Flick of the Day: Calm At Sea / Das Meer Am Morgen

Today’s flick of the day is a quiet and affecting drama based on a real life event during the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War. Premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, Volker Schlondorff’s German-French co production was screened yesterday as the opening film of the IFI’s German Film Week, marking a welcome return to the capital of a contemporary German film festival for the first time in four years. Details regarding the remaining films can be found here.

Opening in a French prison camp in 1941, Calm at Sea tells a dark tale from the rich tapestry of dark tales that was the German occupation of mainland Europe during the war. We are introduced to an impossibly young French student named Guy played by Leo-Paul Salmain. He has recently been interned at the camp for supposedly being a troublemaker. He spends his days trying to impress the girls on the other side of the fence, specifically the girl of his dreams Odette while conversing with his fellow inmates who are mainly staunch communists with an intellectual bent. They play boules, box and smoke and all is well. Unfortunately for them, the resistance fighters on the outside are stepping up their attacks against the German occupiers. This leads to the assassination of the German Commander of the town of Nantes for which the Fuhrer demands that 150 French prisoners be executed as a reprisal. Despite the best efforts of the administrators and the cowardice of the French collaborators, the men of Guy’s camp are selected for execution by firing squad.

The film then follows this event with an excruciating level of detail to give the film an almost documentary feel. We learn of the various heart-breaking chances which might have allowed some of the men to escape such as the boy who was due to be released the next day and has to be dragged from his wife’s arms to be shot. Ultimately however, this is a tale of woe. The men go to their fates with their head held high and the script attempts to portray the events as a turning point in the relationship between the people of occupied France and the Nazi administration and perhaps it was but it makes for poor drama.

Where the film shines is in its emotional punch. It would be a hard hearted man who would not feel for these men who even the German officers would admit have done nothing wrong. They are simply facing the wrath of a tyrant and a regime which would go down in history as one of the most monstrous.

The largely French cast give believable turns as the prisoners and the villainous German’s are suitably catty. All in all, this is an important film in terms of documenting this horrific event but perhaps could been dealt with by a documentary rather than a drama given the lack of real drama. We know what will happen to them with about 30 minutes remaining and the film falls away.

Flick of The Day: Once

With the news earlier this week that the Broadway adaptation of John Carney's Once had been nominated for 11 Tony Awards, it felt like just the right time to revisit the original film which garnered such praise and a richly deserved Oscar win for Glen Hansard's music. Shot on a budget of €150,000 and financed by the Irish Film Board, it is a romantic tale of music and the bonds it forms between people and perhaps more than that a time capsule of Dublin at the height of the Celtic tiger boom.

Once

A Dublin busker player by Hansard splits his time between helping out in his father's vacuum repair shop and practising and playing his own songs on Grafton street. One day he meets a young immigrant played by Marketa Irglova who makes her living selling flowers and cleaning houses. She quizzes him about his songs and who he wrote them for and he offers to fix her broken vacuum cleaner. Before long we learn that our guy had his heart broken by his ex-girlfriend and has lived with his father since the death of his mother the previous year. The girl is separated from her Czech husband and lives with her young daughter and mother in a small flat in Mountjoy Square on the city's north side. They bond through their love of music and the girl urges the guy to take his music to a wider audience. A small simple tale of the once in a lifetime meeting between two people who catch each other at just the right time.

There is an almost fairytale quality to this film telling as it does the tale of off chance meeting between two unnamed people on the streets of Ireland's capital. John Carney's sparse script is a love story that doesn't rely on the usual tropes of the genre but rather builds itself around the song writing ability of Glen Hansard. This is an inspired decision for Hansard is one of the most talented and least appreciated Irish songwriters of the last 20 years. It is criminal that he has not had the critical success of his contemporaries and yet perhaps this is his just desserts. Once brought his work to a much wider audience, earned him an Academy Award with Marketa Irglova and opened up a world of opportunities including opening for Eddie Vedder on his current tour.

It is six years since the film was shot on a shoestring over the course of 19 days in Dublin and even in that limited timespan, this feels like a timepiece. Shot at the height of the boom years when the sight of new immigrants coming to Dublin was a common one, the direction of migration has very much reversed with the downturn. Despite the fact that neither Hansard and Irglova are trained actors, they deliver believable and measured performances throughout, inhabiting roles that are made for them.

This really is a gem of a movie. It is simple, sweet and and to the point and delivers a memorable tale of romance in modern times while the musicianship of Hansard and Irglova carry the film over the line. A musical for people who don't like musicals.

Flick of The Day: Mary and Max

From strange beginnings can great things grow. At first glance a claymation adaptation of the true life pen pal relationship between an obese middle aged New Yorker and a lonely young girl from the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia would not seem like a promising idea for a film. However, in the hands of Australian animator Adam Elliott it becomes a truly ground breaking piece of cinema. Today's flick of the day is Mary & Max.

Mary & Max

In 1976, a young girl named Mary, voiced by Toni Collette struggles with loneliness due to her alcoholic mother and emotionally absent father. One day on a trip to the post office, she picks a name from the New York phone directory and decides to write to them. Her letter reaches Max Horowitz voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman, a 44 year old Jewish man who struggles with obesity and Asperger's syndrome. Amazingly, these two misanthropes who live on the margins of their own society find in each other a friend with which to converse and share their doubts, worries and neuroses and love of chocolate over the course of 20 years. Where they initially appear as oddballs and outsiders, we gradually see that both are perceptive and aware of the world around them and perhaps more importantly far nicer human beings than those supposedly normal folk.

A work of incredible depth and emotional maturity, it transcends its genre to tell a tale that everyone should know. It is not a happy story and not for children but it is a worthy one all the same. Rarely have issues such as mental illness, loneliness and isolation been dealt with in such a mature manner in a piece of cinema. It's a dark and beautiful picture and one will surely be left with a lot to think over for having seen it.

While the animation is the star of the show, the voice work is excellent throughout. Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman are unrecognisable in their voice characters and perhaps that is as it should be. While the film shows a bleak view of the world, it is this bleakness which gives it such an emotional punch and it is perhaps closer to the reality of many lives than we dare to admit. The relationship between the two allows Mary to open up to the world, indeed the animation noticeably brightens as her own confidence improves while Max finds that which he has sought all his life, a friend.

Overall then this is a triumph of a film with a deep message about what friendship means. As the film notes at its close "God gave us relatives, thank God we can choose our friends".