A Pure Place

A Pure Place

Director – Nikias Chryssos

Writers – Nikias Chryssos, Lars Henning Jung

2021, Germany-Greece

Stars – Sam Louwyck, Greta Bohacek, Claude Heinrich

 

At online Grimmfest Easter.

 

A prime pleasure of diving into festivals is that you can enter a film knowing nothing. If you’re happy to just plunge in. (There was a moment when I wondered if ‘Cross the Line’ would turn supernatural; I try to know as little as I can (I didn’t even know Dano was in ‘The Batman’)). ‘A Pure Place’ pretty soon reveals itself as a cult narrative, but there’s a lot of offbeat edges that leave it a slippery beast, such as Jodorowsky, a nod to magic realism, a hint of ‘The City of Lost Children’. On a Grecian island, a delusional man has created his own narcissistic religion and class system with homeless orphans working below and white-wearing upper class above. They earn money by making soap, which fits Fust’s fascistic obsession with cleanliness. Furst’s mixture of unforgiving fascist classism mixed with Hygenia as its God makes for a credible belief system (and no telling how ugly it would all be if race was a factor), topped with Romanesque pomp and theatre.

 

Beautiful imagery, courtesy of the Greek island and heightened set design, and layered with themes of exploitation, delusion, class, abuse, etc.; but it leans towards fairy-tale rather than horror in its tone. Indeed, there’s a permanent doubt of just how much this is set in the real world, being somewhere between Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s ‘Evolution’ and Ariel Kleiman’s ‘Partisan’; and even the poverty magic realism of ‘Tigers are not Afraid’. The acting highlights are Sam Louwyck’s performance as Furst, his natural dancer’s tendencies giving the character an innate elegance and charm, and young Claude Henrick’s feisty turn as Paul.

 

Intriguing, entertaining, sunny, slightly ethereal and slightly disturbing, the tone is one where lacunas barely matter. Certainly, in discussion, Chryssos talks of its grounding in real cases of cults, but the tone is not one that relies on veracity. A curio which maintains its oddness to the very end, where escape is a strip joint.

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Capernaum

CAPERNAUM

Nadine Labaki, 2018, 

Lebanon-France-USA

This is the tale of Zane (Zane Al Rafeea), who is apparently around twelve or thirteen (they can’t quite tell). Zain has a tough life, struggling to exude masculine confidence and dominance over the surrounding chaos of his family and the outside world, all whilst looking younger than his age. When homelife becomes unbearable – like Zvyagintsev’s ‘Loveless’, the parents are too obsessed with their own misery to impart real affection to their kids – he takes to the streets and strikes up an unlikely babysitting job with illegal immigrant Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw).

Labaki directs with her focus always on her subjects, although there a couple of occasions that it descends into annoying blurry and unintelligible shaky-cam, or there will be a breath-taking birds-eye view of Beruit. Her husband produced, giving her a freedom from studio demands. Mostly it has the naturalistic, quasi-documentary feel that many bildungsroman focusing on poverty utilises (‘Pixote’, ‘Kes’, for example) rather than the magic-realism trend (‘Tigers Are Not Afraid’ comes to mind). Robbie Collins says, 

“…Capernaum is closer in both texture and spirit to the Brazilian crime epic City of God: it teems with the same excitement and danger as Fernando Meirelles’s film. The sensation of being right there on the ground stems from the nimble camerawork, which darts after Zain through the city’s markets and slums, and also the incidental colour vividly woven through the story itself.”

There are plenty of tentpoles where it could hang its drama upon, but even the courtroom framework where Zane is suing his parents dissipates once the characters speak their piece. It’s the kind of conceit that promises the most tabloid of structures and narrative, but the verdict is not the point. Many moments that could have made for high-drama are played out off-screen to allow the sorrowful struggle of the desperate and disenfranchised to play out mostly unruffled by cruder demands of narratives. The film doesn’t want for emotive and heart-tugging moments, but they’re as clear-headed as they are manipulative. It also navigates around something more lurid and grimmer (I’m thinking of ‘The Golden Dream’ and ‘Helos’ (both excellent)): for example, the sequence where Zain is trying to sell to various groups on the street and often getting beaten up is delivered as a montage rather than dwelt upon. In this way, it retains understatement whilst trawling through its tragedies and absurdities. 

In a world of mostly belligerent and manipulative adults, Rahil provides empathy and softness. You will wonder that the toddler playing her baby (Boluwatife Treasure Bankole) seems to be giving as much of an affecting performance as the adults (which is evidence of masterful editng). Zain Al Refeea’s look of constant resolve and defiance is the film’s guiding force, charging forward, until it becomes a mask for an irreparably hurt kid. Anyone familiar with the tricks of these things knows it is likely to culminate in Zain finally smiling as he has spent the entire film morose and never cracking one – even during the somewhat hilarious encounters with “Cockroach-man” – but even when it comes, there is a moment just before when you doubt if he can even achieve it.

Susa

Rusudan Pirveli, 2010, Georgia

Susa is a twelve year-old boy surviving harsh Georgian poverty and where his entire life is selling illegal vodka. He has no friends; he doesn’t seem particularly streetwise though he has learnt to negotiate the pitiless adult world around him. There are hints of his creativity when he makes his own kaleidoscope – just one of numerous times where he seems to try and see the world through different perspective, as when he puts eyeholes on a window he steams up; or when he puts utensils to his eyes to give surroundings a colourful filter. 

There is no humour here to brighten things as with, say, Taika Waititi’s ‘Boy’ (which is nevertheless just as downbeat but is sneaky about it). But neither is there the same ambiguity of Sam French’s short film ‘Buzkashi Boys’ where the hope for choice is crushed and could be either the tragic dismantling of dreams or the message to put away childish things. We know there will be no happy resolution for Susa because we can tell what kind of film this is. He and his mother pin their hopes on the return of the husband/father and that this will lead him to taking them away from it all, but we know that won’t happen long before he turns up as a burnt out shell who won’t change a thing. This aesthetic is not where hope will make an appearance.

The use of bildungsroman to lay out the pitiless nature of poverty is a well-established agenda and it proves no less effective here. As typical of this genre, the visuals are drab and drained, the aesthetic deceptively straightforward and unflashy. Perhaps you might be appalled at the poverty portrayed. There is little dialogue and music to provide respite. It looks and feels like something that could have been filmed anytime over the past several decades. Rusudan Pirveli’s direction keeps Avtandil Tetradze as Susa central at all times and is rewarded with an unflashy performance that, through context and slight expression, show his vulnerability, intelligence, sadness, resolve, and fleeting moments of enjoyment. It avoids the cliché of giving Susa a bad homelife – everyone is caught up in this punishing poverty – and his futile final expression of anger won’t mean a thing. This is how it is right now and it is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future. That it comes in at 75 minutes means its sparse nature is direct without outstaying its welcome as a piece of empathising miserablism. Where the bulk of mainstream cinema offers up trite and persistent messages of hope, films such as ‘Susa’ are there for those who find those messages leave broken hearts and spirits.