L'enfer

Tanovic combines a compelling and riveting narrative with powerful and believable acting by a superb cast to create a thought-provoking, challenging, and rewarding film.

Premiered tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival, the film was well received by the audience, myself included. It was suitably thought-provoking and had me later thinking back to earlier moments in the film to forge my own connections with later events. I might even call the film thought-challenging - definitely a European, not American film, and ready to deal with tough and complex issues of family, betrayal, guilt, and self-doubt.

There were definitely some disturbing scenes and themes, but between Tanovic's direction and the actors' tour de force performances, I got through them, occasionally wanting to look away but compelled to watch nonetheless. Tanovic said before the screening began that he didn't expect the audience to necessarily "enjoy" the film, but hoped that we would appreciate it and watch it through to the end. I both appreciated it and watched it through to the end, and I can say without a doubt that I did enjoy it. Bravo to Mr. Tanovic and the actresses and actors (and the others involved in the making of this film).

I would take my friends to see this film, and then go out for coffee or a drink to discuss it with them.

I find it hard to comment on an art film, simply because art films provide more than just statements. They pose questions, questions unanswered, questions rhetorical, questionable statements.

Hell opens with a beautifully made sequence of a bird and her 3 eggs in a nest, through a kaleidoscope vision. One of the eggs was exchanged by another bird, and its chick "killed" the other two eggs. Personally, I think it's probably the best opening sequence I've ever seen. It's both beautiful, and yet very disturbing.

Like the opening, the movie is also beautiful and disturbing. The stories between the three sisters plays powerfully, pushing you towards the revelation given by the 'boy' who shamed their father. From then onwards it's straight forward. But before that, the characters seem to be so unrelated to each other and each story seems to play just because. Well, they're not what you expected them to be.

I didn't find it to be very emotional. It is gut-wrenching, but at the same time very rational. On the other hand, its rationality does not (logically?) lead into cliché or any expected outcome. There is a great number of subtlety that you might miss, so better keep your mind alerted while watching it.

Just saw this film at TIFF. I was quite moved by it. The voting stats here claim the film was better received by females than males. I can understand this completely. The characters all had elements a woman could relate to and some of the scenes just felt so real. Particularly the scene involving Emmanuelle Beart and her husband in the kitchen. Gosh, don't you just want to kiss her bee-stung lips?

I feel it was masterfully executed by the director (who seemed like a nice guy during his Q&A session -- great sense of humour). The cinematography, the editing, the performances. Fabulous. You could tell that Danis has a real passion for film-making and has clearly studied the greats with an exceptional eye for detail. His self-proclaimed homage to Krzysztof Kieslowski hit the mark for me with it's claustrophobic interiors and dark females haunted desperate secrets. I highly recommend this film.

I'd like to begin by saying that while this film undoubtedly shows the talents of its actual director, for the sake of this commentary I will assume it is a movie by Krysztof Kieslowski. I suppose this movie needs to be viewed together with Tom Tykwer's "Heaven" (2002) in order to be understood from a broader perspective (I don't think anyone has directed "Purgatory" yet, the third part of the trilogy suggested by Kieslowski). Another important source for understanding the film is perhaps Dante's "La Divina Commedia", since this is what inspired Kieslowski in the first place.

What the film does, I think, is to offer the viewer a set of disturbing stories, from the very first opening sequence of the bird hatching and pushing the other eggs out of the nest; All these stories, right to the end of the film, never reach any satisfactory resolution. Character's lives are simply damaged or destroyed by events based on misunderstanding or ignorance, as well as human fallibility. Perhaps this is what makes for the film's theme of "Hell". If this is so, and here I can only guess at what Kieslowski's original intentions might have been, then "L'Enfer" is a very modern film in it's representation of hell as the presence of unresolved, arbitrary trauma in human life - hence perhaps the professor's speech about destiny and coincidence is of central significance in understanding the movie. This may in fact be the question the movie is supposed to put to its audience: is life a matter of destiny, or is it just coincidence? This film therefore shares with all other works directed or inspired by Kieslowski that director's strengths, as well as his weaknesses. Kieslowski had a genius for translating transcendent concepts into immanent imagery, and showing the viewer the place where eternity and time coincide; "La Double Vie de Veronique" may be the best example of this. However, that same Polish genius tended to skim lightly over the harsher, more troubling aspects of human tragedy - I would have liked to have seen him attempt a movie about the holocaust, or the life of Job, because I think shadow, while not entirely missing, is nevertheless a little too stylised in his films. Evil is unfortunately real, and while there may be light at the end of every tunnel, the way there gets very dark indeed. A great filmmaker has a responsibility to show this, especially when dealing with universal themes. Hell is not a place that has the good looks of Emanuelle Beart (funnily enough, this actress also starred in a 1994 movie with the same title)! Overall, a movie worth watching.

... brought lovingly to fruition. For those living until yesterday in a remote Galaxy on the Dark side of the Milky Way maybe I should explain that the late and Great Polish writer-director Krystian Kieslowski left among his papers three Screenplays, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory and now the fine Bosnian (No Man's Land) director Danis Tanovic has shot the second part so that what we have is a Polish screenplay directed by a Bosnian with a (largely) French cast. The result is harrowing but richly rewarding and Bergman buffs will feel right at home with the doom and gloom which is present in both the story and dark interiors. With actors of the calibre of Carole Bouquet, Manu Beart, Karin Viard, Jean Rochefort and Jacques Gamblin you'd have to work at screwing it up (okay, Godard could make a pig's ear of it without trying but luckily he's unrivalled at ineptness and incompetence)and Tanovic has scrupulously and perfectly captured the writer's intention. This is a film of nuances and 'moody' to the nth degree with three sisters united by a common tragedy but distanced from each other in the present; Karin Viard is the only one who visits mother (Carole Bouquet) long institutionalized and reduced to communicating via pencil and paper. Viard turns in a career-best performance as a bruised, repressed spinster, longing for companionship and Bouquet is not far behind completely deglamorized in straggly gray hair and a wonderful way with a curtain line. Marie Gillain is perhaps the most conventional character as the youngest sister who allows herself to become pregnant by a married Sorbonne Professor - played by Jacques Perrin finally escaping his fate as a top-and-tailer; he played the narrator in both Cinema Paradiso and Les Choristes and is on on view currently in Le Petite Lieutenant - who kills himself rather than deal with the situation, and Manu Beart is the terminally unhappy wife of Jacques Gamblin. There's not a lot of joy on offer here but there are some beautifully realised cameos like the porter on the train who finally plucks up courage to approach Viard romantically after years of punching her ticket as she travels to the institution and accepts defeat of a sort - he chooses the day when the sisters have reunited and are travelling together - philosophically and Jean Rochefort as a fellow inmate of Bouquet who does little but sit on a bench but HOW he does it. If your idea of a great movie is American Pie you won't last five minutes with this one but if you value fine acting, directing and storytelling you'll want to go again.