmed to meet his executioner. There, he encounters Michael, a wealthy banker who contemplates suicide because life has no meaning for him anymore. Father James consoles him, embracing him, and promises he will come by his home later to talk with him. Another soul is touched, another spirit lifted by the priest who has learned that his greatest goal is to honour others, to understand and accept who they are and to love them unconditionally.

 

FINALLY, he walks to the beach where we see a figure approaching. It is the town butcher, Jack Brennan. Here, I disagree with Sharez__Jek. I think Father James knew all along it was Jack who would come for him. It makes sense of some of the looks, venom, and veiled threats passing between the two in the days leading up to the priest’s murder. Father James tells Jack it’s not too late, that he doesn’t have to kill him. Jack disagrees saying it’s ordained, unstoppable. He's wrong, of course, there are always choices that can be made.The priest looks at Jack, refusing to look away as the butcher raises his revolver. Father James's gaze is open, accepting what will come and, at the same time, accepting Jack unconditionally, loving him even as Jack murders him. Jack cannot meet the priest's gaze and turns away as he pulls the trigger.

The movie ends with short depictions of the people whose lives Father James had touched. Most seem to be living much as before. It is with Fiona, Gerald, Michael, the young altar boy who witnesses the shooting and, perhaps, Jack that moments  of grace are achieved.¹

 

The final scene is of Fiona visiting Jack in prison. She is seated in the glassed-off booth with a phone link prisoners use to talk with their visitors. She is calm, her gaze is tearful, and like her father’s, it is open, accepting. She will listen to him without reservation. Jack is terrified of her, barely able to approach the booth and sit. (I had the image of a devil, brought from the dark depths to the surface, blinded by the light of a world he had long ago abandoned.) What frightens Jack the most, I think, is he knows she will forgive his unforgivable act. And then where will he be? What will he be? The road to redemption is always there even if it can be a difficult and rocky one.

 

MY APOLOGIES for the length of this review. I kept trying to describe the movie (some gorgeous scenery, BTW). I could have simply said it’s a good watch, all-in-all.

 

CHEERS, JAKE.

_____________________________________ 

 

* At the beginning of the movie, Father James drops off some groceries to Gerald Ryan, an elderly American novelist who is writing a book in a cottage near town. He asks Father James for a gun with the unspoken purpose of using it to end his life if he were to become disabled. Father James said he would try to get him one. He does but, instead, keeps the revolver. He clearly means to keep it for self-protection against his would-be assassin.  Which is why he had a gun with him at the pub. 

👉It also reminds the viewer that Father James is on his own spiritual journey. He is human, with all the fralities and faults that entails. On his late night drive back from the airport he accepts the fact that he will face his own Golgotha the next day and he quietly prepares for whatever is to come.

 

1. Not everyone in town is changed by their relationship with Father James. Not everyone accepts or seeks unconditional love or expresses it. Moments of grace, the film tells us, are few and far between in life; they should be cherished and encouraged whenever they occur.

 

👉For GoT fans: Doctor Frank Harte (a misnomer if ever there ever was one), who believes in the sanctity of no one, is a cold and heartless character. An ending tableau after Father James’s murder has the good doctor standing in an autopsy room. He is smoking a cigarette. There is a stainless-steel bowl on the counter in front of him containing what looks like a human heart and upon which he butts out his cigarette. He is someone you’d like to punch in his stupid face, if truth be told.

But FYI, the actor portraying Dr. Harte played Littlefinger in GoT, also someone you’d like to punch in the face.

 

P.S. I just had an annoying thought: Are we to assume the heart is Father James’s?  Conceivably the priest could have been autospied in Easkey by Dr. Harte who sees human beings as machines that eventually break down, no more, no less. And no matter how he might ‘excavate’ Father James’s body, he will never encounter the priest's soul, nor come to regard his own.

 

 

P.P.S. A nice touch in the film is this landscape shot of Father James's altar boy painting the seascape in the moments before the priest is murdered. While Jack strides along the beach to meet his fate, Father James simply waits. The boy's painting is unfinished, the future is open, the last dab of colour has yet to be applied, if at all. Free will and choice are always at play; nothing is pre-ordained as Jack believes.
 

 

 

MOVIE REVIEW: ZONE OF INTEREST

 

   "WORK SETS YOU FREE"

I WATCHED a movie last night called “Zone of Interest”. It’s a Polish/UK drama based on true events depicting the lives of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss. Rudolf was the longest serving commandant of Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration/death camp, during WWII. The film is an odd venture as it is set almost entirely in the zone of interest around Auschwitz, which were lands reserved for the Schutzstaffel (SS) and their families, as well as for agriculture production and experimental farming. Auschwitz is the name Germans gave to the Polish town of Oswiecim, after they conquered Poland, which is located 50 kilometres west of Krakow near the confluence of the Vistula and Sola rivers. A former army barracks, it started out after 1940 as a POW detention site, but its central location, nearby rail hub and fresh water supply made it an ideal setting for an expanded network of camps, extermination facilities, and barracks for forced labour at nearby agriculture and industrial enterprises. For example, the German chemical giant I.G. Farben* built a synthetic rubber plant there specifically to take advantage of the massive influx of detainees after 1940.

Birkenau is a name associated with Auschwitz. It was the “sub-camp” facility (“Auschwitz-II”) where most of the executions and cremations were carried out, though Auschwitz also had crematoria. Auschwitz-Birkenau was one of five Nazi extermination camps established in Central Europe where mass executions were carried out using gas. This procedure was deemed more efficient than shooting, hanging, etc. Auschwitz has the distinction for being the largest such facility. In all, there were more than 40 sub-camps in the area associated with “Auschwitz-1”.

 

IN THE MOVIE, we do not have scenes inside the camp proper, even though the camp is literally a stone’s throw from Commandant Höss’s⁺ backyard, in which his wife Hedwig gardens constantly even putting up flowering vines “to hide the wall” between their world and that of the camp. Though we can hear what goes on next door, the shouts, screams, conversations, occasional gunfire, and the hiss of roaring furnaces form a background soundscape, distant, almost dream-like, subliminal, yet always present. Incidentally, Zone won 2024’s Oscar for best soundtrack—there is little music scored for the movie—and the sounds representing the unseen world next door were meticulously curated for the film. In a strange way you’re almost ‘bored’ with next door, and it is sometimes possible to forget it’s even there as you watch the children playing in the swimming pool, or adults laughing and joking at Rudolf’s birthday party. It’s only when you look over the wall and barrack roofs and see drifting in the wind smoke from the crematoria that you remember, and you wonder how it is possible you forgot in the first place.¹ 

 

The Höss household is a busy one. With five children it’s no wonder! We watch the children as they are scrubbed and dressed and eat their breakfast and are whisked out the front door to school, if they are of age. The younger ones play in the backyard or are coddled in basinets. Busy, busy! Women doing chores—cooking, scrubbing floors, laundry, darning socks. There is order and precision as they perform their duties. Soon you realize, besides German neighbor-wives dropping by for coffee klatches or Hedwig’s mother visiting, that most are prisoners seconded from the camp. And through the household’s busyness, by attending to details, to routines—by rushing about getting things done—that is how what happens beyond the wall can be forgotten, ignored.

IT'S ONLY WHEN the household orderliness is disrupted, for example by an argument between Rudolf and Hedwig and a spill not cleaned up yet, that the mask slips: Hedwig, at breakfast and between bites, reprimands one of her slave-servants saying she could have her husband “spread your ashes over my azaleas.” It’s a chilling statement from someone who holds the power of life and death over the camp women who work in her house. The young woman, whose life Hedwig so casually threatens, rushes from the kitchen to attend to the spill. Here, the two worlds—home and camp—intersect and a place once thought safe and harmonious in an instant becomes a minefield.

 

ANOTHER EXAMPLE occurs when Rudolf takes his children swimming in the nearby river. As they splash about, we see a flow of cloudy water moving downstream toward them. It is ash from the camp’s crematoria released into the river and Rudolf runs quickly to grab his two young children from the water. Later, the children are bathed, and Rudolf cleans himself off, noting some bone cremains left in the sink basin. All done. All clean. It’s back to ‘normal’ now.

SCENES in the household between Rudolf and Hedwig reflect a happy marriage, as are scenes between parents and children. Of course, their tranquil family life is based on a façade, a brittle veneer of lies and deceit, but as long as they ignore what goes on beyond the wall ‘next door’, their domestic idyll remains intact. But when, with the passage of time and events, reality once more comes knocking and Rudolf tells Hedwig they must move because he is being transferred, Hedwig is adamant that she and the children remain behind in the home they have worked so hard to build. Hedwig later reminds Rudolf they live a life that, without Rudolf’s position in the SS, they could never afford, and she looks forward to “when the war is over” and they can buy a farm. Their self-delusion is monstrous.

It's an important film to watch no matter how disturbing the content may be.

 

👉AND what is happening today in Palestine, in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, is the product of a similar mind set, the same delusions. Israelis can ignore what they and their government are doing to the Palestinian people. And as long as Palestinians remain behind walls and barbwire, Israelis are free to ignore the common humanity each side shares with the other. It is a tragedy every day, with the death toll set to rise as the displaced population starves, as children die of starvation directly through the actions of the Israeli military. (And shamefully, with the complicity of the United States and many of its allies, including Canada.) And even more deaths are to come when the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) decides to enter Rafah in force in the coming days and weeks. It is a genocide they are committing--a crime against humanity and international law, the consequences of which will be felt for generations to come. There must be a permanent ceasefire and withdrawal of IDF troops from Palestinian land now. Free Palestine.

 

Jake.______________________________________

 

* The same chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that gave the world synthetic aspirin from its Bayer subsidiary also produced the pesticide Zyklon-B which, infamously, was used at Auschwitz to murder an estimated one million Jews, along with tens of thousands of ethnic Poles, Romas, Russian POWs, Czechs, Belorussians, and other groups. It is thought that 2.7 million Jews were killed in such “killing centres” during WWII. An additional three million Jews were murdered by other means during this time, including from disease, starvation, pogroms, forced marches and violence. 

 

+ Rudolf Höss was found guilty of the mass murder of 3.5 million people at Auschwitz and other death camps he organized during the war. At his trial, he disputed that number saying: “No. Only two and one half million—the rest died from disease and starvation.” During the war, he oversaw experiments on prisoners using different kinds of poisons to find one suitable for his plans of mass extermination. He settled on Zyclon-B which killed rapidly, with prisoners exposed to the gas dying in five to 15 minutes. He said in his written Nurenberg testimony: “We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped.” [Note: Auschwitz was where Doctor Mengele conducted his horrific medical experiments on camp inmates. He evaded custody and fled to Argentina. When discovered by authorities and Israeli intelligence operatives, he emigrated under an assumed name first to Paraguay then Brazil where he died of a stroke while swimming at the age of 69.  Ed.] 

Höss was tried and hanged for his crimes on 16 April 1947 at Auschwitz before an audience of around 100 people, many of whom were former inmates.

 

1. An interesting scene occurs with the visit of Hedwig’s mother who remarks on how modern and clean their home is, how healthy her grandchildren are, how beautiful Hedwig’s garden is. And as they walk around the garden, Hedwig’s mother timidly asks if that’s the camp beyond the garden wall. It’s like someone asking something not normally mentioned in polite company, something disreputable and distasteful. Hedwig acknowledges it is and then continues showing her mother the rest of her garden. Later that night, as her mother sleeps in an upstairs bedroom, she is awakened by a sound and sees her curtains glowing a deep red. She goes to the window and looks out over the camp to see flames roaring from the crematoria chimneys. The next morning, we learn she has left early, not saying goodbye, just leaving a note for Hedwig who reads it then tosses it in the garbage.

 

2. Throughout the movie there are scenes of a girl riding a bicycle to what looks like a series of earth works or compost heaps. She appears to be placing apples in a row among the piles of earth. It is filmed through a dark red filter, almost like reverse-negative photography, and I took it for some kind of dream sequence. I was puzzled by it until I read an account of a 12-year-old member of the Polish resistance who would ride her bicycle at night to the agricultural sector in the zone of interest and do just that—hide apples for the prisoners to find and eat. Her name was Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk. Interestingly, Aleksandra found a piece of music written by Joseph Wulf, a camp inmate who survived his ordeal.

 

 

      

 

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