Miracle

2013 European Union Film Festival coverage

Dear Kamila Zlatusková, Associate Producer,

There’s no murkier job description on a film set than that of the Associate Producer. How you personally earned this title, and what your responsibilities included, are anyone’s guess. Maybe you’re an up-and-coming big shot, or a bona fide number cruncher, or a valued creative partner, or a local string-puller, or someone the director just needed to pacify by slapping a label on you. If it’s the latter (as is often the case), I’m going to imagine you as a troubled Slovakian 15-year-old girl willing to do terrible, terrible things to get that title you desire – be it “associate producer” or simply “girlfriend”.  

I really hope I’m wrong. Drawing that parallel between you and Ela (Michaela Bendulova), the main character in Miracle, is far-fetched, right? Surely you would be smarter than selling yourself to human traffickers just so some asshole guy that you like can get himself out of debt. Because – spoiler alert for idiots – that might not go so well. Even if your plan is just to eventually “escape”.

Luckily, the way co-writer and director Juraj Lehotsky tells the story, I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic to Ela’s plight. Much like his main character, we as audience members are taken straight to a female re-education centre without any proper explanation. The resulting friction between the girls we meet there reveals more than enough for us to piece together what’s ailing Ela. Her father is not in the picture, her mother (Katarina Feldekova) is tired of dealing with a troubled teen, and there’s a mysterious man whose name is tattooed on her knuckles named Roby (Robert Roth). When Ela finds out she’s pregnant, she runs away to find Roby, but he’s hardly happy to see her, even before she breaks the news. In fact, she seems more like a forced-upon intern pushing for a full-time position than she does an actual girlfriend. 

Still, my sympathy rested squarely on Ela’s shoulders, since few other characters even register. And as the story skips quickly between scenes and seasons, brevity may be the film’s greatest virtue. At 78 minutes, Miracle manages to make a strong enough impression to recommend it as at least a cautionary tale to young stubborn women. Which, again, I’m sure you’re nothing like.

Making false associations,

Christopher

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)

Holy Motors

Dear Mathilde Profit, Continuity

If there was ever a film that didn’t require your services, Holy Motors might be it.

Leos Carax has crafted a story that sidesteps logic at every turn to manufacture a transparent – but bizarrely absorbing – reality. We quickly abandon accusations of “well, that doesn’t make sense” and surrender ourselves to the simple conceit: someone, somewhere within the film, is orchestrating the actions of the main character. Who it is doesn’t really matter. Not when the circus is so engrossing.

The mysterious puppeteer’s muse is played by Denis Lavant, a performance artist who is driven from one strange assignment to another. He goes by many names and many faces (enough to make even the actors in Cloud Atlas jealous), all in the service of a trying to create beauty in sex, violence, poverty, parenthood, or death. In the back of a limo, he prepares for each task with the silent dedication of an assassin. He treats the outside world as his stage, preferring to watch the passing landscape through a television feed rather than look directly out the window. His filtered reality is that strong—and it’s one of the most consistent strengths of the film.

At one point, the performance artist observes that cameras used to be bigger than he was, then they shrunk to become the size of his head, and now they’re so small he can ‘t even see them. We can assume, therefore, that when he’s eating flowers, fingers, money, or hair (for example), someone is watching. Between getting shot and stabbed, he has quiet moments as a disappointed father and dying grandpa—even a few musical outbursts. This is a twisted tale that exists to be audacious. When he plays a naked Christ-figure in living tableau with the Virgin Mary (played by Eva Mendez), he does so with a full erection.

Accepting the countless oddities that fill each frame is one thing, but the larger questions still remain. Does it all add up? Is the film more commentary than it is compelling? Do strong individual sequences (such as the acrobatic sexual acts in a green-screen room) say something about the nature of entertainment, or something about the characters themselves? The answers are as piecemeal as the film itself. The sequence with Kylie Minogue certainly does a lot to invest some much needed emotion to the mayhem—but it’s nearly undermined by a comically nonsensical final shot that literally brings to life the film’s title. Yet it all works. Somehow. And I’m not sure how you pulled that off.

Maybe in the end, your job was just to make sure people weren’t sure exactly what’s going on – to keep us guessing. That would make perfect sense, after all.

Continuously yours,

Christopher

Status: Air Mail (4/5)