JFL

Holy Shit! is a likable little high-concept flick that, with the exception of a few shots, takes place entirely in a porta-potty, in which a construction engineer is trapped under bizarre and very painful circumstances and which he must get out of in time before he is buried forever by a planned demolition explosion. In his directorial debut, Lukas Rinker consciously and very exaggeratedly plays with acknowledged patterns and references, thus coming up with a rollicking and intentionally overdone toilet-based paraphrase of both Phone Booth and Cast Away. Stylistically, his absurdist thriller proudly straddles the line between the excessive formalism and intense physicality of the flicks turned out by the duo of Neveldine/Taylor and the insipid bullshit of German television productions (the wilfully stupid crime series Hubert und Staller is a prime example). In places the film exhibits the usual shortcomings of debut directorial efforts, such as the inability to abridge or abandon shots that were either difficult to get or made with ease, and thus the wheels occasionally come off. When, however, it fires on all cylinders and really gets going, such as when it fully revels in exaggerated physicality and depictions of filth and pain bordering on the naturalistic extreme and splatstick grotesqueness, Holy Shit! is a very entertaining spectacle. [screening at the Marché du Film in Cannes]

Assholes could be to Generation Z what Shortbus was to millennials, as it also delivers a wildly debauched, destructively self-absorbed and whimsically shallow take on the polished American indie films of the time, and will also be condemned by some for its superficiality and lack of clearly defined categorisation. Like in the case of Shortbus, however, only time will tell if Assholes truly depicted its generation and what defined the inner moods of the members of that generation and how society, or rather its boundaries, was transformed through them. But it is just as possible that Assholes will simply remain a very off-the-wall relationship flick whose dramatics are guided by the amount of poppers inhaled and that isn’t afraid to admit that its twists are literally sucked out of its ass. But if we truly take both films as statements about their respective generations, then what do they tell us about them? What these generations basically have in common is that they all mainly want to get laid and that their dreams, frustrations and values are to a large extent shaped by the audio-visuals of their time, particularly pornography. Millennials thus longed for orgasms, which they could seek out across genders in an expanding sphere of sexual orientations, or rather preferences. The younger generation, defined by excessive reality-show and extreme hyper-physical pornography, is then transformed into hedonists, of which even Mephistopheles winds up on a psychotherapist’s couch. At least that’s how Peter Vack depicts generation Z in his rollicking debut, which he conceived as the film equivalent of herpes – irritating and disfiguring, but at its core, also abounding with the promises and echoes of something wild and unrestrained.

Another film from the market in Cannes whose closing credits outshine everything that came before. In the case of this biopic about a cartoonist’s coming of age and his relationship with his estranged father, who is a Holocaust survivor, the credits feature the subject’s original caricature drawings, which further put the generic visuals of this animated film to shame. Beyond that, My Father’s Secrets is a sad testament to the validity of the rule that little can reveal the creative powerlessness to express oneself through cinematic means such as a voiceover. In the end, the film is a poorly paced, unimaginative and unoriginal illustration of the work on which it’s based. [screening with English dubbing at the Marché du Film in Cannes]

Rocha’s radical folk ballad is still fascinating to this day due to its primitive (in the best sense of the word) form, which, thanks to the fact that it is not bound by standardised norms, can be iconoclastically avant-garde. Unsurprisingly, Black God, White Devil may evoke Alejandro Jodorowsky’s more recent The Mole, compared to which this classic is just a hair less psychedelic and bizarrely deviant in its superficial excess.

“It's such a fine line between stupid and clever”, or a captivatingly clever comedy that takes the attributes of rock bands and their myths and dials them up to the point of caricature, thus putting their thundering stupidity and generic would-be originality of full display.

The Mother and the Whore is an essential “French gab-fest”, but unlike most of its successors and imitators (including Wes Anderson), it not only doesn’t take itself so deadly seriously, but it also doesn’t hesitate to step into the waters of disarming immediacy and shallowness. As a result, this mammoth film about the delicate subject of amorous relationships can be simultaneously romantic and caustic, as well as tragic and playful.

Östlund’s take on Animal Farm is a wonderfully biting and sardonic portrait of our society, which likes to talk about equality, but does nothing to promote it. Triangle of Sadness stylistically straddles the delicate line between the refined sophistication and complexity of Parasite and the delightfully carnivalesque and cheekily incorrect shallowness of Troma Entertainment’s social caricatures like Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead and Shakespeare’s Sh*tstorm. Thanks to this, it also remains uniquely universally accessible and, at the same time, so multi-layered that each viewer will find in it a different character in whom they will see a reflection of themselves and their position in society, which is hopeless and desperately undignified, despite momentary illusions or supposed status. Östlund isn’t afraid to weave in the absurdity of today’s world of the young and aware as well as the old and secure, but he doesn’t neglect those in between, who keep the whole spoiled, civilisational circus going. With savage laughter, he lets the viewers enjoy beautifully served nuggets that stimulate our inner anger and maliciousness in order to dip us in the bile and show us the truly warped nature of gender roles and the social hierarchy of excessive capitalism. ___ PS: The icing on the cake in the film’s excellent cast is not Woody Harrelson, but Zlatko Buric, who hasn’t had such space and such a great role perhaps since the phenomenal Pusher 3. ___ PS2: I very much hope that the film will be distributed to multiplexes, because after watching it you will want to walk among luxury shops, where models promoting meaningless status symbols look at you from the display windows with sullen faces.

One day the extravagant model Chantal returns to her Berlin apartment, where the downtrodden Gertie is waiting for her. Gertie tells her that they had met at a fashion show in her home town and that the diva had invited her to visit. Despite the initial conflict, the two women eventually begin to grow closer. As both of their lives descend into chaos, Gertie tries to find herself and Chantal’s showy facade begins to crumble. Director and screenwriter Roland Klick conceived the story of the two women’s unusual friendship as a phantasmagorical bildungsroman about the formation of personal identity. The narrative is intentionally and playfully exaggerated and it abounds with self-reflexive overstatement, obtrusive genre allusions, impressive interpolations and fantastical twists. The affected hyper-expressiveness superbly reveals the inner world of the characters and helps to uncover the essence of their dominant-submissive relationship with constantly alternating roles. Roland Klick’s filmography is full of bizarre circumstances of origin, creative conflicts and obstacles that the distinctive filmmaker had to overcome to fulfil his vision. In the end, however, Klick was always supported by his audience. Therefore, the straw that broke the back of his creative career was fittingly neither the maniacal, drug-addled Dennis Hopper, thanks to whom the filming of White Star could have ended in disaster, nor the arrogant initiative undertaken by the proponents of the “New German Cinema” that brought about the withdrawal of Deadlock from competition at Cannes. The most severe blow to Klick’s career was delivered by his otherwise seemingly least demanding project, Hiccup, which became a shining example of the authority exercised by the film fund, which, based on its assessment that the film did not contribute to improving the quality of German cinema, withdrew the grant originally awarded to the production and essentially confiscated the film. Hiccup thus never made it to cinemas. In connection with the struggle associated with this turn of events, Klick said that he saw filmmaking as a devastating addiction that he had to break in his own interest. [written for the 2018 Summer Film School]

Roland Klick’s second feature film can be described as a modern minimalist paraphrase of Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The narrative also revolves around a trio of goons on a hunt for treasure. Instead of the opulent spectacle of the master of spaghetti westerns, however, Klick gnaws the premise and all of the genre attributes down to the marrow. As the suitcase full of money successively changes hands, the dynamics of the relationships between the individual characters and, primarily, the tension between the roles they outwardly play and their inner personalities begin to emerge. After all, though the characters do not deny their affinity for western archetypes (the sheriff, the mysterious stranger, the sinister brute, the ill-fated girl and the fallen woman), in Klick’s deranged interpretation they come across more as people maliciously trapped in a timeless genre amusement park in the form of a desolate one-horse town in the middle of the desert, from which there is no escape and where the aesthetics of Wild West towns blend with post-apocalyptic decay. Filming took place in the adventurous spirit that is typical of Klick, in the no-man’s land between Israel and Jordan after the Six-Day War, and Klick stated that the border tensions at the location contributed to the film’s overall atmosphere. The music was composed by the German experimental rock band Can, whose hypnotic tones further contribute to the phantasmagorical pop/art mood of the work. Deadlock was selected by the dramaturgs of the Cannes International Film Festival to represent Germany in the main competition.  However, this decision caused resentment among the favourites and members of the “New German Cinema” movement, and the film was consequently screened in Cannes outside of the main programme (its place in the competition was taken by the now completely forgotten Malatesta [1970] by Peter Lilienthal). Despite this, Deadlock received an enthusiastic response at home upon its release in cinemas and subsequently won the German Film Award for Best Director. [written for the 2018 Summer Film School]

White Star was supposed to be the peak of Roland Klick’s filmography, a major international project with a respected Hollywood actor in the lead role. Unfortunately for the director, however, that actor was Dennis Hopper. On the one hand, Hopper had become a renowned icon of American independent film thanks to Easy Rider (1969) and later confirmed his status as an actor in Mad Dog Morgan (1976), The American Friend (1977) and Apocalypse Now (1979). In Klick’s film, his role was to be that of a pragmatic promoter who tries to make a naïve musician a star using dubious methods. Hopper was enthusiastic about the project and later went so far as to say that it was his most personal part. This was in no small part due to Klick’s creative method, the essence of which consists in creating characters based on the actors and letting the actors merge with their respective characters and bring them to life with their own personality instead of conforming to strictly predefined roles. At the time, however, Hopper was at the absolute peak, or rather rock bottom, of his cocaine addiction, which meant that he not only had wild outbursts of emotion and sudden mood swings during filming, but that he mainly was actually usable for only about two hours a day. With an erratic lead actor and a limited shooting schedule, Roland Klick was forced to edit the script on the fly and come up with solutions for the lack of exposition to Hopper’s scenes that the actor was unable to perform. The result is a defective work, but at the same time, it is a fascinating cinematic phenomenon thanks to its impulsiveness, roughness, ellipticity and manic nature. It is necessary to recognise that, despite all of the circumstances of the filming, Klick managed to pull out of Hopper’s performance a relatively functional portrait of a self-absorbed and self-destructive maniac, which is even more meaningful today in the era of coked-up managers and the monstrous machinery of the PR industry. [written for the 2018 Summer Film School]