‘Rebel’ by Adil and Bilall is an overwhelming viewing experience like we havenever experienced in Belgian cinema ★★★★✩
By Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, with Aboubakr Bensaihi, Lubna Azabal, AmirEl Arbi and Tara Abboud
God be praised and Allah praised! To have something Adil El Arbic andBilall Fallah made an incredibly beautiful film with ‘Rebel’! An epiclasting more than two hours that takes us from the snack bars in Molenbeek tothe IS training camps in Raqqa, punctuated with song and dance and for desserta severed head that is far from finished. When we put it that way, it allsounds rather out of place, and yet this is a perfectly cool and controlledfilm, an overwhelming viewing experience such as we have never experiencedbefore in Belgian cinema.
Now some find it insulting that Adil and Bilall have made a film about a youngBelgian jihadist who will fight in Syria on the side of IS in 2013. We canonly say that IS had not yet shown its true horror face to the world in 2013,and that even we, from our lazy chair, felt some understanding for those guyswho, just like Kamal in ‘Rebel ‘, went to Syria to help in the hospitals ofAleppo or to fight against the cruel dictator Bashar al-Assad. Some seesimilarities between Kamal and Oskar Schindler the noble Nazi from’Schindler’s List’, but we saw more similarities with Chris ( CharlieSheen ), the idealistic student who voluntarily travels to Vietnam in’Platoon’ and, once in the brooding reality of the jungle, is constantly onthe brink of physical and mental collapse.
If ‘Rebel’ makes one thing crystal clear, it’s that Adil and Bilall are attheir very best when, just like Spike Lee and Oliver Stone in theirmost relevant films, merging their cinematic bravado with their socialconcerns. Their virtuosity is best shown when they pan their camera around abombed-out hospital in Aleppo, the blood and grit and panic of the crowdsplashing you in the face. Tarantino would say: ‘ Now that’s what I calldirecting, man!’ A dangerously flared grill fire in a snack bar forms theopening salvo of a beautifully choreographed musical number that makes uswonder how they managed it technically. Incidentally, those musicalintermezzos do not serve to inject a bit of cheerfulness into the drama, butto emphasize the spinning emotions of the characters.
Thinking back to the surprisingly moving scene with the muttering head cut, wecan only admire the audacity of Adil and Bilall. With ‘Rebel’ they made a filmabout our time, our society, our losses, and about the grief of the mothers ofwhatever faith they lose their children to recruiters, ratters and othermanipulative bastards. ‘Rebel’ is their best movie yet, and something tells usthe duo is far from the peak of their growth curve. “Extremely powerful,”Oliver Stone said of “Rebel.” Nothing to add.
‘Triangle of Sadness’ is very hard to laugh at, but the thorny questions thefilm raises sears the soul ★★★½✩
By Ruben Östlund, with Thobias Thorwid, Woody Harrelson and Charlbi Dean
The Swedish director Ruben Ostlund is as notorious for his ruthless humoras for the sharp arrows he aims at humanity in his films (‘The Square’,’Turist’). In Golden Palm winner ‘Triangle of Sadness’, the account of aremarkable sea cruise, Östlund unleashes his wrath on the one percent of theworld’s population who single-handedly own half the wealth on Earth. And how:About halfway through the cruise, Östlund drops the filthy rich passengers offthe luxury yacht, in a frenzied scene that may now be called as legendary asthe Mr. Creosote in ‘The Meaning of Life’. ‘Triangle of Sadness’ is veryfunny, but the thorny questions that Östlund raises in the meantime – aboutgender differences, about the cursed patriarchy, about the gap between richand poor and what to do about it – sear the soul.
‘Blonde’ remains blind to the Marilyn Monroe who was more than a sex object
By Andrew Dominik, with Ana de Armas, Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody
The moment Ana de Armas first appears as Marilyn Monroe in ‘Blonde’, aroundthe 17th minute, we froze in our seat: because Ana is Marilyn! She really doeslook like her!
Admittedly not like two drops of water: in her voice you can hear a hint of aCuban accent – the Armas was born in Santa Cruz del Norte – and hopefullyno one will blame us when we notice, walking on eggshells as carefully aspossible, that the slender Ana lacks a certain, er, fullness in the physicalsense. And yet there is something of the magic of the real Marilyn aroundher. Her childlike innocence, her sparkling wit, her unrelenting charm, herendearing sheepishness (like when Marilyn has no idea how to eat a boiledegg), the garland of tragedy that hangs around her: all the characteristics wehave learned over the years. , rightly or wrongly, we have come to associatewith Marilyn, we find very beautiful back in the rendition of the Armas. Herewith that Oscar nomination!
It’s a shame that the film is not aware of the performance of the leadactress. It’s not often that we shy away from a blonde – gentlemen preferblondes , not true! – but on this ‘Blonde’ we were finally blown away. Thefirst point of discussion is the approach: director and screenwriter AndrewDominik Without much sense of nuance, Marilyn portrays Marilyn in ‘Blonde’as an innocent little bird released into the hell of patriarchal Hollywood.Already in one of the first scenes we see how Marilyn is raped during anaudition without a boo or yuck by a studio boss who goes by the name ‘Mr Z’:hmmmm, could it be Daryll F. Zanuck the big boss of Twentieth CenturyPictures?
In the most shocking scene, the president, stretched out on a hotel bed, grabsKennedy Marilyn by the curls and he forces her into a blowjob in a longheld sickening shot. It could well be that Marilyn actually had to undergothose humiliations, but a disclaimer is appropriate here: the scenes inquestion do not arise from facts, but from fiction, rumors and fictions.’Blonde’ is based on a novel by Joyce Carol Oates , who used Marilyn’slife as the basis for an (allegedly splendid) work of fiction. Anyway, byportraying Marilyn as a butterfly mortified, abused, exploited, and ultimatelydestroyed by maledom, Dominik joins an expanding movement that hasposthumously proclaimed Marilyn a martyr of feminism.
“Look at what happened to Marilyn!” this is how you could summarize themessage of that movement (and of ‘Blonde’). “Look at the brutality she had toendure, and you’ll see why feminism was desperately needed!” Or like thewriter Nancy Friday it said, “Look closely at Marilyn’s life, girls.Because this is what happens to you when you let yourself be treated as a sexobject!’ Correctamundo, correct and completely true, but the devil’s advocatein us would like to throw a question into the group: Doesn’t that approachignore the fact that Marilyn was much more than just a martyr?
Don’t forget: for every soul who proclaims Marilyn a martyr of feminism, thereis a biographer who portrays her as an ambitious, intelligent woman who knewperfectly that her value lay in her curves and her curves. And wasn’t she alsoa great performer who had the unique gift of enchanting the whole world? Put100 Flemish and international celebs on stage and have them perform ‘I WannaBe Loved By You’, and we’ll give you a note that none of them will be able tomatch Marilyn’s version – even Harry Styles not, if he put a blond wig onhis crown. But for those qualities – her engulfing naturalness on the bigwhite screen, her magnetic appearance, yes even her acting talent that bubblesunder the skin – ‘Blonde’ remains completely blind.
In ‘Blonde’ we see how the gifted Marilyn is reduced to a sex object by mostmen, but the question is: does not Dominik make the same mistake by portrayingher in most scenes as a ruthless romper? Anyway: enough material to put up asturdy tree in the cafe afterwards. But you know, overall, it’s not evenDominik’s slightly narrow-minded angle that troubled us. No, it is mainly hisfilm style that we have been rejected. Instead of opting for a classicbiographical account, Dominik tries to draw us into a slightly surreal streamof images with his dreamy photography and his trance-inducing music score.
In that respect ‘Blonde’ can actually be compared well with ‘Spencer’, theidiosyncratic biopic that pablo Larrain last year made over LadyDi. Dominik also used that poetic style in 2007’s ‘The Assassination ofJesse James By the Coward Robert Ford’, with wonderful results, but this timehe misses the point in most scenes. During an abortion, the cinematographergives us a point of view shot from Marilyn’s vagina, and during the blowjobshe gives to JFK, images of surface-to-air missiles actually pass through – asif we are in a ‘The Naked Gun’-esque farce – like phalluses pointing upwards.Okay, there’s nothing wrong with a little comic relief, but the momentMarilyn’s unborn fetus starts talking out loud, we thought: okay, Andrew, nowit’s enough with your imagery-of-licking vest.
Finally, one more thought. We wouldn’t want to feed them, all those writers,essayists, journalists and filmmakers who have been researching, commenting,analyzing, claiming, interpreting and reinterpreting Marilyn’s life since herdeath on August 4, 1962. But we may never know who she really was. We’d loveto offer her a gin fizz and have a chat with her, but hey, she’s been underthe sod for 60 years. Hopefully she rests in peace.
Watching ‘Toute une nuit’ is like having a time capsule to the eightiesopening up before your eyes, with beautifully lit images ★★★★✩
By Chantal Akerman, with Aurore Clément, Frank Aendenboom and Tchéky Karyo
Chantal Akerman the Belgian supreme lady of poetic slow cinema, owes herworldwide fame – among others Martin Scorsese and Gus Van Sant his fan– especially her chef d’oeuvre ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080Bruxelles’, but also the slightly lesser-known ‘Toute une nuit’ from 1982,which can be seen this week in a restored version, is a trembling chunk ofurban poetry. Watching ‘Toute une nuit’ is like opening a beautiful timecapsule from the eighties before your eyes (There, a Citroën DS!), but thepassions that rise from the beautifully lit images are universal and timeless.’Toute une nuit’ makes you want to go into town and – just like the characters– to dance a slow in a café to a tearjerker of Gino Lorenzi. We alreadysaid it: slow cinema!