Laxe, Linklater, and Loznitsa

Luis (Sergi Lopez) and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) wander into a rave thumping nonstop miles away from anywhere. They’re looking for Luis’s daughter, Mar, who disappeared five months ago. A band of ravers—Stef (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), Jade (Jade Oukid), and Bigui (Richard Bellamy), all more or less playing themselves—suggests that she might be at the next rave.

Before they head out together, eventually becoming an ad hoc family, soldiers pull up, looking for EU citizens. A radio issues patchy reports of global conflict. Luis and the ravers take off toward mountainous terrain, and it’s here that most reviewers shut off their plot summaries and advise going into Oliver Laxe’s Sirât knowing as little as possible beforehand. More than a few, though, mention Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (1953) and William Friedkin’s remake, Sorcerer (1977), as well as George Miller’s Mad Max movies.

For Jessica Kiang, reviewing Laxe’s fourth feature for Variety, “it’s hard to convey how jaw-dropping it is when, right after the halfway mark, an eviscerating tragedy occurs. It’s like getting chopped in the windpipe. From then on, Sirât (ominously named after the hair-thin bridge that purportedly connects heaven and hell), which has never been exactly straightforward, never exactly ordinary, moves into ever wilder, more bizarrely existential and allegorical territory. Turns out, even the most off-grid, self-sufficient, nomadic existence is a construct that can be dismantled, piece by piece.”

“Laxe is a filmmaker whose early work, such as You Are All Captains [2010] and Mimosas [2016], inhabited a more playful metacinematic territory,” writes Little White Lies editor David Jenkins, “while his most recent Fire Will Come from 2019 saw him erring a little more towards conventional narrative and directly articulated themes. Sirât is his most expansive, unique, and troubling (in a good way!) film.”

Laxe “maintains rising tension throughout, although to frustratingly inconclusive effect,” finds Jonathan Romney in Screen, while the Hollywood Reporter’s Lovia Gyarkye suggests that “the movie’s message can be punishing and oddly muddied at times.”

At IndieWire, though, David Katz proposes that Sirât is “the kind of film that Cannes attendees from far and wide come to the festival for: sui generis and evading any classification, emanating from a wholly personal vision of cinema while not resisting galvanizing, and sometimes crowd-pleasing, pleasures.”

The tagline: “This is the story of Godard making Breathless, told in the style and spirit in which Godard made Breathless.” Well, yes and no, suggest most critics. It’s about a scene, 1959, Paris, and the gaggle of film critics who became directors and collectively launched the French New Wave. Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague “isn’t a comedy,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, “yet there’s a deadpan comic dimension to it, and it has to do with what an insanely minimal process the making of Breathless was, and what it actually took for Godard to get away with it.”

Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) and cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) shot on the streets and in naturally lit rooms without sound—audio was added in post—and without a screenplay. Scenes were mapped out each morning during the twenty-odd-day shoot. If Godard ran out of ideas, he’d call it a day, infuriating his producer, Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst). Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) was game, but Godard repeatedly had to persuade his only star, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutsch), to stick with the project.

Eventually, everyone learns to “take comfort in the idea that the stakes are relatively low, and the time commitment is minor,” writes Vulture’s Alison Willmore. “And that is, really, the point Nouvelle Vague sets out to make. It’s determined to approach its characters, which also include François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), and Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest), not as future icons of cinema but as young, brash artists questioning conventions, determined to make great work.”

“With the movie shot in lustrous black and white by Bruno Dumont’s recently favored DoP David Chambille, every artistic decision in Nouvelle Vague comes from a desire for authenticity, yet it’s never stifling,” finds David Katz at Cineuropa. The Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer notes that the sets by Katia Wyszkop “recreate Paris interiors of the epoch, including the original Cahiers offices and various cafés all around town. As for the exteriors, three hundred shots required extensive VFX to whisk us back to the time period, especially for the famous scenes in Breathless that were lensed on a jam-packed Champs-Elysées.”

For Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov, “while it’s obviously very impressive that Linklater is making a feature with the loose, limber handheld style and edits of 1959-era Godard, using a language he’s never deployed before and assimilates with astonishing smoothness, it’s to no real end. This is an expensive project dedicated to flawlessly pastiching a sixty-plus-year-old style, which is obviously ironic when the film in question was all about revolutionizing cinema in part by being explicitly against cinema’s default resources and established traditions.”

And it “may end up being appreciated by only about 2.6 percent of the general population,” suggests Time’s Stephanie Zacharek. “Who would make a picture like that? Only someone who cares.” Nouvelle Vague is “the ultimate inside-baseball making-of movie. But even more than that, it’s a picture that stands strong on the side of art, of history, of working to solve the puzzle of things that maybe at first you don’t fully understand. It’s both a shout of joy and a call to arms. It’s all about the bold, muscular act of caring.”

In the late 1930s, at the height of Stalin’s Great Purge, Georgy Demidov, an experimental physicist at the Kharkiv Technical Institute, was arrested. He spent the next fourteen years of his life in the Soviet gulag. Adapted from his novella—written in 1969 but not published until 2009—Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors “could be the most terrifying comedy that Aki Kaurismäki never made,” writes Deadline’s Damon Wise.

An aging prosecutor (Alexander Filippenko) manages to get a plea for justice written in blood out of his cell and into the hands of a newly appointed prosecutor on the outside, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), who becomes determined to argue the case for the man who once delivered a lecture on the rule of law at his university.

“Kornyev is greeted by various forms of rudeness which don’t bother to masquerade as politeness, and a vast portion of the film’s first part consists of him being glared at by a remarkable collection of gargoyle-adjacent guards, a gallery of nightmarishly unpleasant faces that are inevitably pretty funny in their grotesquerie and hostility,” writes Vadim Rizov.

“What’s fascinating about Two Prosecutors,” finds Jordan Mintzer, “is that nobody directly turns down Kornyev, nor do they ever let him know what they’re really thinking. This is a world where everyone is so afraid that the slightest word or act could land them in jail, or possibly Siberia, that they’re constantly holding their tongues as they try to strategize their way through the system.” For Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage, “that one can guess Kornyev’s fate long before his arrival in Moscow doesn’t detract from the tragedy, but heightens it.”

Loznitsa, far more prolific as a documentary filmmaker than as a director of fictional features, “plays it straighter” in Two Prosecutors than he did in A Gentle Creature (2017) or Donbass (2018), writes Jessica Kiang, “and the result is much stronger for it, as though he has met some self-set challenge to see how efficiently a rigorously formal aesthetic can evoke the pervading, dehumanizing horrors of living under totalitarian control. It gives the experience of watching Two Prosectors an almost tactile literariness, like reading a slim paperback classic by Camus or Kafka or Orwell, where the pages are spotted with age, but the insights remain painfully, vividly fresh.”