I remember when I started going to the Festival, every second film seemed to be presented in conjunction with Canal+. Nowadays, the pie-slap of Madman Entertainment seems to start more than half of what I see. Is it my changing tastes, the changing tastes of the programmers, or have they just gotten super-big? \u00a0Or maybe it’s a conspiracy…<\/p>\n
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Would you beg your colleagues to keep your job, even though that would mean that they’d lose a bonus that their family needs? \u00a0Would you vote to fire someone who you’ve worked with if a thousand euro bonus you’d been relying on was in jeopardy?<\/p>\n
In Two Days, One Night <\/i><\/a>a woman who has been on sick leave (for depression) has come back to work to find that management has decided that they can do without her, so they’ve\u00a0told\u00a0her workmates vote about whether her position should be kept. \u00a0But if she stays, they lose their end-of-year bonuses…\u00a0and the team leader has hinted to enough people that someone else might get fired if she stays\u00a0that the original vote was 14 to 2. \u00a0However, the boss is persuaded that this was unfair, and to have a secret ballot on Monday\u00a0–so the woman has the weekend to find out whether she can persuade her workmates to let her stay.<\/p>\n I don’t know if I could do that: deal with depression and beg for other people to give up something that they need. I don’t know if I could be the husband supporting and pushing her to do that. \u00a0I don’t know if I could say that my family will struggle more so that this other person can have a job.<\/p>\n I hope I never have to find out.<\/p>\n I knew going in that it was going to be a hard film to watch, one of the ones I might not brave enough to try if I didn’t know I was going to watch a bunch of others. \u00a0I’m glad I did.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Does Boyhood <\/i><\/a>benefit from being filmed over a long time, from watching the kids and adults age? \u00a0I think it does, but perhaps as much for the authentic ageing of the adults as the kids. It’s certainly true that the kids get better at acting as they get older. \u00a0There were times that it made me think about the process as much as the story, though. It’s hard to imagine (for example when dark stuff is happening in the middle of the picture) what the kids are thinking about what they’re seeing, and how this makes them perceive the adult world.<\/p>\n I’m not sure that the film was made more profound by the way it was made. \u00a0But I thought it was a good film.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n Sacro GRA <\/i><\/a>was a “film what is going on” documentary. \u00a0It was certainly interesting to see the different extremes of ostentation and poverty, urban apartments and herds of sheep, dancers swaying listlessly on the counter of a bar while a fisherman pulls in pots of eels, all off the same ring road.<\/p>\n Because there’s no narration, you get the fragments of story that the people there tell each other – the ambulance crew joking with the crash victim on the gurney, who says that the hospital is so close he should have walked. \u00a0Or the woman getting her makeup done in the car by another woman, complaining that when the police arrested her they said she had been completely naked, while she had been clothed, and that she’ll get a lawyer and he’ll write a letter to the mayor.<\/p>\n As is usual with these sort of films, it was a bit slow, and I’m not sure they managed to tie it together too well. \u00a0But there were enough interesting bits that I don’t feel disappointed I saw it.<\/p>\n * * *<\/p>\n