SARAJEVO (Das Attentat: Sarajevo 1914, 2014)

The U.S. will soon observe the centennial of its entry into World War I. With that in mind, Netflix is currently streaming Andreas Prochaska's Austro-Czech TV film, which looks to be the JFK of World War I movies. It's about the investigation by Austrian authorities in Sarajevo, the capital of Austrian-ruled Bosnia, of the assassination there of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The Archduke and his wife were killed on the second try that day by Serbian nationalists. Holding the Kingdom of Serbia responsible for their action, Austria issued an ultimatum most observers feel was designed to be rejected so that the Hapsburg empire, backed by Germany, could invade Serbia. Historians are certain that rogue elements within the Serbian government, if not the government itself, supported the conspiracy, but the assassination, given its world-historical consequences, has been an overdue target for more creative conspiracy theorists. Why, they might ask, was the Archduke allowed back on the street after the first assassination attempt, a bombing, failed? Why did the second motorcade seem to stop right in front of Gavrilo Princip, the gunman who succeeded where the bomber failed? And why would any Serbians carry out a conspiracy that amounted to national suicide?

The assassin's creed: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

Prochaska and writer Martin Ambrosch go for the solution that probably seems most obvious to the modern conspiracist. Since Austria's ultimatum seemed to show that they were spoiling for war, might they not have tried to create a pretext for war themselves? Franz Ferdinand was a controversial figure thought to desire greater rights for the empire's ethnic minorities; that would make him expendable, presumably, to some in the Hapsburg establishment. But according to Ambrosch the ultimate motive is more venal. Investors wanted to build a railroad linking Germany to the farther reaches of the Ottoman Empire, reaching from Berlin to Bagdad. To be feasible the road would have to go through Serbia. Better than if Serbia were subject to the German powers in Berlin and Vienna. Serbs had reasons of their own to lash out at Austria -- they resented the perceived subjugation of fellow Serbs through the Austrian annexation of Bosnia in 1908 -- but given how obvious it now seems that Austria would punish Serbia with war, the Serbs can only seem patsies furthering what looks like an Austrian or German agenda.

A mere functionary like Leo Pfeffer can be told what to think; he has less luck convincing others.

So it comes to seem to Leo Pfeffer (Florian Teichtmeister), the magistrate put in charge of the initial investigation. He comes under increasing pressure to produce a report blaming the Serbian government as soon as possible, as if a timetable had already been determined. But as Pfeffer sees the apparent implausibilities in the events as they played out, and as he falls in love with the daughter of a Serbian industrialist who has fallen under suspicion, he begins to stall for time to get at the truths that his superiors seem increasingly uninterested in learning. As he keeps raising questions, and keeps pressuring Princip and the other Serb prisoners to tell all they know, he is made more conscious of his outsider status as a Jew who's in love with a Serb. Pfeffer was a real person who isn't highly thought of by historians who see him as an underqualified provincial. Das Attentat imagines a more conscientious Pfeffer who's forced to sign the required indictment of Serbia -- his motive here is to secure his lover's release from prison -- while continuing his own dogged quest for the truth to universal indifference. The filmmakers can change the historical Pfeffer, but their more heroic Pfeffer still can't change history. Teichtmeister gives a good slow-burn performance that permits some sympathetic suspension of disbelief as you hope he'll find something that might stop the war in its tracks. Inevitably Das Attentat must take the form of tragedy, and that tone seems appropriate to the tragic truth of the Great War, even if the filmmakers' historiography is unsound.

DAY OF THE SIEGE (2012)

In the U.S. Renzo Martinelli's would-be epic has the title of a generic war film. That probably infuriated a director who opened the film with a quote from 20th century French historian (and victim of the Nazis) Marc Bloch: "Misunderstanding of the present grows fatally from ignorance of the past." In Martinelli's home country, Day of the Siege is known as 11 Settembre 1683. On that day, the siege of Vienna by the Ottoman Turks was broken by an attack by a Polish army led by King Jan Sobieski. Martinelli's Italo-Polish production credits this rescue of Christendom from the last great Islamic military assault to date to the Polish king (played by director Jerzy Skolimowski) and an Italian friar, Marco d'Aviano (F. Murray Abraham), who was the spiritual adviser to the Emperor of Austria. The Poles, presumably having less of an agenda, or more likely seeing an existential threat coming from a different direction, call this movie The Battle of Vienna. For Martinelli and his writers, however, the immediate agenda is Islamophobic, though their hackneyed commitment to the conventions of historical drama, and perhaps a degree of good taste, make the film less of a hatefest than it could have been.

In 1683 Islam was on the march again, the Turks' ultimate goal being to turn St. Peter's in Rome into a mosque. The Sultan entrusts his grand vizier Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso) to take the Hapsburg capital. Friar Marco, first seen in Venice almost reluctantly healing the blind, goes to Vienna to stiffen Austrian resolve and convince the haughty Hapsburgs to accept the aid of the Poles and their upstart King, whom the Austrians see as a social inferior. With the Poles finally on board Sobieski insures ultimate Christian victory by defying Kara Mustafa's expectation and dragging artillery up a steep mountain to a commanding position from which he can soften up the Turkish position before scattering it with the cavalry charge of his dreaded winged hussars.

 

Above: a Muslim's nightmare vision of a Christian army.

Below: the badass reality of the winged hussars

Martinelli -- last noticed here as the auteur of the boxing biopic Carnera: The Walking Mountain -- felt it necessary to add human interest to this epic subject. He does this in two ways. First, his writers invent a sort of relationship between Friar Marco and Kara Mustafa in order to justify a meeting between his two main characters. When they were young men, Kara Mustafa while visiting Venice saved Marco's life from a falling piece of ship's cargo. As the Ottoman army nears Vienna and the two men become aware of each other's role, each grows curious to meet the other, but their fictional showdown is necessarily anticlimactic since it can't change the course of history. Meanwhile, a subplot focuses on an interfaith couple in a village Marco visits. The husband is a Muslim, the wife a Christian mute. As news of the Turkish invasion spreads, the villagers want to lynch Abul (Greek actor Yorgo Voyagis), but Marco intervenes to save him. He is repaid by Abul's flight to the Turkish lines, where he advises Kara Mustafa about the holy man on the Christian side. Later, after the invaders sack the village, Abul's wife is taken prisoner. He ignores her squawking, grunting pleas for rescue and allows her to be herded into a stockade with other women, presumably to be used for sex or sold as slaves, but he returns at night to arrange for her release. Later still, he appears at the gate of Vienna to urge the Austrians to save their bodies and souls by surrendering, converting to Islam or paying the tax required of People of the Book. Abul's story ends when, with the Turkish army in retreat, he covers Kara Mustafa's escape by putting on the vizier's armor and charging the Polish cavalry single-handedly. His pregnant wife is left weeping over his bullet-riddled corpse. This little story ends tragically, it seems, solely because Abul is a Muslim and Muslims can't change their stripes. Martinelli seems to want it both ways, catering to liberals by having Marco save Abul from a lynching, yet pandering to Islamophobia by showing that Abul couldn't be trusted after all. That's a provocatively mixed message to send to audiences in Europe, where anxiety about Muslims in their midst is much greater than it is in the U.S.

For what it's worth, the screenwriters take the position that Muslims worship a different God than Christians. This would be news to Muslims, who believe themselves the most authentic acolytes of the God of Abraham; their idea is that Islam is the default religion of that God from which Jews, despite Moses, and Christians, despite Jesus, have deviated in dangerous if not damning ways. Many Christians believe, however, that if Islam can't imagine God having a son, or if it insufficiently emphasizes loving fatherhood as a defining divine attribute, then Allah may as well be a fictional character Muhammad invented. That point aside, the script tries to score more points against Islam by having Friar Marco argue that "the one true God" does not demand submission -- which literally defines Islam -- but wants men to be free. That in turn would be news to countless people who've lived in Christian countries under the dominance of various Christian churches, but to be fair that's another story for other films. For now it's enough to note that despite some sketchy efforts to humanize the important Muslim characters (Kara Mustafa is shown as a doting father, for instance), Day of the Siege is indisputably an Islamophobic film, though not grotesquely so. You can't argue that any film showing Christians fighting Muslims is Islamophobic because I'll throw Kingdom of Heaven at you to stop that argument. What makes Day Islamophobic is its constant implication that permanent peace with Islam is impossible. There's no other way to interpret the Marc Bloch epigraph, while Kara Mustafa in the story warns Friar Marco that defeating Islam before Vienna would only be "trimming the Prophet's beard," i.e. a temporary setback. Don't get me wrong; there's plenty to object to about Islam, and more still about Islamism, but Day of the Siege strays into "all Muslims are a threat" territory, where we shouldn't really want or need to go no matter what our beefs are with specific Muslim goons today.

The film's Islamophobia could be redeemed if it inspired some epic action, but Martinelli's reach exceeds the grasp of his international budget. He can compose some impressive images on a relatively intimate scale, but the battle scenes upon which the film presumably depends constantly betray limitations on budget, technology and imagination. Martinelli has to rely on CGI reinforcements to supplement his extras. Worse, he resorts to CGI explosions and musketry along with repetitive, too-familiar shots of stuntmen flinging themselves from explosions. It may be unfair to bring up Kingdom of Heaven again, but that underrated picture has perhaps the best portrayal of siege warfare ever, while the battle scenes in Day of the Siege are actually some of the dullest parts of the film. Bad acting also undermines the picture. It was reportedly shot in English, but that appears to have left everyone (who wasn't dubbed afterward, that is) except Abraham at a disadvantage. Predictably enough, he alone brings any passion or power to his role, and if anything he might have shot for over-the-top more often. Only he comes close to the intensity the whole show needed badly, and that Martinelli may have felt while shooting it but doesn't really show on screen. The Siege of Vienna should be the stuff of thrilling cinema, but for that to happen someone will have to attack the subject again another time. Marc Bloch's advice might come in handy then.

On the Big Screen: AMOUR (2012)

It isn't exactly accurate to describe Michael Haneke's film as an unflinching look at aging and death. By my standard, Haneke does flinch near the end, opting for a sudden catharsis or climax rather than taking the ride to its proper end. The climax really makes Amour about something besides aging and death, but you'll have noticed that the film is titled neither Aging nor Death. That title may be a deliberate echo of the movie film buffs remembered octogenarian Best Actress nominee Emmanuelle Riva for before this one: Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. But while the Academy, always impressed by affliction, has recognized Riva, and quite rightly, the title really refers to the plight of her co-star and fellow Nouvelle Vague veteran Jean-Louis Trintignant. He plays the husband of Riva's stricken pianist, and his character faces the universal dilemma of what to do for, or about, a loved one who feels her life is over, no longer worth living, and who may be objectively correct. What you may have heard about Amour is that Haneke is unflinching in his depiction, and Riva in her portrayal, of the woman's physical, emotional and mental deterioration. That may have been confirmed subjectively by an overheard audience member who lamented that the film might make people want to slit their throats. It's tough material, sure, but some of us are made of tougher stuff than that. I was toughened by some personal experience of death and by reading Phillip Roth's last run of death-haunted novels. If you can stand Everyman ("Old age isn't a battle; it's a massacre.") you can deal with Amour, though the added visual element may make the movie more challenging. In fact, I'm tempted to say they should give Riva the Oscar for sheer fearlessness in doing a nude scene -- she's being washed by a nurse in a shower -- at age 85. What might make Amour even harder to take is that, while Roth told his late stories from the vantage of his faltering yet still basically sentient protagonists, Haneke compels you to empathize with someone watching a loved one irreversibly deteriorate. We're dealing with two kinds of helplessness, one of which can't be helped while the other always second guesses itself. The Trintignant character strives to normalize his and Riva's predicament, and the effort rings true. In part it's a vain hope that the situation will stabilize, that you'll reach a new normal and stay there, and in part the day-to-day adaptation is the new normal. You see that when Haneke contrasts Trintignant's exhausted calm with the horrified panic of Isabelle Huppert, playing the couple's daughter who only drops in occasionally and thus only sees a crisis. For those on the ground, a long dying does establish a normality that Haneke depicts with enough accuracy for Amour to live up to its advance notices. He does this so well that it seemed disappointingly predictable that he opted for shock. Even then, the climactic act raises fair questions in keeping with the overall theme and the title. Is it an act of love or a lapse from love? You'll have to see it to decide, but once you see it you should be able to appreciate either side of the question.

Amour is a sharply made movie that respects audiences' intelligence or assumes their understanding. Haneke steers clears of the sentimental cliches and many of the predictable signposts of most movies about dying, mainly because he isn't interested in acceptance or transcendence. He didn't make a tearjerker, though he recognizes that some may feel otherwise. He has Trintignant tell a story about seeing a sad movie as a child; as an old man, he doesn't remember what the movie was about, but he remembers being so moved by recounting the story to someone else that he cried during the telling. In another scene, Trintignant has a vision of a restored Riva playing her beloved piano. Haneke cuts from this vision to Trintignant appearing to see it. Your average director would next cut back to the piano and its empty bench, so all can understand that Trintignant was hallucinating or daydreaming. Haneke can do without this. We see a CD player working behind Trintignant, and we see him shut it off, and it's clear from that he was only hearing the music and imagining Riva healthy again. Another way he avoids sentiment is the absurd, Herzog-like denouement in which Trintignant chases a pigeon around the apartment, repeatedly trying to catch it by throwing a blanket on it. At almost the last moment you'll think that Haneke has finally succumbed, giving Trintignant one more vision of a revitalized Riva and making it look like the wife guiding the husband out of life. Very sad and very sweet, except for one thing -- and while I won't spoil the climax I'll spoil this: we never find out exactly what happens to the husband. You might assume that he's also died, but this is never confirmed. For all you know, he may have been taken away to just the sort of home that he'd promised to keep Riva away from. For all you know, that vision promises not transcendence but madness. Either way, it probably does illustrate love in a tragic way. My only problem with Amour is that its climax seems gratuitous rather than dramatically necessary. The picture doesn't need that extra bit of drama, but if Haneke's resort to it disappointed me it didn't really compromise the powerful overall effect of one of 2012's best films. It's a work of art worthy of its dread and ultimately humane subject.

LOURDES (2009)

The pilgrimage shrine at the spring where St. Bernadette is said to have seen the Virgin Mary, where the waters are reputed to have healing powers for the faithful, has been a ripe subject for satire almost from the beginning. In Austrian director Jessica Hausner Lourdes has found a relatively benign satirist. She avoids what might look like the obvious object of satire from the secular humanist perspective, the mythos of heavenly visitations and miraculous healings. Instead of an attack on faith and spirituality, Lourdes is a critique of the de-sacralization of the pilgrimage experience through custom, bureaucracy and commodification.

Hausner follows a tour group of pilgrims, who look much like any tour group found in any tourist trap, except for a disproportion of wheelchairs. They're thoroughly supervised, with the most handicapped assigned "helpers" who feed them and wheel them around if they haven't loved ones to do that for them. For the helpers, in many cases, working at Lourdes is just another job and not the most appealing among all those available to young people. For the clergy, too, a certain institutional cynicism sets in after a while. A priest tells this joke: Jesus, Mary and the Holy Spirit are discussing where to go on vacation this year. The Holy Spirit suggests Bethlehem and Jerusalem, but Jesus shoots down those ideas because they've gone to both places so often. How about Lourdes, then? The Blessed Virgin thinks that's a great idea -- "I've never been there before!"

One of our tour group is Christine (Sylvie Testud), who suffers from MS. She isn't the most enthusiastic or the most devout pilgrim, especially compared to her roommate, Frau Hartl (Gilette Barbier), who often proves more of a helper to Christine than the young woman who actually holds that job. The Lourdes environment isn't exactly conducive to spirituality, except perhaps for the most simplistically devout. Frau Hartl will make her devotions to a life-size Virgin statue in a hotel lobby, but pilgrims in town can pass souvenir shops filled with thousands of smaller-scale statues without batting an eye. If anything, the clergy seem determined to dampen expectations of miracles. We learn over the course of the film that the Church is actually admirably objective, though almost to a demoralizing degree, about appraising healings. They don't want to jump the gun before a relapse; to qualify as a miracle, a cure has to be permanent. As if to foreshadow the main event of the film, characters discuss a reputed recent miracle in which another MS patient rose and walked. A priest cautions them that with MS especially remissions and relapses are frequent.

Naturally, it's Christine who rises and walks. The news is received with skeptical tentativeness by the authorities, with reflected glory by some pilgrims, and with barely-concealed jealousy by others. The fortunate one gets a particularly dirty look from one mother whose daughter experienced a sort of near-miss earlier in the pilgrimage, recognizing and responding to her parent before lapsing back into unresponsiveness. The ways of God being, as ever, inscrutable, people wonder how Christine, of all pilgrims, deserves His grace. The mystery of His ways grows deeper as a helper suffers a seizure and is hospitalized, freeing up a spot for Christine, who had been disqualified earlier due to her disability, to go on the group's mountain-climbing trip. The group is eager, of course, to have their picture re-shot with an ambulatory Christine for the historical record. The lucky woman herself seems bemused rather than transfigured, and the story of her fellow-sufferer from the earlier pilgrimage clearly troubles her. Still, she takes advantage of every opportunity to climb mountains, dance with the uniformed male helpers and eat dessert with her own hands. Will it last? Christine takes a tumble on the dance floor, but she's still on her feet to accept the Best Pilgrim award at the end. Beyond that?...

Lourdes leaves the final answer ambiguous. To spoil things, it ends with Christine settling back into her wheelchair, which Frau Hartl has thoughtfully kept near, but that alone isn't enough for us to conclude that she'll never walk again. Taking her seat may be an act of simple weariness -- the spectacle of the helpers performing like asses at a final party is admittedly wearying -- or it may be a gesture of resignation. The most troubling thing about it is the sense that it doesn't matter one way or the other, to Christine or the other pilgrims. From a spiritual perspective, one of several from which viewers can choose, the message may be that the "miracle" itself doesn't matter, that there's no point to Christine staying on her feet because no one, her included, has responded to the healing with the appropriate reverence. An alternate message can be that Christine may as well sit down because the cure hasn't really changed the empty life to which she must return now that the pilgrimage is over. I don't find the ambiguity frustrating; it actually testifies to the subtle realism of Hausner's narrative. There may or may not have been a miracle, but Lourdes takes place in an environment where theme doesn't impose a single meaning on events.

Give our star a round of applause; Sylvie Testud, ladies and gentlemen!

Had this film been made in the United States, Sylvie Testud might have been a front-runner for the Oscar last year, since her role is what we tend to think of as awards-bait. I say "might have been" because she gives a nicely understated performance, unburdened by vocal tics or the need to give revelatory speeches, that might not have set off the Academy's master-thespian meter. As it is, Testud won a European Film Award for her trouble, which may prove that the less-is-more principle is appreciated somewhere.

The film itself plays out with commendable clarity, making its satirical points obviously enough but not blatantly. The nature of its satire reminded me a little of Robert Altman's movies, though Hausner does largely without the American's diffusive sprawl, keeping us consistently focused on Christine while emphasizing a few supporting characters enough to cinch the sense of a realistic social environment. Lourdes might have made a great subject for Altman (not to mention, closer to home, a subject for Jacques Tati), while the closest American equivalent to its concern with recovery and relapse is arguably Penny Marshall's Awakenings. Hausner's Lourdes is better than that and deserves some belated recognition in the U.S. as one of the better European films of the past year or so.