Year-End Lightning Round (Part 2) (Patreon)

Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)

One would have to be heartless not to be affected by the story of Amin, an Afghan refugee who endured years of terror and anxiety in his effort to survive. Before finally arriving in Denmark (courtesy of a comparatively less venal human trafficker), he lost contact with his family for years and felt compelled to deny their very existence. Since some people still need to be convinced that refugees are human beings and not an invading horde of global refuse, films like Flee certainly have a job to do.

Having said all that, Rasmussen appears so committed to honoring Amin's story that he barely attempts to shape it into a film. We are never outside of Amin's perspective, which means that the broader context shaping his circumstances (e.g., Afghanistan's Soviet-era communist government and its treatment of the citizenry, relative to the hard-line, proto-Taliban Mujahideen) is seen only fleetingly, as it is perceived by the young Amin in passing. And while it probably seems insensitive to complain that Amin's experiences lacked a story arc, Flee is very much a "this-happened-and-then-this-happened" proposition, with limited artistic embellishment. Rasmussen might have productively explored Amin's struggle with trauma and memory, but this is merely literalized, with Amin shown, eyes closed, working to remember. As for the decision to animate the film, while it has a practical purpose (disguising the identity of Amin and his family), it never really becomes a creative tool for the director. If we are somehow meant to simply be surprised and intrigued by the fact that Flee is animated, well, considering the existence of films like Persepolis, Waltz With Bashir, and Tower, that's just no longer possible.

Belfast (Kenneth Branagh, 2021)

I gave up on this one after 40 minutes. You know, just because you're making a film centered on the point of view of a child, that doesn't mean it should actually appear to have been written and directed by a child. The film Belfast most superficially resembles, John Boorman's wonderful Hope and Glory, consistently places its young protagonist's perceptions within an overt framework of remembrance and retrospection, asking us to consider the boy's narration as unreliable, or at least distracted by the unavoidable business of growing up. 

By contrast, Belfast opens with an obscenely idyllic neighborhood fantasia, with young Buddy (Jude Hill) ecstatically playing dragons-and-damsels with the other kids, as cheerful Protestants and Catholics from central casting smile and wave, behaving like they are all on the verge of breaking into song. And then, perfectly art-directed explosions and rioting disrupt poor Buddy's childhood innocence, as the crisp black-and-white cinematography assures us that such sectarian nonsense is safely in the past. There is no Ulster Defense League or IRA here, just some local hooligans who, were it not for the Troubles, would be shaking down the local kids for lunch money.

In other words, Belfast presents a sort of Disneyland dark-ride version of Northern Ireland in the 1960s, its commitment to wide-eyed innocence yielding pseudo-humanist pabulum whose simplicity purports to speak for us all. Or, as Boy George once put it, "war, war is stupid." And people are stupid. (Belfast: 2021 TIFF Audience Award.)