“The appointment”
Director: Teona Strugar Mitevska
Cast: Jelena Kordic Kuret, Adnan Omerovic
Duration: 95′
Sarajevo today. Asya is one single woman 40 years old and to meet a soul mate he signs up for a speed dating event, dating company for single women and men. Here she meets Zoran, a mysterious man and good-looking with which at the beginning a harmony seems to be born.
But Zoran isn’t there to find a soul mate: he is a secret in his past which concerns Asja.
Mitevska, a Macedonian director, became famous thanks to “God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya”, her first film of international standing. Even in “The Appointment”, Mitevska starts from a female portrait for reflect on society, its prejudices and its violencebut also on the ever-living possibility of love and redemption.
And in the case of Sarajevo it is the war of 1992-1993 that re-emerges, with its ghosts, its dead resting in the stadium, not far from the place where the Speed Dating event takes place. The movie is everything shot like a kammerspiel, in a room where forty people meet, confide, eat, dance, in an attempt to create a bond, to consolidate an existence.
But the war, the divisions, the differences there have been and remain: will it ever be possible to go further? Mitevska elaborates the screenplay with Elma Tataragic, revolving around the randomness theorem, where victim and perpetrator meet causally, but not too much; they refuse, but they attract each other, without too many psychoanalytic theories on Stockholm syndrome; but with one vocation to self-annulment, to martyrdom, which has been dormant for too long, giving substance not only to the desperation of the victims, but above all to that of the perpetrators. Responsibilities of both explode suddenly, with a unexpected violence. But what emerges is also a love for Sarajevo, a city that will never be the same again.
And if Asja is looking for a future, Zoran is asking for it even more, rejecting or denying his past and this explains the international title, The Happiest Man in the World, he will be the happy man when he manages to go further and to be accepted. Anyway. (Michael Gottardi)
Score: 6.5
“Leila and Her Brothers”
Director: Saeed Roustayi
Cast: Taraneh Alidoosti, Navid Mohammadzadeh, Saeed Poursamimi and Payman Maadi
Duration: 165′
At 40, Leila spent all his life to take care of her parents and her four siblings. The family constantly quarrels and is crushed by debt, trapped in a country with a huge economic crisis and incredible inflations due to the ignorance of the mullahs who govern the country.
While her brothers are trying to make ends meet, Leila formulates a plan: start a family business that would save them from poverty. But the major opposition will be precisely that of the old father.
The third feature film by director Saeed Roustayi, presented in competition at the Cannes film festival, where it won the Fipresci award from international critics, confirms the goodness of the Iranian film school and highlights at least two extraordinary actors, Taraneh Alidoosti in the role of Leila and Saeed Poursamini in the role of the old hustler father. But that’s all the installation of Roustayi’s film which goes much deeper than the narrative genre of comedy does not say.
The proposal, by an important branch of the powerful family that has always kept him at a distance, considering him starving, to become the godfather at the wedding of the firstbornrepresents on the one hand a unique opportunity for social redemption, on the other it opens an internal conflict that will create further fractures.
It seems to witness the best tradition of Italian comedyin which the wickedness of the protagonists intersects with the harshness of the social and economic conditions, well described by the alternating montage of the first sequences between the factory strikes and the embarrassment of the old man sitting in the mosque alongside the powerful.
It’s a pity that a certain propensity to want to say everything ends up dilating the time of the film beyond two and a half hours, but it is an effort worth making (Michele Gottardi).
Score: 6.5
Director: Martin Bourboulon
Cast: François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Eva Green, Romain Duris, Pio Marmaï, Vicky Krips, Louis Garrel
Duration: 121′
The young Gascon D’Artagnan (François Civil) arrives in Paris to become a musketeer of King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel), but the first meeting with the “colleagues” Athos (Vincent Cassel), Porthos (Pio Marmaï) and Aramis (Romain Duris) are not the best, so much so that they are challenged to a duel by all three.
But in France it is not time for personalities: a bigger and fiercer fight is being waged between Catholics and Protestants and now more than ever the Musketeers, joined by D’Artagnan, must defend the Crown from the intrigues of Cardinal Richelieu (Éric Ruf) and his ruthless shadow Mylady (Eva Green), in a plot to discredit the Queen (Vicky Krieps).
The fecundity of Alexandre Dumas’ serial novel generates a new film version directed by Martin Bourboulon who opts for tradition without excessively distorting the plot and characters, relying on a cast that includes many great names in French cinema.
Except for a few features (Porthos’ sexual preferences) and for decidedly more up-to-date duels, “The Three Musketeers – D’Artagnan” travels on autopilot on well-known tracks, leaving the ending to blatantly open up to the sequel (already filmed: it will be released in the autumn). Immersed in a photograph with murky and medieval stamps, the film carries out its “little homework” without thuds or peaks: Eva Green is always disturbing (his best line is when he calls himself “The Devil, probably”), Civil has the right face for a cheeky but good-hearted D’Artagnan, Krieps is content with a marginal role. Cloak-and-dagger lovers will appreciate it. (Marco Contino)
Score: 6
***
Director: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic
Italian voices: Claudio Santamaria, Valentina Favazza, Emiliano Coltorti, Fabrizio Vidale
Duration: 92′
“Super Mario Bros”
The Italian-American brothers Mario and Luigi have just set up on their own and are trying to break through on the plumbing market with a commercial that depicts them as two Brooklyn plumbing superheroes. They don’t know that, shortly thereafter, they will really become such, when they will be mysteriously projected into Princess Peach’s Mushroom Kingdom, threatened by the ferocious turtle Bowser, in love with the latter and thirsty for her power.
The survival of those worlds is at stake but also the personal revenge of Mario and Luigi who have always been mocked, even in the family, for their naivety. Arrives at the cinema (in 715 copies!) “Super Mario Bros – The Movie”, the result of the collaboration of Illumination (reduced from the various “Despicable Me” and “Minions”) and Nintendo which, in the 1980s, it released one of the best-selling video game franchises in historyfocused on the plumber Mario (but before – in the original “Donkey Kong” – he was a carpenter) and on hundreds of other characters who have become generational icons.
Recovering the origins of gaming with the army led by Kong (the one who in the first video game threw barrels at Mario) and recreating the worlds of Super Mario (blocks, magic mushrooms, clouds, green pipes, coins, …), the directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic bet on a hyper-colorful interface especially suited to younger audienceswithout forgetting those who played in the 80s with the infinite variations of the musical theme that has become a cult.
Obviously the operation rewards and looks above all to those who have the liveliest synapses, but you don’t get bored (also thanks to a duration that is finally suitable for children too) and you go home even with a little nostalgia for the old cartridges by Nintendo. (Marco Contino)
Score: 6.5