Viewings: Caught three interesting films, all good and all foreign.
Kontroll is a Hungarian dark comedy about life among a team of subway ticket inspectors. They are, generally, slackers in various shapes and sizes, and are essentially charged with ensuring everyone riding the train has a ticket. Of course they have no real power to enforce the rules, other than threats, and they are defied at every turn by moronic commuters of all sorts. They form cliques to guard against the disdain of the world. They engage in shadowy after-hours shenanigans. Essentially, it is a comic window on an undistinguished little subculture built on a pointless dead end service job. Set the scene, add a love interest, a serial killer, and stir vigorously. A nicely done take on the genre. Funny, engaging and entertaining. It's also a cute novelty to see another country's take on honoring their unambitious serving class.
President Last Bang is another black comedy, this time Korean and dramatizing the final day of President Park Chung Hee who was assassinated by the head of the Korean CIA in 1979. Park is portrayed as a letch and his cronies are ass-kissing cretins. The decision to kill the president is spur of the moment. The head of the KCIA makes noises about a goal of preserving democracy, but it is clear he is simply annoyed and disgusted from serving with these idiots and, frankly, he's having a bad day. The act itself as an exercise in bungled confusion and only succeeds because the security forces more confused and inept than the assassins. Comedy is mixed with chaos and violence. The effect is almost surreal.
The film works especially well because no characters are shown as irredeemable. The KCIA head seems like a decent person who is wounded by the shameful duties of his job, but also a deep cynic. His aid is a first class douchebag, but he has had to suffer constant physical and mental abuse from his superiors. The president is a dirtbag, but at the moment he is about to be killed he looks into his assassin's face not with cowardice or defiance, but befuddlement. I don't know how factual this portrayal actually is, but it strikes me as the sort of film that will define the event going forward in the popular mind.
Lives of Others is a German thriller set in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall. No comedy here. This is the story of a Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi agent assigned to monitor the activities of a dissident playwright and his actress wife. Wiesler is a dour, lonely man leading an empty, loveless life. As he listens in and follows the couple he is assigned to, he becomes more and more attached to them and sympathetic to their lives. Events lead to him being ordered to destroy the lives and work of the couple he now cares for. He does everything in his power to avoid doing so. He lies and falsifies documents to the extent he feels safe doing so. He manipulates events to whatever extent he can, but in the end he has no choice but to break the actress during an interrogation under the eye of his superior. Still, he makes one last desperate and futile act to prevent their total destruction.
In the end he succeeds, marginally, but for his trouble he becomes suspect himself and gets assigned to the Stasi mailroom doing pointless unimportant tasks. Redemption only comes some years later after the Wall comes down.
William F. Buckley declared this film to be the greatest ever made, which is overstating the case a bit. But it is certainly a profound piece of work. For most people, the picture of resistance to the East German regime probably contains a picture of an earnest Solzhenitsyn-esque protestor diligently and famously fighting the good fight, getting imprisoned and tortured but never giving in, sacrificing all liberty and life itself for a higher cause. But the majority of people in the world are not of that stripe. The majority are not ready or brave or unselfish enough to completely sacrifice the one life they have to a cause, however worthy. But maybe they would make the safe compromises and take the small risks to save someone here or there. Were I to be caught in a similar situation, I have no illusion that I would be a Solzhenitsyn, but I hope I would at least be a Wiesler.
