Since Otar Left
(102 mins, 15) Directed by Julie Bertuccelli; starring Esther Gorintin, Nino Khomassouridze, Dinara Droukarova
Japanese Story
(107 mins, 15) Directed by Sue Brooks; starring Toni Collette, Gotaro Tsunashima
The Reckoning
(110 mins, 15) Directed by Paul McGuigan; starring Paul Bettany, Brian Cox, Willem Dafoe, Gina McKee
La Kermesse héroïque
(117 mins, 12A) Directed by Jacques Feyder; starring Françoise Rosay, Jean Murat, Louis Jouvet
The feature debut of the French documentarist, Julie Bertuccelli, Since Otar Left, is a deeply moving, wryly amusing film about a middle-class Georgian family in Tbilisi who have fallen on hard times since the break- up of the Soviet Union. The city is falling apart. The electricity regularly packs in. The water gives out as you shower. You ask at the post-office how you can guarantee the delivery of a letter, and the clerk suggests you light a candle in the church next door. A sick person going into hospital has to pay the cardiologist in cash.
Two things sustain this family, a sense of national identity and a pride in their city and culture, however threadbare. In a wonderful sequence of a welcome-home party for an old lady who has been in hospital, everyone breaks into spontaneous song and dance. The second sustaining factor is quite antithetical - the family's love for France, its language and literature, though they've never been there.
This is a household of women - the elderly widow Eka, who looks back nostalgically to the Stalin era; her widowed daughter, Marina; and her granddaughter, Ada, a student and translator. Marina's husband was killed fighting in Afghanistan. Eka's son, the eponymous Otar, is a doctor, trained in Moscow, but now working as an illegal labourer in Paris to support the family.
When he's killed on a building site, Marina and Ada conceal the news from his mother, faking letters home (rather as the bedridden woman is deceived about the new status of East Germany in Good bye Lenin!). Eventually the three women go to Paris for the first time, with surprising consequences.
Since Otar Left is the work of a documentarist with an observant, compassionate eye. Whole scenes are shot without dialogue, and nothing is spelt out or overstated. The final effect of this movie about absence and loss is unsentimentally affirmative.
Another first feature by a woman director, Sue Brooks's Japanese Story, is an affecting road movie set in the outback of Western Australia. Toni Collette has never been better than as Sandy, a geologist, who reluctantly escorts a Japanese businessman, Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) around factories, mines and the countryside. The pair initially seem like parodies of national types, and the opening scenes are predictable (but enjoyable) as they size each other up. Rituals involving the exchange of business cards between the visitor and mining engineers are hilarious.
But they come to see each other in a different light when their four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser gets bogged down in the desert miles from anywhere. They experience shared danger and develop a deep affection for each other. From then on the movie is anything but predictable.
The images of the flat, intimidating landscape with its endless horizons and sandstone outcrops are hypnotic. They're the work of Ian Baker, whose work we've been admiring since he shot Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith a quarter of a century ago.
Based on a novel by Barry Unsworth, The Reckoning is an ambitious failure that takes its Scottish director, Paul McGuigan, from the sordid modern world of his previous pictures, The Acid House and Gangster No. 1, to 14th-century England. Paul Bettany plays an adulterous priest on the run from his angry parishioners, who joins a troupe of travelling players heading across a wintry landscape towards Durham.
Stopping to perform a mystery play at an isolated town, they stumble across an open-air trial that ends with a hearing-and speech-impaired woman being framed for murder. Their leader (Willem Dafoe) suddenly decides to build a new play around this incident, inventing a secular, community-based theatre. Their melodrama, like the show put on by the players in Hamlet , catches the conscience of the king in unexpected ways. As a narrative it's a confused, murky piece with echoes of Eco as well as of Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael, a fellow Benedictine of the Bettany character.
Jacques Feyder's 1935 classic, La Kermesse héroïque, is back after a long absence. It's a politically dubious anti-war satire in which the bourgeois ladies of a town in 17th-century Flanders disarm the Spanish invaders with sex, good food and other domestic comforts while their husbands hide. Their leader is the mayor's wife, a Lysistrata figure played by the imposing Françoise Rosay. The plot depends on the enemy being kind and harmless, and it ends up as a handbook for collaborationists. Except for Louis Jouvet as a crafty Spanish priest, there is little laughter-producing comedy, but the movie, which resembles paintings by Dutch masters, is beautifully designed by Lazare Meerson.
