#130: The Shop on Main Street

(Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos, 1965)

Along with Closely Watched Trains, The Shop on Main Street is one of two Czech films Criterion released in tandem early in Criterion's DVD run that primarily revolved around the country's role in World War II two decades earlier. The two films were made a year apart and, along with a number of other 60s films, signaled the emergence of the Czech New Wave, a movement which has since been represented in a well-regarded Eclipse box set.

Beyond these similarities - which are by no means superficial - the films share little in common. Closely Watched Trains had a light and wry tone, and even in dark moments the film never felt heavy or especially serious. Conversely, The Shop on Main Street is one of the most intense films you are likely to see - about the Holocaust or anything. It doesn't necessarily start out that way, but as the film descends into conflict and the protagonist takes his stand, there are few more disturbing and emotional climaxes in the Collection.

This isn't what makes The Shop on Main Street a masterpiece, though. That's a combination of the beautiful and skillful direction, mainly by Kadar, and the lead performance by Jozef Kroner. Kroner's work, in fact, threatens to overtake everything else about the film - he's that good in this role, which requires a wide range of emotion and physical and mental states. This alone would guarantee the movie a place in history, but the direction is so intricate without being overbearing that this is a masterclass in filmmaking from a lesser-known director. When compared to the simplistic work in Closely Watched Trains, it's a good reminder that just because Czechoslovakia was blooming as an international cinematic voice doesn't mean they weren't already a diverse and talented group with very different aesthetic takes and levels of sophistication.

The Shop on Main Street, I should also point out, is the best indication yet that I am not "scraping the bottom of the barrel" as I near the end of the Criterion Collection. I put this film off for so long mainly because it is not available on Hulu or Netflix, meaning I would have to rent it in order to watch it, unlike most of the other Czech films in the Collection. While the film isn't as high profile as even some of those films, and certainly not as well-known as, say, Breathless or Seven Samurai, this is one of the best films Criterion has released, and, I think, essential viewing for anyone interested in film.

#144: Loves of a Blonde

(Milos Forman, 1965)

As noted in the essay that accompanied Loves of a Blonde oh so many years ago, the film is essentially divided into three acts. The first is a wacky mixer where awkward older soldiers mingle with shy and uninterested factory-bound women who have been shipped into a small town to balance out the gender ratio. The second is a more intimate look at one of the girls being seduced (or, really, prodded and cajoled) by a musician that played at the dance. The third and most appealing story is of the girl leaving the town to see the musician in Prague, where she ends up in an awkward situation with his parents.

All three of these stories have their charms, and Forman does two things extremely well throughout the film: merging plot and character motivation with social and political commentary quite naturally, and balancing on the line of quirky characters in over-the-top situations and authentic depictions of the realities of Czechoslovakia circa 1965. But its ultimately the humanity that shines through - both with the doomed couple (his awkward game is only matched by her naive pouting) and the boy's parents - certainly a stereotype by now but pulled off so well here that they seem like fresh and native characters in the film. The success of the depiction of both of these relationships is what makes the final sequence the best. It's funny and poignant in a very effortless way.

I've always had high esteem for Forman - he made a great film in each of the last three decades of the 20th century - and I enjoyed this film even more than Firemen's Ball. I think this is because of the almost neo-realist eye Forman trains on his characters. The film's plot and narrative style reminded me fondly of the Olmi duo of films Criterion released a few years after this, particularly I Fidanzati. Both of those movies feature big awkward dance parties, but the love story of the later film has many of the characteristics of the far less-romantic interactions here. Both films are very aware of the social situations which surround their characters, and these situations are not just used as a backdrop and/or metaphor for their characters actions, but are actually meant to have an impact on their behavior. Without the plant in Loves of a Blonde - not to mention the reason for the plant existing in the first place - the girl's decision to leave for Prague would make much less sense.

I bet this movie would improve with multiple viewings. At this point, this humanist and socially aware approach to the material is the most striking thing about the film.

#128: Carl Th. Dreyer - My Metier

(Torben Skjødt Jensen, 1995)

My Metier is a mostly straightforward profile on one of the most important filmmakers in history. His life and work are profiled in chronological order, with voiceover of his own writing and various talking heads serving up anecdotes and personal reflections on working with Dreyer. In this regard, it's not much of a film, and entirely forgettable on a technical level.

That said, this is a very well-done version of the respectable television profile. The insights and stories from people who worked with him are funny and engaging, and the story told is informative and useful for understanding Dreyer's relatively small output. Despite the fact that Dreyer's final four films were spread out over more than 20 years, very little of his life outside of these movies is covered, yet the second half of the film is almost entirely dedicated to the three films that accompany this one in Criterion's boxset. This is partially because many of the people who worked with Dreyer on the films were still alive in 1995, whereas his earlier collaborators were long gone, but it's also an indication of just how significant these later works were (and still are) for film to come. In many ways - and despite its clear influences on later movies - silent film as an artform is completed, and can be viewed as a dead and preserved medium. It would be silly to argue that Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr do not continue to influence film to this day, but their overall style and impact are impossible to capture today (Vampyr of course does have some talking, but is mostly silent).

Now, do we see films like Gertrud and Day of Wrath in today's modern American marketplace? No, of course not. But their influence in things like personalized camera technique, heightened reality which veers towards the abstract, and deliberate pacing are evident in arthouse and commercial films alike. Dreyer to this day seems less commercial than even a filmmaker like Bresson, but his films seem both more and less singular in different regards - more in that it is impossible to replicate Dreyer's style, less in that virtually every spiritually minded director seems to have tried. My Metier doesn't break any ground as a film, but it's a vital piece of the puzzle for understanding Dreyer's more earthly achievements, even if the ineffable quality of his work remains a mystery.

#127: Gertrud

(Carl Th. Dreyer, 1964)

I can't remember the last movie that elicited such a wide swing in my opinion of it within the span of one viewing as did Gertrud, the final Dreyer film both in Criterion's boxset and in his career. Created nearly forty years after Dreyer's silent landmark, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Gertrud was released into a film landscape dominated by European filmmakers who were younger than Dreyer's first masterpiece and grew up idolizing the elder statesman. I mention this because it's important to note the context in which this film was released when trying to understand just how much of a lightning bolt it was on the cinematic scene - how unexpected and how revolutionary.

As I've mentioned before on this blog, Paul Schrader is famous for penning a thesis linking Dreyer to Ozu and Bresson. Both of these directors employed a cinematic style that was unique in its pacing, narrative technique, and visual identity. But once you fall into the rhythms of their work, the entire oeuvre opens up to you and the issue of accessibility is tossed aside. Not so with Dreyer, whose cinematic language became more and more unique and foreign as his career went on. Much of the flashiness of his earlier work has been replaced here by an almost sparse grammatical structure. More importantly, his characters have slowly become divorced from reality. The construct of their existence veers towards the abstract in Gertrud, particularly because they refuse to look at each other - at one point early in Gertrud I laughed out loud because it seemed like the actors were being held at gunpoint, forced to recite lines they didn't want to give to other actors they didn't care to know in a movie they had refused to appear in.

And yet... just offering my attention to the film seemed to slowly bind me to its emotional core. The film gradually began to make sense to me, Gertrud's personal suffering felt entirely real, and the themes, performances, and - yes - even Dreyer's style began to make total sense. Gertrud began as a strange joke played on Dreyer's audience and turned into a beautiful and moving ode to a life uncompromised. By the time it was finished, I had little doubt that Gertrud is Dreyer's masterpiece, the culmination of his life's work. I can't wait to watch this one again and see just how he managed to pull it off.

Note: I'm going to mention two movies that came to mind while watching Gertrud, one topical and one embarrassing. The topical one is Certified Copy, which Criterion just released and I just rewatched, confirming my initial impression of it as one of the great films of the past few years. Like Gertrud, Certified Copy is partially about the nature of love. I watched Kiarostami's discussion of this element just before watching Gertrud and was pleasantly surprised to see many of the themes he discusses come up frequently in the film - sometimes quite literally, with Gertrud expressing similar sentiments. The embarrassing one is Titanic. Yes, I couldn't help but think of Rose in the final sequence of Gertrud, though of course Rose didn't choose to lose her one true love and she did (apparently) eventually get married. But still, you didn't think of it? Fuck you, you totally did. You know what? Just go watch Gertrud and try to get this comparison out of your head.

#126: Ordet

(Carl Th. Dreyer, 1955)

At some point during Ordet, around the time when a couple of old men with weird beards are sitting around a table smoking long pipes in a dreary house and discussing God and children, I remembered that The Avengers made $200 million dollars in three days and I laughed out loud. I haven't seen The Avengers and I plan on watching it at some point, so I'm not speaking to the quality of that film, or even really to the inaccessibility of this one - in fact, from a technical perspective, Ordet is actually not that difficult of a film (philosophically and emotionally, of course, it is intensely challenging). What seemed so absurd to me was just how big cinema is, that it can encompass both of these galaxies.

Like Day of Wrath before it, Ordet is a movie about faith. But Ordet is based on a play written by a preacher (who was later killed by the Nazis) so this isnt' going to be an indictment of Christianity - instead, it's a confirmation of God's existence (apparently made more literal in the film than in the play). What was so frustrating to me about the ending of Ordet was not the confirmed miracle, but the implication that it was this miracle which gave the husband faith in God. Faith is not the knowledge of something, but the belief in it despite its absence. When his wife is resurrected, the husband is no longer becoming faithful, but merely acknowledging the truth before his eyes. To me, this seems like the exact opposite of the intension of both the film and religion in general.

I certainly don't want to come off as rash or foolish, but Ordet is not a movie for me, as anyone who has read this blog has probably figured out. Still, it's a masterfully made film. Dreyer uses sweeping pans and subtle tracking with a dogged consistency that avoids becoming tiresome because it's so brilliantly incorporated into the tone of the film. The movie's swaying fields and sets that alternate between stage-like and realistically open (most notably in a couple of subtle but masterful 360˚ turns) call to mind another Scandinavian director who focused on faith, Ingmar Bergman, who was just hitting his stride around the time Ordet was released. (One funny similarity about Bergman and Dreyer: if you believe the DNA tests from last year regarding Bergman being switched at birth, both directors were not raised by their biological parents.) Bergman's films are more clearly accessible than Ordet for the atheist or agnostic because his characters are constantly questioning the absence (or at least as one movie was titled, The Silence) of God, but they also ring truer because they are not directly about faith or religion, but about people (the HUGE exception to this is probably The Seventh Seal, though a handful of other Bergman films might be debatable). Ordet didn't feel that way to me, so the film strikes me more as a cultural oddity than an emotionally memorable work.

#134: Häxan

(Benjamin Christensen, 1922)

It's hard to imagine two more different films featuring the devil than Häxan and the film I watched right before it, The Devil and Daniel Webster (Little Nicky and The Passion of the Christ?), but such is the life of a Criterion completist. Unlike The Devil and Daniel Webster, which is a fairly typical (if upmarket) Hollywood production, Häxan is one of the more interesting movies in the collection. Constructed more as an essay than a narrative film, this silent exploration of witchcraft through the last 1000 years is at once an intriguing use of film to advance an intellectual posture and a supremely pleasing recreation of supernatural moments as they were perceived in history.

Certainly the most entertaining element of the film is the presentation of Satan as a tongue-wagging prankster leading the innocent into the darkness. The devil pops up at the most opportune times, forcing women to do horrible things in the name of evil. The recreations here must have been shocking in 1922, despite the fact that the film implies that its modern era has overcome beliefs in a literal devil that oversees literal witches.

From a current-day perspective, the argument that hysteria is similar to a belief that one was possessed by the devil seems logical but somewhat antiquated - especially since the notion of hysteria itself has long gone out of fashion. Most obviously missing from the film is a feminist perspective on either "medical" movement, a much needed balance to an issue that was directly related to the role of women in society. Still, Häxan is one of the more interesting silent films I have seen, and I'm not surprised that it would amass quite a following among fans of the macabre.

#146: The Cranes Are Flying

(Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)

The Cranes Are Flying is often lumped in with Ballad of a Soldier - both films came out of the USSR in the late 50s, the years after Stalin's death when cinema was finally able to thrive, and both films focus on World War II, where the country lost by many estimates 10 million people - a truly staggering number - but eventually emerged victorious. Indeed, the two films sit just two spine numbers away from each other in the Criterion catalog (the modern masterpiece In the Mood for Love sits between them), indicating that they were clearly planned in tandem.

While all of the similarities (particularly the USSR origin) make the grouping understandable, it's hard to imagine two films that are technically more different than these two. While Ballad of a Soldier is elemental, poetic cinema, The Cranes Are Flying is flashy, abstract, and contemporary. The movie's greatest moments are big loud sequences, beginning with the angular framing of the opening scene that establishes the film's cinematic language and peaking with the undercranked sequence in which Veronica, the film's protagonist, rushes after a train.

The key phrase in that sentence might be "cinematic language," as this zeroes in on what makes these two Russian films genuinely linked in film history. Because the USSR was really just beginning its move into modern cinema, both films were first stabs at an answer to what was being produced in the US. Each movie could easily have defined Soviet cinema post-WWII - they are that elemental and moving. While The Cranes Are Flying is the easier pick, I actually preferred Ballad of a Soldier, mostly because I think it is more difficult to make a film in such a simple way, and the rarity of success makes it more exciting. I also felt like many of the techniques and even the moments of true exploration of the Soviet experience (e.g. the father dismissing the propaganda line) hid a mostly conventional plot with a clear villain and a standard heroine. But a preference for this earlier film is totally understandable, and really the most obvious thing that both films share is that each one is a masterpiece that has lasted and will last long beyond its country of origin.

#143: That Obscure Object of Desire

(Luis Buñuel, 1977)

Though it was pure coincidence that I viewed them back to back, Bad Timing and That Obscure Object of Desire make for a pretty cohesive double feature. The final Buñuel film in the collection chronologically (and his final film before his death), That Obscure Object of Desire is a fitting end in that it sums up many of the themes Buñuel had explored, particularly in the latter half of his fifty-year career. But it's also a pitch black comedy of manners, and - like Bad Timing, made three years later - a deeply cynical film about the power struggle between the male desire of possession and the female desire for individuality.

The film is (very loosely) adapted from a heralded book that was often the source material for films, Le Femme et le Pantin, about a sophisticated gentleman who falls in love with a woman and sacrifices everything for her to be his. Buñuel shifts so much around (and heavily infuses his film with an anarchic spirit carried along by the random acts of terrorism sprinkled throughout) that the movie is much more of an enigma than this set-up might have you believe. In the end, is the man being tortured, teased, and prodded by his object of desire, or is the woman constantly struggling to force him to see her as her own person?

Buñuel makes his film so oblique that I honestly don't know if this confusion was intended or not. The rest of the film is equally unattainable. The titular object is played by two separate women (and dubbed by a third), both of whom come and go in random succession, with no explanation.The film's prologue and narrative framing seems almost totally irrelevant, except to place the viewer's sympathies with the male protagonist from the beginning.

There are so many Buñuelian elements to the film that it seems silly to list them all: maids, bourgeois, food, etc. are all present. The movie is so much about Buñuel's movies that it's unclear to me whether the terrorists are terrorizing the world of the film or the film itself. Moving through Buñuel's films has certainly given me a stronger affection for his sensibilities, but That Obscure Object of Desire reminded me that he can often seek to normalize his own hang ups, which makes me feel alienated from some of his production, including this final movie, where everything goes up in smoke anyway.

#145: The Firemen's Ball

(Milos Forman, 1967)

The Firemen's Ball is a major movie in minor-movie clothing. Created by Milos Forman just before he would flee his native Czech Republic and 8 years before he would make one of the only three movies to win all five major Oscars (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), The Firemen's Ball is a bumbling comedy that lasts less than 80 minutes and seldom wanders away from its main event, a volunteer firemen's ball in a small Czech town. It's not an ambitious movie, either, trying to use some not-so-subtle metaphor to make a sweeping point about human behavior. It inadvertently becomes one, though, not just by the force of its technique, but by the context of its origins.

Filmed in 1967, the movie was released during the Prague Spring (an event depicted in another, totally different Criterion film, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and managed to piss off everyone in power, ending Forman's career in his home country, no small feat for a movie that is basically just a story of some bumbling but lovable old men trying to put on a show (but with a little sex). Underneath the surface, though, is a movie about authority and human nature that could easily be seen as a comment on decreasing trust in the government, not in a cynical or angry way, but in a way that is far more dangerous. Obviously, comedy (ridicule) can often be a more effective way to speak truth to power, not only because you reach a wider audience but because extremes can often be used to highlight the hypocrisy in things. The Firemen's Ball does this very well, even if Forman insists to this day that there is no deeper meaning to the film.

#149: Juliet of the Spirits

(Federico Fellini, 1965)

Juliet of the Spirits might be the Felliniest movie Fellini ever made. The film is also as reflective in a purely surreal way of Fellini's home life as 8 1/2 was in an almost literal way of his professional life, casting Giulietta as a lonely wife stuck in an elaborate kaleidoscope with a cheating husband and a life she never planned on having. The director surrounds his wife and frequent star with virtually every trick he has up his sleeve, including exaggerated caricatures in extreme close-ups and complexly staged establishing shots, startling fantasies about vague and completely obvious Catholic guilt, and over-the-top-to-the-point-of-being-dull bourgeois friends and neighbors, stumbling through modern life and struggling to keep up with their perceptions of themselves.

The movie is so jam-packed with visual flair from both the elaborate sets punched with vivid colors (this was Fellini's first film in color) and the non-stop dance of flamboyantly dressed characters that it's easy to forget that the plot is extremely simple: a woman suspects her husband is cheating on her, hires a private investigator, discovers the truth, and struggles with her new perception of life. Of course, the movie isn't really about any of that as much as it is an interaction between Fellini and his wife. Most likely because she isn't in his most famous films, La Dolce Vita and 8 1/2, Masina does not receive nearly enough credit for Fellini's success as a director. The star (and almost certainly the core) of two of his best films, La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, Masina is truly one of the great movie stars of all time, and even here, where you get a vague sense that she doesn't actually want to be in the movie, her performance anchors a film that might otherwise slide off into the mystic. Not just because Giulietta is playing Giulietta, the movie feels like a conversation (or perhaps an argument) between husband and wife. Fellini is trying to convince Masina to, you know, get with the free-wheeling times, man. Clearly, Giulietta and Giulietta are both having none of it, and while the final scene of the actress walking into the woods was apparently interpreted differently by director and star with the former believing it meant she was free and the latter believing she was alone, I have to agree with Masina here. Fellini entirely fails to win the argument here, though one suspects, mostly because he clearly loves his wife, despite his indiscretions, that his heart wasn't in it from the beginning anyway.

That's kind of where Juliet of the Spirits falls apart. The crazy goings-on are not really that crazy: much like the serious-as-death orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, the scene here of Masina passing by lovers embracing each other seems less sexy than rote. In fact, I was reminded of Kubrick's late (and severely underrated) masterpiece often during Juliet of the Spirits. Like Juliet, Cruise's doctor is drawn into a surreal night of temptation and self-reflection by a severe case of jealousy. And like Fellini, Kubrick uses an unappealing balance of malice and affection to tie his two characters together. Of course, Kubrick's characters have an enormous amount of hang-ups they are unaware of, while Juliet is very aware of her increasing number of them, especially her religious upbringing, coupled with a sense of love as doomed endeavor represented by her drowned classmate, who late in the film beckons Juliet to join her. But these hang-ups actually seem to prevent the film from being as dark as Kubrick's, making Juliet of the Spirits maybe Fellini's most lighthearted film since The White Sheik.

Piled on top of that emotional baggage are the film's extreme (and often seemingly superfluous) uses of color. The movie's palette is so ridiculous that at one point Juliet wanders through a house draped with patched curtains that feature every color in the rainbow and stretch multiple floors. They seem to be there simply to remind viewers that this is, in fact, Fellini's first movie in color. But they aren't even the most impressive uses of the format here, as scenes in nature pop with greens and blues in beautiful fashion; this is truly a spectacular visual feast, even if Fellini's meager attempts to find his way out of a bind might leave you empty and alone at the end of the night.

#129: Le Trou

(Jacques Becker, 1960)

Le Trou is about humanity, concepts of freedom, and ultimately issues of loyalty and the proper delineations of society (not, like The Grand Illusion, in a class sense, but instead a more primal sense of us vs. them). This is why the final twist hits home so strongly. It throws all of these themes into question and challenges the viewer to shift his or her perception of what they have just seen.

However, where Le Trou really shines is in the depiction of process, specifically that of human work. Like the perfect Rififi, Le Trou is about professional criminals coldly executing a complex plan in silence and with unspoken trust. Coincidentally, both involve clever methods of digging through structures, and both films depict without music or dialog the intense and laborious process of carrying out their plans. The stubborn insistence in many French crime films (many of Melville's films have a similar rote quality to them) to show process with a clear and deliberate perspective serves to simultaneously deglamorize the criminals and ramp up the suspense you feel in the moment. Their work is stretched out into real time, and it makes the suspense all the more realistic.

The scenes of these men digging and crawling through tunnels - both made by them and created for the prison - are truly exciting, and turn the film into a ground-level counterpoint to Bresson's divine A Man Escaped. By the time two of the men poke their head out into the street, you actually feel like you were in prison for the rest of the film, like you had been claustrophobic without realizing it, and the open air feels just as liberating as it must have to the characters. The film's final moments come with such rapidity and unexpected power that many questions are left unanswered but it doesn't seem to matter. Le Trou is that rare kind of masterpiece which says much more than what is literally depicted, but doesn't particularly need to in order to generate an immense emotional impact.

#150: Bob Le Flambeur

(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1950)

Despite Breathless and its obvious debt to noir, it's hard to imagine a film that seems to have simultaneously influenced the New Wave and inspired both versions of Ocean's Eleven. But Bob Le Flambeur is such a movie. Melville's first real heist pic, the movie's characters exist in filmworld, that place that is hot and sweaty and oozes saxophone.

Bob is addicted to gambling, to the point where he forgets about the massive casino robbery he planned once he gets into the room and sits down at a roulette table. But he's also a suave, struggling anti-hero, the kind of guy who will refuse to help a pimp but doesn't hesitate to slap a woman who lets slip his heist plot. He's Bogart but Frenched up, basically, and it's really fun to watch.

Melville hadn't perfected his craft yet when he made Bob Le Flambeur, and one of the reasons is that the film is in black and white. Part of the reason his later masterpieces Le Samurai and Army of Shadows are so memorable is the way Melville using color to evoke moods in the films. In fact, color is the first thing I think of when I think of these two movies - one hot and red, one faded blue and penetratingly sad. I enjoyed Bob Le Flambeur, but I get the sense that the three Melville films to come will have more to offer me.

#131: Closely Watched Trains

(Jiri Menzel, 1966)

Closely Watched Trains is one of the most well-known Czechoslovakian films (of which there will be no more), and it's easy to see why. While this is not necessarily a five-star classic, it's a highly entertaining, immediately engaging film about becoming a grown-up. The stories about the protagonist's ancestors in the opening are very funny and charming, while the end of the film takes a dramatic turn which I had not expected, but found strangely satisfying.

One thing that should be mentioned is how sparse and simple the direction is. The editing is loose to the point of being leisurely, and the shot selection reminded me of the silent film era, when cameras had serious physical limitations. Still, elementary as it might seem (particularly when compared to the highly modern and reflective films being made in France at the same time), the film is extremely effective, especially in the expertly constructed suicide attempt sequence.

A very enjoyable film.

#148: Ballad of a Soldier

(Grigori Chukhrai, 1959)

Ballad of a Soldier is cinema in its most essential form. It is just as visual as it is narrative, and the film is designed to elicit an emotional connection with the material that would be impossible in any other art form. The movie depicts the USSR during World War II as a country destroyed by war. One character has lost a leg, while another his home. A child blows bubbles aimlessly into the stairwell of an apartment complex where a soldier's wife has taken a home with another man. A poor city girl hops trains to see her aunt. These characters are all encountered by the soldier in the title, an inadvertent hero we already know is dead from the opening scene, yet we follow anyway.

I haven't seen many films from the Soviet Union; besides Tarkovsky, I can't think of any Russian filmmakers off the top of my head. But Ballad of a Soldier moved me. There was propaganda here - every superior officer is strict but even-minded and kind, and the soldier hero himself is practically a saint. But there's also complexity, in the soldier's admission of fright, in the one-legged soldier's mixed emotions about returning home, and most of all in the mother's embrace of a son she will only get to see once more for a brief moment. The film could easily be dismissed as a sort of mirror image of America's tomb of the unknown soldier, an everyman story of the pride inherent in giving yourself over to God and Country. But it is so effortlessly made, so convincing in its emotional touchstones, and so poetic in its imagery of a war-torn nation, that it isn't easy to ignore. A really great movie.