for this week’s TRIBUNE : ‘Involuntary’ [8/10]; ‘The Hunter’ [6/10]

Published on: October 28th, 2010

Involuntary

Involuntary
Director: Ruben Östlund

The Hunter
Director: Rafi Pitts.

Ruben Östlund’s Involuntary, a chillingly precise examination of social behaviour and its boundaries, is unquestionably one of the films of the year. But which year? Perhaps 2008, when it world-premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s edgy Un Certain Regard section and won awards at festivals in Brussels, Geneva, Mar del Plata and Stockholm, before being released in its native Sweden. 
   Or maybe 2009, when ticket-buyers in Norway, Hungary, the Netherlands, France (where it was shown under the decidedly ironic title Happy Sweden), Belgium and Denmark were able to sample the delights of this ambitiously episodic feature-length debut from acclaimed shorts-director Östlund, co-written with Erik Hemmendorff.
   Or perhaps 2010, the year in which Involuntary (De Ofrivilliga) has found belated exposure in a select handful of Britain’s arthouses thanks to distributor Trinity Filmed Entertainment – some 28 months after that initial Cannes screening. One presumes that this is something to do with all things Swedish being very much in vogue just now, thanks for the likes of Wallander, Let the Right One In (Stateside remake Let Me In is coming soon) and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy featuring Lisabeth Salander.
   The UK’s film culture is outstanding in many respects – but one major failing is that time and again outstanding movies from many parts of the world either never make it into commercial distribution at all, or else pop up after an unfathomably protracted delay.
   Östlund (who also edits) and Hemmendorff are already putting the finishing touches to their follow-up, entitled Play – which might well appear in competition at one of early 2011′s major festivals such as Berlin or Cannes, such has been Involuntary‘s success on the global circuit. Indeed, if European cinema needs an heir to the likes of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl – Austria’s ageing auteurs of archly distanced anthropological analysis, Östlund looks perhaps best-placed to fill the bill.
   His style and subject-matter also place him somewhere between two of his much more widely-heralded countrymen, Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor; You, the Living) and Lukas Moodysson (specifically his first features Show Me Love and Together). Like the former, he combines very precise visual compositions – with Östlund, working with first-time cinematographer Marius Dybwad Brandrud, events off-camera are often just as important as what we can actually see – and a deadpan, ‘Nordic’ humour that’s as dry and cold as sub-Arctic tundra.
   Like (early) Moodysson, he’s clearly fascinated by group interactions among teenagers, a demographic group where peer-pressures can exert an exaggeratedly strong impact. Kids are involved in most of the main plot-strands here – one concerning a middle-aged actress (Maria Lundqvist as ‘Maria’) on a coach-trip along with some noisy youngsters; another a teacher (Sara Eriksson as ‘Sara’) who witnesses a colleague abusing a pupil and is gently ostracised after turning whistleblower; a third following some booze-swigging teenage girls on an increasingly wild night out.
  It’s Swedish society as a whole which is Östlund’s real area of study: in this social-democratic ‘paradise’, he discerns certain surprisingly rigid parameters of inter-personal etiquette which have become part of the national DNA. “What you did crossed every line”, a character is curtly informed at one stage, and Östlund’s achievement is to show the location and nature of these lines via a series of discrete, seemingly innocuous vignettes which meticulously and stealthily accumulate over the course of 90-odd brisk minutes into something revealing and disturbing.

In contrast to the 28-month gap between Involuntary‘s world premiere and UK release, Rafi Pitts’ moodily downbeat Iranian drama The Hunter – first screened in competition at Berlin in February – has been relatively “fast-tracked” onto our screens. But why this should be is something of a mystery – the picture didn’t win anything at Berlin, nor has it picked up many awards on the circuit since, and critical reaction has been mostly lukewarm. Then again, Iran is seldom out of the news headlines for very long these days, and this tale of an apolitical, fortysomething Tehranite whom tragic circumstances compel towards drastic anti-authoritarian actions has an undeniable topicality.
   Nondescript Ali (Pitts, who also writes and directs) lives with his wife Sara (Mitra Hajjar) and young child in a grimy corner of Iran’s bustling, car-clogged capital. He’s the sort who instinctively keeps out of trouble and who has no interest in the power-struggles that are followed with such intense scrutiny in the west (he pays little attention to radio-broadcasts commenting on the upcoming general election, for example).
   But when his wife is accidentally killed by crossfire during a political demonstration – a death which carries inevitable (but apparently accidental) echoes of the widely-publicised Neda Agha-Soltan incident of June 2009 – Ali’s world crumbles and he seeks revenge against the repressive organs of a state which he now despises (“I think our country has no law and order”). As in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1969), this previously mild-mannered, law-abiding individual turns deadly sniper, taking aim at police-cars as they pass on a multi-lane highway – setting in motion a chain of events that will see him go from “hunter” to “hunted.”
   At certain key junctures Ali’s trajectory owes rather more to the demands of plot and political metaphor than believable character-psychology, Pitts’ inscrutable, taciturn features internalising Ali’s grief and despair to the point of arch over-minimalism.
   A slow, deliberate affair that deliberately holds much important information from the viewer – such as, for example, the fate of Ali’s child – The Hunter treads a precarious line between low-key intensity and an unfocussed, generalised kind of gloomy, alienated ominousness. And the extended final sequence, in which Ali and a pair of police engage in a cat-and-mouse chase through forested, underpopulated countryside, strains a little too hard towards morose, symbolic significance. Still, as a sustained study of a man partly defined by, partly at odds with his geographical and political contexts, The Hunter exerts a certain steely grip that can’t be entirely discounted or easily forgotten.
 
Neil Young
10th October, 2010
written for the 27th October edition of Tribune magazine

THE HUNTER : [6/10] : Shekarchi : Iran/Germany 2010 : Rafi PITTS : 92m (BBFC) : seen at Cameo cinema, Edinburgh — 17th June 2010 (Edinburgh International Film Festival – press screening). {16/28}
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INVOLUNTARY : [8/10] : De Ofrivilliga : Sweden 2008 : Ruben OSTLUND : 102m (BBFC) : seen at Moviemento cinema, Linz (Austria) — 21st April 2009 (Crossing Europe Film Festival – public screening — complimentary ticket). {22/28}