Film Journal January 2018

front of noisy traffic, his camera follows the
grandfather as he approaches a bunch of kids
in hoodies. (We hear nothing but the roar of
cars, but may assume he’s requesting a killerfor-hire.)
When Anne’s son visits the projects,
where he’s presumably trying to make amends
for the construction accident, the scene is
filmed from such a remove you can only intuit
what triggers the ensuing violence. (It will be
later be used against the worker’s family in the
settlement.)
In American films about family dysfunction,
the usual cause is lack of parental love, sibling
rivalry, etc. etc. In Haneke, it’s the lopsidedness
of the larger world that warps character. Eve
is not so much a bad seed as the logical mutant
produced by her self-absorbed clan, a spawn
of the one-percenters who pushes their values
to a twisted extreme. She barricades herself
behind technology, the better to manipulate
a family who would show her no mercy, she
intuits, when push came to shove.
The confidence Haneke projects as he
maneuvers the scattered mosaics of his tale
into a cohesive whole is nothing short of
thrilling. And when the true “happy end”
circles back to Eve’s final video, it inspires the
darkest sort of laughter. In fact, Haneke’s brilliant
orchestration of his materials is as much
the subject—and triumph—of Happy End as
anything else. To criticism that his vision is
overly gloomy, the filmmaker replies, “I simply
present things the way they are.”
—Erica Abeel
FERDINAND
20TH CENTURY FOX/Color/2.35/Dolby Atmos &
DTS:X/106 Mins./Rated PG
Voice Cast: John Cena, Kate McKinnon, Anthony Anderson,
Bobby Cannavale, Raul Esparza, David Tennant, Belita
Moreno, Peyton Manning, Gina Rodriguez, Daveed
Diggs, Gabriel Iglesias, Jeremy Sisto, Boris Kodjoe,
Flula Borg, Sally Phillips, Carlos Saldanha, Juanes,
Jerrod Carmichael.
Directed by Carlos Saldanha.
Screenplay: Robert L. Baird, Tim Federle, Brad Copeland.
Screen story: Ron Burch, David Kidd, Don Rymer, based
on the book by Munro Leaf, Robert Lawson.
Produced by Bruce Anderson, John Davis, Lori Forte, Lisa
Marie Stetler.
Executive producer: Chris Wedge.
Director of photography: Renato Falcao.
Art director: Thomas Cardone.
Editor: Harry Hitner.
Music: John Powell.
A Blue Sky Studios, Davis Entertainment and Twentieth
Century Fox Animation production.
Fox sends in an animated animal act to do
battle with Star Wars for the Christmas trade:
a peace-loving bull who won’t fight—don’t
ask him.
If that Spanish bull named Ferdinand wasn’t
the first to stop and smell the flowers, he is
certainly the most famous, and Ferdinand (the
2017 film) celebrates that fame.
Munro Leaf dashed off this pacifistic
mammal in pencil on six sheets of yellow
legal pad in 40 minutes back in 1936 and gave
it to a friend, Robert Lawson, to illustrate.
That combo created a bestselling children’s
yarn beloved for generations. This version
boasts all the computer-generated bells ’n’
whistles of contemporary animation, weighing
in at 108 minutes—making it the longest
cartoon feature ever produced by Blue Sky
Studios. It has more padding than a matador’s
cummerbund.
Happily, none of this is dull. It’s frenetically
eventful and usually fun—once you forgive
the unnecessary plot tangents and irrelevant
additions. Okay, so there’s the obligatory bullin-a-china-shop
scene, but it’s nevertheless
calamitously entertaining.
The title toro (voice-casted with John
Cena for no apparent reason other than his
beefy persona) comes with a full complement
of cohorts. First and foremost and emphatically
funniest is Kate McKinnon’s Lupe, a calming
goat who is a long way from calm, functioning
primarily like Burgess Meredith to Cena’s
Sylvester Stallone.
Miraculously, the story’s overriding message
is not lost in all the extraneous detours
and par-for-the-cartoon-course silliness:
Ferdinand remains true to himself, smelling
flowers rather than butting heads. And he’s
right to resist the secret, silent agenda of Casa
del Toros, a camp in rural Spain that trains
bulls for Madrid’s arena.
Six screenwriters—Ron Burch, David
Kidd and Don Rymer for screen story; Robert
L. Baird, Tim Federle and Brad Copeland for
screenplay—are credited with refrying Leaf’s
40-minute concoction. As previously noted,
there are a lot of side trips in this movie, but
the beginning and the end are beautifully—
brilliantly—connected by a red carnation. As a
young calf, Ferdinand is bullied when a young
bull crushes a red carnation into the ground;
later, as a fully grown bull about to be sacrificed
to a matador’s blade, he zeroes in on a red
carnation thrown by the crowd and smells it.
—Harry Haun
IN BETWEEN
FILM MOVEMENT/Color/2.35/103 Mins./Not Rated
Cast: Mouna Hawa, Sana Jammelieh, Shaden Kanboura,
Mahmoud Shalaby, Henry Adrawes, Aiman Sohel Daw,
Riahd Sliman, Ahlam Canaan, Ferass Naser, Khawlah
Dipsy, Suhail Hadad, Eyad Sheety, Amir Khuri.
Written and directed by Maysaloun Hamoud.
Produced by Shlomi Elkabetz.
Director of photography: Itay Gross.
Production designer: Hagar Brotman.
Editors: Lev Goldser, Nili Feller.
Costume designer: Li Alembik.
Music: M.G. Saad.
A Deux Beaux Garçons Films and En Compagnie des Lamas
production.
In Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.
A propulsive debut from Maysaloun Hamoud.
Girls just wanna have the freedom to have
fun in this electric debut from Arab-Israeli
filmmaker Maysaloun Hamoud. Her In Between
is a political film, critical of Arab culture
and Arab-Israeli relations, but thanks to the
strength of its characterizations it is never a
didactic film. Hamoud proves once again the
potency of a tried-and-true formula: Elucidate
the macro through the personal.
Three Palestinian twenty-something
women are sharing an apartment together
in Tel Aviv. There’s Lalia (Mouna Hawa), the
gorgeous-and-she-knows-it criminal lawyer
who plays just as hard as she works, which is
to an extreme. She is a thick-skinned, cosmopolitan
woman who has yet to abandon her
belief in romance and who is capable of great
tenderness. Lalia has been roommates for
some time with Salma (Sana Jammelieh), a DJ
who is cool to the point of sullenness, who
comes from a Christian family in Galilee, and
who is beginning to explore her feelings for
another woman. At the beginning of the film,
they’re joined by a devout Muslim student
named Nur (Shaden Kanboura), who rents
their third bedroom so she can be closer to
her university. Nur wears a hijab and doesn’t
know what raves are; her fiancée, a man so
unctuously pious one suspects he doth pray
too much, doesn’t like the drinking, smoking,
fornicating ways of her new roommates. But
after a rocky start, Nur bonds with Lalia and
Salma. She resists her fiancée’s attempts to
convince her to move elsewhere. We know
this cannot end easily.
Meanwhile, Lalia and Salma wrestle with
romantic entanglements of their own. The
seemingly liberal Arab man for whom Lalia has
fallen may not be as enlightened as he first appeared,
while Salma must juggle the romantic
freedom she enjoys while living on her own
in Tel Aviv with the unyieldingly traditional
viewpoints of her family. Again, no easy solutions
are in sight.
Without resorting to cumbersome flashbacks
or clunky exposition, we are given a clear
understanding of the life of each protagonist
as we follow her for a time solo. It is the time
taken to explore these women individually that
makes those occasions when they interact together
so impactful. When a moment of shocking
violence occurs, the emotionality of their
reactions is deepened by this understanding of
each in her turn, and continues to reverberate
to the film’s conclusion..
The film’s greatest strength lies in its unwillingness
to go for an easy sense of righteousness.
Yes, these women are asserting themselves; yes,
there are victories gained. But swimming against
the tide and living “freely” is not easy.
In Between ends on a note of ambiguity
over which a less confident filmmaker may have
glossed, or eschewed altogether. But Hamoud,
who, thanks to In Between, has become the target
of the first fatwa to be issued in Palestine since
1948, is nothing if not confident in her choices.
This story of clashing values and women chafing
and pretty young things in-and-out-of-love is
not novel, however of-the-moment it may be
politically. But when filtered through Hamoud’s
sensibility, the result is distinctive, a mix of rock
’n’ roll and sorrow.
—Anna Storm
JANUARY 2018 / FILMJOURNAL.COM 77
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