Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben)

Asghar Farhadi

Everybody Knows is a family story that, instead of introducing its world and characters or drawing a branchy family tree, throws the viewer right in the middle of the relationships between the family members and those who are close to them, and the yet unclear meanings that are bringing tension to these relationships. Farhadi is able to convey a very complex story with special attention and care. Each subsequent scene or dialogue makes the characters and their relationships more and more understandable for the viewer. The initial mess is gradually being sorted out, which, at some point, does not only justify the decisions and behavior of the characters but makes you see that in some cases there was no other choice. Just like the characters in the movie are being set up to do the detective work to find the 16-year-old Irene, the viewer has to do the detective work but extend it to the whole family. This is a film about getting to know, and at the end of the film, every glance you missed before is suddenly full of meaning. The viewer has become part of the depicted family. The viewer is drawn into it, although the fact who can be part of the family and who cannot, remains the leitmotif of the film. 4/5

The next screening of Everybody Knows is on November 27 at 7 p.m. at Tartu Cinamon.

Climax

Gaspar Noé

A visual and sometimes even lethargic mishmash, which is the opposite of boys-in-the-one-corner-girls-in-the-other type of parties. However, the attention of the viewer may move away from the individual well-composed aspects and get stuck into the empty dialogue and stereotypical and even banal plot. The movie takes most of its clichés from American teenage comedies (see party, sex, dance, finding yourself or your place among other people, alcohol, characters’ naive future dreams, boys’ and girls’ talk over opposite sex, an innocent child who accidentally happens to be at the party and who is often someone’s little brother or sister, in case of Climax, it’s a child of one of the characters) and mixes them with elements characteristic to the horror genre (death of an unborn baby, super bad trip, burning hair, self-harm, rape, beating, incest, child death, suicide). If you add to this Noé’s roller coaster visuals, which are so overacted that it creates the feeling that Noé is a mediocre imitator of his own style, it ends up being a compote that can only be eaten on the eater’s own responsibility. 1/5

The next screening of Climax is on December 1 at 10 p.m. at Solaris Apollo Cinema.

Shoplifters (Manbiki Kazoku)

Hirokazu Kore-eda

This is a film that, in addition to its several significant awards, is famous because the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe doesn’t like it. If Abe mostly disapproves the fact that Japan which is known for its cult of success is given a low-life look here, depicting characters who are sincere and humane despite their poverty and social problems, Shoplifters would probably be disapproved in the same vein by Viktor Orbán, or in the Estonian context by Helmes, Vooglaids and Järvis. Kore-eda shows great social sensitivity in order to portray a story of a family that does not qualify as a family for many people. He plays with a thought of an untraditional family, which, in addition to topics such as stealing and teaching how to steal, reveals the family values that have disappeared in the Japanese society. The film shows that blood is never thicker than water because if there’s something that really ties people together, it is the attention that they give to each other. 4/5

The next screening of Shoplifters is on December 2 at 3.15 p.m. at Cinema Sõprus.