Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE FATHER WHO MOVES MOUNTAINS” My rating: B (Netflix)

108 minutes | No MPAA rating

In the clumsily titled “The Father Who Moves Mountains” a middle-aged man launches a desperate search after learning his twentysomething son has disappeared with his girlfriend on a high-altitude hike. 

Had the film been made by Hollywood it undoubtedly would follow a fairly predictable arc, culminating with a last-minute rescue and a more-or-less happy ending. There might even be a crime at the heart of the disappearance.

But Daniel Sandu’s Romanian entry is something else entirely… part rescue procedural (like a police procedural except rather than solving crime the professionals are attempting a rescue in rugged terrain), part personality study of a once-powerful man learning that throwing around his weight is bringing diminishing returns.

Mircea (Andrian Titieni) is a retired mover and shaker in the Romanian government. He’s doing Christmas shopping with his pregnant trophy wife when he hears a TV news report of missing hikers in the Carpathians.  Learning that his own estranged son is one of the missing, he races to the mountain resort now packed with holiday revelers and immediately begins throwing his weight around.

He is joined by his ex-wife Paula (Elena Purea), still bitter about Mircea’s infidelities but grateful that he still has enough pull in high places to kick things into high gear.

The parents of their son’s girlfriend also show up — though Mircea and Paula make it clear they blame her for everyone’s predicament. If they rescue the girlfriend it will simply be a byproduct of their parental obsession with saving their own blood.

sMircea immediately begins butting heads with the alpine rescue crews who have been searching thick forests and avalanche-prone slopes.  He insists on going out on one of the canvasses, even though he’s so out of shape he slows the progress.

He doesn’t stop there. Before long he’s joined by a unit from the Romanian intelligence service who specialize in sub-zero scenarios.  Much to the chagrin of the year-around mountaineers these black-clad pros set up a tent crammed with high-tech equipment and further complicate an already complex situation. 

The screenplay by Sandou and Christian Routh takes a dispassionate view of these proceedings.  Clearly, the filmmakers are ambivalent about their main character, a ruthless and once-powerful man learning the hard way that there now are some things over which he has absolutely no control.

The result is not a likable film — it starts out with minimal hope and then keeps getting grimmer — but it is a weirdly compelling one.

I’m particularly curious about how Romanians themselves might view this yarn.  That country has been a democracy for 30 years, but for a half-century before that it was a Communist dictatorship with all the baggage that entails.  Mircea is just about the right age to have started his career in the latter stages of the Bad Old Days…how might working for the Communist secret police have molded his bull-in-the-China-shop mentality?

Titieni absolutely nails Mircea’s fierce drive, but he also chips away at the character’s guilty  conscience.

Given the harshness of the subject matter, the film is unexpectedly lyrically visual. Tudor Vladimir Panduru’s cinematography captures all the harsh beauty  of the mountains in winter while carefully mapping the changing emotions on human faces.

| Robert W. Butler

“AILEY” My rating: B (Available through mulitple streaming services)
82 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Ailey” opens with the 1988 Kennedy Center awards ceremony at which  choreographer Alvin Ailey was  honored for his contribution to American arts.  Actress Cicely Tyson praises Ailey — who would die only a year later — for developing what she calls “choreography of the heart.”  

That’s a terrific description of Ailey’s work.  And in fact the high points of Jamila Wignot’s documentary are the many performance snippets of Ailey’s brilliant creations, especially the life-changing “Revelations,” a distillation of his African American childhood and cultural influences capable of reducing the viewer to tears with a simple but absolutely perfect gesture.

Those moments of physical revelation are key to this doc because, truth be told, Alvin Ailey is knowable almost exclusively through his dance. The man himself kept his cards close to the vest.

The film employs creative editing of old footage to evoke Ailey’s childhood — born to a single mother in Depression-era Texas — and his subsequent adolescence in Los Angeles where he was exposed to the ballet and became a huge fan.  Later he became a dancer, working in New York before founding his American Dance Theatre and becoming a major force in the ballet world.

The Ailey legacy looms large.  As a child he could not conceived of a black professional dancer, and his creation of magnificent black-themed ballets was revolutionary.  At the same time, he insisted that his company be integrated.  Talent, in Ailey’s eyes, was color blind.

But the man himself?  Well, even people who worked with him for years — among them famed dancer Judith Jamison and fellow choreographer Bill T. Jones — had trouble getting a handle on his personality.