Beyond the Hills

Opens Fri., March 29 at Seven Gables. 
Not Rated. 150 minutes.

Cristian Mungiu won international acclaim for his devastating 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (aka “the Romanian abortion movie”), which took that year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes. His latest feature, based on Tatiana Niculescu Bran’s nonfiction accounts of a modern-day exorcism gone wrong, feels like it lasts for about 4 months, 3 weeks, and then some. Cristina Flutur and Cosmina Stratan play Alina and Voichita, respectively, two former lovers who grew up together in an orphanage. But don’t make the mistake of expecting a racy lesbian romance here. Beyond the Hills’ dark, doom-laden story matches the stark, colorless Moldavian monastery where it takes place. It’s a painfully arduous watch; over two-and-a-half hours long, it’s a film that also demands an intermission—a nap, a walk, a hug—if you want to escape its enveloping torpor.

Beyond the Hills should be an hour shorter, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting story. Stratan, who looks like a more severe Mila Kunis, is intriguingly restrained as Voichita, who has been living at the New Hill Monastery under the tutelage of a stern priest and a kindly, submissive Mother Superior. Her childhood roommate Alina—an agitated, violent girl, her hair always pinned back tightly—has been living in Germany working as a waitress, but she returns to the monastery hoping to liberate Voichita, for whom she still harbors a fiery passion. Mungiu infuses each scene with a sense of unease: Dogs are always yelping, birds chattering, knives chopping, dishes clattering. He uses the same subtlety to refer to Alina and Voichita’s romantic history. It’s never spoken of directly, but it’s made obvious from the beginning. “You have a fever,” says Voichita, touching Alina’s forehead. “I’ll need a rubdown,” says Alina, pulling out rubbing alcohol and stripping off her blouse. That’s as physical as the two girls get. When Voichita declines to share a bed with her, Alina is surprised and disappointed. She still longs for Voichita, who believes she’s vanquished that forbidden passion by devoting herself to God—“the path that means I’ll never be alone,” she says. That emotional distance brings Alina to uncontrollable rage.

The monastery nuns are aptly described by Alina as crows, a cawing, fluttering flock. They gossip and whisper about Alina, speculating that she’s joined a cult or been possessed by a malevolent spirit. The priest attributes it to a hidden sin that she’s unwilling to confess. We of course know that Alina isn’t demon-possessed; she’s just madly, indomitably in love. But this is where Beyond the Hills becomes confusing and provocative, a collision between the modern and the medieval, as Alina is bound with chains and gagged. She’s twice a victim of passion—both to her obsessive attachment to Voichita and to the monastery’s cruel rituals.

It’s fascinating, frightening material, but Beyond the Hills is so long and relentlessly heavy-handed that we end up suffering along with Alina. ERIN K. THOMPSON

From Up on Poppy Hill

Opens Fri., March 29 at Egyptian. 
Not Rated. 91 minutes.

If your idea of Japanese anime is space opera, cyberpunk action, and Hayao Miyazaki’s modern fairy tales, then From Up on Poppy Hill might surprise you. Produced and co-scripted by Miyazaki and directed by his son Goro Miyazaki, this is a gentle, somewhat slight story of student life and young love in early-’60s Japan. As the country looks to bury its wartime history and show the world a modern new face at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, these students are determined to hold on to the past by saving their old, neglected clubhouse (known as The Latin Quarter) from demolition.

Nothing like a cause to spark a sweet, utterly chaste high-school romance between sunny young Umi, a teenage girl who’s running her family boarding house and looking after her siblings, and student leader Shun, until unexpected complications halt their blossoming relationship.

Poppy Hill comes from a tradition of Japanese manga focused on the social and emotional lives of kids and teens, without the complications of superpowers or supernatural legacies. The film’s simple animation matches the subject. There’s none of the chaotic comedy or zippy action of Disney or Pixar here, no caricatured figures or exaggerated trials. Instead, the world is pared down to defining details, the pace slowed to appreciate the peace and stillness within the social bustle of school and home. (Umi’s mother is studying in the U.S.; her father was killed in the Korean War.) The English-dubbed cast, which includes Anton Yelchin, Gillian Anderson, Christina Hendricks, Aubrey Plaza, and Bruce Dern, is appropriately understated.

This second film by Goro Miyazaki marks an enormous evolution from his debut, the inert 2006 Tales From Earthsea. You can attribute some of that to his father’s delicate scripting and image-planning, which leaves much of the emotional drama suggested but unspoken. Goro weaves it all into a charming and oddly comforting portrait of simpler times. But behind the idealized, picaresque coastal village of Yokohama is a postwar culture of absent parents, self-sufficient kids, and adults uncomfortable acknowledging (let alone discussing) the past. No surprise that the film turns to the West for its jabs of nostalgia, from the bouncy score of swing and proto-rock to the Francophile flourishes in The Latin Quarter. Poppy Hill is more a short story than a feature, almost unbelievably optimistic, but it offers a surprising, innocent window on an era usually associated with nuclear anxieties, cultural neuroses, and juvenile delinquents. SEAN AXMAKER



No

Opens Fri., March 29 at Guild 45th. 
Rated R. 110 minutes.

Mad Men for a different era, No is basically the true story of two rival 1988 ad campaigns—one for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the other for “happiness,” according to Rene Saavedra (Gael Garcia Bernal), the advertising hotshot with a very difficult client. Rene, the adult child of leftists, was once exiled with his family (presumably after the CIA-sponsored ouster and killing of Salvador Allende in 1973). Now he’s back, separated from his red-leaning wife, fully embracing the bourgeois dream: He’s got a house at the beach, a French sports car, and Atari video games for his young son. He knows how to sell microwave ovens, and microwave ovens are the future. His boss Lucho (Alfredo Castro) will likely soon make him a partner. Why would Rene want to give up any of that?

Outside Chile, international pressure has prompted Pinochet to offer a national referendum on his rule. After a 27-day TV blitz, voters can vote either Si (thus keeping Pinochet) or No (bringing in a new coalition government). Rene and Lucho consider it a rigged contest, yet Rene is lured into running the No campaign—perhaps less out of ideology than his simple desire “to win,” as he puts it. (Lucho will later lead the Si campaign.)

All this is true in outline, but director Pablo Larrain and his writers embellish history and devise a funny, effective series of fake ads and jingles for both campaigns. Previewing one grim TV spot, a parade of riot cops and statistics on the disappeared (leftists abducted and killed by Pinochet’s secret police), Rene curtly declares, “This doesn’t sell.” What sells? The future, not the past. Hope and optimism. Microwaves and happy families . . . wait, that’s it! Rene decides to redefine No in the affirmative: No to Pinochet and civil war, yes to happiness. “We have to find a product that is attractive,” says Rene. Product: That’s the key word, in which sense Rene can be seen as the Roger Ailes of his day, a guy who packages ideology irresistibly. His ads show picnicking families, spontaneous dancing in the streets, golden beaches, and smiling faces. Those who remember our Reaganite ’80s will recognize the same sunny spirit; No cleverly inverts that era’s hemispheric politics.

No is the third film Larrain has set in the Pinochet era. (Tony Manero and Post Mortem both starred Castro.) It’s also by far the most cheerful and affirmative, in part because we know the script: Pinochet will be humiliated and cede most of his power (though keeping the military), and everyone gets a microwave oven. Good will triumph over evil. As a result, each roadblock and creative breakthrough for Rene feels more than a little rote and illustrative. Are these the original ads we’re watching, or lovingly recreated ’80s facsimiles? (Larrain, born in 1976, clearly remembers that decade’s tastes and textures well; he’s also worked in advertising.) A straight documentary would leave no such doubts.

Still, you’re left with the enjoyable dissonance between messenger and message in No. When a riot breaks out near a political rally for his side, with Molotov cocktails, tear gas, and a water cannon deployed, Rene’s first thought is his beloved Renault Fuego Turbo parked in the melee. “Fuck, my car!” he indignantly yelps. Never mind politics. Once the referendum is over, he’ll have soap operas and appliances to sell.

What’s that old saying? The revolution will be advertised. BRIAN MILLER

PThe Revolutionary Optimists

Opens Fri., March 29 at SIFF Film Center. Not Rated. 83 minutes.

What’s most satisfying about this touching documentary is its modest approach. A film about breaking the cycles of poverty in India, it spends no time presenting sweeping generalizations about, or remedies to, the sex discrimination and government inaction that makes Kolkata (Calcutta) so miserable for those on its bottom rungs. A few well-placed statistics give a larger sense of the problem, but filmmakers Nicole Newnham and Maren Grainger-Monsen—Seattle natives now based at Stanford University—spend most of the film’s brisk 83 minutes following three kids through their individual victories and tribulations. Their stories emerge during two years filming the work of attorney Amlan Ganguly, the son of a high-level Bengali official who’s devoted himself to improving the lives of India’s slum-dwellers, especially women, through his organization Prayasam. (Clean water, polio vaccinations, and education for girls are among his goals.) And as the title suggests, hopelessness doesn’t make an appearance in the film. Nor do outrage or pity. The joy I felt when one village successfully pulls off a coed soccer tournament is testament to the tenderness Newnham and Grainger-Monsen put into telling what may seem like inconsequential stories from a nation of a billion people. And I left the film with an understanding of Indian poverty that no sober recitation of the country’s socioeconomic situation could have provided. DANIEL PERSON

The Silence

Opens Fri., March 29 at Varsity. 
Not Rated. 111 minutes.

As the Cold War recedes into memory, child pornography has become the new Communism. I mean, what’s the worst you can say about someone (all the better if it’s unsubstantiated)? Better Red than ped. Who’s that perv hanging around the playground? We should call 911! No one, apart from the Tea Party right, worries about our national order being toppled. But surely there must be a pedophile lurking around every corner, waiting to abduct your child. Our antiseptic, air-bagged culture demands monsters, yet this German crime drama, directed and adapted by Baran bo Odar from a novel by Jan Costin Wagner, subtly complicates the divide between defenders and predators of children.

In a 1986 prologue, two men in a red car follow an 11-year-old girl on a bike into a wheat field. The worst thing happens. One man is clearly culpable; the other is a mute witness, an accomplice who never goes to the cops. They separate for 23 years. Then, near the same wheat field, another young girl goes missing. The police investigation swirls around a suburb half-built before the recession, when land was cheap; then everyone ran out of money. Leading the search is agitated, unstable cop Jahn (Sebastian Blomberg), still struggling with the grief of losing his wife to cancer. Aiding him is cranky old retiree Mittich (Burghart Klaussner), who couldn’t crack the first case back in ’86. And that first victim’s mother Elena (Katrin Sass) now becomes a concerned onlooker in the second girl’s disappearance. “It’s exactly like it was back then,” she tells the police. But why would a serial killer so specifically repeat his crime, right down to the calendar date?

With occasional flashbacks that eventually help explain (to us) the twinned crimes, The Silence proceeds on parallel tracks of guilt. The passenger in that fateful red car becomes a suburban dad with two kids, tortured by the sight of young children cavorting in his pool. Like Leopold and Loeb, he and the red car’s driver are bound by a shameful sexual predilection. The driver, meanwhile, wants for opaque reasons to send a “message” to his former protege. But after its sparse, almost dialogue-free first scenes, with its many characters and relationships, The Silence wants to expand into a TV miniseries like AMC’s The Killing. Each household in this unnamed bit of Germany has its unique stories and woes (in addition to the police station house), but we only get glimpses inside.

Though inconclusive by American standards (Kill the monster!), The Silence does have the virtue of confounding cop-movie formulas. The ghosts of the past only increase in number, and there’s no solace for the living. BRIAN MILLER

Sushi: The Global Catch

Runs Fri., March 29–Thurs., April 4 at Grand Illusion. Not Rated. 75 Minutes.

When making sushi, a Tokyo chef insists in Mark Hall’s eco-documentary, the rice is as important as the fish. But diners worldwide are fixated on the latter, creating a potential environmental crisis, according to the experts who populate this polemic (essentially Food, Inc. at sea). Sushi corrals chefs, wholesalers, scientists, and fish ranchers who bemoan the skyrocketing demand for bluefin tuna—China’s bottomless hunger looms like a thundercloud over such discussions—and the corresponding depletion of Atlantic tuna stocks. “No species has fared worse at the hands of humans,” says one expert. (Really? Not even whales or Atlantic salmon?) We also meet an Australian entrepreneur who’s farm-raising tuna; the doc suggests bluefin abstinence until he’s perfected the technique. Oh, and there’s even a handy “Seafood Watch” app for your iPhone. Like so many advocacy docs, Sushi oversimplifies the issues. After establishing sushi’s global reach by poking fun at the sweet, saucy rolls sold in Poland by a former pizzeria owner and mocking the rib-eye, cilantro, and jalapeno rolls popular in Texas, the film can’t pin all the bluefin blame on new sushi eaters, who are generally eating California rolls packed with fake crab. Another problem: The starkly saturated images of fresh tuna meat are more gorgeous than Hall realizes. As I overheard at the press screening: “Makes you never want to eat sushi again, huh?”, a moviegoer was asked. His reply: “Actually, it kind of makes you crave it.” HANNA RASKIN

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