Opening
ThisWeek

PAbout Elly

Runs Fri., May 22–Thurs., May 28 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 118 minutes.

Before the international acclaim earned for The

Past and A Separation, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi delivered this impressive beachside drama to SIFF 2009. Only now, however, is it getting a U.S. release, so it seems like the last in a trilogy of films dealing with the social constraints placed on women (not just Iranian women), instead of the first. The proprieties of marriage, courtship, and divorce cloud what begins as a cheerful weekend on the shore of the Caspian Sea. There are three married couples, some small children, the recently divorced and Germany-based Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), and the friendly, eligible Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti). She’s a schoolteacher of slightly lower and less cosmopolitan caste than the rest, invited along by Sepideh (Golshifteh Farahani), the group’s self-appointed matchmaker. Sepideh knows more about Elly than she lets on; and though intending well for Ahmad and guest, her calculated deceptions have terrible consequences after a plot-swerving accident and mystery. (It’s like a Rohmer film suddenly interrupted by Antonioni.)

With the action mostly confined to a rundown beach villa, About Elly first resembles a carefree stage comedy; Farhadi deftly orchestrates both the blocking of so many characters and the delivery of steadily more damning drips of truth. Elly is there under somewhat false pretences (no one even knows her last name). There are surreptitious cell-phone calls and whispered conferences. Even as we’re rooting for a new couple to form, the other marriages start to fray before our eyes. (In one quietly well-played car scene, Ahmad tells Elly how his German wife curtly ended their marriage; but as we know from Farhadi’s other movies, nothing is so simple or final in wedded life.)

Late in the film, we meet a second suitor for the enigmatic Elly, another outsider the group deems unsophisticated (and possibly dangerous), named Alireza (Saber Abbar). Not quite a stalker, he’s a gentle-eyed, unrequited beau; and unlike the hipster-ish, red-BMW-driving Ahmad, he offers no bright prospects for Elly back in Hamburg. Though a scuffle or two breaks out and a nose is bloodied, what really frightens the vacation group is the cops being called. To secure their weekend rental, they lied to the landlord about Elly and Ahmad being newlyweds—because a single young man and a single young woman could never be permitted to travel together.

But the cops do come calling, a corpse is found, and all the blame gets dumped on poor Sepideh. Even her forbearing husband Amir (Mani Haghighi) finally turns on her, shockingly. More than love or marriage, About Elly makes you feel the dread weight of a woman’s “honor” pressing down upon on all its characters, male and female. And from that, no vacation is possible. BRIAN MILLER

Good Kill

Opens Fri., May 22 at Varsity. 
Rated R. 103 minutes.

What does war become in the remote-control age of drone strikes and remote surveillance? That’s what Andrew Niccol ostensibly asks in Good Kill—a film we know, after watching a few minutes, is going to spin its impersonal military-speak title into bitter irony. There we see Major Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) destroying military targets in Afghanistan from the Nevada desert, where he mans the deadliest videogame you ever saw.

This veteran Air Force fighter pilot has been downsized to drone jockey, and Tommy wants nothing more than to get back into the cockpit, even if it means going back to Afghanistan. Or maybe especially if it means going back. It’s not just the G-forces and the rush of speed. There’s something about deployment that makes war more real. After a day of launching missiles and tallying the body count, Tommy climbs into his car, takes the freeway home, and settles in with his wife and kids in a cookie-cutter Las Vegas suburb. It’s commuter combat, where the boundaries between battlefield mentality and civilian life blur. “You just have to keep compartmentalizing,” advises Tommy’s C.O. (Bruce Greenwood). Tommy compartmentalizes himself all right, numbing his ambivalence about his mission with alcohol.

Good Kill isn’t science fiction—it claims to be “based on actual events”—but it feels like it, with its sealed, space-capsule-like remote cockpits and antiseptic disconnect from the kill zone, the drone pilots watching the consequences of their actions on large computer monitors. Just a few miles away, the gleaming Vegas cityscape is photographed like some futuristic fantasia: Tomorrowland as the ultimate R&R distraction. When the CIA takes command of Tommy’s crew, the disembodied voice (Peter Coyote’s, of course) over the speakerphone becomes a black-ops Big Brother, coldly ordering strikes like mob hits. Niccol’s disapproval is clear, but Good Kill isn’t prosecuting war crimes; rather, it’s about the toll taken on button-pushing soldiers fighting off-the-books wars.

Writer of The Truman Show, Niccol has long explored the distorting effect of technology on humanity. But, Gattaca aside, he’s stronger on ideas than characters or story. Hawke helps him with an alienated and internalized performance, a man turning inward so he won’t act out. Good Kill is war film as moral crucible, where death is a movie watched on a video screen. Like the drone warfare it presents, it’s a remote, chilly drama, where Niccol’s characters serve rhetorical roles in a stark morality play. SEAN AXMAKER

In the Name of My Daughter

Opens Fri., May 22 at Seven Gables. 
Rated R. 116 minutes.

As evidenced by the success of radio’s Serial and TV’s The Jinx (like anybody consumes things on radio or TV any more, amirite?), our collective taste for true-crime stories remains boundless. If murder is on the menu, so much the better. Which means that veteran filmmaker Andre Techine (The Girl on the Train) ought to have a foolproof picture with this dramatization of a tantalizing real-life mystery. The case is better known in Europe than in the U.S., but that shouldn’t matter much—and like The Jinx, it involves wealth, decades of unanswered questions, and a missing woman who is yet to be found.

Thing is, Techine’s approach feels designed to smother the breathless melodrama of Serial and The Jinx. The movie sets the hook just fine, sketching its three central characters and their 1970s Riviera world of money, the Mafia, and casinos. A directionless young woman, Agnes (Adele Haenel), returns to the south of France to claim her inheritance from her mother, the formidable casino operator Renee Le Roux (Catherine Deneuve). Madame Le Roux is trying to ease her slick lawyer, Maurice Agnelet (Guillaume Canet), out of the business. He will not go away quietly, and this playboy finds Agnes a ripe target for his seductive talents. Most of this plays as a backroom drama, where the machinations of the casino biz blend with charged family dynamics to create an absorbing high-stakes poker game.

Engrossing material, with a very watchable trio—as in other recent roles, Deneuve brings out the matronly side of her chic personality, and Canet (also a director, notably of Tell No One) taps into the creepy careerist hiding just beneath his amiable looks. Those two are established Euro-icons, but Haenel, an intense rising star, holds her own. The longer the film goes on, the less inclined Techine is to explain key events, or even include what would seem to be crucial plot points. (Information delivered in the final credits makes you wonder why these tasty-sounding scenes weren’t dramatized and included in the film itself.) A certain amount of this elliptical storytelling is justified, as there are things about the case that nobody knows, or nobody’s talking about. The unresolved mystery seems to suit Techine just fine. Apparently he wants to remind us that we can’t ever know all the answers—something we have to accept, given that the case (ongoing even after the movie was completed) continues to mystify. ROBERT HORTON

Realite

Runs Fri., May 22–Thurs., May 28 at 
Grand Illusion. Not rated. 95 minutes.

The films of Quentin Dupieux would’ve been a smash in the late ’60s and early ’70s, crammed as they are with surreal tricks and car tires that kill people and questions about how much of what we see is real, man. After the zany shenanigans of Rubber and Wrong, Dupieux takes on the moviemaking business in Realite, although this movie is about other things too. And possibly about nothing.

A little girl is puzzled by a VHS tape she sees tumbling out of a boar’s belly when her sportsman father cleans the dead animal. But this vignette turns out to be part of a movie being shot by a pretentious director (John Glover), whose French producer (Jonathan Lambert) is growing impatient with the film’s realistic style. The producer also green-lights an idiotic-sounding horror movie pitched by cameraman Jason Tantra (Alain Chabat), but on one condition: Tantra must record the ideal groan for the dying characters in his movie. When Tantra and his wife (Elodie Bouchez) attend a movie, he is shocked to discover that someone else has stolen his exact concept—the ultimate artist’s nightmare. But is it literally a nightmare? Dupieux regularly shows us that some incidents in the film are the characters’ dreams, a conceit that grows alarming when the people we thought existed in a fictional reality start to interact with the movie characters. Or possibly vice versa.

This leaves out a talk-show host (Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder) diagnosed with “eczema on the inside,” and a school principal (comedian Eric Wareheim) who dreams of dressing in women’s clothes. All of which would wear out its welcome after, oh, 40 minutes or so if Dupieux hadn’t commited so fully to his brand of reality-bending. There’s no guessing game here, no encouraging the audience to figure out who the ultimate dreamer might be. The result is a movie that isn’t really funny, although you will laugh a few times. It’s more eerie than funny, like looking into a distorted mirror and realizing there might be some truth there. Tantra’s movie idea is about TV sets that hypnotize and then finally kill the world’s population. Realite is presumably offered as a tonic to this scenario—and yet it’s still dangerous. ROBERT HORTON

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