Margin Call (2011, MC-76, NFX) was quite good, especially as a showcase for actors, but I guess I was expecting too much from it, so J.C. Chandor’s debut film left me with a slight sense of disappointment. As an inside view of the financial meltdown of 2008, this film does not supersede either Too Big to Fail or Inside Job, in their quite different fashions. The neat thing, however, is that Chandor’s father worked for Lehmann Brothers right till the end, so the characterizations are based on long personal experience. And actors like Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, and Jeremy Irons can make the most of that. Nonetheless, I’m not sure I wound up understanding any of these characters better than I did going in. The film unfolds over a single long night, which begins with downsized senior risk analyst Tucci being marched out of the office by a security guard, and passing a memory key to a young protégé, with the advice, “Be careful.” The former rocket scientist quant looks over the data after hours, while others in the office are out partying. We look from the perspective of the computer monitor as the horror of the numbers begins to dawn in his face. Thereafter one superior after another is called in, till CEO Irons helicopters in and ruthlessly decides on a strategy for survival that undermines trust in the whole financial sector, which the underlings then have to execute, whatever their personal feelings and fates. While very watchable, in a Mamet-like manner, this drama of the financially high and mighty falls short of Shakespearian.
Circumstance (2011, MC-65, NFX) is the story of two Iranian teenage girls who can’t keep their hands off each another. And who can blame them? They are spectacularly beautiful, and well-acted to boot. To all intents and purposes this is an Iranian film, though it couldn’t be made or shown there, shot in Lebanon with Iranian ex-pats in the cast, but writer/director Maryam Keshawaraz is a NYU film grad nurtured at Sundance, where this film won the Audience Award last year. There are a lot of things to like about this film, including the softcore girl-on-girl action, but especially a glance at a vibrant underground of modern society in Iran. One girl is from a wealthy family, her parents professionals educated in America who returned during the revolution of 1979 out of idealism, and managed to do well for themselves without succumbing to Islamic fundamentalism. The other girl’s parents were dissident intellectuals who were erased somehow, and now she lives with an uncle and grandmother who are trying to marry her off. The rich party girl leads her friend into an illicit realm of sex, drugs, music, and banned movies from the West. Meanwhile her drug addict brother “reforms” into a militant tool of the mullahs, and also has eyes on the girlfriend. The resolution of this triangle does not quite satisfy, not to the level of Persepolis for example, but there is a lot of worthwhile observation in this promising debut.
The quick and dirty take on Submarine (2011, MC-76, NFX) would be “Rushmore in Swansea, Wales.” High school misfit tells his story of romance, and of being a hero in his own mind, in self-absorbed but possibly endearing fashion. Richard Ayoade is a first-time director who is apparently a sitcom star in Britain, and doesn’t do badly, though some of his offbeat stylistic tricks are simply off-beat. The boy and girl actors are fairly fresh, and so is the setting. And adult support is offered by Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, and Paddy Considine, all of whom I like a lot and who acquit themselves well here. So if you haven’t had your fill of quirky adolescent romance, you might submerse yourself in this, but otherwise it’s nothing you need dive into.
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