THE LOOK OF SILENCE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Powerful, important, deeply moving and utterly chilling companion piece to Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing"

The Look of Silence (2014)
Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A sure-fire way to avoid insanity after killing someone is to collect a couple of cupfuls of the victim's blood as it gushes from their jugular, then drink it all down: hot, steaming, sweet, salty and savoury.

If, after repeatedly hacking someone with a machete, and they're still alive, cut off their penis.

If you're interested in merely killing someone and not torturing them, feel free to hack off a woman's breast before she's dead in order to examine what it looks like.

These are a few words of wisdom imparted by men who, with smiles on their faces and infused with great pride, contributed to the wholesale slaughter of over one million innocent people during a foul genocide perpetrated some 50-years-ago.

Yup, you guessed it, Joshua Oppenheimer, the documentarian with the art of filmmaking hardwired into his very DNA is back in town and I steadfastly deliver you this following iron-clad guarantee:

You have not seen, nor will you ever see a movie like The Look of Silence. Never. Ever. Unless, of course, you've seen The Act of Killing, to which this film is a companion piece and one in which I made a similar guarantee when I reviewed that earlier work.

The Look of Silence proves to be an equally brave and cinematically brilliant look at the violent 1965 aftermath to the fall of Sukarno in Indonesia when the country shifted to a military dictatorship. Indonesians who opposed the new government were accused of being communists - a crime punishable by death. In less than a year with aid from the west, most of it from America (naturally), over one million "communists" were murdered.

Yes, many of the victims were communists, but so many others were simply labelled as such to justify killing them. Though the killings were sanctioned by the army, they were, in fact, carried out by civilian militias - squads of bloodthirsty garden variety psychopaths eager to taste blood for the "good" of their country.

THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
THE ACT OF KILLING
THE LOOK OF SILENCE

The only serious and good dramatic feature film to focus on the beginnings of this tragedy is Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hunt in her brilliant Academy Award winning gender bending performance. Not that it's a factual document or anything, but it's a stylish fact-based fictional look at the events leading up to the genocide, placing things in a digestible manner. Given how sickeningly powerful Oppenheimer's documentaries are, the Weir picture isn't at all a bad place to begin before diving headlong into the horrors of both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

Kudos are to be extended to Oppenheimer for creating an equally affecting companion piece that can work just fine as a stand-alone piece, bringing a completely new perspective to the tragedy. His first film on this subject focused the killers. Here, we focus on the victims.

Oppenheimer pulls out all the stops on his filmmaking prowess as an original cinematic storyteller by following Adi, a young 40-something travelling optician whose older brother was butchered during the genocide. Adi's route to offer eye examinations and to sell glasses takes him into the homes of the still-living killers (still feared, all rich and revered by the government as heroes) where he checks their eyesight and probes them about their parts in the genocide. If you want it, metaphor and irony abound in this odd tag-team of eye exams and hardline questioning, but for most, the story and the storytelling here will be the overriding element.

The look of a brother

Oppenheimer bounces between Adi watching interview footage with the various killers in the district (including those men describing gleefully how they murdered Adi's brother) and Adi on the road, confronting the same men he's seen in the videos. In most cases, these confrontations are chilling, the killers dropping unsubtle hints that Adi might be a communist himself and in need of extermination.

His Mother and wife are both terrified for Adi, but also for themselves and Adi's children. Adi's Mother lives everyday with the horror and pain of her son's murder while taking care of her blind, infirm husband whose own memories have been erased by the onset of senility.

The look of a killer

Adi, however, is a man obsessed. He's driven to ask the questions about the brother he never knew. He MUST ask the questions nobody dares to ask. At one point, a killer is so upset with Adi's questions - often relating to morality, culpability and guilt - that the sleaze bucket points out that not even Joshua with his interviewer cap on ever asked such penetrating questions. Oppenheimer, of course, intentionally kept a cool distance in his previous film to allow the killers a chance to "hang" themselves with their bragging, but here, he keeps another form of distance altogether to tell a story - that of Adi's powerful journey to confront the killers of his brother.

This is highly potent and explosive material and once again, Oppenheimer delivers a motion picture that's not only an important document of history, but a magnificent, harrowing and consummate work of art. The fact of the matter is this - most documentary filmmakers are not filmmakers. They're journalists and/or committed activists wanting to present a point of view with respect to information and/or interesting subjects. Oppenheimer transcends those staid notions of documentarians, though. He's a genuine filmmaker, an artist of the highest order. His work is not ephemeral in the least and will survive long, long after he and the rest of us are six feet under.

Though The Look of Silence lives now, it will, most importantly, live forever.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

The Look of Silence begins its theatrical release in Canada at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto via Blue Ice Docs.

THE RAID: REDEMPTION (now on Blu-Ray and DVD from Alliance Films) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Gareth Huw Evans is the real thing. Christopher Nolan and all the other ham-fisted directors could learn more than a few tricks from this mad, meticulous filmmaker.

The Raid: Redemption (2011) dir: Gareth Huw Evans

Starring: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Donny Alamsyah, Yayan Ruhian, Pierre Gruno, Ray Sahetapy

***1/2

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I've got a great idea! Surprisingly (or not-so surprisingly), Christopher Nolan was the chief inspiration for the proverbial lightbulb blinking above my noggin. Here's my revelation:

Deep six everybody who can't direct action and/or suspense and replace them with Gareth Huw Evans. In fact, I'd go so far as suggesting that every action movie ever made from here on in needs to be directed by Gareth Huw Evans. Well, actually, we'll leave John Woo, Sam Raimi and a handful of others alone, but the rest can don netted wife-beater shirts, spandex shorts and a fashionable (but equally practical) pair of shoes to beat the pavement in a suitable neighbourhood to turn tricks for in-the-closet married johns.

After a promising feature debut with the sicko thriller Footsteps in 2006 and the kick-ass sophomore effort Merantau in 2009, Gareth Huw Evans, the plucky Welsh director has "Top of the world, Ma!" written all over him. This guy's going to keep delivering the goods until he goes out in a blaze of glory.

Clearly indebted to the influence of John Woo, Sam Peckinpah and some of the great Shaw Brothers martial arts classics, but with his own additional flavour of relentless style, Gareth Huw Evans is, no doubt, one of the most astonishing talents to break into the motion picture temple of those men who hold forth the torches of genre genius.

Every neck snap, bone cruch, gunshot, machete hack and explosion in The Raid: Redemption is imbued with narrative propulsion, mind-blowing bravura and often, suspense strung so tight one is waiting for something within one's own viscera to snap. After three viewings (at TIFF 2011's Midnight Madness, theatrically and now on Blu-Ray), my delight and excitement has not diminished.

The screenplay by Evans is deceptively simple - a Jakarta SWAT team invades a huge, blasted-out apartment building to make their way, floor by floor, to get to the very top in order to take out a powerful dirtbag crime lord. Along the way, they meet any number of lowlife scum buckets and eradicate them with zeal.

Eventually, even the SWAT team is no match for the army of trained killers that besiege them from every nook, cranny and apartment. A handful of the cops remain and must decide whether to continue ever-upwards to finish the mission or make their way down to get out. Either way, death seems inevitable for some, if not all of the boys in special-ops black.

That's pretty much it, but Evans injects a few welcome narrative touches that add an element of humanity to the otherwise savage proceedings. Firstly, the hero of the picture Rama (Iko Uwais) is given just enough flesh for us to desperately root for him. We pretty much hope this rookie will survive in order to see his loving wife give birth to their first child, to fulfill a pact he's made with his father, to save as many of his colleagues as humanly possible and, of course, take out the head honcho.

Evans also delivers a simple, but effective element of duality to the good and evil sides of the equation so we get a nice Woo/Peckinpah-like dose of sentimental male bonding.

Iko Uwais is not only a terrific actor (whom the camera loves big time) but he's one of the world's leading practitioners of the ever-so heart-stopping form of Indonesian martial arts, silat. Yup, it involves all the great hand and foot action you'd expect from a martial art, but also blends the sickening, stomach churning and dazzling use of blades - blades of all sorts: knives, swords, machetes - some of which are equipped with the most carnage-inflicting serrated edges imaginable.

Uwais also choreographs the action - all of which is performed by a seemingly endless number of expert practitioners of silat. Needless to say, there is plenty of blood.

Happily, Evans captures every single action set piece with both the approach and precision of a true Master. He hangs the camera back and lets the choreography dictate the pace. He uses closeups, dollies and cuts judiciously. Nothing is sloppy, jagged or out of place in the horrible herky-jerky fashion employed by virtually every mainstream director who indulges in action scenes. His sense of geography is impeccable and there's no annoying Christopher Nolan-styled bombast-over-DNA-hardwired-directorial-virtuosity.

The story, though simple - perhaps because of its wise simplicity - always moves forward and most importantly, the action is not only there for suspense and thrills, but to hammer us ever-closer to the inevitable ultimate showdown.

There are times when the movie is so sickeningly violent, you'll feel like averting your eyes. You won't though. You might be missing something you've never seen before.

"The Raid: Redemption" is available on a great Bluray transfer replete with a bevy of excellent extra featues from Alliance Films. It's also available on DVD, but why bother?"

Action fans will definitely want to own "The Raid: Redemption" and perhaps some of Evans's other films "Merantau" and "Footsteps". Feel free to order from the Amazon links below and you'll be assisting with the maintenance of this site.





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