Category: Movie

Ah, sweet Romania: land of weatherbeaten fences and faces, of bureaucratic gridlock and governmental corruption. In the films collected under the informal umbrella of its New Wave, the country comes off looking malnourished and developmentally stunted, its broken state infrastructure and widespread reactionary attitudes making even the simplest task into a drawn-out, pessimistically absurd ordeal with shades of Franz Kafka.

In the case of the latest film from Radu Muntean – a key New Waver, though he lacks the name recognition and awards hardware of his compatriots Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu and Corneliu Porumboiu – the objective at hand is a short yet treacherous drive through the muddiest tracts of rural Transylvania. A group of humanitarian workers have loaded up on sacks of provisions and set a course for a remote village that could really use the aid, but they’ll soon find that affecting positive change doesn’t come easy in a region where even the ground beneath your feet conspires against you.

The age demographics provide the first hint at an allegorical subtext, the volunteers all in a thirtysomething bracket making them de facto representatives of the modern Romania. On their way through the network of unpaved dirt paths, they encounter a relic of the older generation, a shrivelled-up man named Kente (Luca Sabin) hoping for a ride to a nearby mill. They pick him up and venture into a foreboding forest, where their tires lose traction and aggravation mounts as quickly as night falls.

In essence, the stranded car is an immovable object suggesting today’s wayward Romania, stagnating in its effort to build and improve by a populace at odds with itself. Though their motives may not be purest altruism, Maria (Maria Popistașu) and Dan (Alex Bogdan) want to bring welfare programs to isolated communes like the one supplying the title, suffering in their seclusion. Census information indicates that the age of the average Întregalde resident is around 60, explaining the precipitous decrease in their numbers over the past few decades. One village within the subdivision has but a single inhabitant.

Kente’s fixation on the mill gestures to a signifier of national industry long since rusted out, a read affirmed once everyone gets there only to find it abandoned. Muntean plays this scene in a gently mournful tone, never scornful of the senile wanderer distressed to watch the world he knows disappearing. He and his peers have grown unable to care for themselves, and as the tender sponge bath he’s given near the close of the film makes clear, it’s our responsibility to look after our elders.

But the younger element hardly provides a moral exemplar, starting from Dan’s constant denigration of Kente’s homosexuality. (As evident in the work of Muntean’s countryman Radu Jude, a strong undercurrent of social conservatism is alive and well in the area.) When a pair of Romani travellers pass by and offer their assistance, the racism still festering against this marginalised ethnic group doesn’t take long to jump out. For all their ideas about progress, the adults soon to dictate the direction of Romania remain stuck in the past on some crucial matters.

In a film with more going on beneath the surface than in terms of concrete action, the end product can sometimes be less stimulating to watch than to think about. Though his leisurely pacing may require some getting used to, Muntean largely avoids this with liberal dollops of dry humour, from the inherent slapstick of dislodging a stalled vehicle to Kente’s proclivity for non sequiturs.

The occasional mood-lightener helps along a film pitched from a dreary sociological vantage, its prevailing assertion being that internecine conflicts will leave Romania spinning its wheels. The forgiving final moments clarify that Muntean’s not totally without hope, but as dynamics currently stand, everyone’s lost.

“Whoop-de-fucking-doo.” That’s the first word that Mark Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), a hard-boiled sergeant in the Boston Police Department’s Special Investigations team speaks in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime-drama The Departed.

It’s easy to miss: more sarcastic snarl than actual speech, he addresses it as much to the floor as to Matt Damon’s fresh-faced young sergeant Colin Sullivan, who he is ostensibly congratulating on his graduation to the force, and who looks up at his superior with an expression of half-amused bewilderment. But it’s a moment worth paying attention to – not only does it tell you everything you need to know about Dignam, it is also the key to understanding the film itself.

The word “fuck” appears 257 times in The Departed. That’s roughly once every two minutes, making it only Scorsese’s fourth most profane film (The Wolf of Wall Street boasts a whopping 569 F-bombs). Such excessively foul language might seem profligate; a lazy way to inject some decorative grit into a world of mobsters and murderers. But in the hands of Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan it is a strategic choice.

Swearing quickly becomes the currency of the film’s central preoccupation: how to make your way as a hard man in a hard town. The Departed is full of variations on this theme, encompassing both the cops – in addition to Dignam and Sullivan, there’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s undercover trooper, Billy Costigan, and the loud-mouthed Captain George Ellerby, played by Alec Baldwin – and the mobsters they’re pursuing. This second group is led by Jack Nicholson’s psychopathic Frank Costello, who’s the kind of guy who idly plays with a severed hand while enjoying his morning macchiato.

Despite falling on different sides of the law, these men share more than the sum of their differences; both ethically and temperamentally. (The mirrored existence of the two central characters, Sullivan and Costigan, demonstrates this larger truth in microcosm.) The manner of their constant cussing is indicative of a common temperament: a wry world-weariness coupled with a need to speak plainly and to the point. When Dignam says “whoop-de-fucking-doo”, what he means is “this is a tough job for serious people and you’re going to have to do a lot more than graduate from the police academy to impress me.”

The Departed’s swearing is also very funny. The humour lies in the tension between this very straight-talking quality and the expressiveness, almost poeticism, of the language itself. The film’s profanity is ornate, almost verging on baroque. When asked by a fellow officer whether his department has any undercover cops in Costello’s gang, Dignam replies with a perfect tricolon: “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself.” This rhetorical flourish lands with devastating effectiveness; his colleague cowers in his seat as Dignam smirks.

Such linguistic flair is undoubtedly connected to Boston’s Irish heritage. Irish Americans are the city’s single biggest ethnic group and, as apparent in the character names, they dominate the film. Scorsese himself is Italian-American, of course, but Boston native Monahan draws upon his own community’s identity with great authenticity. Without trading in nationalistic stereotypes, The Departed pays filthy tribute to Ireland’s rich literary and poetic history.

Dignam and Ellerby are the film’s most enthusiastic swearers and, not coincidentally, its most memorable characters. They head up rival departments within the force, and when we first see them interact their good-natured rivalry is played out in a theatrical verbal sparring match. “Go fuck yourself,” Ellerby tells Dignam. “I’m tired from fucking your wife,” Dignam replies. “How’s your mother?” “Good. She’s tired from fucking my father.” They then continue to talk shop, perfectly amicably. Having struck two blows each, they are both, it would seem, content to cease hostilities. Swearing is thus a kind of safe form of play-fighting; the civilised officer’s version of a dick-measuring contest.

Except that in The Departed, no one is really civilised: good men turn bad or get killed; bad men come out on top. This corruptness is present in the language: characters pepper their speech with “shit”s and “fuck”s because theirs is a world in which people are constantly being pushed out or screwed over. “What’s the matter smart ass, you don’t know any fucking Shakespeare?” Dignam asks Costigan at one point. Who needs the bard when you have blasphemy this good.

“Whoop-de-fucking-doo.” That’s the first word that Mark Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), a hard-boiled sergeant in the Boston Police Department’s Special Investigations team speaks in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime-drama The Departed.

It’s easy to miss: more sarcastic snarl than actual speech, he addresses it as much to the floor as to Matt Damon’s fresh-faced young sergeant Colin Sullivan, who he is ostensibly congratulating on his graduation to the force, and who looks up at his superior with an expression of half-amused bewilderment. But it’s a moment worth paying attention to – not only does it tell you everything you need to know about Dignam, it is also the key to understanding the film itself.

The word “fuck” appears 257 times in The Departed. That’s roughly once every two minutes, making it only Scorsese’s fourth most profane film (The Wolf of Wall Street boasts a whopping 569 F-bombs). Such excessively foul language might seem profligate; a lazy way to inject some decorative grit into a world of mobsters and murderers. But in the hands of Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan it is a strategic choice.

Swearing quickly becomes the currency of the film’s central preoccupation: how to make your way as a hard man in a hard town. The Departed is full of variations on this theme, encompassing both the cops – in addition to Dignam and Sullivan, there’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s undercover trooper, Billy Costigan, and the loud-mouthed Captain George Ellerby, played by Alec Baldwin – and the mobsters they’re pursuing. This second group is led by Jack Nicholson’s psychopathic Frank Costello, who’s the kind of guy who idly plays with a severed hand while enjoying his morning macchiato.

Despite falling on different sides of the law, these men share more than the sum of their differences; both ethically and temperamentally. (The mirrored existence of the two central characters, Sullivan and Costigan, demonstrates this larger truth in microcosm.) The manner of their constant cussing is indicative of a common temperament: a wry world-weariness coupled with a need to speak plainly and to the point. When Dignam says “whoop-de-fucking-doo”, what he means is “this is a tough job for serious people and you’re going to have to do a lot more than graduate from the police academy to impress me.”

The Departed’s swearing is also very funny. The humour lies in the tension between this very straight-talking quality and the expressiveness, almost poeticism, of the language itself. The film’s profanity is ornate, almost verging on baroque. When asked by a fellow officer whether his department has any undercover cops in Costello’s gang, Dignam replies with a perfect tricolon: “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself.” This rhetorical flourish lands with devastating effectiveness; his colleague cowers in his seat as Dignam smirks.

Such linguistic flair is undoubtedly connected to Boston’s Irish heritage. Irish Americans are the city’s single biggest ethnic group and, as apparent in the character names, they dominate the film. Scorsese himself is Italian-American, of course, but Boston native Monahan draws upon his own community’s identity with great authenticity. Without trading in nationalistic stereotypes, The Departed pays filthy tribute to Ireland’s rich literary and poetic history.

Dignam and Ellerby are the film’s most enthusiastic swearers and, not coincidentally, its most memorable characters. They head up rival departments within the force, and when we first see them interact their good-natured rivalry is played out in a theatrical verbal sparring match. “Go fuck yourself,” Ellerby tells Dignam. “I’m tired from fucking your wife,” Dignam replies. “How’s your mother?” “Good. She’s tired from fucking my father.” They then continue to talk shop, perfectly amicably. Having struck two blows each, they are both, it would seem, content to cease hostilities. Swearing is thus a kind of safe form of play-fighting; the civilised officer’s version of a dick-measuring contest.

Except that in The Departed, no one is really civilised: good men turn bad or get killed; bad men come out on top. This corruptness is present in the language: characters pepper their speech with “shit”s and “fuck”s because theirs is a world in which people are constantly being pushed out or screwed over. “What’s the matter smart ass, you don’t know any fucking Shakespeare?” Dignam asks Costigan at one point. Who needs the bard when you have blasphemy this good.

“Whoop-de-fucking-doo.” That’s the first word that Mark Dignam (Mark Wahlberg), a hard-boiled sergeant in the Boston Police Department’s Special Investigations team speaks in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 crime-drama The Departed.

It’s easy to miss: more sarcastic snarl than actual speech, he addresses it as much to the floor as to Matt Damon’s fresh-faced young sergeant Colin Sullivan, who he is ostensibly congratulating on his graduation to the force, and who looks up at his superior with an expression of half-amused bewilderment. But it’s a moment worth paying attention to – not only does it tell you everything you need to know about Dignam, it is also the key to understanding the film itself.

The word “fuck” appears 257 times in The Departed. That’s roughly once every two minutes, making it only Scorsese’s fourth most profane film (The Wolf of Wall Street boasts a whopping 569 F-bombs). Such excessively foul language might seem profligate; a lazy way to inject some decorative grit into a world of mobsters and murderers. But in the hands of Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan it is a strategic choice.

Swearing quickly becomes the currency of the film’s central preoccupation: how to make your way as a hard man in a hard town. The Departed is full of variations on this theme, encompassing both the cops – in addition to Dignam and Sullivan, there’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s undercover trooper, Billy Costigan, and the loud-mouthed Captain George Ellerby, played by Alec Baldwin – and the mobsters they’re pursuing. This second group is led by Jack Nicholson’s psychopathic Frank Costello, who’s the kind of guy who idly plays with a severed hand while enjoying his morning macchiato.

Despite falling on different sides of the law, these men share more than the sum of their differences; both ethically and temperamentally. (The mirrored existence of the two central characters, Sullivan and Costigan, demonstrates this larger truth in microcosm.) The manner of their constant cussing is indicative of a common temperament: a wry world-weariness coupled with a need to speak plainly and to the point. When Dignam says “whoop-de-fucking-doo”, what he means is “this is a tough job for serious people and you’re going to have to do a lot more than graduate from the police academy to impress me.”

The Departed’s swearing is also very funny. The humour lies in the tension between this very straight-talking quality and the expressiveness, almost poeticism, of the language itself. The film’s profanity is ornate, almost verging on baroque. When asked by a fellow officer whether his department has any undercover cops in Costello’s gang, Dignam replies with a perfect tricolon: “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself.” This rhetorical flourish lands with devastating effectiveness; his colleague cowers in his seat as Dignam smirks.

Such linguistic flair is undoubtedly connected to Boston’s Irish heritage. Irish Americans are the city’s single biggest ethnic group and, as apparent in the character names, they dominate the film. Scorsese himself is Italian-American, of course, but Boston native Monahan draws upon his own community’s identity with great authenticity. Without trading in nationalistic stereotypes, The Departed pays filthy tribute to Ireland’s rich literary and poetic history.

Dignam and Ellerby are the film’s most enthusiastic swearers and, not coincidentally, its most memorable characters. They head up rival departments within the force, and when we first see them interact their good-natured rivalry is played out in a theatrical verbal sparring match. “Go fuck yourself,” Ellerby tells Dignam. “I’m tired from fucking your wife,” Dignam replies. “How’s your mother?” “Good. She’s tired from fucking my father.” They then continue to talk shop, perfectly amicably. Having struck two blows each, they are both, it would seem, content to cease hostilities. Swearing is thus a kind of safe form of play-fighting; the civilised officer’s version of a dick-measuring contest.

Except that in The Departed, no one is really civilised: good men turn bad or get killed; bad men come out on top. This corruptness is present in the language: characters pepper their speech with “shit”s and “fuck”s because theirs is a world in which people are constantly being pushed out or screwed over. “What’s the matter smart ass, you don’t know any fucking Shakespeare?” Dignam asks Costigan at one point. Who needs the bard when you have blasphemy this good.

Homage has always been the lingua franca of the Coen brothers, and though Joel and Ethan have parted ways with prospects of another joint feature looking dim, that much hasn’t changed. Their films append scare quotes to hidebound American genres like the western, screwball comedy, noir, or musical, a practice that Joel applies to the concept of the filmed play through less overt and less ironic means in his solo directorial debut.

His magnificently mounted The Tragedy of Macbeth finds a fresh angle on an English 101 staple by peering into the past for aesthetic cues and tapping into its lineage of gorgeous artifice. As the director admitted in a Q&A session following the premiere at the New York Film Festival, he drew inspiration from Orson Welles, presumably meaning both his 1948 screen adaptation as well as his earlier all-Black stage production dubbed Voodoo Macbeth.

The groundbreaking latter work must necessarily be in conversation with the first motion picture to cast an African-American performer as the Thane of Cawdor, but Welles’ influence can be felt most perceptibly in the production design that evokes a rich theatrical legacy through its graphite-coloured sparseness and containment.

The stark black-and-white photography and boxy Academy ratio foster an aura of the old world. Not the medieval era in which Macbeth (Denzel Washington, at the height of his powers) jockeyed for the throne of Scotland, however, instead transporting us to the first half of the twentieth century, when the membrane between Tinseltown and the most highbrow halls of Broadway was more porous and permissive. Coen eschewed location shooting for the most breathtaking soundstage sets since Allied, another formal nod to classical Hollywood cinema, in order to simulate the rawness of the theatre without getting penned in by the shape of the proscenium.

While his script remains faithful to the text, Frances McDormand finds new shades of defiance in Lady Macbeth and Kathryn Hunter’s gurgling interpretation of the Weird Sisters suggests that Gollum might be their brother. In a role done so many times that its dialogue has begun to sound like incantation, Washington reinvigorates the apprehension and eventual power-hunger of Big Mac with unexpected readings, underplaying big moments and loosing his full gravitas in quieter scenes. He practically tosses off the “tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy, and it works because by that point, he’s already demonstrated how much he’s holding in.

The creative departures – the word ‘revisionist’ has no place here, Coen’s historical reverence every bit as distinct as the transposed milieu the term usually connotes — come through in the spartan sets and how cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel shoots them. Indoors, Coen gives his cast little more to work with than walls and large stone blocks swathed in frame-whitening fog; a climactic conflict takes place in a cramped rock corridor, and the cinematic medium affords us the added benefit of a bird’s-eye view. The faux-outdoors will dazzle anyone with an attachment to the look of early studio releases, the fake trees and ground and sky a direct link to a lifetime of nostalgia. (Joining Leos Carax’s similarly stage-minded Annette, Coen also named FW Murnau’s Sunrise as a reference point.)

When paired with a story so settled in centuries of enshrinement, the meticulousness of Coen’s craft can sometimes slip into formalism for its own sake, as if Shakespeare’s words function as scaffolding on which to hang the painterly compositions. During what we may have to sadly refer to as the “brothers era,” their typical project would be packed with commentary, symbolism, and philosophical tangents. However elevated by style, this one is what it is, its narrative self-evident and unaltered.

Even if the dry wit and cherrypickable allusions may be absent, the technical virtuosity on display marks this as the work of a master. Visceral, haunted and severe, Coen’s vision coaxes out not just the intensity in the play – every “gritty” take has done this, from Roman Polanski to Justin Kurzel – but its older renderings too. Newly single, he’s in the process of rediscovering what it means to make a film his own. And that won’t stop him from making ’em like they used to.