The keeper of lost causes - Kvinden i buret

Seen in Cluj-Napoca at the wonderful Cinema Victoria, in Danish with Romanian subtitles...

Bea says: We really wanted to see something at this lovely independent cinema in Cluj, Romania, and out of the 4 films running that day this suited our schedule and looked appealing, as we are fans of The Killing, and this presented itself as a dark, Scandi film noir thriller.

And indeed it was.  It was in Danish with Romanian subtitles, so I had to make to do with trying to listen to the Danish with a German ear to pick up odd words, and read any latin-ish type words on the subtitles.  But mostly, I used the visuals to tell me the story, and followed the plot without too much trouble (particularly helpfully, the film played out the key reason for motive in a beautifully filmed flashback sequence which really helped put a lot of jigsaw pieces in place).  I like thrillers and detective stories anyway, and trying to work out the plot in advance so this was kind of like doing that.

If you are a fan of The Killing, this is remarkably similar – anti-hero type detective suffering from PTSD gets assigned to a desk job, but investigates a disappearance with his desk job mate and eventually solves the crime, through many twists and turns. We in the audience know what has happened to the disappeared person, and our story is interspersed with her situation and the policemen trying to follow the trail – will they get to her in time?

Definitely not for the faint hearted – there are scenes of quite brutal violence and torture, somewhat disturbingly so.  Although I enjoyed the story, it was disturbing and I thought of it a few days later when in Brasov we saw a poster for the annual Non Violent Film Festival.   The violence is mostly of course directed at a woman, and the perpetrator as well as the rescuers are male – and that is different to The Killing.

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Cecil says: Yes this felt very much like a Saturday afternoon at home on the setee with a  DVD of The Killing, only Sarah Lund was absent for this episode.

As Bea says, the Danish crime genre is great but I can’t help feeling it’s becoming a bit of a cliché of itself. Scenes filmed in dark places that make you wonder if it is in fact a black & white film, the same actors with the same emotional and family issues (but that is also in The Wire so seems to be the type we have to see on police films these days)., as the soundtrack, we just kept expecting The Killing tune to chime up..

But the plots are good, and as Bea says, this needed to be a story you could follow in spite of the Danish audio and Romanian subtitles. And yes, the scenes where we discover the motive are actually vital to us getting the whole story, though I think we were both doing OK up to then too.

The tooth extraction scene was just a bit too graphic and lengthy for my liking. We discussed afterwards how a 1970s or 1950s police film might have put that across so that more is left to the imagination. Do we really need to see – and hear – that much?

It was great to see this film in Cluj. I had often seen the name Cluj appear on those EU Media Programme funded films at the intro when they flash up the participating towns and the Cinema Victoria was great. As was the price: at less than £2 for both of us, you can’t get cheaper than that.

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Diplomatie (Diplomacy)

Seen in Vienna, dubbed in German from the French original

Cecil says: We’d heard about this film as we passed through Paris and found out it was to be released in Germany just after we left, so we were delighted to find it suddenly in front of our eyes in Vienna.

We found a small independent cinema and wanted to escape from the pouring rain. Diplomatie had just begun five minutes earlier, but we thought we’d go for it.

All we knew was that it was about how a Swedish man had saved Paris from being bombed by the Nazis during the War. We didn’t even know which end of the Paris occupation this was (just before the Germans arrived, or just before they left), but with having been in Paris for the 70^th anniversary of the Liberation, this felt like a very appropriate film to see.

I’ve no idea how the film begins, but within seconds of sitting down we knew it had to be as the Germans were leaving, since there were scenes of German soldiers looking slightly the worse for wear and uniforms smudged or torn, with sweat on their brows.

As usual in German/Austrian cinemas, this film was dubbed (I guess from French, even though Schloiendorff is of course German), which meant some of the dialogue was extremely quick (do the French really talk that much faster than the Germans?), so we both may have missed some of the subtleties of the script, but this was a gripping film from the moment we took our seats.

It’s all about how a Swedish (neutral in theory) diplomat manages to persuade the Germans not to blow up most of the Paris landmarks as they abandon the city. The film is big on dialogue and on the persuasive methods of the Swede, as he slowly convinces the man in charge that for historical reasons, family reasons, and any other reasons he thinks might work, it is wrong to press the trigger.

There are a few things we didn’t quite understand, like why the hardline officer let his junior leave with a laissez passer early on in the film – and it is his return towards the end that reveals to him that he has been duped after all.

And there’s the lovely moment when the man who early on is most nervous about the project ends up being the one who actually stops it happening – but we won’t do a spoiler on that one.

I’d love to see this film again to get those nuances, and maybe see it in the original (French).

Well worth an afternoon out of the rain. I’d go even in brilliant sunshine

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Bea says: Despite being interested in WW2 history in Europe, this film made me realise how little I actually knew about the German occupation of Paris, and how Paris actually escaped the bomb damage that scars almost all of the rest of the major European cities, and it was very personally resonant as we had just been in Paris as it celebrated 70 years since liberation.

 We saw it about a week into our time in German speaking countries, and so I had had a chance to recover some of my fluency in German after a long break, but as Cecil says the dialogue was fast paced, and somewhat complex as well, but although I did not follow all of the intricacies, I did keep up with the plot – visual contextual clues helping a lot, as did the extremely expressive face of …, the Swedish diplomat.  Perhaps it was because I was relying more on visual cues to check out my understanding of the dialogue but I have rarely seen facial features used so well in film. 

A gripping film, particularly as the pace and tension builds throughout.  I would also love to see it again, and in fact could have watched it again straight away.

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