Reviews
My Brother is an Only Child, Beaufort, The Book of Revelation and I'm a Cyborg But That's OK
In the 2003 epic, Best of Youth, screenwriters Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli produced a chronicle of post-war Italian life that merited comparison with the German masterpiece Heimat. The duo revisits many of the same themes in Daniele Luchetti's My Brother Is an Only Child, a study of the political divisions of the 1960s and 70s that centres on two siblings in love with the same girl. This is more a domestic dramedy than an analytical snapshot of the times. However, its suggestion that conviction is merely a disposable lifestyle accessory is particularly apt for our own era of pick'n'mix values and soundbite ideologies.
Having quit his seminary as a teenager, Elio Germano returns home to compete with older brother Riccardo Scamarcio for the affections of their mother, Angela Finocchiaro. However, Germano's habit of taking things to extremes means that when Scamarcio becomes the Communist organiser at the local factory, he begins associating with Fascist leader, Luca Zingaretti, whose activities range from pilgrimages to Mussolini's grave to violent interventions at opponents' rallies.
However, Germano is more interested in annoying his brother than taking a committed stance and, although he moves in on Scamarcio's girlfriend (Diane Fleri), blood ultimately proves thicker than party loyalty.
Germano plays the anti-hero with a diffident rebelliousness that is, on occasions, disconcertingly attractive. But the real key to this engaging, if never wholly compelling picture is Luchetti's deft use of his location, whose added significance lies in the fact that the town of Latina was built by Il Duce on land reclaimed from the Pontine Marshes.
d=3,3,1Fighting one's corner in a lost cause is also the subject of Joseph Cedar's Oscar-nominated barrack-room drama Beaufort. Adapted from a novel by Ron Leshem and set in a former PLO outpost abutting a 12th-century Crusader fortress in the mountains overlooking southern Lebanon, this unflinching examination of duty and dignity makes an intriguing companion piece to Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, especially in its evocative use of a setting that is both spectacular and claustrophobic and in the muscular sensitivity with which it tackles the pressures of combat.
Despite the digs at the Israeli high command, the perspective is never wholly impartial. But Cedar (himself a veteran of the 1982 incursion into Lebanon) credibly conveys the mix of cynicism and dedication felt by soldiers dismayed at being ordered to defend a bastion they are about to evacuate so that their planned withdrawal doesn't look like a retreat in the face of sustained Hezbollah bombardment.
With Oshri Cohen impressing as the inexperienced commander and Cedar generating considerable suspense during the bomb disposal and shelling sequences, this is a poignant insight into the human cost of conflict and a provocative attack on the motives of those determined to prolong the Middle East conflict.
Having made an impressive debut with Head On, Australian director Ana Kokkinos rather misses her step with The Book of Revelation. The theme of male sexual humiliation is well worth exploring. But the sequences in which kidnapped dancer Tom Long is forced to perform for the pleasure of a trio of women in kinkily tailored and unnecessarily Islamic-looking cowls more often smack of the erotic than the shocking.
Furthermore, the periodic dance interludes have a pomposity that carries over into the performances of Greta Scacchi, as Long's dying choreographer friend, and Colin Friels, as her cop ex-husband. Every moment they're on screen creaks with a self-conscious significance that the material simply can't sustain.
Much more persuasive are Anna Torv, as Long's co-star/lover (whose inability to cope with his taciturnity on being delivered from his ordeal is chillingly unfeeling), and Deborah Mailman, as the equally wounded soul who seems to offer Long salvation before he loses everything in a sickening act of misguided revenge.
Re-learning to communicate is also the theme of Park Chan-wook's I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay, which revisits ideas first broached in both Oldboy and the masterly Vengeance trilogy.
Im Soo-jung and Jung Ji-hoon excels as a couple of contrasting asylum inmates, with Im being convinced that she's half-machine and has to lick batteries to survive, while Jung believes he has the power to absorb the personalities of his fellow patients. He certainly recognises that Im is a soul in torment and laudably vows to understand her confused psyche in a bid to convince her to resume normal eating.
Park dazzles with his shifts between wit, ingenuity and compassion and he's well served by his stars. But he's most indebted to cinematographer Jung Jung-hoon and production designer Ryu Seong-hee for making the forbidding institution and the various fantasy environments that Im and Jung inhabit so visually striking and psychologically compelling.
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