Ha Thanh Spetlíková in “Miss Hanoi.” credit: filmer.cz
Zdenek Viktora is a Czech writer who has done a fair amount of TV work, and has moved into directing feature films. Like his first feature, Raluca (2014), his newest film shown here, Miss Hanoi (Czech Republic, 2018) is a contemporary crime story with some nicely bleak film noir touches. This criminal investigation takes place in the impressively large Vietnamese district just outside of Prague; Anh (a nice leading turn from Ha Thanh Spetlíková) is a young Vietnamese policewoman being shown the investigatory ropes by her fatherly mentor, the Police Chief Doubrava (Miroslav Hruska). A few years ago, her good friend Hien (My Pham) was raped and beaten to death soon after winning a beauty pageant, and the convicted perpetrator has just been released from prison. But soon after his reappearance his body is found hanging in the woods. Is it revenge for his crime, or is someone cutting off a long-missed path of inquiry?
Eventually Anh, given little credit by her fellow Czechs, viewed with suspicion by her Vietnamese friends and family, and with little if any help from a coarse and clumsy outside investigator named Kriz (David Novotný), discovers a series of secrets that influenced, and perhaps distorted, the original investigation. Zdenek Viktora’s film is well-presented, but its clash-of-cultures specifics, interesting as they are, can’t make up for what is essentially a big-screen version of a good episode of Law & Order. You won’t be sorry you saw it, but by itself I can’t recommend it, either.
Laila Hennessy in “Tower. A Bright Day.” credit: mediamove.pl
A film I can heartily recommend, however, is the beautiful and disturbing Tower. A Bright Day (Wieza. Jasny Dzien) (Poland, 2017) from promising young polish director Jagoda Szelc. Her first feature concerns a family gathering to celebrate the first communion of Nina (Laila Hennessy). Her parents, Michal (Rafal Cieluch) and Mula (Anna Krotoska) live in a small rural town with Mula’s infirm mother Ada (Anna Zubrzycki) and have invited along Mula’s brother and sister-in-law Andrzej and Anna, as well as Mula’s sister Kaja (Malgorzata Szczerbowska). Kaja may not be long past institutionalization of some sort, and she shares a profound secret with Mula and Michal. Mula lays down some behavioral rules for Kaja to follow, and Kaja is amiably agreeable, though there’s still a haunted unsteadiness to her demeanor. The family gathers, the celebrations commence, the kids play the day away in the large yard and nearby woods and all seems right with the world. But there’s an unspoken tension between Mula and Kaja. Ada, out of nowhere, becomes surprisingly lucid and active, and unpredictably joins in the festivities. Meanwhile, the minister at the church, usually reliable if mildly eccentric, starts faltering, becoming confused in the children’s classes and even forgetting parts of the mass. The family is full of tiny little rituals, not uncommon, but subtly emphasized here. Eventually, with some filmmaking-craft-assistance, we become aware of far deeper forces affecting, or even controlling, the events we’re witnessing; the elemental feminine, the indifferent, sometimes darker, whims of nature and the wild, the graciousness, or subversion, of religion and ethics. Nothing escalates or distracts, but it’s all insistently there.
Przemyslaw Brynkiewicz is Szelc’s cinematographer, and he’s very good, but it’s all being guided by the director’s firm vision. She borrows some tropes from j-horror – sudden edits, super-shallow depth-of-focus, the soundtrack of enhanced diegetic sounds and Teoniki Rozynek’s electronic musical score – but her taste and subtlety in employing these tools is uncanny. You’ll be talking about the final scenes of this one long after you’ve left the theater, and Poland is not going to be able to keep Jagoda Szelc to themselves much longer. Her newest film, Monument (Poland, 2018), opens in Poland this month, and I can’t wait to see it. This film, however, is a Must-See.
“Tower. A Bright Day” screens on Sunday, March 10th at 3:15 pm and Monday the 11th at 8:00 pm.
Periscope In The Bathtub 