Summer Films

Summer films are supposed to be fun. Well, I suppose hiding out behind a cairn from a helicopter can be fun.

Here are a few films that we enjoyed in the last few weeks.

The Biggest Little Farm (USA)

This movie chronicles the efforts made by John Chester and his wife Molly to transform 200 acres of arid land in Southern California into a healthy, working, organic enterprise. Not being farmers themselves, they hire Alan, a self-professed expert in sustainable agriculture, to help them spend their money. Where did the money come from? A bunch of good-natured friends and investors. It sounds like a utopian dream, and a financial disaster in the making.

Alan has lots of theories about diversity, manure tea, ground cover, pigs, diversity, gophers, sheep, erosion, bees, diversity, and other concepts. After forty-five minutes of struggles and setbacks, I was curious to see the farm's balance sheet and listen to candid interviews with some of the major investors.

But at a certain point, those thoughts faded into the background, because the farm operations themselves became so darned interesting. The mama pig gives birth to fourteen little piglets. (For cute.) The starlings ruin most of the fruit—all 147 kinds—but there is a market for it anyway. Eggs become a cash crop, a production mainstay, highly valued in town ... until the coyotes start killing all the chickens. Chester reluctantly shoots a few coyotes, only to discover that along with enjoying an occasional chicken dinner, they've been doing a good job of keeping the gophers in check. Barn owls are added to the equation to nab the gophers. And on it goes.

By year seven, some things have died and others have flourished. The young people hired to work the farm are so energetic, I was surprised they didn't start a little winery on the side and open a Friday night farm pizzeria. We still haven't seen any balance sheets, but we've seen a lot of plants, animals, insects, and people, shot with often amazing cinematographic skill, and it's all very beautiful and, yes, heartwarming.           

The Farewell (China)

Every recent summer has had its Asian hit. Two years ago it was The Big Sick. Last year it was Crazy Rich Asians. Now the break-out star of that film, the rapper Awkwafina, is back in a film called The Farewell. This time around she plays an anguished and independent young  Chinese-American woman who returns to China along with her parents to visit her grandmother, who has only a few weeks to live. Trouble is, they haven't told the old woman she's on death's bed.

Awkwafina abhors the hypocrisy, and struggles to keep her mouth shut. Meanwhile, grandma appears to be not only the wisest and most pleasant, but also the liveliest member of the family. There are plenty of misunderstandings and squabbles to go around about why various family members moved to Japan or the US. They haven't been together as a family for a long time. And the young nephew whose wedding has provided the excuse for this family farewell provides plenty of laughs, too.

Everyone loves a wedding. No one cares much for a death bed scene. Not even grandma.      

Woman at War (Iceland)

Terrorist in any form is hard to stomach, but the eco-terrorism in the Icelandic film Woman at War, waged with a bow and arrows by a choir director named Halla, is fairly palatable. She wants to shut down the foreign-owned aluminum plant by disrupting its energy supply.  She has a bit of help inside the local  government, but it's mostly a matter of pulling down the high-voltage power lines that feed the enterprise.  They stretch across the treeless heaths of Iceland—very hard to patrol, even with helicopters—though Hella finds she needs a bit of help from a local sheep farmer who happens to be a distant relative. (Everyone in Iceland is a distant relative.)

This cat-and-mouse game can't last forever. But the plot is thickened and invigorated  when Hella learns her name has finally risen to the top of the list of candidates to adopt an infant from the Ukraine.  Her twin sister, on her way to an ashram in India, also has a part to play in the unfolding story.

The most controversial aspect of the film, from the aesthetic point of view, is the tuba-band soundtrack. It lends a comic, almost circus-like flavor to the tale, and that element is further accentuated by the fact that the musicians themselves often appear in the scenes they're accompanying. This is an imaginative effect, but it tends to undercut the drama, turning the film into a fable, if not a long and languorous joke.  Not something to take entirely seriously. But something to think about ...

A Fortunate Man (Denmark)

This three-hour Netflix drama is based on the not-so-famous (except in Denmark) Danish novel Lucky Per.  The author won the Nobel Prize in 1917, but has since been so thoroughly forgotten that at the moment  his name has slipped my mind, too. But the story is a good one.

The director, Bille August, won an Oscar for a previous film, Pelle the Conqueror. Here he follows the life of Per, the son of a rigid and austere country preacher. he escapes the oppressive piety of his country home by pursuing an education as an engineer in the city, where he falls in with a wealthy Jewish family, and even becomes engaged to the elder daughter. The family is eager to finance Per's schemes for modernizing Denmark by means of a series of canals and hydroelectric projects. The plot hinges on whether Per can kowtow sufficiently to the bureaucratic powers-that-be who must approve his schemes—an act made difficult by the legacy of his father's paternalistic oppression, but also of Per's seemingly inexhaustible personal vanity. 

Perhaps the most interesting character in the tale is Per's fiancée, Jacobe, who is liberated by her engagement to him from her warm but clannish family circle, in the same way that Per is able to escape from his austere and repressive Lutheran upbringing through the wealth and flamboyance of Jacobe's family circle. It's an epic tale in the tradition of Tolstoy, trimmed down to Danish proportions.

Welcome to Greenland (France)

NETFLIX. Two nerdy, unemployed, French twenty-something actors, both named Thomas,  travel to a remote village in Greenland, where everything is already remote, to visit Thomas's father and simply hang out. The snow-covered hills are gorgeous,  the sea is covered with ice, and they amuse the kind-hearted locals as they jog across it in their brightly colored down parkas.

The villagers welcome them, they sample seal liver, and do a little break-dancing on the ice. Neither Thomas speaks Inuit, so they have to guess what the locals are saying about them. They're usually wrong.  There isn't much of a plot. A lukewarm romance, some health concerns, a seal-hunting excursion. It's all pretty lighthearted, sweet, and fun.