Okuribito (Yojiro Takita, 2008)

Departures, the winner of the 2008 Foreign Language Oscar, is built on a promising enough proposition: a young man, giving up on his career as a cellist, applies for what he thinks is a travel agency job to find himself thrust into employment as an 'encoffiner' instead, charged with ceremonially preparing the dead for burial. His fiancee, given the traditional stigma attached to handlers of the deceased as the work of the underclass, is mortified at the discovery of his new position.
Takita's film has a choice to make at this point: to go all-out with the gallows humour at the protagonist's awkwardness, which it initially toys with to reasonable effect, or to probe deeper from the social critique angle. It fumbles the ball at this point and smoothes both out by opting for sentimentality instead, which proves its intellectual undoing even as it concomitantly guarantees the product's appeal to the saccharine-seeking Academy Award audience. It's never a good sign when a director attempts to convey soulfulness by having a camera encircle a man passionately playing a cello in the open air. You may recall this as shorthand for Jan-Michael Vincent's emotional depth in the dire '80s gadget action series Airwolf.

5/10

La Grande Séduction (Jean-François Pouliot, 2003)

The tiny Quebecois fishing village of Ste. Marie-La-Mauderne hits upon the idea of attracting a factory to provide much-needed employment for its welfare-dependent population. There's just one catch: for that, they need a doctor in residence, something they have singularly failed to achieve to date. Then they do find a candidate, but have their work cut out in conniving to reel the city slicker in.
Seducing Doctor Lewis rather fancies itself as an old-fashioned comedy of foibles, with Monsieur Hulot overtones, if the soundtrack is anything to go by. The humour is accordingly more often broad than subtle. The collection of gently observed quirky hicks is straight off the shelf too, and the set-up pretty much directly a transposition-as-farce of Local Hero. Nevertheless, it's cute enough to endear by virtue of zest alone, and raises a frequent warm chuckle.

6/10

The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002)

As an actor, Peter Mullan has a wide oeuvre, but it's particularly his characterisation in Ken Loach's bleakly gritty My Name is Joe that seems to sum up the best of what he brings to a role, and so perhaps appropriate that as director he's so far ploughed a similar furrow of uncompromisingly harrowing real-life stories.
For all its well-meaning critical acclaim, though, The Magdalene Sisters is not his best. That it takes a few liberties in splicing together various real people to create a dramatic composite isn't the problem: the rub is, it's not dramatic enough. The history of the decades of cruelty of Ireland's nun-run Magdalene workhouses-come-prisons for women fallen by the wayside or undesirables just interned by their families has abundant potential, but Mullan's direction falls flat in its earnestness, the script containing little to surprise, also including Geraldine McEwan's stock sadistic Mother Superior. And if the quartet of girl-victims aren't actually biographical, do they need to be so gormless in their attempts to flee their plight?

5/10

Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek, 2010)

Faithfully adherent to Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 dystopian novel, Never Let Me Go posits a modern-day England in which clones are nurtured to adulthood to be farmed in stages for body parts.
It starts off in a generically post-war boarding school setting, and it's apparent that since the biggest question that must be addressed is why the battery humans are so resigned to their fate, Ishiguro always intended the institutionalisation of that form of establishment to be a justification for their passivity. It still remains the biggest weakness of the set-up, though, when transferred to film: what can be accepted without question in the hermetically sealed universe of a novel, where suspension of disbelief is facilitated by an awareness that we're only seeing what the novelist as God allows us to see, becomes trickier to take in in the cinematic medium where it's difficult to treat a world that looks like reality as not functioning like reality. The same applies to a fudged justification of why a society breeding stock just for spare parts would really bother to educate any of them.
Of course, down the route of rebellion against their destiny lies the action and chase scene version, namely Michael Bay's The Island. It is preferable to that to comply with Romanek in taking a great deal of what transpires as metaphor for other forms of institutionalised oppression, even if a little more attention to suspense would not have gone amiss, with the film letting the cat out of the bag too early. The remainder is heart-rending and beautifully acted (barring Keira Knightley's stage-school turn, as usual), but also a drainingly sheep-like march towards the inevitable.

6/10

Rukajärven Tie (Olli Saarela, 1999)

The Road to Rukajärvi, lumbered with the hopeless video game-style title Ambush 1941 for the English market, is one of those platoon-scale Cross of Iron perspectives on WWII (as opposed to the massed battle more typical to the WWI trench set-up) that allows room for character development and less emphasis on the futility of war or the idiocy of generals. Not that a Finnish director would have much truck with the latter anyway, the overwhelming opinion on the country's experience seeing it as a victim rather than a guilty party.
Nevertheless, you can't keep a liberal agenda out of a Finnish war film, so it's no surprise the first casualty of the platoon's foray ends up being a Russian civilian. This is also a fair way into the film, and the tension keeps on building with little happening and the forest itself potently taking on the role of lurking adversary, until a thankfully short finale of slow-mo carnage.
Saarela's film doesn't really kick up anything new besides a setting novel to foreign audiences, but the parallel story of the lieutenant lead and the loss of his fiancee is nevertheless surprisingly affecting, and the mise-en-scene makes the most of a fragile band in a dizzifyingly endless and vacant landscape.

6/10

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

Leonardo DiCaprio might have been well advised to leave some space between this and Inception, since it's clear early on in both that his character is beginning to doubt his own sanity. He's in danger of becoming a rent-a-breakdown. But then, given the menace that Scorsese hits you with from the start, and Ben Kingsley as a psychiatrist, you can hardly expect anything other than tears.
This time, DiCaprio plays a federal marshal charged with investigating a disappearance on an asylum island. He's hit from the outset with migraines and unsettling visions of his dead wife, and things can only deteriorate from there, with Kingsley and the wardens of the facility dropping increasingly provocative hints.
The whole owes a rather large debt to Samuel Fuller's seminal Shock Corridor, in which an investigative journalist undercover at a mental asylum loses his grip on reality, and so the eventual twist, heavily signposted, hardly raises an eyebrow. But this being Scorsese, the execution is of sufficient quality that you'll still keep watching until the denouement.

6/10

Jadesoturi (Antti-Jussi Annila, 2006)

Jade Warrior has the distinction of being in a genre on its own, and this will remain so.Who would have known the world needed a cross-over between the Finnish Kalevala and Chinese Wuxia epics, with wire-work and demons thrown in?
The drunken premise is basically a warrior-monk being reincarnated as a depressed smith in modern-day Finland, having to face up to his true identity to save mankind from his eternal foe. It's far too derivative to serve as anything other than a daft curio: the Pandora's Box the smith is suckered into forging is straight out of Hellraiser, The Fifth Element, or any number of other sources, the chopsocky inferior to the full-blown havoc of fully Chinese films, and the hero a muddled doofus who spends a great deal of time swooning over the revelations he keeps on getting hit with. Finnish cinema will some day get round to producing a border-crossing blockbuster instead of just black comedies or grim war films, but this isn't it.

4/10