A gripping moral and social drama set in present-day Iran, Asghar Farhadi’s follow-up to the fine About Elly lifts the director to the front rank of contemporary world directors, and should be compulsive viewing for anyone wondering what has happened to Iranian cinema. It is compelling viewing for just about everybody, for that matter.

Showing a control of investigative pacing that recalls classic Hitchcock and a feel for ethical nuance that is all his own, Farhadi has hit upon a story that is not only about men and women, children and parents, justice and religion in today’s Iran, but that raises complex and globally relevant questions of responsibility, of the subjectivity and contingency of ‘telling the truth’, and of how thin the line can be between inflexibility and pride – especially of the male variety – and selfishness and tyranny.

About Elly, which played in competition at the Berlinale in 2009, was not widely distributed, but Nader And Simin is a more commercial arthouse prospect. About Elly had an existential spin and a slightly overwrought feel in some of the dialogue, but here Farhadi has found a story that sublimates its spiritual resonance in a tense family drama that is always real and grounded.

Believable performances from the universally strong cast – including two key child actors – and crisp photography, handheld and intimate without ever being jerky, help to seal the package, and should see the director finally achieving multi-territory recognition.

The opening scene shows Nader (Moadi) and Simin (Hatami) in a judge’s office, arguing with each other and the judge – whose point of view the camera takes – about her reasons for wanting a divorce. The family, which also includes 10 year-old Termeh (Farhadi), has been granted a visa to leave Iran for some unspecified foreign destination. But Nader now refuses to leave because his father (Shahbazi) is suffering from Alzheimer’s and needs constant attention.

Incensed, Simin wants to divorce Nader and go, even without her daughter, as Nader refuses to give his consent, and Termeh herself – a quiet, studious girl whose strength of character will come through as the story develops – who seems to want to stay with her father.

Refused a divorce, Simin heads off anyway (only as far as her mother’s, it turns out), and Nader is forced to hire Razieh (Bayat), who has a little daughter, Somayeh  (Hosseini), in tow, to look after his father while he is out at work. The class distinction between Razieh and her employers is clear even to those unfamiliar with Iranian society: she is meek and devout, wears full black chador in contrast to Simin’s hastily draped silk headscarf, and is unhappy about working in the house of a man who has separated from his wife – and even more so at having to clean up after his father when he wets himself (she even makes a call to a friend or spiritual advisor to check whether removing his trousers to clean up counts as a sin).

Nader and Simin, on the other hand, are modern, Westernised Iranians, from the same sort of well-off elite that the director focused on in his previous film. Though it’s never explicitly stated, the fact that this elite occupies an uneasy place in an Iran ruled not by the monied classes but by a political theocracy, underlines and gives depth to the stand-off that will develop between Simin’s rich, Westernised family and Razieh’s poor, devout family, when an incident occurs that will lead to serious charges being filed against Nader.

While the investigative twists and turns that follow are always compelling, the brilliance of the film is the way it manages to keep afloat, at the same time, our compassion for the two children in the case. Unable to do the right thing himself, Nader keeps passing the moral buck to his daughter, blackmailing her emotionally when he thinks he’s just treating her as an adult. Pre-school Somayeh is also made an accomplice in the stand-off that follows, and the glance of understanding that the two girls exchange at a certain point inside the courthouse is more eloquent than a page of dialogue.

As the film builds to its dramatic climax, we wonder how the director can possibly find an ending that does justice to this compelling story’s narrative and thematic complexities. The round of applause that followed the film’s Berlinale competition press screening was a tribute, at least in part, to the sensitivity – and perhaps, the inevitability – of the perfect solution he comes up with.

In his new film The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodóvar reaches out tentatively into unexplored genre territory — horror. It’s a creepy story: Antonio Banderas stars as a plastic surgeon devoted to creating a new kind of skin resistant to pain — and finds a human guinea pig on whom to perfect the process.

Yet despite squirm-worthy moments when scalpels are poised above bare torsos, the promise of horror gives way to Almodóvar’s broader, familiar preoccupations: identity, blood ties, disguises and genetic traits. When one character wails: “I have insanity in my entrails!” it’s funny and moving in equal measure.

As usual with Almodóvar, the past informs the present, and the labyrinthine plot takes several apparent detours that finally integrated seamlessly into its climax.

It becomes clear that 12 years previously, the wife of Robert (Banderas) was burned horribly in a car crash, and took her life when she finally saw her scarred face. Their dysfunctional teenage daughter was sexually molested by a young man at a swanky party, but believed afterwards that Robert was the predator.

Unanswered questions continue into the present. Why is Robert’s assistant Marilia (Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes) so blindly devoted to him? Why is Vera (Elena Anaya), a beautiful, unstable young patient on whom Robert conducts his experiments, kept under lock and key upstairs in his home, where he practices his surgery? And why does he watch her every move from downstairs, on wall-mounted widescreens?

A list of the story’s various elements — date rape, murder, secrets, lies, mystery parents, gender ambiguity, unbreakable emotional bonds — confirms The Skin I Live In as essentially a melodrama. Yet Almodóvar’s story-telling is nowhere near as shrill as it once was: as a mature artist, he has refined his skills to a point where these soap-opera tropes assimilate smoothly into a complex whole.

The notion of our identity being shaped by the skin we live in — and gaze upon in the mirror — has resonance outside the actual narrative. Almodóvar may be making a point about how audiences perceive films and the actors who inhabit them. Antonio Banderas is a handsome matinee idol who has retained his looks into middle age — so does casting him put us on the wrong foot in how we initially regard Robert? In a story that leaves us wondering who’s heroic, villainous, an oppressor or a victim, it’s a pertinent question.

Typically for Almodóvar, it all looks ravishing, thanks to production designer Antxon Gómez and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine. All three men have the gift of investing mundane objects with a unique sheen; here even surgical instruments, about to be used malevolently, assume a dreamy, otherworldly quality. The Skin I Live In is the work of a master near the top of his game.

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The film opens somewhere near the Arctic Circle. A teenage girl, named Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), has just killed a deer with an arrow, followed by a bullet. She drags the carcass of the animal through the deep, icy snow to a cabin in the woods where her father, Erik (Eric Bana), is waiting for her. Not the best conditions for a teenage girl, I’m sure. We learn that father and daughter have been in this place since Hanna was still an infant. She has been homeschooled all her life. And because Erik is a wanted CIA agent, he forms Hanna into the perfect assassin.

Not everyone gets to master martial arts and firearms at that early age, and the secluded home of Hanna offers little distractions. But, this lifestyle is not without disadvantages. Except for her own father, Hanna has not known any other person. Her books tell her that the world contains so much, and she knows that she is a stranger to almost all of them. That is probably why she was more than eager to find out that her mission will require her to travel in order to eliminate lots of bad guys, including a secretive CIA officer, Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett).

“Hanna” is less about a plot to assassinate a group of government officials and more about a young girl’s opportunity to discover what it’s like to have a normal life. It’s an interesting and amusing sight to see a girl who has as much awkwardness in her as there is violence. For Hanna, escaping maximum security and assassinating countless of men is the easy part. One of her biggest challenges involves a loud TV and a remote control that she cannot quite understand. Maybe this is why it’s possible for me to like a killer like Hanna and despise a killer like Hitgirl from “Kick-Ass”. Hitgirl is merely identified as a weapon; Hanna is treated like a person.

Saoirse Ronan agreeing to play Hanna is a good sign. Most actresses who started out young in Hollywood usually stray away from good movies as they get older. (What was Lindsay Lohan’s next great starring role after “Mean Girls”?) Saoirse is in the right direction, who always looks for roles that would expand her abilities in acting. Did you know that she was nominated for an Oscar at age thirteen? This girl is a gem, and also, the second prettiest girl my eyes have ever seen.

The care given to the development of the characters is extended towards the action sequences. Most action sequences of recent years, which are especially true to 2011, are composed of nothing but bits of frames spliced and edited back together in order to form something… anything… that resembles movement. Directors who resolve to quick cuts are either lazy of their work or uninformed of their craft. The director here is Joe Wright, who is known for his long, continuous, and uninterrupted shots. This is the first time he has done an action picture, and has already proven himself more competent with the genre than someone like Paul W. S. Anderson. Wright’s steady direction, accompanied by a magnetic soundtrack by The Chemic Brothers, is a pleasure for both the eyes and the ears.

“Hanna” is a great film and a fine example of filmmaking. Because action films are more familiar with the public, my hope is that many people will see it, and be astonished by its superiority. My honest hope is that this will cause them to raise their standards, and start looking for more of its kind. People who take serious time to defend something like “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” only tells me that they haven’t seen anything better than it.

Still, things start out on a fairly upbeat note, as three Mossad agents – Rachel (Jessica Chastain), David (Sam Worthington) and Stephan (Martin Csokas) – step off a plane in Israel in 1966 to applause from waiting officials. While they may not have succeeded in their mission to capture Nazi war criminal Doktor Bernhardt, aka Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen) and bring him to trial, Dieter did end up dead (shot while trying to escape) and that counts as a win in everyone’s book. Jump forward 30 years and while Rachel (Helen Mirren) is at the launch of a book by her daughter detailing their mission, David (Ciaran Hinds) is being collected from his dingy apartment by a secret agent. David doesn’t look happy; outside, when he sees Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) waiting for him, he’s unhappier still, as shown by the way he promptly throws himself in front of a passing truck.

While their present day situation might be complicated – Stephan and Rachel are now divorced, with Stephan being the father of Rachel’s daughter – things weren’t that much better back in 1966. Undercover in East Berlin with no backup and no experience, the trio are in well over their heads even before Rachel visits and is examined by Vogel in his current job as a gynaecologist (current front-runner for creepiest scene of 2011: he’s a Nazi OBGYN). Not to mention all the romantic tension seems to be between her and David; clearly it’s not just their Nazi-snatching mission that goes off the rails.

To reveal much more would be to give away the film’s central twist… not that it’s all that hard to figure out. Suffice to say the film’s big theme turns out to be “unfinished business”, which is a bit of a problem because while the ’60s-era action is a well put-together and reasonably tense spy thriller built around the desperation of the trio as they frantically try to grab Vogel without being grabbed themselves by the East Germans, the 1997 plotline feels muddled and half-baked. It doesn’t help that last time Helen Mirren played a spy coming out of retirement to kick butt it was in the action-comedy Red: in any comparison between the two The Debt comes off second best, largely because here Mirren doesn’t go berzerk with a machine gun. Then again, she does get into a crawl fight with a pensioner, so it’s not all bad news.

While the casting director clearly (and arguably, correctly) decided to go for quality rather than trying to find actors 30 years apart in age who matched up in looks, it does seem a little perverse to have Worthington play a character who ages into Hinds when he actually looks a lot more like a young Wilkinson. A swap wouldn’t hurt Csokas either, as he’d much more plausibly age into Hinds. As for the Chastain aging into Mirren, while it’s not much more plausible both actresses are never less than compelling. Together, they go a long way towards making this film work as well as it does.

This acting disconnect does highlight the big problem this film has: there’s no real emotional link between the two time frames. Despite what should be a firm connection between the two, time and again it feels like we’re watching two completely separate stories. There just doesn’t seem to be much continuity of character over the two periods. Without that bond the second of those stories – the one set in 1997 – doesn’t hold up.

The ’90s-era characters are meant to be scarred by their past, but by showing us so much of it – and showing what seems like very different characters living through it – what should be an extended flashback instead becomes its own film. Their troubles today don’t seem linked to what went before, and without that link, this is just a decent ’60s-era thriller encased in a flabby, pointless ’90s shell.

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Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson) is a police inspector and also the only completely tone-deaf member of an extended musical family, including a younger brother who is a famous conductor. Warnebring knows enough about music to realize that a ticking noise his colleagues believe is from a car bomb is in fact a metronome … and the discovery of that metronome puts him on the trail of a gang of musicians perpetrating odd crimes. Sanna (Sanna Persson) and her composer friend Magnus (Magnus Borjeson) are the head of a group performing Magnus’s symphony “Music for One City and Six Drummers,” which comprises four movements set in the most unlikely parts of town and involves the most unlikely musical instruments. Everything has musical possibilities in this group’s hands, from medical equipment to shredders to bulldozers.

‘Sound of Noise’ plays exactly like a good old-fashioned caper film, specifically the kind where the criminals leave whimsical clues at the scenes of their crimes (‘The Thief Who Came to Dinner’ leaps to mind) and form a mysterious bond with their pursuers. But these aren’t criminals, ma’am, they’re musicians, although hardly law-abiding. Their musical performances are delightful, and nothing like anything you’d hear in a traditional movie musical, I assure you. I mentioned ‘The Blues Brothers’ above and I feel certain the filmmakers love the movie too, and have made some sly jokes echoing that film.

The movie reminded me a lot of the 2009 American film ‘(Untitled)’, which also addressed the themes about what constitutes art and music, and how people work to explode those boundaries. ‘Sound of Noise’ is more overtly humorous, less snarky and lighter in tone — and frankly, the music is often easier to listen to. However, if anyone ever plans a remake of this particular Swedish genre film, I hope they’ll get David Lang, who composed just the right score for ‘(Untitled),’ to work on the musical aspect.

Filmmakers Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjaerne Nilsson made a short film in 2001 with the same theme (and musicians) on a smaller scale: ‘Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers’, which you can watch online. I’ve embedded it below, so you can get an idea of the bizarre and entrancing way that these characters make music. Combine that with a well-paced police story and even a touch of romance, and ‘Sound of Noise’ is a charming result. It’s my favorite film from Fantastic Fest so far (although admittedly we are not quite halfway through the fest).

Stunning to look at, authentic to a fault and a little tedious to follow for over two and a half hours, the Taiwanese action saga Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale tells the true story of Taiwan’s aboriginal people who were almost wiped out by Japanese colonizers in the 1930s. Their rebellion under the leadership of Chief Mouna Rudo is recounted in a spectacular, almost non-stop sequence of grisly hand-to-hand combat scenes. No martial arts here, but skillfully realistic fighting with spears and machetes, guns and cannons, which spare no one.

Outside of China and particularly Taiwan, where a longer version will be released in two parts, this big-scale action coproduced by John Woo will check in as a strange sort of exotica for very specialized audiences, read festival and serious action fans.
Taiwanese writer/director Wei Te-Sheng, known for his top-grossing 2008 hit Cape No. 7, throws a bit of legend and magic into history as seen through the eyes of the proud insurgents, whose abject humiliation and descent into alcoholism under the arrogant Japanese provide many parallels to other stories, like the Native Americans. He has assembled an extraordinary cast of emotionally expressive, non-pro actors of aborigine descent, and watching their displays of physical prowess as they run barefoot through tropical forests is half the movie.

In lieu of the usual opening titles, the action begins as China hands Taiwan over to the Japanese in 1895. In the remote mountainous interior, aboriginal tribes of Seediqs still lead a traditional life, hunting for animals, warring with neighboring clans, head-hunting and tattooing their faces as a sign of initiation into manhood. Wei pulls no punches on the toughness of the chief’s arrogant son Mouna Rudo (played by Da Ching as a youth and Lin Ching-Tai as an adult), while extolling his fearless heroism in hunting and killing. Rather than conventional sympathy, viewers are made to feel respect for a man dyed in tradition.

When the tribes are at last contained by the Japanese army, who view them as savages and set out to “civilize” them with schools and post offices, they sink into wage slavery and alcoholism. During this interlude in the film’s battle scenes, Mouna Rudo secretly organizes the surviving Seediq clans in an uprising of 300 warriors. On a sports holiday, they stage a surprise massacre of the assembled Japanese which Mouna calls “a blood sacrifice to our ancestors” that includes abundant decapitation. In the guerrilla warfare that follows, the forest-wise Seediqs do serious damage to the Japanese army, until the general’s call in airplanes, cannons, mortars and gas bombs to subdue them (the year is 1930.)

No matter how ingeniously it is varied, the non-stop fighting becomes oppressive in the long run. The film’s most memorable moments showing director Wei’s dramatic flare and the actors’ surprising natural talent are quieter moments: the suicide by hanging of the Seediq women who kill themselves rather than be a burden to their fighting husbands, and the extremely moving deaths of a mixed Japanese-Seediq family.

The action is set in the spell-binding Avatar-land of Mount Chilai and its lush rain forest, where waterfalls and rainbows, narrow paths and the ancient trunks and giant trees are embellished with bright green CGI work.

There are many standouts in the huge cast, from the fierce traditionalist Lin Ching-Taiin the leading role, to young Lin Yuan-Jieas an unstoppable boy warrior. Their tattoos, clothing and singing and dancing lend the film a stamp of authenticity. Dialogue is in Seediq and in Japanese.