World Cinema

Neglected by her mother, a street singer in the seedy Paris district of Monmartre, and abandoned in a brothel by her circus performing father, Edith Piaf (played by Marion Cotillard) learned to grow up fast. She was blind for much of her childhood, but according to one account miraculously regained her sight during a pilgrimage honouring Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux, an event that the film portrays with the same realism as documented fact. Singing in the street one day, she was spotted by an impresario and soon became one of Europe’s best loved stars and a French icon. She was less than five feet tall, earning her the nickname ‘Little Sparrow’, and had a string of affairs with famous men such as the actor Yves Montand and middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan. She drank till she could no longer stand, injected herself with morphine, contracted crippling arthritis and met an early death in her forties.

What a life, and one that director Olivier Dahan does not attempt to sweeten. In fact the “emotional journey” he takes us through is nothing short of tragic. Flitting dizzily between key events - stunning performances in 1940’s New York, a childhood characterised by loneliness and abuse, car crashes in California and the onset of liver cancer - Dahan’s approach is fragmented and disorienting, reflecting Piaf’s inner turmoil and public demise.

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The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher), from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky, tells the true story of concentration camp Jews who escaped the gas chambers by counterfeiting for the Nazis. The film is based on a memoir written by Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation and later interned at Sachsenhausen.

In 1942 the Nazi’s launched Operation Bernhard, which aimed to flood the economies of their enemies with millions of forged British pound and US dollar notes, whilst bolstering their own flagging war chest. And who better to do it than the Jews, whose payment was their life, as long as they were needed? So, in the world’s largest ever counterfeiting scam, dozens of Jewish printers, typographers and a few ex-cons in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were set to work on the forgery of some £130 million. At the helm was Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (Salomon Smolianoff in real life), played by Karl Markovics, who had lived the highlife as a professional counterfeiter before his six year ordeal in the concentration camps. “Why earn money by making art?” he asks one person. “Making money by making money is so much easier.”

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Set in Communist Romania in the final years of the Nicolae Ceauşescu era, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days tells the harrowing story of two female students who try to arrange an illegal abortion, 20 years after the practice was outlawed so that Ceauşescu would have more subjects to rule. Directed by Cristian Mungiu, it won the Palme d’Or and the FIPRESCI Award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Mungiu based the film on a real story he had heard which he said “still affected me after more than 15 years”, and which had been repeated countless times among young Romanian women who turned to the black market to avoid the indignity and poverty that would accompany single motherhood. The film cost just $600,000 to make and forms part of a planned series of stories from Romania before the fall of the Iron Curtain, called Memories from the Golden Age.

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Like many films that have come out of Germany in recent years, Yella is concerned with coming to terms with the past and adjusting to the present.

Yella (Nina Hoss) is a reserved yet ambitious woman who is determined to leave behind her old life in a rather demoralising eastern German town, where her possessive ex-husband (Hinnerk Schönemann) trawls the streets in search of her, unable to accept that she no longer loves him. Partly to escape him, she accepts an accountancy job in Hamburg, but nothing is quite as it seems. After a brutal parting shot with her husband, Yella legs it to the train, sodden and dishevelled. She arrives at her new workplace the next day to find that her lecherous boss (Michael Wittenborn) has been given the sack, leaving her jobless, alone and haunted by the past.

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A welcome addition to that sub-genre of films depicting dour north Europeans falling for Latino charm (c.f. Italian for Beginners), Mostly Martha is a German comedy from writer/director Sandra Nettleback about a workaholic chef who has to force herself out of her fixation and learn to live a bit.

Martha (Martina Gedeck) is head chef of a fancy Hamburg restaurant who has no problem with lecturing customers who object to the texture of her fois gras. Her obsessive attitude towards her work has kept her single and her colleagues at arm’s length. Because of her phenomenal culinary abilities (she is reputedly the second best chef in Hamburg) and dedication to her work, her boss, Frida (Sibylle Canonica), cuts Martha plenty of slack. In spite of regular appointments with a therapist, played by August Zirner, Martha finds it difficult to control her temper in and out of the kitchen. On one occasion she throws a raw slab of meat at a customer who complains that his steak is overdone. Even her kindly new neighbour Sam (Ulrich Thomsen), for whom she offers to cook, fails to remove the deep furrows from her brow.

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Director Tsai Ming Liang returns to his native Malaysia to present this melancholy study of human alienation. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone was among several films commissioned by Peter Sellars’ New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna in 2006, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.

If you are already a Tsai fan and enjoy his unique cinematic methods - long, steady shots of urban decay; characters who wander round aimlessly, expressing longing through gesture, glance and touch rather than coherent dialogue; and bald landscapes as a metaphor for human loneliness - then I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone may be right up your street. If, on the other hand, conventional drama with dependable characters and an obvious structure is more your cup of tea, you could be in for the longest two hours of your life.

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The newly released double box set of Ang Lee’s enigmatic epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Stephen Chow’s slapstick farce Kung Fu Hustle (2004) couldn’t offer two more different perspectives on the Wuxia genre of filmmaking.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a great deal more than a mere kung fu film. This sweeping, majestic fable is a near masterpiece, combining beautiful cinematography, fight scenes that will take your breath away and a two touching love stories with very different outcomes.

Based on the fourth part of a 1930s pentalogy by novelist Wang Du Lu with a script by James Schamus, Crouching Tiger is concerned with the theft of a holy sword, the Green Destiny, which belongs to the legendary warrior Li Mubai (Chow Yun-Fat). Looking for a quieter life, Mubai entrusts his sword to the gifted martial artist Yu Shulien (Michelle Yeoh), with whom he shares an unspoken love. Yu takes the sword to Beijing, where she meets Jen (Zhang Ziyi), the teenage daughter of a political bigwig, whose nurse bears a striking resemblance to the murderous witch Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei). But when the sword is stolen, everyone leaps into action in a frantic search to retrieve it.

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During the 1960’s Chairman Mao’s government moved countless Chinese workers, along with their factories, to the countryside of Western China in to form a ‘Third line of Defence’ in case of a Soviet invasion.

Cut to the 1980’s when China started opening up to the West under Deng Xiaoping’s social and economic reforms. Many factory workers wanted to move back to the big city, often against the wishes of their more settled children. Director Wang Xiaoshuai came from such a family himself, and in Shanghai Dreams he gives a fascinating portrait of life in China’s factory towns in the 1980s, which engages as much with the political upheavals of the era as it does with the universal theme of intergenerational conflict.

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Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which cleared up at the recent Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards, is a winning ‘rags to Raja’ drama set in contemporary Mumbai.

Slumdog tells the story of Jamal Malik, chiefly played by Dev Patel (aka Anwar from Skins); an 18-year-old Muslim ‘chai wallah’ (tea boy) for a mobile phone call centre who is just one correct answer away from 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? which apparently features exactly the same format, graphics, studio set up and theme tune as the good old British version.

During a pause in filming, Jamal is arrested and whisked away to a police cell on suspicion of cheating. How could a lowly chai wallah who came up from the slums of Mumbai possibly know all the answers?

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Propelled to fame playing regal beauties in grandiose historical dramas such as Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell my Concubine, Chinese actress Gong Li takes a professional U-turn in this bittersweet romance with hints of French cinema from director Zhou Sun, recasting herself as Zhou Yu, a thoroughly modern, independent woman whose sexuality is part of her personality. Torn between two lovers, the ethereal introvert and the easygoing charmer, Gong takes comfort in somnolent train journeys through the countryside of northwest China. Zhou Yu’s Train is adapted from the novel by Cun Bei.
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