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davidgeoffreyholmes
Reviews
Så som i himmelen (2004)
as it is not in heaven
An internationally renowned conductor, Daniel Daréus, played by Michael Nyqvist, suffers a heart attack during a performance and returns to his native Swedish village to take stock of his life. Yet, his efforts to keep aloof in self-reflection do not succeed. After overcoming his initial reluctance, he becomes the local church choir teacher and inspires a bunch of no-hopers not only to find their true singing voice but also to get in touch with their inner, more sensual selves. Inevitably, this outsider-come-guru with his New Age ideas rubs up against the conservative-minded curate Stig, played by Niklas Falk.
However, what sounds a promising story is holed beneath the waterline by cliché and clunking pretentiousness. The priest is a leftish caricature--weak, hypocritical, envious. Armed only with his 'outdated' ideas of sin and redemption, he cannot compete with the touchy-feely emotions awakened in each of the choir members by Daréus who, adorable with his air of pained vulnerability, liberates (albeit unwittingly) the inhabitants from the stifling moral climate which pervades the village. With his peculiar intimate way of communicating music, he takes the inhabitants to a higher mystical plane, which, of course, is clearly intended by the director, Kay Pollak, to be several orders higher than Stig's fusty Christianity. However, the director's efforts are so clumsy in this regard, that no such effect is achieved. The director has also decided to lend the film a strong, but slightly jarring feminist slant. All the male characters are either weak or weak, stupid and bad, or completely inoffensive like the protagonist himself (heart condition) and the retarded youth who plays, rather predictably, a mysterious role at the heart of the group. In contrast, all the women are strong, intelligent and sensitive characters. The battered wife of the group sings solo a defiant song about 'finding herself' and so on. But it's the attempts at profundity that annoy. Daréus' new-found girlfriend, Lena, played by Frida Hallgren tells him 'there is no such thing as death'. I suppose that's meant to sound profound. But it drops from her mouth like a potato from a torn sack. Yet it's the finale which finally exposes the vacuity of the film, where, without giving the end away, the director's final stab at sublimity merely makes you squirm in embarrassment.
Vicente Ferrer (2013)
A good man in India
The film attempts to recreate the life of Vicente Ferrer, a Spanish Jesuit priest-cum-philanthropist, who defied prejudice, the powerful and even his own ecclesiastical superiors to improve the lot of a community of 'untouchables' eking out a miserable existence in the Indian region of Anantapur, in the second part of the twentieth century. But the film fails to do justice to his life. The character of Ferrer, played by Imanol Arias, is as thin as wallpaper. Which means we don't care very much what happens to him. When he resigns from the Jesuits—and without too much apparent soul searching—or when he proposes marriage or gets thrown in prison we barely raise an eyebrow. When later on in the film he comes across an old and much loved friend, the scene—clearly intended to be poignant—evokes no emotion whatsoever, because the friendship has not been previously developed. Another thing that grates, apart from the banal dialog, is that Ferrer, until his famous spiritual crisis kicks in, is a Jesuit. Yet we never see him pray, celebrate mass or even, except at the very beginning of the film, wear a priest's garb. In fact, he never mentions God or Christ anywhere in the film. Surely someone trained as a Jesuit,assuming he's not a charlatan, would turn to God in life's darkest moments? Shouldn't there be at least a hint of that, in the film, to help us understand him better? But no, in the film Ferrer just goes around without any apparent spiritual or self-reflection at all. There are other flaws. Arias is wooden throughout. And when he occasionally speaks English—with an excruciatingly bad accent, by the way—it's as though he's reading a bus timetable pinned to a wall in front of him. The Indian actors battle gamely to bring life to the film, but since no dramatic tension is ever generated and the characters remain as little more than cyphers, the result is dull and flat. The film is also painfully clichéd. Ferrer's Jesuit superiors are pantomime villains, seemingly resentful of his proud independence and superior humanity, while the angry mob is cowed by a mere withering look from the great white man. All in all, the resources would have been more profitably spent on a documentary.