Quick takes on The Hand of God and other foreign films

In our pop culture-influenced society, many think that the popular social influencers have it easy. Sweat shows that it may not always be so. Sylvia is a fitness trainer who has built her brand to a 600k+ following on the various social sites. She has the looks, and her bubbly personality and constant instagram posting keeps her fan base growing. But on the inside, she’s lonely. She sees her friends getting married while she can’t even keep a boyfriend, and she has to deal with stalkers and online trolls. Anything she does or anything she says is poured over. Case in point: she recently made a genuine post where she was upset that she is single, and got emotional, and people called her out, saying she should stick to workout videos. The film stars Polish actress Magdalena Koleśnik in her first leading role, and she is eye-arresting, and not just because she’s a pretty face. The viewer rides the ups and downs of her emotional roller coaster with her. Solid film. ★★★½

Azor is, I guess, a thriller, but it’s the most low-key thriller you’ll ever find. It takes place in the late 70s in Argentina, where the government has just been overthrown by the military, which is cracking down on dissidents while trying to keep everything running. People, and sometimes whole families, are disappearing, while everyone else is trying to go along like nothing has happened. Into this chaotic scene comes Ivan de Wiel, a Swiss banker who’s come to wine and dine Argentina’s wealthy. The bank had previously sent a man named Keys, who has also mysteriously disappeared, and de Wiel is there now to make sure money isn’t lost (not to see what happened to Keys, oddly enough). De Wiel is greeted by soldiers checking ID’s, and the view of a couple young men held at gunpoint just off the street; the viewer thinks they’ll be shot down at any moment. De Wiel starts meeting with various people, trying to gain their business for his bank. Everyone talks about Keys, with either reverence, friendship, or animosity. Keys was either the life of the party or the scum of the earth, depending on who you ask. De Wiel is able to work his way down Key’s left-behind schedule with one exception: a cryptic meeting labeled “Lazaro.” When he attempts to make inquiries as to who or what Lazaro is, de Wiel is met with blank stares, or abrupt changes of subject. Throughout the picture, there is a subtle but growing sense of trepidation. The people de Wiel talks to are rarely forthcoming, leading to a continued sense of mystery. A lot of dialogue (in French and Spanish), but it is a (quietly) wild ride. ★★★★

I did not get Ghost Tropic at all. The whole plot of the film is a 50-something woman, a cleaner, falls asleep on the subway ride home after getting off from the late shift, and sleeps past her stop, only waking at the end of the line. It being late at night, the subway won’t run anymore, and she has no cash to call a cab. She sets out for the long overnight walk back to her home. The film is her encounters along the way. She finds a homeless man freezing to death and calls emergency services. She gets a cup of hot tea from a kind convenience store clerk just before closing. She visits a home she used to clean years before. That’s it. Maybe the film is about being kind to your neighbors, but if so, it was a bit too obtuse to nail it down for me. I don’t mind a slow movie (see above), but this one brings crawling to a whole new level. ★½

Holy cow is Prayers for the Stolen a great film. It follows three girls in Mexico, best friends, as they navigate the terrors brought to their rural village. The men of the village work either work in the dangerous mines on the other side of the mountain, or in the USA, and while they are supposed to be sending money home, few do. This leaves the women and children to make do as well as they can, which often means working for the local drug cartel. The “safe” job is harvesting morphine in the poppy fields, because as a worker there, they have a level of protection from the cartel when they come to the village to do a different kind of harvesting: looking for young women to sell into human trafficking. As young girls, the film’s protagonists are unaware of the evils around them, and their questions to their parents go unanswered. When two of them have their hair cut short, they are told it is because they have lice, but we all know it is so they look like boys. The girls are jealous of the third friend who is allowed to keep her long hair; little do they know that it is because, with her cleft pallet, her parents aren’t worried about her getting carried off in a raid (when she later gets the defect corrected by visiting doctors, she gets her hair chopped off right away). After awhile, the film fasts forward a couple years, to when the girls are now young teens, and the short hair will no longer hide their developing bodies. A scary, harsh, and eye-opening film about the evil in our world, with really strong acting from the young cast, and beautifully shot and wonderfully told. ★★★★½

The Hand of God is another great one for those with patience. It takes place in Naples in the 1980s, and is a coming-of-age film about a teen named Fabietto. He’s shy and withdrawn, with no friends, so spends his days and nights with his family, who are plenty of fun actually. Fabietto’s big passion is soccer, and the talk of the town is whether Napoli can land big star Diego Maradona. The first half of the film features plenty of laughs from Fabietto’s large extended family, full of interesting characters. There’s the aunt who sits alone mouthing obscenities whenever someone checks on her, another aunt who suffers from mental illness and keeps taking her clothes off in front of everyone (much to the chagrin of Fabietto and his raging hormones), or Fabietto’s own sister, who is never seen on camera because of the running joke (to the audience) that she’s always in the bathroom. Fabietto’s mom delights in playing pranks on people, and no one is off limits; there’s no limit to what she’ll do for a laugh either. Into this joyous setting comes tragedy, which rocks Fabietto to the core. The viewer feels this blow just as deeply, because by the time it comes, I was was really invested in this characters and felt I knew them all well. Masterfully told and gorgeous shot along the Italian coast, this is a fantastic film-lovers kind of movie. ★★★★★

• TV series currently watching: Hawkeye (miniseries)
• Book currently reading: Boundless by RA Salvatore