The Weekly Gravy #175

Salt for Svanetia/Соль Сванетии/Sol’ Svanetii (1930) – ***½

CW: child death; animal cruelty.

I might’ve come to Mikhail Kalatozov earlier than any other Soviet director. His last film, the international co-production The Red Tent, was an early favorite of mine (I really need to rewatch and review it), even though I’ve only seen the international release print and not the original cut, which runs over half an hour longer and has a different score. But through VideoHound, I learned about his penultimate film, I Am Cuba (coming soon from Criterion), and I would later learn about his two films before that, his Palme d’Or-winning The Cranes are Flying and The Letter Never Sent, which like The Red Tent deals with survival in a remote locale.

At the other end of his career was this docudrama, set in the Svanetia region of northwestern Georgia. In an isolated valley is the village of Ushkul (Ushguli), marked by the long-standing towers which allow them to fight off invading forces – like the local barons who try to bleed them dry via taxation. The Revolution has hardly reached these people, but neither has the 20th century.

Their lives are marked by old customs and traditions, some worthy – their long-practiced methods of spinning yarn, their enduring architecture – and some archaic, as when a wealthy man dies, a pregnant woman is cast out during his funeral because to give birth during a funeral is “unclean,” and while she cries out for water and must squeeze milk from her breast to anoint the grave of her dead child, the wealthy man’s relatives sacrifice an ox, drive a horse to death, and guzzle water or wine with no thought for how much they spill.

Their lives are also marked by tedious labor and the barest of comfort. Thanks to the elevation, they can only grow barley, and to make even the simplest food it must be ground by an ox-pulled sledge, then threshed and winnowed by hand. The grinding sequence does feature one of the film’s few jokes, as the weary woman who rides on the sledge whilst rocking her newborn in a cradle must leap up to thrust a spade under an ox as it defecates – can’t waste good manure, after all.

Nor can they waste salt, and salt is very, very hard to come by in Ushkul. For the humans, it has to be brought in via the treacherous mountain passes which are the only way in or out; for the animals (at one point a cow “calls” for salt), it can be found by lapping up the humans’ urine (a funny scene) or by licking the blood off a newborn child (a disturbing scene). I’d argue The Towers of Ushkul would be a more fitting title, but the desperate need for salt is certainly a significant part of the film.

So is the treachery of nature; a sudden snowstorm in the middle of summer nearly destroys Ushkul’s barley crop, and later an avalanche kills many of the working men of the village, who’d left to find work and were just returning with the precious salt. Small wonder, then, that the women of Ushkul cry out in despair, lamenting the prospect of bringing children into so miserable a world. If the film ended there, it’d be one of the biggest downers I’d ever seen.

This being a Soviet film of the period, however, we suddenly see a valiant young man calling out to Svanetia, and teams of laborers using pickaxes and dynamite to carve roads out of the mountains, and axes to clear a path through the forests, all to build a highway to Svanetia and bring them into the present day, thanks to the first Five-Year Plan. The road isn’t even finished, but it hasn’t been five years yet.

The sudden burst of propagandistic informercial at the end is a touch jarring, but Kalatozov has moved between ethnographic observation, odd humor, harrowing tragedy, and obviously staged but stunningly composed images for the last 45 minutes or so. (The film runs between 47 and 52 minutes, depending on the version available.) The thesis can be somewhat muddled, and apparently the powers that be weren’t too happy with the finished product, but the film remains of considerable interest for other reasons.

Chief among them is the cinematography, which is simply astounding. Whether it’s a beautifully framed image of trekkers on a mountain ridge, a low-angled portrait of an anxious mother barely clinging onto her infant, a vertiginous camera movement evoking stones being thrown from the towers, or that heartbreaking image of a mourning mother squeezing the milk from her breast, the film is magnificent to look at.

So it would be if it simply focused on the ruggedly beautiful scenery and those amazing towers, which thankfully still stand. The factual value of the film can be debated, as can its real value as propaganda; aside from the gut-wrenching funeral sequence, it doesn’t come near the greatness of, say, The Battleship Potemkin. But it’s impressive enough and brief enough to be worth seeing, and while the version on Kanopy looks somewhat rough, it has a very fine score by Zoran Borisavljevic; sync that to one of the better restorations on YouTube and you’ll be set.

Score: 82

Nimona (2023) – ***½

Oscar Nomination: Best Animated Feature

So begins my journey through the Oscar-nominated films I haven’t seen. The specialty categories (International Film, Animated Feature, and Documentary Feature) account for the majority of them, and some titles are easier to come by than others. Thanks to Netflix, this is one of the easiest – and thanks to Disney, it was produced by Annapurna Pictures and released by Netflix in the first place, and thanks to associated corporate entanglements, it’s opening three years after its original release date.

But it received critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination (and a whopping nine Annie nominations), so all’s well that ends well, yes? Not quite – Blue Sky Studios was shuttered during the film’s lengthy gestation, adding another layer of bittersweetness to a film full of it. Still, the film is here for all to see, and it’s been well received.

For the most part, it deserves that as well. I wasn’t so sure initially; although I was reasonably interested in the journey of knight-errant Ballister Boldheart, the first commoner to achieve knightly status in the history of the Institute, and was intrigued by the setting, a land which combined medieval values and aesthetics with futuristic technology, I wasn’t quite sold on Nimona.

That’s not a knock on Chloë Grace Moretz’s vocal performance so much as the writing (and to a degree the animation) which have Nimona (who seems to have come from a Hot Topic in the mid Aughts) firing off cheerfully misanthropic quips and zipping around such that Ballister’s head starts to spin. Frankly, I shared in his exasperation, but after being framed for the murder of his queen, Ballister is in dire need of allies – even his boyfriend, Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang) is hesitant to go against the Institute – and Nimona, seeing him as a super-villain in the making, is eager to be his sidekick.

However, as their journey progresses and we learn about Nimona’s long and unhappy past – and both her ability to shape-shift and her feeling more at peace when she’s free to – the film settles down and allows us to appreciate the characters and the messaging. The fear others feel for Nimona, and the distrust they feel at her ability to change form, is a clear allegory for transphobia – and ND Stevenson, who wrote the source novel, is non-binary and transmasculine – while the scenes where children display the same prejudice as their elders are a pretty devastating example of how such values are internalized and perpetuated.

Add to that the unassuming depiction of Ballister and Ambrosius’ romance and you’ve got a film which is heartening and valuable, all the more so as transphobic legislation is being passed around the country and the world. Moreover, we simply come to really care about Nimona, her friendship with Ballister, and her private battle with the values this land is literally built on. It uses fantasy and fairytale tropes thoughtfully – my opinion of it has improved, sitting here writing my review.

That doesn’t mean it’s a great film. The actual story is still heavy on tropes; for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I’ll simply say that other animated films of the last decade have deployed a lot of its story beats as well or better. The villain, when they make themselves known, is somewhat thin, and the more we learn about Nimona, the less her initial characterization makes sense.

The animation – 2D computer animation, for the most part – is generally pleasant to look at, the music is lively, Moretz is suitably spunky and sensitive as Nimona, and Ahmed is likably overwhelmed as Ballister. There are some really funny moments courtesy of their contrasting energies, and some deeply moving ones as they come up against the ingrained cruelties of their world. For me, it’s not the best animated film of the year, but for younger viewers, it should work like a charm.

Score: 83

The Zone of Interest (2023) – ****

Oscar Nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Sound, Best International Film

(I rewatched the film several weeks later and offer my additional thoughts here.)

This was the big film I hadn’t seen as of Tuesday morning. I figured it would be in for most of these awards, but A24 held off on releasing it in my area until after the nominations. Fair enough; it’s not the kind of film that would necessarily do well without the attendant boost. But it’s not the kind of film that would necessarily earn the Academy’s approval; director Jonathan Glazer has only come near the Oscars once, when his first feature Sexy Beast got a Supporting Actor nomination for Ben Kingsley.

It’s also not the kind of film that would necessarily work for me; I wasn’t a great fan of Sexy Beast outside of Kingsley and I cooled considerably on Glazer’s Under the Skin on a second viewing. (I haven’t seen Birth.) I’ve found his films visually compelling, but his detached, elliptical approach to narrative and character, especially in Under the Skin, left me cold.

I can’t say that Zone made a Glazer fan of me, but it works far better for me than Skin. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) is the commandant of Auschwitz. He lives in a house just on the other side of the camp walls with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) and their five children. He runs the camp with great efficiency; we see him meeting with industrialists about a new crematorium that will allow them to dispose of their victims at the rate of thousands a day.

Hedwig has devoted considerable effort into making the house a home; she takes particular pride in showing off the extensive garden to her mother (Imogen Kogge). She also takes pleasure in ill-gotten gains; we see her trying on a new fur coat, and when she finds a tube of lipstick in the pocket (and tries that too) we realize that the coat belonged to one of the camp’s victims.

They try to live an ordinary life, and in their minds they may be doing so, but everything is refracted through the prism of the atrocities literally next door. Hedwig rebukes one of her maids with a threat: “My husband could have your ashes spread across the fields.” One of the children plays with gold teeth taken from camp victims. A dip in the nearby river is disrupted by the careless disposal of human remains. Hedwig and her mother wonder about whether a Jewish acquaintance is at the camp, and what she and her family were “up to” – “Bolshevik stuff,” “Jewish stuff,” they conclude.

Rudolf is temporarily transferred to Berlin to oversee the whole network of camps; Hedwig refuses to be uprooted and stays behind with the children. After being tasked with the genocide of Hungary’s Jews – named Operation Höss – Rudolf calls Hedwig to let her know he’s coming home. He also tells her that he went to a party and thought about how he might gas the guests. She doesn’t bat an eye.

Up to this point, at least in the viewing, I got the film, I got what it was going for, but I didn’t feel a great deal. I’m certainly aware of the notion of the banality of evil, and the juxtaposition of the Höss’ domestic order with the sounds – and for the most part only the sounds – of the camp’s operations played more on the level of an art installation than a film. Friedel and Hüller are both quite good, but Glazer’s objectivity, his preference for simply watching the characters, often from a slight distance, made for a film that was more often cold than truly chilling.

There’s no question it’s extremely well crafted. Łukasz Żal’s cinematography is perfectly in tune with Glazer’s vision (the night scenes are especially fine), Paul Watts’ editing keeps the detached tone from growing tedious (and at times evokes security footage), Mica Levi’s sparsely used score effectively combines ambient drones and guttural bleats, and the much-vaunted sound design, while perhaps slightly overhyped, does effectively convey the horrors we know are just out of sight.

But it wasn’t until the final moments that the film really cemented itself as a great one, first with the singularly disturbing sound of Höss’ retching, reminding me of The Act of Killing, as Anwar Congo involuntarily and viscerally responds to the knowledge that he committed heinous deeds. But then comes the masterstroke, as we get a glimpse of the present, as the camp, now a museum, is prepared for visitors by the janitorial staff.

The commission of atrocities, especially in a system like Auschwitz, behooves one to be detached and desensitized, as the Höss family and most of their friends and colleagues seem to be. (Hedwig’s mother seems to be an exception.) But does it not behoove one who lives with the aftermath – say, someone who has to sweep out the gas chambers, or polish the glass behind which lies a mountain of shoes, or vacuum the floor in front of a display case of looted luggage – to desensitize themselves as well? Does it not behoove us, knowing about all the horrors of history, to desensitize ourselves, just enough to get through the day?

But even in the midst of that great evil, there are reminders of humanity. The Höss’ new baby cries constantly. Höss himself cannot repress that retching. Hedwig’s mother cannot sleep for the sight of flames and smoke in the distance. And in striking photo-negative scenes, we see a girl hiding fruit for the camp laborers under the cover of night, and discovering a tune, written by an inmate, and playing it on the piano, the words she does not speak aloud flickering by in subtitles:

Sunbeams, radiant and warm

Human bodies, young and old

And who are imprisoned here

Our hearts are yet not cold…

“Sunbeams,” Joseph Wulf

Score: 87