Small Things Like These
It’s early, but three very different films have already won the Berlinale. I usually try to pair similar films in these dispatches, so they give off the appearance that they’re a kind of representative sample of what’s showing at the festival this year. But sometimes it’s more fun to put two disparate works next to each other because even though they may not seem like obvious companions, together they show how many different types of movies are being made right now all over the world.
“Small Things Like These” is a tender character study set in Ireland and graced with Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a coal deliveryman who’s also a father to five girls with his wife. The week before Christmas 1985, he sees something awful while dropping off some fuel at a convent. A young woman about 17 years old is being dragged into the church by her mother and some nuns while she kicks and screams. They don’t say it outright in Claire Keegan’s novella, which was adapted into the film, but given the politics of that place at that time and what we know about Catholicism there then (and still now), she’s an unwed mother. The sight does something to Bill; it activates one of his own repressed memories from childhood and sends him on another collision course with rock-hard religion in this small town.
A haunting meditative work by Tim Mielants, “Small Things Like These” marks its rhythms most powerfully during its somber second hour, when we realize it probably could’ve been 10 minutes longer than its already substantial two hours without losing anything important or trying anyone’s patience. In one seamless intercutting sequence. We flash back to see young Bill living with his single mom on the farm where she works for an imperious employer, then we snap forward again to find him grown up as a slumped shoulder manual laborer. The director and his DP Frank van den Eeden use opaque compositions we see Bill through foggy car windows, enclosed distantly in door frames that tell us who he is quiet, alone, with a code or set of values all his own. At the convent where the nuns imprison these girls in plain sight of all else (and yes, everyone knows it), even a whisper against a sister’s name could get you killed.
No one has ever loved Emily Watson more than Tim Mielants does here as the face of evil incarnate inside every Catholic nun. But his villain problem isn’t nearly as severe as that facing “God’s Creatures,” another recent movie about an Irish town’s systematic misogyny enabled by ecclesiastical patriarchy. There the sisters are shown to be real people with personalities and motivations, they’re actually characters who do things at times other than “be malevolent” Not so much here. Still, Mielants tells us everything we need to know about this place through radiant images of its countryside and small town streets, and having Murphy on hand never hurts, he’s like George Bailey whenever he shows up in movies now, because it feels like his character is the only one who can make this whole crazy town come alive just by being there. Besides, during each pause for breath that Cillian Murphy gives himself while acting which often last five minutes or more in real time you can feel him deciding which tiny facial muscle or lung compartment to expand before inhaling again and exhaling what he didn’t realize was still there.
This is also how you know he’s good: Because once Sarah asks Bill why no one ever did anything about what they all knew was going on inside that church (where she used to be locked up after giving birth) right out behind where Bill parks his truck every day to deliver coal for warmth over Christmas week 1985 once Sarah asks this question, which is a big one, the biggest in fact, and one we’ve all wondered ourselves even if only after seeing the movie’s poster or hearing someone else talk about it at work.
You know what Bill does next? He takes her to a different church.
His brother, Achi (Lucas Kankava), a dreamer who wants to leave the small Georgian town they live in and go to the city, claims to know where Tekla has gone she is now in Istanbul, Turkey. He says he will tell Ms. Lia if she brings him along too. “Crossing,” an achingly sad story about regret, gets its pulse from this unlikely bond formed out of deep solitude.
But Ms. Lia and Achi’s search feels like only half the story how can you find someone in a big city with only an old address? because there’s also Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), equally undeterred. After working as a trans sex worker, Evrim has become a legal volunteer; she helps out during the day with cases like that of an orphaned child peddler who needs bailing out of jail, and at night she likes to socialize with her queer community. When her boyfriend is too scared to be seen with her, she doesn’t disappear. She moves on to a hotter guy.
The rest of Levan’s patiently composed follow up to “And Then We Danced” beautifully revolves around these three characters, showing how each one feels unacceptable by society. Kankava plays this mopiness well, hiding a heart of gold behind his hangdog face, Arabuli keeps everything locked up tight inside herself, light seems to bend around Dumanli whenever she’s on screen. These three performances, along with indelible images of Turkey’s trans community, set the mood for a movie built around Tekla that we hardly ever see. The final five minutes of “Crossing,” which are overwritten and almost ruin all the quiet work that the visual language does for itself earlier on, still manage to jump off the screen because of all the powerfully empathetic work that came before them.
Tillman Singer’s high concept horror movie “Cuckoo” is not based on much, but its slight details like that the story takes place at a resort on a secluded mountain owned by a creepy German named Mr. König (Dan Stevens, exceptionally crawly) are enough to make the film discomfiting, puzzling and surprising.
Seventeen year old Gretchen (Hunter Schafer) arrives at a retreat with her father Luis (Marton Csókás), stepmother Beth (Jessica Henwick) and mute 7 year old stepsister Alma (Mila Lieu), still grieving. She recently lost her mother and copes by calling their old answering machine, where she can still hear her voice. But Gretchen didn’t come to stay; she has some money saved up that she hopes will get her back home to America soon. In the meantime, she works as a receptionist at Mr. König’s hotel (a small nod to “The Shining”), while Beth and Luis design him a new resort. Strange things start happening quickly.
A scream echoes through the quiet hills, trapping whoever hears it in an eternal loop of time, Alma starts having seizures because of these incidents, more than one woman is seen shuffling around outside uncontrollably vomiting. No wonder Mr. König tells Gretchen not to go out alone at night his warning becomes more justified when a shrieking woman begins stalking Gretchen, causing an unexplained detective to take notice.
Symbolism in “Cuckoo” is often heavy handed like Hannah Bergholm’s “Hatching,” it aims for grief processing, female voices and reproductive rights but Singer knows better than to take himself too seriously; instead he lets these themes breathe through evocative psychosexual lighting, playful framing and eerie compositions.
Schafer is like a rotten sore, balancing her silent and hostile moments while trying to keep herself from falling apart. But it’s Stevens who really stands out, even among other strange acts of his, as he might be remembered for surpassing Andre 3000 in being the best flute player ever in the cinema. Each decision made by Mr.König is both derisive and menacing, and they are just as much funny as they are sadistic.
A number of plot holes in the movie were filled with loud sound that remains in memory forever due to this final energizing freak out along with its creative world construction.
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