Rising From the Ashes

 

    

Summer can be the perfect time for a hiatus from a movie blog. It’s the time of year for the film industry to make the big dollars that company stockholders are expecting, so it’s blockbuster season. A rather arid time for lovers of film as art. However, my hiatus has been only in part been due to this. I’ve also been on vacation and away from movie screens, as much as that has been hard to do.

I wasn’t completely gone.  I did treat myself to some very excellent documentaries, in particular The Wolf Pack and Amy, which I comment in the Fresh Cuts section of this blog (I reiterate my invitation to click the Fresh Cuts tab to see ratings and short comments on all the films I see).

 I also saw the blockbusters that got the good reviews, in particular Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Man from UNCLE. I reveal my age by telling you that I enjoyed watching Mission Impossible and Man from UNCLE as TV shows, when I was a child; this makes it just that much more fun to show up for these–so much better – film versions of the shows.

The fifth installment of Mission Impossible did not disappoint. Tom Cruise is certainly committed to his work and the airplane lift-off scene, where he didn’t use a double or green screen, is truly worthy of applause, as is the motorcycle chase scene in the movie (amazing editing!). It’s a very fun film to watch, which I know is what Cruise was going for and what he’s best at. 

Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

Man from UNCLE has director Guy Richie’s style, established with his two Sherlock Holmes films, which is to say it is also a fun movie worth paying to see. The beautiful Alicia Vikander, of A Royal Affair stature, made more famous by Ex-Machina this year, delivers her charm in the movie, and entices in her cold war relationship with Arnie Hammer, one of the two very good looking leading men of this first in what promises to be a film series. Television on the big screen.

Arnie Hammer, Alicia Vikander and Henry Cavill in Man from UNCLE

All said, it was the American July release of the German movie Phoenix that really rose above all other as the must see movie of the year for me… so far (fall begins). The director is renowned German director Christian Petzold (Barbara) who again works with the amazing Nina Hoss (Barbara, A Most Wanted Man) in a movie about the enduring trauma of the holocaust in post war Germany. The movie takes place immediately after the fall of the Third Reich, as we see in the opening scene where American soldiers stop a car travelling with two holocaust survivors in Germany: Nelly (Hoss) and Lene (Nina Kunzendorf). Nelly bears the scars of the war both internally and externally, requiring plastic surgery, and Lene, the one person that truly loves Nelly, bears profound scars internally and quietly. They look to each other for emotional survival after the colossal trauma of what each has lost and suffered, but Nelly’s husband Johnny is still alive and with him some unbearable secrets. The movie has most definite resonances of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, as Nelly and her husband Johnny begin to weave a fascinating and lethal web of deceit.

Nina Hoss and Nina Kunzendorf in Phoenix

The acting in the movie is superb, as is the story-telling. There is a little of film noir and a lot of that dark feeling around this time period that is so well conveyed by European films. European film makers, without necessarily using explicit and graphic scenes of the horror of the Holocaust, are able to express such horror with truly creative subtlety. This film now joins such great films of this sub-genre, like Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s Das Schlangenei (The Serpent’s Egg), or Hungarian director István Szabó’s Mephisto. It is a story about the nature of human beings in times of extreme tribulations and what we are willing to endure and forgive, because of love; how we are also able to betray and destroy; and, ultimately, how we can regenerate, like the mythological Phoenix, and rise from the ashes or our lives, again and again.