Month: October 2023

The hills are alive with the sound of sexual revolution

Novice nun Elisabeth (Lilith Grasmug) is forced to return home to her family following the mysterious death of her older sister. (Photos courtesy of Dekanalog)

By Richard Ades

Switzerland’s nominee for 2023’s international Oscar is Thunder, the quietly striking debut feature of writer-director Carmen Jaquier.

Critics have compared the French-language film to various acclaimed predecessors, and Jaquier herself has said its style was inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light.

Given that its heroine is a novice nun who’s forced to leave an Alpine nunnery and rejoin secular life, the most obvious comparison is to The Sound of Music, but the similarities are only on the surface. While that blockbuster musical’s Maria discovers love, family and marriage, Thunder’s Elisabeth (Lilith Grasmug) discovers something decidedly earthier.

Set in a conservative village around the turn of the last century, the tale begins with a series of images showing the difficult lives of its inhabitants, particularly its girls and women. The montage ends with a disturbing shot of a young woman chained to the kitchen where she’s working.

The scene then switches to a distant nunnery, where 17-year-old Elisabeth is told she must return to her family because Innocente, her older sister and best friend, has died. The girl has to be carried out forcefully, apparently because she has no desire to leave the safety of religious life. Even as she trudges through mountainous terrain toward home, Elisabeth asks God to hide the secrets of the world from her because she wants no part of it.

Yet as soon as she returns to the family she hasn’t seen in years, Elisabeth begins trying to uncover the secret that’s been haunting her: What happened to Innocente? Her curiosity only grows when her mother (Sabine Timoteo) refuses to discuss the matter, and when a passing villager charges that her late sibling was a deviate who would have sex with anyone, including the devil.

Answers finally begin to appear when Elisabeth finds a diary in which Innocente describes in graphic detail her discovery of a part of life that is repressed in their rigidly religious society—sex. Intriguingly for the spiritually minded Elisabeth, Innocente writes that the discovery makes her feel closer, not farther, from God.

Will Elisabeth follow in her late sister’s dangerous path? Her parents fear that she will, especially after she befriends three young men who fell under the sexually adventurous Innocente’s influence.

Despite dealing with physical passion and such serious subjects as repression and misogyny, Thunder’s style is quiet and meditative. Cinematographer Marine Atlan’s images of the Alpine landscape and composer Nicolas Rabacus’s score complement each other in their calm beauty.

Leading the cast, Grasmug projects understated strength and determination as Elisabeth. Behind her, the supporting cast is uniformly convincing.

Despite the film’s strengths, some viewers may have reservations, feeling that writer-director Jaquier stacks the deck in her depiction of a mini-sexual rebellion in turn-of-the-century Switzerland.

Would teenagers really be able to handle the type of shared intimacy being shown without jealousy or hurt ever arising? And while the adults’ disapproval seems to be motivated solely by their religion, wouldn’t any modern parent be just as concerned, if for different reasons?

But Jaquier doesn’t address such questions, being focused solely on the age-old battle between repression and freedom, particularly as it relates to girls and women. And she depicts that struggle beautifully in a film whose subdued style in no way diminishes the strength of its convictions.

Rating: 3½ stars (out of 5)

Thunder (no MPAA rating) opened Oct. 25 in New York City, with a national rollout set to follow.

A Scottish woman’s struggle to survive

Kirsty (Hermione Corfield, in white dress) attends a village celebration in The Road Dance. (Photos courtesy of Music Box Films)

By Richard Ades

In 1904, on a beach in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, a man and his young daughter have just finished a swimming lesson. When the father asks the girl what she’s learned, she names the three most important lessons: paddle with your arms, kick with your feet and, perhaps most importantly, breathe.

Thus begins The Road Dance, setting the stage for the survival struggle that faces Kirsty (Hermione Corfield), the grownup version of the girl, 12 years later. Her problems stem from a farewell celebration held for her beau, Murdo (Will Fletcher), and other local men who’ve been called up to fight in World War I.

Despite the circumstances—and despite the obvious jealousy of Kirsty’s rejected suitor (Tom Byrne)—it’s a joyous occasion. But then Kirsty goes off by herself to answer the call of nature and is subjected to an attack that leaves her dazed and irrevocably changed. The encounter sends her on a dark journey that she attempts to hide even from her loving mother and sister (Morven Christie and Ali Fumiko Whitney).

Directed and written by Richie Adams, who based his script on a novel by John Mackay, The Road Movie is steeped in atmosphere.

Petra Korner’s cinematography immerses us in the rustic island community, with its stone fences and houses, windswept hills and lonely beaches. Composer Carlos Jose Alvarez’s mournful score is as distinctly Scottish as the inhabitants’ dialects.

Further clarifying the time and place are bits of dialogue that define the community’s religious core—for example, when a minister sermonizes about a village girl’s fateful surrender to temptation, or when an old woman demands to know if Kirsty is carrying her Bible. (She is.)

Murdo and Kirsty (Will Fletcher and Hermione Corfield) take a walk.

One result of the focus on atmosphere is that following Kisty’s attack, we assume what happens next will be as predictable as the sunset over the Atlantic. How could it be otherwise, given who she is and when and where she lives? And for a long section of the story, that appears to be the case.

Eventually, though, things change. Rather than being predictable, The Road Dance proves to be full of unexpected developments. Some of them, truthfully, are a bit contrived, but fine, naturalistic acting by Corfield and the rest of the cast help to keep the tale centered.  

Though not perfect, The Road Dance is worthwhile not only for the tragic story it tells but for the beautiful and richly atmospheric way in which it tells it.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

The Road Dance (no MPAA rating) will be available through select theaters and VOD outlets beginning Oct. 13. It will be screened at Columbus’s Gateway Film Center beginning Nov. 3.

Giving their all to protect reproductive freedom

Francine Coeytaux (left) is a co-founder of Plan C, an organization devoted to making the abortion pill available and affordable even in conservative states such as Texas.

By Richard Ades

Recent developments in the battle over abortion rights have mostly favored the forced-birth side of the argument. In particular, there’s the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, emboldening conservative state legislatures that had already been working to restrict access to abortion.

Such developments are disheartening to those who care about reproductive freedom and women’s health care. For them, the documentary Plan C offers a reason to hope. Directed by Tracy Droz Tragos, it introduces us to a group of intrepid women who have been working behind the scenes to keep abortion available and affordable.

The doc is named after Plan C, an organization devoted to spreading information about the “abortion pill” drugs mifepristone and misoprostol. In interviews, co-founders Francine Coeytaux and Elisa Wells talk about the group’s efforts to adapt to the changing political landscape.

The COVID pandemic made their work more important than ever because (1) people seeking a surgical abortion were often prohibited from visiting a clinic, and (2) a mid-pandemic court ruling made the abortion pill available without an in-person medical appointment.

The documentary also introduces us to Just the Pill, as represented by medical director Julie Amaon and clinic director Frances Morales. The group works to deliver the abortion pill to those who need it—when they need it. Its distributors have been forced to shift into hyperdrive to keep clients on the right side of new state laws that prohibit abortion after as little as six weeks.

Supporters of the abortion pill hold a strategy meeting in a scene from Plan C.

Plan C also interviews several medical personnel and patients who prefer to keep their faces and names hidden due to their fear of legal repercussions and even physical attacks from abortion opponents.

Thanks to political rhetoric, abortion has long been a polarizing issue, and it’s becoming even more so as Republican-led legislatures pass increasingly extreme laws. The documentary devotes much of its attention to Texas, where one such law encourages citizens to spy on each other and to sue anyone they suspect of helping someone obtain an abortion. One day, predicts lawyer and journalist Carrie Baker, the Lone Star State will turn to surveillance to ferret out even those who perform their own abortions.

Much of the documentary presents a similarly cautionary viewpoint, as underscored by composer Nathan Halpern’s ominous score. In fact, it may strike some viewers as overly pessimistic, since it fails to note that all the restrictive laws may be sparking a backlash in the form of Republican election losses and statewide votes to protect abortion access—for instance, Kansas’s August 2022 rejection of an attempt to remove constitutional protections for the procedure.  

On the other hand, the film offers one big reason for optimism in its portraits of brave women who have devoted their lives to fighting for reproductive freedom. Their efforts leave even the most jaded observer feeling uplifted and inspired.

Rating: 3½ stars (out of 5)

Plan C opens Oct. 6 in select theaters, including Columbus’s AMC Dublin Village 18, AMC Easton Town Center 28 and the Gateway Film Center.