(France, 135 min.)
Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius
Starring: Bérénice Bejo, Annette Bening, Maxim Emelianov,
Abdul-Khalim Mamatasuiev
Michel Hazanavicius’s The
Search is a lost cause. The writer/director of The Artist follows up his smash sleeper hit and Best Picture Oscar
winner with a film that couldn’t be further from the charm and whimsy of his
2011 sensation. It's not quite his post-Oscar Catwoman, but it's close enough. If The Artist is a delightful
ditty that reminds audiences of their love for film, then The Search is a protracted bore that’ll have moviegoers wondering
why they don’t spend more time outside in the sun. It’s a terrible and pointless
film.
Hazanavicius is simply out of his element here as The Search brings The Artist’s Bérénice Bejo (also the director’s wife) to war-torn Chechnya in 1999 as Carole, a human rights worker investigating the terrors of Russia’s “anti-terrorist operation” that raged war against civilians. The Search, inspired by the 1948 Fred Zinnemann film of the same name, lets the director explore the ravages of war admirably and take on a weightier subject than he previous has in films such as The Artist and his wonderful OSS: 117 spy parodies, but sobriety isn’t Hazanavicius’s forte. The Artist and the OSS movies (like The Artist, they’re homages to a different era of cinema) might seem like lightweight exercises in style, but they’re thoroughly enjoyable even if considered as such. Hazanavicius does throwbacks well: he’s a clear cinephile and his previous works show a strong passion for classic cinema that leaps off the screen and delights the viewer. The Search only remotely fits in the director’s oeuvre if it calls to mind a kind of filmmaking from a bygone era.
The Search
meanders with three narrative threads that converge at a glacial pace. Carole
mopes about interviewing victims and she takes in a stray child, Hadji (Abdul-Khalim
Mamatasuiev), as some kind of atonement for her ineffectiveness in the conflict
at a bureaucratic level. Hadji, traumatized by the murder of his parents,
cannot speak and he and Carole find a form of communication through music and
mutual respect. Hadji’s sister, Raïssa (Zukhra Duishvili), searches for him in
the aftermath of their parents’ murder. Finally, Kolia (Maxim Emelianov) finds
himself drafted into the Russian army when police catch him with a reefer on
the street. All the parties see the horrors of war from different perspectives,
be they victims, agents of terror, or some combination of the two. Throw in
Annette Bening (who frankly looks bored here) as the epitome of the overworked
and overtired NGO worker and the aimlessness of The Search effectively underscores the pointlessness of war.
Hazanavicius takes his time pulling the stories together and
The Search plods through bleak
miserablism as it fixates on poverty, death, gore, and suffering. These grey
images are frequently inert and lifeless: misery doesn’t constitute substance
and substituting the world of classic cinema with, basically, an Instagram
filter called “war-torn Chechnya” doesn’t create a powerful visual palette. Much
of the film plays out wordlessly and relies on these images to convey the
horrors of war, but The Search doesn’t
display the same flare for visual storytelling that the silent whimsy of The Artist does. (The sets and
production design create a notable and effective realism, though.) Bejo also
struggles to match some of her previous work here (re: the dramatic chops of The Past) as she surprisingly lacks
screen presence, although fleeting glimpses show Carole as a beacon of
resilience and kindness when Bejo has some silent interactions with her young
co-star Mamatsuiev.
The storylines progress with no discernable rhythm, so one
often forgets that some characters are even in the film. Carole’s storyline
evokes the pace and character of an old-school message movie (wannabe Stanley
Kramer, say), but she and Helen talk about the ineffectiveness of bureaucratic
paperwork and indifference in flat, declarative, and pedantic tirades that
hammer the themes on the nose. It’s a message movie with nothing to say.
Alternatively, the thread with Kolia resembles an altogether different movie
(wannabe Kubrick, say) as the film evokes the dehumanization of soldiers into
the brutal machinery that creates victims at every turn. The scene that pulls
together the grainy video images of The
Search’s overwrought introduction is actually a smart suggestion of the
futile circularity of war, but there’s no excuse that the rambling two hours
between the frames should be so pointless.
Rating: ★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Search screened in Ottawa at The ByTowne.
It’s also available
to rent/own on iTunes.
