TO LIFE (À la vie) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Auschwitz survivors get some fun in the sun.

Sand, surf and fun in the sun
await this trio of MILF Holocaust survivors.

To Life (aka À la vie) (2014)
Dir. Jean-Jacques Zilbermann
Scr. Zilbermann, Danièle D'Antoni, Odile Barski
Starring: Julie Depardieu, Suzanne Clement, Johanna ter Steege,
Hippolyte Girardot, Mathias Mlekuz, Benjamin Wangermee

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I suspect I'm going to burn in hell for this, but about thirty minutes into the ludicrous post-holocaust melodrama À la vie, a most (shall we say?) unusual notion crept into my brain, thus making the entire turgid affair watchable without having to nail my feet to the floor. My thoughts began swirling with possibilities when it occurred to me that Three MILFs from Auschwitz might be the more appropriate title for this abomination and its tag-line could be something like: "Hot MILFs at the Beach! They've survived the Holocaust and now they're gonna: Live! Laugh! Cry! Most of all, though, these girls just wanna have fun!"

Ugh! That's really what the picture boils down to.

15 years after meeting, befriending and caring for each other in Auschwitz, three plucky MILFs: Helene from Paris (Julie Depardieu, yes, she's the daughter of Big Daddy Gerard Depardieu), Lily (Johanna her Steege) from Amsterdam and Montreal-based Rose (Suzanne Clement), get together for some sun, fun and frolics on the beaches of the northern French coast town Berck-sur-mer. (Uh, for the uninitiated a MILF is a "Mother I'd Like to Fuck" and the soon-to-be-utlized FILF is a "Father I'd Like to Fuck".)

"Mais oui, but I am a castrato, and you're not!"

Our MILFs are staying in the resort town gratis thanks to the largesse of handsome FILF Raymond (Mathias Mlekuz). He's well aware of the special nature of this reunion and donates the use of his rental property. It doesn't hurt that Raymond still carries a torch for Helene (she turned down his marriage proposal years ago, but they've maintained a close friendship). Instead of a potential union between this perfectly matched couple, Helene married her sad-sack childhood sweetheart Henri (Hippolyte Girardot). Why is he so dour? Well, in Auschwitz, his testes were blasted with radiation, then snipped off.

In a nutshell (so to speak), Helene has been married to a castrato for fifteen years. He can't get it up and is only able to provide kissing, cuddling and caressing. No matter. She loves him dearly. In spite of this undying love, Helene confides to her fellow MILF Holocaust survivors that this state of affairs has been depressing the living crap out of her, especially since she is still a virgin and longs for schwance instead of the (no-doubt) nimble digits drilling into her needy, greedy mutersheyd. Like some MILF Holocaust Survivor version of Porky's, the gals make it their business to get Helene laid.

As luck would have it, klafte-pronging is just around the corner. Jilted hubbie-to-never-be Raymond introduces the gals to the buff figure of Pierre (Benjamin Wangermee), proprietor of Club Mickey, the local beach day camp for kids. This 20-something God of Love turns out to be an Algerian orphan who lived in state care most of his life - it wasn't quite Auschwitz, but traumatic enough to give him some cred in the suffering sweepstakes.

Luckily, he's got a raging hard-on due to being a virgin and he's so smitten with virginal Helene that she is on the verge of getting some strokin' from a bonafide MILF lover.

A young, buff virgin Algerian orphan looking for MILF.

Of course, as this is a film about Holocaust survivors, there's plenty of serious issues to be dealt with. Alas, they're handled very clumsily and rife with cliches. All three women have deep secrets they want to reveal and the screenplay too conveniently allows each woman a shot at spilling the goods which have haunted them for fifteen years.

Everything about the picture is by rote and nothing ever rings true - so much so, that one wonders why director Zilbermann even bothered. Ah, he bothered because this is A TRUE STORY, based upon his own mother and her two friends. "Based on" seems to be the operative phrase to apply here. This is clearly a fictionalized version of the events. Though I've not seen it, Zilbermann has already made a documentary about his mom called Irene and Her Sisters. As it deals with the real subjects, I suspect it's not as ludicrously dappled in the perverse fluorescent colour scheme he employs to capture this empty fictional rendering.

In addition to the dreadful script, lacking as it is in genuine shadings of character, complexity and genuine emotion, the production design goes out of its way to be as accurate as possible in capturing period detail, but nothing ever seems to be "lived in". One of the more egregious elements soiling the picture is the jauntily horrendous ooh-la-la score which makes the film far too similar to a horrendous Claude Lelouch affair with music (if one can call it that) by the (mostly) insufferable accordionist Francis Lai.

About the only positive note is that the performance of Depardieu is extraordinary enough to evoke a genuine tear or two. One scene where she first discovers that one of her friends in Auschwitz is not dead is pretty extraordinary. Sadly, she struggles with attempting to find a character amidst the film's dross.

MILFs have secrets. Whaddya say they're gonna share a few?

Nothing in the film rings true.

"But it's a true story," you say.

I say, "So what?" If a movie can't make itself truthful, then it betrays all tenets of good storytelling.

The most disappointing aspect of the film is dashed when the MILFS declare they will meet regularly every year at the same resort. Damn! There goes the potential for a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby "on the road" franchise (albeit with MILF Holocaust survivors, 'natch). All through this wretched excuse for a movie, I kept imagining different locales for our girls to cavort about in endless sequels. Disappointingly we'll never get to see what shenanigans these wacky MILFs from Auschwitz could have had in Bali, Waikiki and Morocco. The list is endless, but merely relegated to my feverish imagination.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: * One-Star

TO LIFE (À la vie) is an Unobstructed View release which opens May 20 in Canada.

SUNSET SONG - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Oh Dear, Another Terence Davies Masterpiece. What else is new? UK's Greatest Living Director Serves Up Epic of Romance and War.

Sunset Song (2015)
Dir. Terence Davies
Nvl. Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Starring: Agyness Deyn, Peter Mullan, Kevin Guthrie, Jack Greenlees, Daniela Nardini, Douglas Rankine, Ian Pirie, Linda Duncan McLaughlin, Mark Bonnar

Review By Greg Klymkiw

To my mind, Terence Davies is a National Treasure and easily the United Kingdom's greatest living director. Over the course of 30+ years, he's brought us eight feature length diamonds. Some have been exquisitely in the rough like 1983's The Terence Davies Trilogy of short films, the 1993 Southern Gothic of The Neon Bible and the shimmering 2008 Liverpool documentary Of Time and the City.

The carefully hewn diamonds are something else altogether - one picture after another to take their rightful place as cinematic equivalents to the priceless Persian Koh-I-Noor diamond. Blending painterly tableaux, to-die-for lighting, sweetly breathtaking camera moves (often slow and subtle), replete with Davies's virtually trademark recurring themes of time and memory, are, with few peers, amongst the best films of all time.

The masterpieces include 1988's Distant Voices, Still Lives, the gulp-and-tear-inducing exploration of a family seeking solace in "old songs" at the local pub to allay the constant physical, verbal and psychological assaults from a brutal patriarch, 1992's The Long Day Closes, a ravishing ode to movies in post-war Britain, 2000's The House of Mirth, the finest Edith Wharton film adaptation anyone will ever make, and 2011's The Deep Blue Sea, the finest film adaptation of any Terence Rattigan play that (you guessed it) anyone will ever make. (That said, Anthony Asquith's adaptation of The Browning Version with Michael Redgrave is a pubic-hair-close-second in the Rattigan movie sweepstakes.)

And now, a new masterpiece can be added to the pile.

Sunset Song is the ravishing, romantic story of a young woman who gives up her dreams of a higher education to care for farm and family. Her father is a brute who physically abuses his eldest son and demands constant sex from his wife, turning her into a breeding machine long after she is physically able to handle it. Upon the matriarch's death, Daddy Dearest gets a stroke and attempts to demand sexual favours from his only daughter. As she always has, she fights back against the unfairness and evil of patriarchy. Though her dreams of teacher's college were dashed, she discovers that her real dream consists of a deep love for the land, its people and the sweet-faced kindness offered by marrying a handsome, caring young man.

All seems well and then, war.

What's precious about her life is about to flip topsy turvy, but her strength, indomitable courage and intelligence will constantly be set upon the greatest of life's challenges. Davies charges this simple, yet complex tale with an astonishing mise en scène. Never has an on-screen courtship been sweeter and the love experienced by the young man and woman beats its heart constantly through joyous events, strife and hardships of the most devastating order and beyond.

We're faced with a myriad of life's moments with Davies's masterly direction: a deliriously romantic exchange amidst a sea of sheep, a glorious wedding sequence and barn dance, the cruelties of shell shock and the horrors of war.

There's a sequence in Sunset Song which is blessed with one of the most moving series of images and sounds that you're likely to see in any films - period. It's pure Terence Davies, yet also worthy of the very best of John Ford. The sequence is especially reminiscent of those stirring moments from Ford's screen adaptation of novelist Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley - a cornucopia of knockout moments wherein Welsh miners sing songs of sadness and joy at key points in Ford/Llewellyn's narrative of the land and its people.

Davies, of course, is not in Ford's Wales, but delivers his narrative of the land and people of Scotland in this heartbreaking, but ultimately moving and soaring film adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's immortal book "Sunset Song", the first in his important trilogy, "A Scots Quair".

As this is a Terence Davies film, music and song carry us to euphoric and elegiac heights. Using what might be the ultimate contemporary recording of Hugh Robertson's arrangement of Katherine Tynan's gut wrenching "All in the April Evening" (performed by The Glasgow Orpheus Choir), Davies and cinematographer Michael (Winter's Bone) McDonough's dazzling camera follow the people of the Estate of Kinraddie in Kincardineshire Mearns of northeastern Scotland as they slowly make their way over the rolling fields of yellow grasses until they converge upon the parish cathedral to prepare for a very solemn Sunday Service.

As beautiful and rich as the images are, along the country road and past the ancient rock buttressing the House of God, the camera, then dollying slowly backwards inside the cathedral as the townsfolk sit whilst sun streams through the majestic windows, waiting for the words of Reverend Gibbon (Mark Bonnar), there is a portent we cannot help but feel to our very core. It doesn't seem lost upon the townspeople either - what begins as a happy parade to worship, soon betrays visages of both melancholy and trepidation and the gait of the assembled, is ultimately not unlike a funeral march.

Tynan's song tells the tale of Christ's Passion, but given that Scotland has been corralled into war by England against The Hun, we cannot help but ascribe the meaning of the lyrics to reflect what really awaits the folk of Kinraddie:

The sheep with their little lambs
Pass'd me by on the road;
All in an April evening
I thought on the Lamb of God.

The lambs were weary, and crying
With a weak human cry;
I thought on the Lamb of God
Going meekly to die.

As the camera passes by the newly, happily married couple, Chris (Agyness Deyn) and Ewan (Kevin Guthrie), the lyrics are timed thusly:

. . . but for the lamb, The Lamb of God
Up on the hill-top green;

Here, Davies and McDonough reverse the angle upon the pulpit as the grim-faced Reverend slowly makes his way to the "holy" perch above the people. And the lyrics lament:

. . .Only a cross, a cross of shame
Two stark crosses between.

The Reverend ascends the stairs to his lectern of doom, lowers his head, then raises it, staring straight out at the congregation as the final lyrics hang in the air like a harbinger of death:

I saw the sheep with their lambs,
And thought on the Lamb of God.

The light then shines upon the suitably creepy Reverend as if it's been cranked-up by God Himself. Taking its place amongst such hellfire and brimstone cinematic sermons like John Gielgud in Joseph Strick's 1977 film of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Orson Welles in John Huston's film of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Davies is blessed with the casting of Mark Bonnar to have us (and the congregation), quaking with horror.

With his brogue pitched to hysteria and meanness, Bonnar's rendering of the sermon seems to be the very core of the film (even though the picture is essentially a grand coming of age story). It goes thusly:

"As you know, we are now at war with Germany. This NEW BABYLON has as many corruption as the old one. How long it will rage is what God in His wisdom will only know. But it's a chastisement by blood and fire that the nations must arise and prevail against this enemy. And Scotland, not the least of these, in its ancient health and humility to tread again the path of peace and courage that will ultimately lead to our victory.

Their King, which they also call Kaiser, is the Antichrist - a foul evil upon this Earth that must be swept away by the righteous.

Those who will not fight to defend their country, must be exposed for that they truly are.

Cowards. And pro-German cowards at that."

History proves that the needs of the state are always bolstered by organized religion. Worse yet, World War I notoriously sacrificed the youngest and largest number of men from Scotland, Ireland and the colonies (including Canada, Australia, etc.) to ensure victory. Whole swaths of generational promise were sacrificed in this dirty war fought between the "ruling classes".

God forbid Davies should ever be politically obvious in a didactic fashion, but in so far as he chooses his material and presents it, he still exposes as many terrible truths about humanity as only the best filmmakers/artists do. Sunset Song is a love story, a coming-of-age story, but most of all, it serves as one of the most heartbreaking and potent antiwar films of the new millennium.

And here's my guarantee, you will shed copious tears.

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

Sunset Song Opens in Canada via Unobstructed View:
May 13: Toronto, Cineplex Cinemas Varsity and VIP (55 Bloor St. W)
Toronto Holdover, Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas
May 27: Vancouver, Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour St.)
May 28: Winnipeg, Cinematheque (100 Arthur St.)
June 3: Calgary, Globe Cinema (617 8 Ave SW)
June 3: Waterloo, Princess Twin (46 King St. N)
June 17: Montréal, Cinéma du Parc (3575, av. du Parc)
Cinéma Beaubien (2396, rue Beaubien Est)
June 17: Ottawa, ByTowne Cinema (325 Rideau St.)
June 17: Québec City, Cinéma Le Clap (2360, chemin Sainte-Foy)
June 17: Cobourg, The Loft Cinema (201 Division St.)