stdesjardins

Take It Or Leave It was part of the AFI's EU Film Festival, an Estonian movie about a rather immature man whose ex-girlfriend calls him up out of the blue to tell him that she's just given birth and the baby's his. Oh, and she doesn't care about the baby at all, so she's putting it up for adoption. He decides to take care of the baby, with the help of his parents, until she gets over what he assumes is post-partum depression; later, he moves out of his parents' house, enraged at how they make it clear he's not living up to their standards as a parent. And they have a point: he screws up a lot, neglects basic housekeeping, and is not emotionally prepared for responsibility. But he sticks with it until he gets the hang of it, and when the mother reappears and tries to reclaim the child, he's ready to fight. This is a quiet but satisfying movie, an unsatisfactory ending but a solid middle.

The Whiskey Bandit, a Hungarian movie based on the exploits of a real-life bank robber, is less satisfying. I had read a book called The Balled of the Whiskey Robber years ago, and I thought it did a better job of explaining the social conditions and the planning that went into making Attila Ambrus so successful. The movie ... well, I thought it left out the most interesting parts of the story, and simplified other elements in heavy-handed ways. Skip the movie, read the book.

Wonderland was a Finnish movie which I saw at the Phillips Collection. A woman whose husband left her, faced with her first Christmas alone, flees to a cheap bed and breakfast with her best friend, where she finds a lonely bachelor (the B&B's only other guest, ever) and a failing farm run by vegans who bought it for ideological reasons. Everyone in this movie is unhappy and unsatisfied, but they all grope towards greater happiness and more self-awareness. A competent and pleasant movie which doesn't achieve great heights but avoids any serious pitfalls.

Sügisball is another Estonian movie, this one from Netflix, set in the period before independence. I don't remember it well, but I thought it was not good, the sort of movie that uses the characters' unsatisfying sex lives as a metaphor for the failure of their society to make them happy. Bah humbug, dull and boring.

Sweet Emma, Dear Böbe is another Netflix movie, this one Hungarian, about the period right after the fall of Communism. The main characters are a pair of rural schoolteachers who move to Budapest and struggle with poverty and dead-end jobs. Both characters have affairs, one idealistically and one with more mercenary motives, but neither finds satisfaction. The whole thing is shot in a very dated manner, like American movies from the sixties, when filmmakers were thrilled with the new freedom to show naked women. Not terrible, but I don't recommend it.

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail is an early Kurosawa movie, about a lord whose brother becomes suspicious of him, who tries to escape with a group of his retainers disguised as itinerant monks. (It is of course not a Finno-Ugric movie, but it's not Indo-European either, so I'll throw it into this post.) Pretty much standard Kurosawa, beautifully shot with some noteworthy comic relief and a very traditional subject.