Asharq Al-Awsat at the Venice Film Festival
There is an Arab Birdman and no one knows about it. In Mohamed Ben Attia’s new film “Behind the Mountain”, a character is a man who throws himself from above because he can fly. He says in the film: “The first person was walking bent over, but one of them walked straight, so they attacked him, and then they all walked like him. So is flying. People can really fly.
Perhaps the hero of “Beyond the Mountain” could fly, but unlike “Birdman” in the movie Alejandro González Iñárritu, he does not know how to land, and whenever he wanted to return to the ground, he fell and appeared dead.
Director Ben Attia (“I have”, 2018) tells the story of a man who flies in the air whenever he wants to. But some of his first flight looks like a suicide attempt. It is not clear why he repeatedly throws himself from higher floors, because the actual story could begin after a third of an hour into the movie, when Rafik (Majid Mastura) kidnaps his son from school and takes him in his car to a remote mountainous area. There he leaves him sitting on a rock, climbs another far away, and takes off flying between heaven and earth. But soon he returns to the ground passed out. It takes a shepherd (Samer Bisharat) to carry him on his shoulders to his home, where he revives him. Rafik is in good condition, but he still makes mistakes, including not complying with a security barrier and driving his car on bumpy paths before that car comes to a complete stop. Before the end of the day, they find a house in which lives a family consisting of a married couple and their three children.
What happens inside the house brings the film to a state of suspense between invaders and defenders. The first team dominates the second, then the verse is reversed, and the owners of the house take the initiative. Rafik takes his son and flies him. The little boy almost falls (as Margot Kidder almost escaped from Superman’s hands when Christopher Reeve shaved her in “Superman”, 1978). But the father is wise and catches his son before it is too late.
There are many gaps and problems in this movie. What he ultimately wants to say is not clear. The viewer will not come out to stand on the roof of his house and try to fly in space. This is to the point. In detail, it was important to know why the shepherd left his sheep and joined him on that journey. Was it because of his desire to join a man who had no equal in the world.
The technical aspects are fine, but such a production would have needed enough funding to evolve from a fantasy movie experience into a fantasy movie with genre-appropriate visuals.
As he flew, he signed
This is one of the few Arab films at the Venice Film Festival this year. It shares with many Arab films that it is a film that is concerned with issues that are sometimes social and sometimes subjective (as is the case with this film). On this, it is recorded by the director Ben Attia that he knew how to grab attention, even if the film seemed as if he wanted to follow the same line that distinguished the films of the other Tunisian director Aladdin Selim, who is doing strange films, the last of which was “The Last One of Us” in 2018.
It is not that the “Venice” festival chooses not to show Arab films (and its history is full of them), but what happened this year is that the producers who went last year to the project support fund called “Final Cut” missed it this year as soon as their films ended. Some of them chose to take advantage of a favorable opportunity to show their film at the Cannes Festival (which took advantage of the opportunity and brought together no less than five Arab films this year), while others preferred to go to the Toronto Festival.
Another film from the Arab world shown here is “Bye Bye Tiberias” by Lina Swailem.
Her film is a mixture of documentaries and dramas of the situation left by the Palestinian situation over decades. The director seeks to talk about Palestine as it was, and about the Palestinians as they became dispersed in other countries. Do not fabricate this conversation because it deals with the personal experience of four women representing several generations who inherited living far from their motherland.
Fire on Fire: «Adagio» (Ultrego)
A city on fire
The competition to which this film belongs (the “Horizons” demonstration competition) contains many films that command attention, and some of them deserve a suitable win. The same applies to the competition films, noting that many of what was expected of him to lead the expectations did not do so, but rather joined the prevailing films. Good quality, but not super high quality. This makes the competition difficult and the chances of winning unknown.
There are two films about the crime. One with its broad societal framework, and the second within the personality of one individual who committed himself to killing for money. It doesn’t matter who shoots and why, as he says in the movie, he only follows his interest.
The first film, “From Ritala,” was directed by Stefano Soleima (Is the original sound?), returning from Hollywood after he investigated two films, “Sicario 2” (2018) and “Without Remorse” (2021). Hamida’s return, because his Italian cinema needs him more than anything else. The film is “Adegio” that participated in the competition. What the film reveals is Sulaima’s talent in framing events with their natural locations and decorations. This is despite the fact that the film needed more locations in order to prevent the frequent circulation of places.
Majdi Mastura in “Behind the Mountain” (Nomadis Images)
Sulaima has knowledge of the environment in which he speaks and depth in what he presents. This depth is evident from the first shot: a distant overhead shot of a busy road. On the horizon, over a wide area, there is a fire on the outskirts of the city. With this, the director combined the story he would present with the symbol envisioned from that distant fire with a wide horizon. This also establishes the atmosphere of the story that will be presented.
The story itself does not extend to cover the space of the film. It is a plot about a young man who turns to the dangerous gang to help him confront corrupt policemen who want to blackmail him. But this plot is intertwined with paradoxes and other events that give it a life outside the main plotline from which it departs. Relationships between unreconciled characters in a dark underworld. There are many meetings between people who want to escape by themselves and others who are trying to help, but they are linked in turn to that dark situation of what the word crime means.
What the film needed was a different formulation of this scenario, capable of making the viewer know more closely what these characters represent and why their bets are losing.
He is neither a hero nor an anti-hero
The other movie is “The Killer” by the American David Fincher, and he achieved it for the benefit of the first movie, “From Ritala”, which was directed by Stefano Sulaima, “Netflix” (as is the case with the movie “El Condo” by Pablo Laran, which is joint, as is the case with “Adgio” in the official competition).
The murderer here is an individual who has nothing to do with gangs and does not care whether corruption (moral or material) is rampant among the police or others. All he cares about is successfully carrying out the tasks assigned to him in order to get paid and wait for the next task.
Something surprising is happening here: the first chapter of the scenes is, from an audio commentary of this killer, whom we do not hear one name for, but rather several names he uses whenever he flies from one city to another. The owner of the voice (Michael Fassbender) says that there are working conditions that give him the prestige and power he has reached in the world of crime. It starts with enumerating it… things like paying attention to details, focusing on the plan and not allowing it to be modified.
The mission assigned to him takes place in Paris, where the assassin will sniper the president of a republic. He sees it clearly. A woman enters to form a barrier between him and the victim. Patient. She bends over and then suddenly stands up after he fired the shot, only to fall dead. The scenes of escaping from France and how he behaves to hide all the signs of the crime are exciting, as well as the rest of the events in which he finds himself seeking revenge on the killers of his girlfriend for a reason that he will not know until later.
The purpose of the film is to present a mechanically minded hero. act systematically. He knows everything. He sets all these conditions for himself, but he does not always act according to their texts. It is something developed from the character of Charles Bronson in Michael Winner’s movie “The Mechanic” (1972).
That movie was weak and poor in all its technical aspects, but it shares with this movie that its hero follows the special method to carry out his crimes. This is the only meeting point that the director, Fincher, is more aware than presenting a film that is not of a standard. On it, some details betray good intentions. One of his successes is that the character remains gray and does not reveal much about himself. She is not a hero and cannot be considered an anti-hero. A character who successfully leads us into the story that falls with her but doesn’t care if we like her or not.
#Putins #mistress #disappear #disappear #sight
2023-09-04 18:36:01
