Director Park Chan-wook draw with the tones of black comedy in “No other choice – There is no other choice” a tragic future for the post-industrial society of the West, in which a South Korean “small bourgeois” devises gloomy ploys to find a job.
“Norimberga” on James Vanderbilt instead it retraces the days that led to the sentence of the famous trial, filtered through the Mephistophelian relationship between Hermann Göring and the medical lieutenant colonel Douglas Kelley, psychiatrist of the American army, who must evaluate the mental health of the former marshal and the other hierarchs.
Inspired by the autobiography of Amélie Nothomb (Metaphysics of Pipes), Belgian writer, born in 1967 in Kobe, Japan, to diplomatic parents, the animated film is released in theaters “Little Amélie”, journey through the early years of childhood, discovering small things as well as the deepest mysteries in a constant explosion of knowledge. Directed by Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang and Mailys Vallade. Delightful.
No other choice – There is no other choice
Director Park Chan-wook gives us one black-comedy which is also an apologue on the world of work and neo-Toyota capitalism worthy of the best Ken Loach.
His “No other choice” draws well the world of industry in South Korea, where the film is set, but also throughout Far East Asia, even in the solitude and tragedy of a ridiculous man.
Man-su, specialist in paper production with twenty-five years of experience, he is so satisfied with life that he can honestly say to himself: “I have everything”. Sort of “bourgeois small small” Koreanhe happily spends his days with his wife Miri, their two children and their two dogs, until one day he is suddenly informed by his company that he has been fired. “We’re sorry. We have no other choice.”
Feeling as if his head had been severed with an axe, Man-su vows to find a new job within the next three months for the good of the family. Time passes, months too: after a year, desperate, he shows up without warning at Moon Paper to deliver his CV, but ismiliated by line manager Sun-chul.
Knowing that he is more qualified than anyone else to work there, he makes a decision: if there is no vacancy for me, I’ll have to get hired creating one. The problem is that the methods and solutions adopted by Man-su are not exactly legal, on the contrary.
Con a style between social criticism and dark humorexalted by Fate, common to many Korean directors (see “Parasite” by Bong Joon-ho), Park Chan-wook works by accumulation, increasing the protagonist’s events with details and cyclical repetitions, in a unstoppable baroque spiral of psychological and physical violence which lead to an exaggerated ending, in which the possible winner is still a loser, solitary antihero in a now rarefied and compulsive industrial worldwhich sooner or later will engulf him too. Unjustly left out of the awards at the last Venice Film Festival, “No other choice” ends with vitriolic irony, but in reality it seems to be the swan song of a post-industrial society in its decline. (Michele Gottardi)
Little Amélie
Director: Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang, Mailys Vallade
The animated film “Little Amélie”
Who is Amélie? In his first months of life he perceives himself as God, immobile, imperturbable, omnipotent. Then, at two years old, the awareness of life and pleasure after a bite of a bar of Belgian white chocolate given to her by her grandmother. This is how this begins small, poetic and colorful animated film directed by the Liane-Cho couple Han Jin Kuang and Mailys Vallade: “Little Amélie” is inspired bythe autobiography of Amélie Nothomb (Metaphysics of Pipes), Belgian writer, born in 1967 in Kobe, Japan, to diplomatic parents.
The film, with drawings that recallor the stroke and “grammar” of Hayao Miyazachi, it is a journey into the early years of childhood, to discover small things as well as the deepest mysteries in a constant explosion of knowledge, of crazy and curious synapses nourished thanks also to the silent and complicit presence of Japanese nurse Nishio-san with which the little girl forms a very deep bond, coming to perceive the drama of war and atomic bombs, the cultural clash between East and West and the distrust of foreigners in defense of immutable traditions.
Dense themes that the film masters delicately, without didacticism or moralizing drifts with the permanent center of gravity represented by a little girl who, first, becomes a synthesis of different and opposite worlds, absorbing enthusiasm and pain, as, certainly, the impassive tube that she was in the first years of life would not do, naturally incapable of holding anything back but of being, alone, crossed by existence.
Distributed in Italy thanks to Lucky Red, “Little Amélie” is nominated for the 2026 Golden Globes and the EFA as best animated film, a nomination that could also be replicated at the Oscars: a sign that European animation (after last year’s success of “Flow”) is more lively than ever. (Marco Contino)
Nuremberg
Cast: Russel Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Richard E. Grant
The film “Nuremberg”
The main problem when Evil is representedin the images of a film or between the pages of a book, is the risk of sharing, if not identifying with the main character.
It has always been discussed, the problem has also resurfaced for Antonio Scurati’s Mussolini, but further back in time, and in a more clearly historiographical genre, with the six volumes on the Duce by Renzo De Felice.
This time the focus of the big screen shifts to Hermann Göring, Hitler’s infamous former right-hand manand on the other Nazi hierarchs imprisoned after the collapse of the regime and brought to trial in Nuremberg.
At the center of James Vanderbilt’s film, “Nuremberg”, there is the Mephistophelian relationship between Göring and a medical lieutenant colonel, Douglas Kelley, a US Army psychiatrist, who must evaluate the mental health of the former marshal and his acolytes.
The film is based on the 2013 book by Jack El-Hai “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a fatal meeting of minds at the end of WWII”, che racconta la true story of the psychiatrist and how and how much they affected his later life qthose weeks alongside Evilto the point that, after having contributed to framing Göring, Kelley increasingly became convinced that the evil seed sown by the Nazis had also taken root in the United States. He committed suicide, unheard and depressed, in 1958, while supremacists and neo-Nazis were now spreading in the States too.
His story has now been dusted off from oblivion by Jack El-Hai and James Vanderbilt, who obviously focus it above all on the relationship with Göring: in fact “Nuremberg” is based almost exclusively on confrontation, on dialogues, on the various attempts at seduction between the twoon the one hand the former marshal, a great manipulator who appears falsely weakened by imprisonment, played by a great Russell Crowe, the former gladiator here downright monstrous in his attempt to physically identify with the fat hierarch and represent all his possible negative nuances, and the slender, small in physique but also in his interpretation, Rami Malek, già Freddy Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
The rest, the other figures, from the various convicted and hanged Nazis, to Judge Jackson (Michael Shannon) and to the English jurist David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E. Grant), are supporting elements that serve to give structure to the film, create an environment, historicize the images, also with the help of a precise reconstruction of the courtroom and black and white images and period footage, about which he had already said a lot the film of the same name by Stanley Kramer, in 1961.
And beyond the interesting staging, the underlying objective seems to be to raise the ancient question, “how was all this possible?”, in light of recent massacres, endless wars, the horror of other genocides from which we often seem distant and immune. (Michele Gottardi)
The other film reviews of the week on www.ilnordest.it.
