'The Fencer' ('Miekkailija')

Image result for the fencer reviewFinland’s official Oscar contender offers a fictionalized take on a real-life fencing teacher who took a stand against Stalinist oppression in Soviet-era Estonia.

A local story with universal resonance, Finland’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar race is a solid period drama set in the small Baltic state of Estonia during the dark days of Soviet occupation. Given that three out of director Klaus Haro’s previous four features were nominated as Finnish Oscar contenders, The Fencer is hardly a surprising choice. But much like its three predecessors, it will likely prove a little too staid and conventional to make the final shortlist.
Image result for the fencer review Image result for the fencer review
Borrowing some familiar tropes from inspirational teacher-hero dramas like Dead Poets Society, Anna Heinamaa’s screenplay ticks all the right middlebrow boxes, but ultimately fails to deliver on character depth or moral complexity. Already released domestically to critical acclaim, The Fencer screened at Helsinki film festival last week in the Finnish Film Affair sidebar dedicated to locally produced features.
Image result for the fencer review Image result for the fencer review
In early 1952, a haunted young man named Endel Nelis (Mart Avandi) arrives in the backwater town of Haapsalu in Estonia, which has been under harsh Russian Communist rule since the end of World War II. He takes a job as sports teacher at the local high school where, despite an apparent dislike for his young students, he starts a fencing club which proves wildly popular. Charmed out of his frosty shell by cherubic moppet Marta (Liisa Koppel) and sullen teenage rebel Jaan (Joonas Koff), Nelis inevitably starts to warm towards these kids, and begins a hesitant romance with his co-worker Kadri (Ursula Ratasepp).
Image result for the fencer review Image result for the fencer review
But conflict looms in the shape of the school’s authoritarian killjoy principal (Hendrik Toompere), who believes swordplay smacks of pre-revolutionary feudalism, urging Nelis to teach sports "better suited to the proletariat." When local citizens override him, the thwarted headmaster begins digging for dirt in his popular new teacher’s shadowy past. In this paranoid Stalinist climate, with the secret police watching everybody, a simple denunciation can lead to arrest, exile and even execution.
It transpires that Nelis has good reason to lie low in Estonia, as far from Moscow’s tentacles as possible. But when his students begin pressuring him to enter them in a prestigious all-Soviet fencing tournament in Leningrad, he is torn between dashing their hopes and risking his life for sporting glory. We already know which path he will choose, of course. Layering cliché upon cliché, Ratasepp gets the thankless role of the over-emotional female partner vainly trying to prevent her beloved from committing a reckless but noble act of self-sacrifice. "I’ve been running all my life and I’m tired of it," he says, "I can’t let the children down." Groan.
In its final act, The Fencer becomes a race against time as Nelis and his plucky team fight a heavily symbolic battle against an army of better trained, better funded Russian rivals. At this point the film stops being Dead Poets Society and turns into a classic underdog sports drama in the spirit of The Bad News Bears. No spoilers, but the outcome is never really in doubt, given how crudely Haro draws his spirited Estonian heroes and brutish Russian villains. Gert Wilden’s bombastic score cranks up several gears here, directing audience sympathies with a sledgehammer touch.
Tastefully shot in muted autumnal tones by Tuomo Hutri, The Fencer is a handsomely crafted slice of fictionalized history with the feel of a deluxe TV production. Haro’s afterword confirms that the real Nelis lived to see Estonian independence, dying in 1993, while the fencing club he founded remains active. But the man and his motivations remain oddly elusive in this blankly heroic, clunkingly predictable portrait.
Production companies: Making Movies, Allfilm, Kick Film
Cast: Mart Avandi, Liisa Koppel, Joonas Koff, Ursula Ratasepp, Hendrik Toompere
Director: Klaus Haro
Screenwriter: Anna Heinamaa
Cinematographer: Tuomo Hutri
Editors: Tambet Tasuja, Ueli Christen
Music: Gert Wilden Jr.
Producers: Ivo Felt, Kai Nordberg, Kaarle Aho, Jorg Bundschuh

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"House of Lies"

Image
As pitches go it can't have been an easy one: "So our new show, House of Lies, is about a bunch of cut-throat management consultants and the way in which they con corporate clients out of money each week. As the strapline has it: Meet the One Per Cent sticking it to the One Per Cent. Yes, that's right, it's a half-hour comedy about wealthy slicksters screening right in the middle of one of the biggest economic depressions America has experienced. Good joke, huh?" The answer is er, no, not really. House of Lies, which will air on Sky Atlantic later this year, has many things going for it: an outstanding cast, including the charismatic Don Cheadle as the company's fast-talking boss, Marty Kaan, a devious expert at the art of the soft-sell; some genuinely funny one-liners; slick cinematography and a willingness to take risks with the format (Marty often breaks the fourth wall to explain to the television audience what certain terminology means, or how his
Read more

"Ulysse from Bagdad" (Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt)

Image
"My name is Saad Saad, which means Hope Hope in Arabic..."Saad wants to leave the chaos of Baghdad for Europe, freedom and a future. But how do you cross borders without a dinar to call your own? How, like Ulysses, do you brave the storms, survive shipwrecks, evade the opium smugglers, turn a deaf ear to the sirens-turned-rock stars, escape the cruelty of a Cyclopean jailer, or tear yourself away from the amorous enchantment of a Sicilian Calypso?By turns violent, slapstick and tragic, Saad's one-way journey begins. From adventures to tribulations interspersed with conversations with a loving father he can't forget, the novel tells of the exodus of one of the millions of men currently in search of a place on earth: a stowaway. Always a captivating and sympathetic story-teller, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt offers this picaresque saga for our time and questions the human condition. Are borders the bulwark of our identities, or the last bastion of our illusions?              
Read more

"The Men who Stare at Goats" (2009)

Image
Mission Mind Control in Defense of America In “The Men Who Stare at Goats”   George Clooney   wears a heavy mustache and a somewhat shaggier version of the military haircut called a high and tight, two adjectives which also describe his performance in this likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy. As Lyn Cassady — a fictional member of an Army unit that was weirder and possibly truer than most science fiction — Mr. Clooney has shed his cool cat skin to embrace his inner clown. Juggling tics, double takes, eyeball bulges and explosive gestures, he leaps in the air and splats in the sand with cartoon abandon, buoyed by the jokes and the big bounce of his own stardom. With his thrusting jaw, Lyn looks as if he could have been drawn by Milton Caniff, the creator of the comic-strip tough guy Steve Canyon. Instead Lyn has been drawn in crude if generally effective strokes by Mr. Clooney and his producing partner, Grant Heslov, who together also wrote “Good Night, and Good Luck.” M
Read more