Melodie Weigel

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• 218 Vote
• &ref(https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BODM1MjI1YTQtZTQ4My00MTQzLWE0M2ItZjVjYmI3MTFjZjg2XkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTQ5Mzc5MDU@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,629,1000_AL_.jpg)
• Drama
• 2019
• USA
• writed by=Lone Scherfig

Berlin: Zoe Kazan and Andrea Riseborough are wonderful in an otherwise stilted and inconsistent story about the value of niceness in New York City. New York can be an unforgiving city, even in the best of circumstances. Unfortunately for the awkward patchwork of characters who populate Lone Scherfig’s listless new melodrama, “ The Kindness of Strangers ” does not take place in the best of circumstances. Everyone in the film is lost and lonely in one way or another; everyone is either helpless or guilty; everyone is either about to hit bottom, or beginning to claw their way out of a hole that’s too deep to escape without some assistance. The young mother whose story provides the spine of this underdeveloped mosaic, is somehow all of those things at once. Played by a tender and compellingly frayed Zoe Kazan, Clara opens the story in the pre-dawn hours by stealing her two young sons (Jack Fulton and Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) away from their Buffalo home, and from the abusive cop husband (Esben Smed as the demonic Richard) who’s recently turned his rage towards his kids. Paranoid that Richard might be able to track them down, Clara drives towards Manhattan without a credit card or a cell phone or anything else that might be useful for someone who’s trying to start a new life. Of course, it’s not as if Richard allowed Clara to develop much of an old life. There’s a reason why she doesn’t have any friends or family to turn to in her time of need ? a reason why the only person she knows in all of New York is her layabout father-in-law, and he’s not going to be much help. Clara is soon forced to sleep in her car and steal her food, the latter habit leading to the strangest development of a movie that often feels like it’s entirely comprised by inexplicable choices and chance encounters: Using whatever currency her whiteness provides, Clara nips a tray of hors d’oeuvres from a high-end cocktail party. As a result, her youngest son develops a taste for caviar, which inspires her to pinch their next meal from an opulent Russian joint she finds near Wall Street. Decorated like the Hermitage and defined by the cock-eyed humor of a Kaurismäki film, the Winter Palace isn’t just a restaurant, it’s also a respite from the indifference of the outside world. The owner (Bill Nighy) is a sweet man who’s quick to trust the fate of his business to anyone who comes in off the street, and his most recent hire ? a handsome, newly released ex-con named Marc (Tahar Rahim) ? seems eager to reflect his boss’ good intentions. Together, they make the joint feel like a warm hug in a cold city, and a hub of kindness in a movie where everyone could use some. And yet, the script (the first Scherfig has written solo) is entirely disinterested in the Winter Palace as a place, or in any of the various institutions that prop up a scattered plot that gets lost whenever it starts to wander between its locations. While the stilted opening act is mostly carried along by the velocity of Kazan’s desperate sense of parental duty (it’s wrenching to watch her balance her own needs with those of her children, and to wrestle with the ways in which they don’t quite overlap), it’s also sustained by the expectation that all of the characters in Scherfig’s messy ensemble are being pulled towards the enchanted restaurant where they’ll be able to redeem each other. And maybe they are, but the film never finds its center of gravity, or sees how the Winter Palace might help galvanize this story into more than the sum of its misshapen parts. While the movie works to depict how kindness breeds kindness, even in the cruelest of environments, it spends much of the time watching its motley collection of lost souls chase their own tails. Perhaps that’s because Scherfig is stepping outside of her comfort zone, and struggling to reconcile the stately European romanticism of her previous work (e. g. “An Education, ” “Their Finest”) with the hardscrabble vibe of a mercenary American milieu. Shooting with a handheld camera that harkens back to her Dogme 95, Scherfig often seems uncomfortable with her own dour locations and depressing story beats; not every New York movie needs to be shaped by the violent edges of a Safdie brothers’ film, but “The Kindness of Strangers” can’t square the direness of its characters with the underlying humanism that draws them together. Scherfig’s solution is a fable-esque logic that makes everything feel somewhat false. Case in point: Safdie favorite Caleb Landry Jones is (kind of) cast against type as Jeff, a twitchy magical idiot type who gets fired from two different jobs because he’s “bad at just about everything. ” It’s hard to tell if he’s supposed to be intellectually handicapped in some way, just as it’s hard to tell if Scherfig is playing his hopelessness for laughs; sandwiched between difficult sketches of Clara’s encroaching homelessness, we see Jeff lose an apartment because he drops his phone in the toaster, and lose a temp gig because he mistakes a fluffy dog named Beyoncé for a bed sheet and buries it under a massive pile of cloth. Arriving at a soup kitchen in need of a meal, Jeff stands on the wrong side of the counter, and gets handed an apron instead. But Scherfig is also determined to not let things get too detached from reality, and so she occasionally shortchanges the film in other areas. Kazan and Rahim are both immensely charismatic actors, but “The Kindness of Strangers” cuts off their most romantic scenes, as though stifling their chemistry might help restore the movie’s balance between misery and magic. In a narrative that hinges on acts of pure generosity, it’s also strange that Marc wants something in return for the charity he shows to Clara and her kids. It’s not quid pro quo creepiness, but his motivations are too cloudy for a movie that overcomplicates its most basic emotions. Read More:? Casey Affleck’s Narrative Directorial Debut ‘Light of My Life’ Is Headed to Berlin Even the most capable characters are vaguely unreal. That includes Alice ? a heaven-sent ER nurse played by the shapeshifting Andrea Riseborough, predictably brilliant and elusive in a role that a lesser actress might have smothered with moral virtue ? who’s so pure of heart that she uses her free time to run a meeting group for people in need of forgiveness (the role of guilt is over pronounced and under-explained). While “The Kindness of Strangers” is Clara’s story, it’s Alice whose generosity holds it together, and Alice who’s self-interest threatens to pull it apart. Even the helpers need a hand of their own. “I’m nobody’s numero uno, ” Alice laments, but she never abandons her angelic nature, and her persistent goodness pulls everyone to one side or the other; it would be awful enough that Clara’s husband is an abusive cop, but Scherfig feels compelled to turn him into a psychopathic killer, and the whole movie tips over into the absurd. There’s a palpable urgency to the film’s kindness, and a real despair to the film’s inability to make us believe in it. Grade: C- “The Kindness of Strangers” premiered at the 2019 Berlin International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U. S. distribution. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

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Untitled Lone Scherfig New York project home page. 2 / 5 stars 2 out of 5 stars. A strange choice for Berlin’s opening night sees Bill Nighy’s funny Russian the only bright spot while an ensemble cast blunder through Lone Scherfig’s baffling drama Not one for the showreel … Zoe Kazan and Tahar Rahim in The Kindness of Strangers. Photograph: Per Arnesen/Berlinale/EPA T he Berlin film festival gets off to the ropiest start with this inert, implausible, often bafflingly acted ensemble movie from Lone Scherfig about lonely souls who miraculously find each other in New York. It’s what might be heart-sinkingly called a modern-day fairytale ? but the kind of modern-day fairytale that gets both halves of the equation wrong, giving you something twee and improbable, weighted down by a dreary yet unconvincing realism. There are some decent moments: Bill Nighy is often amusingly eccentric as Timofey, the Russian-American proprietor of a failing Manhattan restaurant, and he does have one very funny line as he serves some dishes to two diners and then, having turned to leave, wrongly assumes one of their intimately intense questions is addressed to him. And Zoe Kazan certainly pulls out all the emotional stops playing Clara, on the run with her two boys from a terrifyingly abusive cop husband. But the performance of Tahar Rahim, as Timofey’s restaurant manager, really is not one for the showreel. It’s one that he may now wish to have scrubbed from his IMDb credits. This is not his first English-language performance. But his line readings are mysterious. The American-accented English is challenging. He gives every appearance of not understanding a single word that comes out of his mouth. But then the direction is uneven generally, and the film itself sometimes appears to have been Google-translated from Danish via Welsh. Scherfig herself has directed some great English-language pictures, such as An Education and Their Finest, but the screenplay she has written here is uncertain. ‘We’ve had this conversation! ’ … Bill Nighy as Timofey. Photograph: Per Arnesen/Berlinale/EPA Rahim’s character is called Marc, an ex-con now going straight and his best friend is John Peter (played by Jay Baruchel), the lawyer who took his case. John Peter accompanies Marc to the forgiveness group therapy session at a local church, being run by ER nurse Alice (Andrea Riseborough), who does this in her spare time out of the goodness of her heart, though she is secretly hardly less unhappy than the regular attendees. Poor Clara is to come into contact with all these people as she flees her family home in Buffalo, New York and takes the kids to Manhattan, where she hopes her violent husband can’t find them. They sleep in her car at night and during the day, while the kids are dozing in the public library, she forages by shoplifting and stealing leftover food on trays in hotel corridors. The film shows a civil court proceeding for child custody and then a criminal trial for assault lasting a painless month or so, passing in a very brisk montage. Meanwhile, the strangest and most jarringly unsuccessful character is Jeff (Caleb Landry Jones), an incorrigible guy who reacts to being fired from a mattress shop by throwing a swivel chair through a first-floor window. Is he supposed to have a creepy violent temper, like Clara’s husband? Evidently not. But if he’s supposed to be a sympathetic free spirit, then I guess it’s pedantic and beside the point to care about who that chair might have landed on. The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list. It’s a bit like Fernando Meirelles’s awful film 360, which brings together a similar bunch of uninteresting characters made even more uninteresting by the tiresomely unreal way they are corralled together. And the film is furthermore naive about showing homelessness as a problem to be cured with romance. Still, Nighy has some fun with his wacky cod-Russian accent, arguing with his partners: “Please, Sergei! We’ve had this conversation! ”.

YouTube. | Tomris Laffly February 14, 2020 Just when we thought movies that assert we are all circumstantially connected via cosmic powers went out of fashion for good, comes along yet another story of intertwined destinies. Outdated from the offset?think Fernando Meirelles ’ “360, ” Garry Marshall ’s “New Year’s Eve” and a certain brand of early Alejandro González Iñárritu films without the miserablism ?the frustratingly unrealistic “The Kindness of Strangers” from Danish writer/director Lone Scherfig exploits the aforesaid subgenre’s most testing traits, yielding a syrupy brew thick with twee and an abundance of cringe-inducing moments pulling at heartstrings. Fanciful to a fault and yet carried by an ensemble of committed performers?so purely dedicated that you end up feeling embarrassed on their behalf?Scherfig’s latest effort pursues something naively magical, only to end up with a mélange of miscalculated, cheap sentiments. Advertisement The wondrous emporium that sets the stage for our tangled souls is New York City; the town where this critic is from and therefore can confirm: we don’t quite chip in to the flow of things with an unlimited amount of selfless acts on a daily basis. But in the writer/director’s fantasy edition of the Big Apple, generosity floods through the town’s gridded bowels as amply as the East River. The main benefactor?the one that whisks us into this imaginary version of the city?is Clara ( Zoe Kazan), a horribly mistreated young mother with two sons, running away from her abusive husband who lives somewhere around Upstate, works as a cop and seems thirsty for violence. After their car gets towed?the fugitive family’s temporary accommodation till then?Clara and her good-natured pre-teen boys Jude ( Finlay Wojtak-Hissong) and Anthony ( Jack Fulton) brave it out in the cold streets of downtown Manhattan, trying out homeless shelters or wherever would accept them for the night. Thanks to her implausibly polished looks?slick dresses, freshly touched-up waves (who knows how) and elegant shoes?Clara occasionally manages to sneak into hotels and cocktail parties undetected to scavenge for scraps and crosses paths with a number of helpful yet victimized humans who also seem lost in their own ways. Among them are Andrea Riseborough ’s resolute Alice, juggling an impossible schedule both as a tireless nurse of 12-hour shifts and also as a volunteer somehow, working in support groups and soup kitchens. There is also Tahar Rahim ’s ex-convict Marc, Caleb Landry Jones ’ down-on-his-luck, hapless small-timer Jeff, and the past-his-prime Russian restaurateur Timofey ( Bill Nighy), who runs the once-upon-time-popular joint Winter Palace, an old-worldly spot where Marc works as a manager. A fantastical hub for everyone that the story touches, Winter Palace looks like the kind of place where there is an endless supply of caviar and vodka and a side of thick Russian accent 24/7. Except (and here’s the film’s biggest twist): Timofey is not even Russian. His real name is Tim and his fake accent, he believes, is supposed to create a certain intrigue to better his business. Of course, that never happens. Not that it matters in “The Kindness of Strangers, ” as Scherfig?who had previously found exceptional emotional and historical detail within the romantic and deeply feminist beats of “ An Education ” and “ Their Finest ”?doesn’t linger on anyone or anything long enough for them to grow into substantial entities. Instead, her film moves along with barely there, heartbreakingly lonesome characters spreading some good deeds while getting lost in the shuffle. We wait?and wait?to learn, for instance, why Jeff fails at everything, how Clara found herself in the midst of a nightmarish marriage and what lies beneath her husband’s (slowly revealed) psychopathic acts. Those answers never get delivered. Similarly underdeveloped elsewhere is the vague romance between Marc and Clara?the one thing that could have helped save the aimless movie that fizzles before it reaches anything halfway rewarding. While Sebastian Blenkov ’s picture-book cinematography, aided by Andrew Lockington ’s overly sentimental score, insists on a whimsical idea of human unity in New York, it’s too bad that Scherfig’s untidy narrative never connects the dots. Reveal Comments comments powered by.
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