Scorched Earth <img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star--v1.png"/>

Scorched Earth

Screening at the German Film Festival 2024, Scorched Earth is a belated part two of a proposed trilogy from writer/director, Thomas Arslan. It sees career crim, Trojan (Mišel Matičević) back in Berlin after a decade or so away. Apparently, a botched robbery in 2010s In the Shadows forced him to exile himself for a time, but now pickings are getting slimmer, so back to the capital he goes.

An opening sequence of watchful professionalism explains the character of Trojan - he's careful and succinct, unflappable even. This is displayed when the broker for his latest burglary tries to do him like a kipper and make off with the stolen watches. Of course, Trojan's having none of this, and quickly gets on top of the situation. Unfortunately, this leaves him with some hot gear and no real way to maximise his profits, hence the Berlin return.

On arrival, he looks up old contacts in an attempt to find work. An offer to steal a Caspar David Friedrich painting is made by Rebecca, middle-woman in a 'business consultancy', and he agrees to go along with it. As this is a crime thriller genre pic, thrills are required and the menace is supplied by the client's hired muscle, Victor (Alexander Fehling). The client himself starts the ball rolling by straight-up refusing to pay the robbers for their job - but he still wants the painting. Rich is as rich does. Trojan and his crew - old mate, Luca (Tim Seyfi), driver Diana (Marie Leuenberger) and IT guy Chris (Bilge Bingül) - must stay ahead of the caper and try to move this painting on, all the while avoiding probable pain, possible death.

The whole cast is suitably grim and moody, though there is one moment of light humanity between Trojan and Diana where they discuss their downtime away from crime. The representation of a lifestyle that must be extremely hard to manage is well explored by everyone - for example, Trojan has no fixed abode, moving from hotel to hotel, and Luca paints a target on his back by letting us know this is his 'one last job' before he straightens up and joins his wife in their restaurant business.

The dourness is reinforced by the fact that most of the action either takes place at night or on overcast days - there's very little brightness in this setting, mirroring the path these people have taken. It's a solid, if unspectacular crime drama, well directed and performed with just the right amount of cool.

Scorched Earth is screening at the HSBC German Film Festival at Luna and Palace cinemas until June 5.

See also:

I'm keen on seeing Arslan's earlier film with Mišel Matičević as Trojan to flesh out this story more - In the Shadows (2010). This might be a long bow to draw but some bits of this felt similar to the Coens' No Country for Old Men (2007).

Comments

It Was Just an Accident

The latest from Iranian director Jafar Panahi is a simple, yet brilliant story of a chance encounter with a bastard from the past that oscillates between revenge and forgiveness. We start on an almost uncomfortably close mid-shot of a man and a woman driving at night. They run over a stray dog and the mother explains to her daughter that it was just an accident, setting the stage for other events that may or may not have been accidental. Panahi fills the frame with his protagonists, faces, mostly in states of distress, to the extent that when the screen opens up to show a man digging a makeshift grave in a long shot with vast, lumpy hills in the distance, it's a massive relief of tension. This man is Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who thinks he has stumbled upon Eghbal, (A.K.A. Peg Leg or the Gimp) (Ebrahim Azizi), an Iranian intelligence agent who tortured him years ago. Doubt forces Vahid to enlist other victims to help identify Peg Leg, before any retribution is taken. The film is rid...

Wake Up Dead Man

Wake Up Dead Man (without a comma to be seen) is the third Benoit Blanc mystery, written and directed by Rian Johnson. Daniel Craig stars again as the Foghorn Leghorn-twanging detective but he's a touch overshadowed here by the 'supporting' cast, namely Josh O'Connor as young priest, Jud (Judas anyone?) Duplenticy, Josh Brolin as Monsignor Wicks and Glenn Close as church dogsbody Martha. Though it seems O'Connor is the new big thing, especially in indie films, I find him about as engaging as the weekly supermarket trip. In saying that, he's a pretty good foil for the rest of the characters, who have charisma by the bucketload. Blanc only appears around the start of act two, after all the set-up has been dealt with, in a very similar fashion to the previous films, Knives Out and Glass Onion . We gather that somebody has been killed on Good Friday, and the format for this exposition is a letter that Blanc asks Jud to write to him. This works well enough, (Keigo ...

Predator: Badlands

So without me really noticing, this franchise has reached NINE films (if you include the two Alien vs Predator crossovers). The last three have been directed (or co-directed) by Dan Trachtenberg, who's also helmed an episode each of the TV shows Black Mirror and The Boys . I've got to say, carry on lad, because this is probably the best Predator film I've seen (let me revisit the Arnie one before I remove that 'probably'). This film starts as a revenge quest that soon morphs into a discourse on dysfunctional families and finding your groove in life. All wrapped up in a gnarly, bloody sci-fi romp. I say blood, in actual fact, none of it is human blood, all characters being either alien or synthetic humanoid. That in itself is one of the film's credits - none of the protagonists are human, and the nominal lead is usually a villain. Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is from the Yautja race, the original 'ugly mother-fucker' Predator. The preamble n...

Hesitation Wound

This film was shown at the Revelation Film Festival programme launch for 2024. It's a Turkish legal drama that leaves a lot unsaid, unexplained, with plenty of scope for interpretation. Tülin Özen plays Canan, a lawyer tasked with defending a guy on a murder charge, Musa (Ogulcan Arman Uslu). At the same time, she is dealing with the slow demise of her old mother, hospitalised in a coma. The minutiae of life in this small Turkish town is fascinating. There's one simple, prosaic scene where Canan stops by a chemist to buy a razor so Musa can shave for the hearing. The shopkeeper asks what kind, she tells him she doesn't know, he selects for her, then explains that she can't use her debit card for that amount, so she buys some pretzel sticks. Completely normal, yet for some reason, I've remembered this scene weeks later. Maybe it's the unusualness of seeing a Turkish store on screen, but I think the on-point pacing of the film has a lot to do with it. Another odd...

The Quiet Girl

This is a great film, especially in the way that it manages to create something interesting out of a reasonably mundane synopsis. A young girl is sent away to a relative's house for the summer where she is treated better than at home. Sounds like it could have a bit of Rohmer-style youthful awakenings? Or maybe some gritty Loach-ian societal comment? Even perhaps a revenge tinged 'fear the youth' theme? Well, it's none of the above, and more power to its style. The Quiet Girl herself (Cáit) is a newcomer, Catherine Clinch, and she was apparently found via an Irish language school call out. She's incredible - meek, direct, no airs nor graces whatsoever, with a clear-eyed awkwardness. She's almost like a little female Bowie in The Quiet Girl Who Fell to Earth (no, not a film but I thought I'd italicise anyway). There are orbiting performances that complement her perfectly. Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennet play Eibhlín and Seán Cinnsealach, the couple who tak...

Upon Open Sky

Upon Open Sky sees a trio of teenagers head north from Mexico City on a mission to find the trucker who caused the accident that killed the father of the two lads. Promising enough premise, unfortunately, this is a slight film, aiming for profundity. It opens with the build up to the accident, somewhere in the dusty Mexican bush, then the crash itself acts as a timeslip point to two years later. Fernando (Máximo Hollander) scours a car scrapyard, looking for something. His younger brother, Salvador (Theo Goldin), who was in the car when their father died, understandably mopes around the house, only rising to perv on their new step-sister, Paula (Federica Garcia) as she changes for bed. When mum and new step-dad announce they're off to Spain for a holiday, Fernando makes plans of his own to find (and maybe kill) the trucker. So off they go to a town on the US border in search of him. Now, this film could have been much better, and I'm kind of at pains to work out why I didn...

The Secret Agent

Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho delivers one of the films of the year with this political thriller that hoovered up awards at Cannes. It stars Wagner Moura as Armando, an ex-academic who lands in Recife during Carnival time in 1977. Once there, he's welcomed into a kind of apartment block commune, filled with other 'refugees' from some tyranny or other. The opening of the film teases the situation, slowly unpicking the threads as we cruise through the northern Brazilian setting. It's extremely confident of keeping details held back, no need to rush the exposition. We're introduced to quite a few characters, on both sides of humanity - helpful matriarchs, corrupt cops, selfless in-laws, scuzzy hitmen, crusading journos, and one Jewish German Holocaust survivor. Yep, there's a lot going on here. Around the end of the first act, we flash-forward to the present to find a couple of researchers going through old cassette tapes of interviews between Arm...

One Battle After Another

Before this film, Paul Thomas Anderson had at least one certifiable classic on his CV in There Will Be Blood . Now, make that two. In saying this, most of his films range from good to brilliant. This is his second adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel (after the uneven but interesting Inherent Vice ) and it looks at the lives of modern American revolutionaries, notably members of French 75. The group are apparently named after a WWI weapon, and then a cocktail, both of which have something of a kick. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob, The Rocket Man, who makes the ordnance for the group and is in a relationship with fellow revolutionary, Perfidia (Teyana Taylor). A combination of a run-in with Sean Penn's Colonel Steven Lockjaw, and a rash killing of a security guard triggers more interest in the group, and so a roundup begins. Perfidia is caught, then forced to name names before doing a runner. But not before she has a daughter with Bob, whom he is left to raise on the run. After this f...

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

A few years ago, we hit the S.S.P. (Superhero Saturation Point). And the best way for studios to arrest, or even maybe reverse, the law of diminishing returns is to JUST GIVE IT A FUCKING REST. There's enough residual goodwill in the fan base to guarantee profits....for now. But, as Malcolm Gladwell said, there must be a tipping point. So into this cinematic avalanche slips The Fantastic Four: First Steps , the first film of Phase Six and the thirty seventh overall! It's quite dull for the first 30 minutes, setting up the characters, ensuring the audience understands we're on a slightly different Earth (828), and a different time as well. It only gets going when the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) appears and promises everyone death by devouring. She's not going to eat them, she works for a massive space turd called Galactus, played by Finchy himself, Ralph Ineson. He'll do the devouring. Here's the thing - this film is a perfectly serviceable entry, not brilliant,...

Nouvelle Vague

This opening screening of the Perth Festival's Lotterywest Film season is a cinephile's delight. It documents the production of Jean-Luc Godard's seminal feature debut, À Bout de Souffle (or Breathless ). The title refers to the New Wave of French film from the beginning of the 1960s, which railed against the tired, old ways of film-making. Nouvelle Vague actually looks like it was shot on film, it's riddled with scratch marks, there's are many big black dots indicating the end of the reel, and of course, it's in black and white. The director, Richard Linklater, is obviously a huge fan of Breathless . This is a lovingly made, breezy film, that isn't terribly hard-hitting or deep, but is a fine background to one of the classics. The casting is excellent, specifically the Jeans; Godard, Seberg and Belmondo, played by Guillaume Marbeck, Zoey Deutch and Aubry Dullin respectively. They all look the part and turn in performances just the right side of parody....

Film Shapes

Search This Blog