Jérémie Renier – Way Too Indie http://waytooindie.com Independent film and music reviews Fri, 02 Dec 2016 17:34:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Way Too Indiecast is the official podcast of WayTooIndie.com. Our film critics grip and gush about the latest indie movies and sometimes even mainstream ones. Find all of our reviews, podcasts, news, at www.waytooindie.com Jérémie Renier – Way Too Indie yes Jérémie Renier – Way Too Indie dustin@waytooindie.com dustin@waytooindie.com (Jérémie Renier – Way Too Indie) The Official Podcast of Way Too Indie Jérémie Renier – Way Too Indie http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/waytooindie/podcast-album-art.jpg http://waytooindie.com Neither Heaven Nor Earth (ND/NF Review) http://waytooindie.com/news/neither-heaven-nor-earth-ndnf/ http://waytooindie.com/news/neither-heaven-nor-earth-ndnf/#respond Fri, 18 Mar 2016 13:30:43 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=44395 A great premise is all 'Neither Heaven Nor Earth' has to offer.]]>

The war in Afghanistan gets a supernatural twist with Clément Cogitore’s Neither Heaven Nor Earth, a military drama about soldiers confronting the unknown while stationed at the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s 2014 and the war is winding down, leaving Captain Antares (Jérémie Renier) and his men with little to do until they’re called back home. They’re stationed in a remote valley called Wakhan, where the villagers don’t like them and enemy soldiers hide in the surrounding desert. It all looks like business as usual for the soldiers, until one night when two men vanish without a trace. Antares launches a search, thinking they might have gotten lost or injured, but then another soldier disappears. And then another. And then the group of Taliban soldiers they’ve been fighting offer a ceasefire so they can look for their own men, who have also been disappearing one by one.

At a point where the plot should thicken, Cogitore decides to let things peter out instead, preferring to focus on Antares’ stubborn skepticism (when one soldier describes what’s happening as inexplicable, Antares says that they just haven’t found the explanation yet). Cogitore fails to convincingly portray Antares’ switch from skeptic to believer, and his refusal to provide any resolution about the mysterious disappearances becomes annoying as a result. If Cogitore doesn’t want to give any answers, then his questions should have enough substance to carry the film’s weight, which turns out not to be the case when watching Antares’ crisis play out in a dull, familiar fashion (at one point, Cogitore throws in a nod to Claire Denis’ Beau Travail that only serves as a reminder of better films already out there dealing with similar subject matter). And when hints of something more to the film pop up, like the vanishings acting as a symbol for the soldiers’ fears and anxieties, they get lost in Cogitore’s muddle. Despite its strong cast and impressive cinematography (courtesy of Sylvain Verdet, who makes good use out of the soldiers’ night-vision cameras), Neither Heaven Nor Earth only winds up squandering its great premise.

Neither Heaven Nor Earth screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

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The Great Man http://waytooindie.com/review/movie/the-great-man-ndnf/ http://waytooindie.com/review/movie/the-great-man-ndnf/#respond Tue, 11 Aug 2015 15:00:23 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=32646 Succeeds in capturing the male bond and its significance in manhood.]]>

Perhaps appropriate for a film called The Great Man, director Sarah Leonor’s sophomore effort focuses on the transition from adolescence to manhood. The film, ultimately a tale of two soldiers as they transition from serving in the French Foreign Legion to civilian life, opens with a voiceover by the preteen son of one of these men. Khadji (Ramzan Idiev) unfolds the tale of his father, Markov (Surho Sugaipov), and his father’s best friend, Hamilton (Jeremie Renier), as they chase a fierce leopard during their time in service in Afghanistan. They get caught in enemy fire, and Markov must abandon his weapons and the hunt in order to carry his injured friend through the sweltering desert to save his life.

It sounds gruesome and traumatic, but the tone set by Khadji’s narration is a far cry from the abrupt assaults that might open a war film like Saving Private Ryan. Khadji’s retelling is dreamlike and a bit larger than life, capturing a spirit similar to the heroes of great legends like Beowulf or The Odyssey. Perhaps due to his age (he’s 11), there’s less of a focus on the why and more of a focus on the heroic characteristics of each man (“If one drank, the other wasn’t thirsty”). Martin Wheeler’s score, with its slow, careful guitar plucking, seems to reverberate for days, giving us a feeling of warmth (and maybe longing), but definitely not fear or anger. This mood of the nostalgic, though we don’t quite know what for, continues throughout this slow-paced character film.

But after 10 minutes, the poetry of the initial voiceover ends, and we’re transported to present-day France. Markov, despite saving his friend, gets dishonorably discharged for disobeying orders. Leaving the barracks, Markov, a Chechen immigrant without papers, reunites with his son and undergoes the impossible task of finding work in a country with strict anti-immigration laws. Screenwriters Leonor and Emmanuelle Jacob cleverly leave any social criticism up to the viewer—this is a film that whispers, not yells. Showing the film’s love for slow-moving tracking shots, Markov spends his first night with his son (who he hasn’t seen in five years) on a tour boat gently gliding along the river. Khadji, feeling a bit abandoned, isn’t terribly interested in hearing what his dad has to say. But Markov persists, retelling the story of how the boy’s mother was hit by shrapnel during a Russian raid. It won’t be the first time people are surprisingly upfront with the boy, whose silent acceptance of everything is hopefully a sign of maturity and not despondency. But as Khadji shows great maturity in accepting the whirlwind information of the day, Markov still ends the night putting his coat on the boy. Khadji is brave, but he still needs a protector.

Despite the film’s lack of action and outward intensity (even when the situation warrants it), it’s impossible not to feel entirely invested in the budding relationship between father and son, which becomes something of a triangle after an injured Hamilton is reintroduced. The war stories, which first Markov and later Hamilton tell to Khadji, are the most thrilling moments of the film. Unexpectedly, given the film’s opening sequence, these retellings are sparse—maybe three in total. It’s almost like their sparsity makes us thirst for them even more, as certainly Khadji does, since they’re the surest way he has of growing close to his father.

Hamilton’s relationship with the boy is a lot less straightforward—partially because Hamilton has some growing up to do himself. He must at first seem nothing like the brave soldier depicted in Markov’s stories, the type of man who can hear the silent encroachment of a snake and with godlike reflexes. After a medical leave, he’s just like any other 20-something, immature and without commitments, set on partying and sleeping with girls he can barely hold a conversation with. But this is his story too, and without hitting us over the head with melodrama, The Great Man portrays how bureaucracy and circumstances can destroy men—or allow them to rise to the occasion. The performances by the three lead men (including Idiev here) are both believable and affecting. That’s why we’re willing to take silent journeys on trains; long, windy motorcycle rides through the streets of Paris; and observe serene but uneventful scuba diving scenes. The film’s sense of spacious, meandering time makes the moments of true intimate conversation feel intense and lasting. Like they may just as quickly be lost. And when we learn why Khadji has taken up the task of remembering the two men, we crave every detail just as much as he does.

The childlike lens Khadji’s narration provides allows for the film to hint at larger sociological issues while still prioritizing the immediacy of relationships. For more than just Khadji, The Great Man is a film about how empowering it can be when one man treats another with dignity and compassion, even when a cold world may not. And in capturing that bond, The Great Man more than succeeds.

A version of this review was first published as part of our ND/NF 2015 coverage. 

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The Kid with a Bike http://waytooindie.com/review/movie/the-kid-with-a-bike/ http://waytooindie.com/review/movie/the-kid-with-a-bike/#respond Mon, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000 http://waytooindie.com/?p=2438 The Kid with a Bike is an independent French film written and directed by brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne about an abandoned adolescent boy who refuses to believe his father has left him. Doing everything he can to find him ends up being an emotional journey. The Kid with a Bike won the Grand Prize of the Jury award at the Cannes Film Festival and is nominated for Best Foreign film at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes.]]>

The Kid with a Bike is an independent French film written and directed by brothers Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne about an abandoned adolescent boy who refuses to believe his father has left him. Doing everything he can to find him ends up being an emotional journey. The Kid with a Bike won the Grand Prize of the Jury award at the Cannes Film Festival and is nominated for Best Foreign film at this year’s Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes.

The film opens with a young boy named Cyril Catoul (Thomas Doret) who is attempting to call his father’s phone number but the number is not in service. He does not want to believe that his father has abandoned him. After repeated failed attempts he makes a run for it out of the foster care farm. The counselors barely catch Cyril when he is about to climb over the fenced in wall. All he wants to do is find his father.

The Kid with a Bike movie review

Cyril is reunited with his lost bike when a kind stranger named Samantha (Cécile De France) returns it to him. Immediately, he hops on the bike to show off his tricks with it. He asks where Samantha found it and she insisted that the neighborhood boy bought it from Cyril’s father. But Cyril does not believe that his own father would sell the bike. To him it is obvious that someone in the neighborhood stole it to make some money selling it back.

Now equipped with his bike, Cyril rides around to all the local establishments that he and his father have visited in hopes that one of them would know of his father’s whereabouts. He tries a bakery, automotive shop and pub but no one has seen him in the last month nor knows where he would have gone.

Coming up empty handed on leads for where his father could be, he seeks help from the only person that he knows to trust, Samantha. She agrees to watch him on the weekends but will prove to be more challenging than it seems. Watching over any adolescent is not easy but it is exponentially more difficult when the child is in the troubled state Cyril is in.

With the help of Samantha he finally meets up with his father. They locate him at a restaurant that his is working at but seems very standoff-ish to Cyril when asked why he did not come back for him. He seems to want little to do with Cyril. He does not even give him a phone number that Cyril can call, instead says that he will have to call him. Cyril is okay with all of his father’s excuses, he is just happy to see him again.

It is sad when a father wants nothing to do with his own son and that is exactly the case here. Guy pulls Samantha aside after they stop by the restaurant. He tells her he can no longer see Cyril anymore. She suggests bringing his son even just once a month but still Guy refuses. Guy is coward enough not to tell Cyril the truth, instead he instructs Samantha to break the news. Samantha does not oblige and forces Guy to tell Cyril directly.

Obviously the news is devastating to the little boy. He fells abandoned and not wanted. Without a father figure in his live he is in danger of hanging around the wrong crowd. Which is exactly what happens when a local gang leader takes him under his wing. Samantha must give it her all to protect Cyril from negative influences.

We were never given the full background on Samantha which is a shame. She seemed to thoughtlessly accept Cyril into her life. When the first impression of Cyril was him bursting into a hospital lobby running from counselors it seems a little far-fetched that the next thing she does is locate and buy the kid’s old bike for him. One thing is for certain, there needs to be more Samantha’s in the world.

That being said, The Kid with a Bike feels more like a fairy tale than anything else. It does a great job identifying you with the young boy who just wants his father to be in his life. But ultimately it lacks in details and background information and it will make you wonder where the boy’s mother was this whole time.

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