In June, I challenged myself to watch at least one movie from each nation participating in the periodic regional soccer tournament. There are no rules for this challenge regarding genre or era; the only requirement is that the audio or subtitles be in English or German.
Ukraine: The Diviners (2019)
takflix, original Ukrainian and Russian with English subtitles
The only film on Netflix looked boring, and arte offered nothing but news. After a bit of investigation, I found an “exclusive VOD streaming service to watch Ukrainian films, hand-picked by our curators” that offers some films with English subtitles. Part of the proceeds go directly to Ukrainian filmmakers, and since the Russian invasion, part go to a charity that supports the Ukrainian armed forces. For this project, I went straight to the free films and most of them are recent short films about the war. I understand and appreciate what they’re trying to do there, but I need a break from difficult themes.
From the description (“drama”) I expected this one to be a story, but it’s a collection of Tiktok-style vignettes filmed around the cities of Kyiv, Odesa, and Lviv. People riding the train, enjoying a nude beach, scrolling their phones, beating the crap out of a drunk (so much for avoiding difficult themes), arguing about politics, and all interspersed with video still-lifes. Some people obviously knew they were being filmed, and some–high, or mentally ill, or both–seem oblivious, and Low-budget–the sound is crappy, you can hear the wind rushing through the microphone like on my cell-phone videos–and campy, and surreal.
The thread that seems to tie it all together is the filmmaker’s sense of being Ukrainian, and this is often shown without words by finding objects or lighting striped in the blue and yellow of their flag. I don’t know what to make of this film; it was interesting enough but I would rather have been told a narrative story with characters.
Belgium: Brabançonne (Belgian Rhapsody) (2014)
Netflix, original Flemish with English subtitles
Most of the Belgian films on Netflix looked as depressing as Brugge, die Stille, so even though I don’t really care for musicals, I was happy to find one in Flemish (every 8th word sounds like heavily-accented German or an English word with French roots, huh). Even better, between the silly singing about love was a story about two village brass bands–one Flemish, one Walloon–competing for a European brass band title. The music and the practices/contests brought back a lot of memories from middle school and high school; there were even some of the same jokes. In the middle, there’s a love story between the Walloon trumpet soloist and the daughter of the Flemish conductor, who is scheduled to marry the lazy golf-obsessed son of her father’s corporate sponsor.
Netflix still hasn’t fixed their “subtitles shut off when the characters switch to English” problem, and the European “all walls must be these specific shades of blue and yellow” plague is older than I thought. But it was light and entertaining.
Romania: Povestea unui pierde-vara (The Story of a Summer Lover) (2018)
Netflix, original Romanian with English subtitles
The movie opens with Petru, a forty-ish university math instructor, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes with his two best friends, a sci-fi novelist and a stage actor, discussing how to create commercially successful art vs good art (I was reminded of Big Eyes), and I was intrigued. Then it devolved into a Woody Allen-esque examination of Petru’s neuroses. He’s banging young students, and ready to break up with his “friends with benefits” grad-school lover when she reveals she is pregnant. He waits until after she has an abortion to tell her he would like to form a relationship and a family with her. At the same time he’s considering banging the young student he’s tutoring for free. This is all discussed in great detail with his friends–the writer is taking notes to turn him into a story–endlessly over beer and cigarettes. It felt uncomfortably familiar, like maybe I saw the same characters in a 90s movie–aha! It’s High Fidelity, without the music. Or comedy.
In my post-watch research, I stumbled onto a professional review that suggests “slacker” would be a better translation than “lover”, and that made sense. Petru never takes any decisive action–not in pursuing either woman, not in removing the pigeons roosting under the eaves of his house, not even in ordering a tea at a fancy tea house–and lets the people around him choose the course of his life. (Spoiler? The story ends with his writer friend complain that Petru wasted two months of his life refusing to moving the story forward into a novel people who want to buy.)
Mildly interesting: All the names of the assorted STDs Petru wanted to be tested for are basically the same in Romanian as English and German. The day wasn’t wasted–I learned something.
Slovakia: Little Kingdom (2019)
Netflix, original English
Yeah, English–three of the four main characters are played by actors from the US, the UK, and Sweden. English is the Lingua Franca of 21st-century Europe, and this entertains me to no end. Anyway, this WWII story could have happened in any village in the Nazi-aligned former Yugoslavia region, or France, or Norway, or….
During an evening in a brothel, soldier Jack deserts his unit and returns to his wife Eva, who has written to tell him their baby has died. She’s working at a munitions factory, run by a man sucking up to the regime with an eye on postwar contracts. Jack takes over her job, and she focuses on starting their family anew. Meanwhile, the factory owner agrees to marry the resistance-affiliated mistress of a Nazi official, to keep her safe from his cronies, I guess. She and Jack recognize each other from the brothel, and settle on a Mutually Assured Destruction treaty. Meanwhile there’s a couple different unrequired love and blackmail attempts going on, between scenes of coercive violence and domestic abuse, and some hard scenes when one of Eva’s friends receives word her husband has been killed in Russia.
No happy endings for anyone, except maybe Eva’s second baby. The film ends shortly after his birth.
It wasn’t a bad film, just dark and depressing, and I needed three Rick and Mortys to reset my brain. This is why I was trying to avoid WWII films in this project.
There was a cute teddy bear. I’ll leave you with that.
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