off the leash

Recent movies from Europe, Latin America and Asia, most of which are now available to stream.

France

A Private Life ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) is a French psychiatrist, and seemingly not a very good one. As her patients lie on a couch baring their souls, she seems lost in her own thoughts. When the guy who’s seeing her for help in quitting smoking rings the bell, she quickly stubs out her cigarette before answering.

One of her patients, a woman she’s been treating for nine years, dies of what is called a suicide. Lilian is convinced it’s a murder. Aided by an ex-husband and a hypnotist who has her envisioning the people around her in previous lives, she sets off on a detective mission to solve the crime. Her detective skills are on a par with her psychiatric ones.

Who’s lying and who’s telling the truth? Who’s the murderer? Was there a murder? I’m not sure I can fully answer all the questions even after the movie ends. This is a mystery like no other I’ve seen. And it’s puzzling and unpredictable.

The score features “Psycho Killer” by Talking Heads. They blasted it in the theater where I saw the movie. Would suggest home streamers do the same.

(Available to rent from Fandango at Home,  Amazon Prime or Apple TV)

Germany

Miroir No. 3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Laura is a music student studying in Berlin. She goes on a road trip with a boyfriend she doesn’t seem too keen on. They have an accident. He’s killed, she’s left lying on the side of the road.

Betty is a middle-aged woman living by herself in some rural area of Germany. She finds Laura and brings her home. Laura’s okay, but wants to stay. Once she’s well, Betty invites ‘her men’ over for dinner, a dour-faced husband and son who run a sketchy auto repair garage.

And at this point you know something is very wrong here. The next 60 or so minutes is about finding out what that is. There is a tragedy involved. If I told you what it was it would be a mega spoiler. But the director leaves us some pretty good hints along the way.

Sometimes you see a movie with such great acting, with such great pictures, that you don’t need much in the way of dialogue or narrative. Some of the most poignant moments of this movie are captured in silence. It’s sort of a “picture is worth a thousand words” kind of thing. A simple closed mouth smile at an unexpected moment can, in this film, trigger a wave of emotion.

This is a really powerful movie, skillfully paced and presented. I walked out in a bit of a fog.

(Available to rent from Fandango at Home)

Colombia

A Poet ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

It’s not easy to be a poet. Oscar has no money, his family is like “get a real job,” he still lives with his mother despite not being a young man, and nobody’s reading his books. Add to that, he is a chronic screw up. Failed as a husband and father, as a teacher and as a mentor. And he drinks. So maybe he wakes up sometimes lying in the street clutching a beer bottle.

During a brief stint as a teacher he takes an interest in a young student who also writes poems. She is from a large, very poor family and can never overcome her environment. Oscar’s attempts to help her prove a mixed blessing.

Set in a poor neighborhood in a Colombian city, the movie contrasts the rhythmic, artistic vibe of the poet with the hard life of families in poverty. A lack of expectations is expressed as indifference. But we do get a glimpse of the passion of the poet. And amidst all the anguish, some empathy emerges from unexpected places.

(Available to rent on Prime Video, Apple TV or Fandango at Home))

Japan

Rental Family ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Take the title literally. It’s a Tokyo-based business where you can rent an impersonator to be a family member, significant other or associate of some type. If you’re a single mother needing a father for your child’s school admission interview, you can rent one. If you need a surrogate mistress to apologize to your wife for your cheating, rent one. Maybe you need a journalist to interview your aging father about his wonderful career. You can rent that too.

Phillip Vanderploeg is an American actor with a stalled career living in Tokyo. His resume seems to consist of a few commercials. He reluctantly takes a job at Rental Family where a “big American” is a unique asset.

What transpires is not just deception but emotional connection. Among his assignments, Phillip becomes a father to one, a son to another. And along the way it fills a void in his life. Brendan Fraser is the actor who plays the actor and he does a great job of it, telling the story in body language and facial expression as much as in words.

A unique and creative story and an interesting mashup of Japanese and American culture.

(Available on Hulu)

Germany

Sound of Falling ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A dark movie. In more ways than one. Many of the scenes take place in a dimly lit German farmhouse, the pictures are dark and muted. The other darkness is harder. It’s about abuse, abandonment and death.

The movie is structured almost like a series of vignettes. They’re not sequential. Sometimes they connect, sometimes they don’t. The stories involve a few dysfunctional families and take place in different eras. The only commonality is the setting, a rural village in what was once East Germany. One interesting technique the director uses is employing different imaging to tell time. The early 20th century scenes look like an old movie with shadowy, murky images. As the timing becomes more modern, the imaging becomes sharper and brighter.

The sounds of falling? They include bodies falling off barnyard lofts or moving horse-drawn carriages and the raging currents of a river that more than one character plunges into for different reasons. If there’s a lesson to be learned here it’s that for most of the 20th century it was tough to be a woman in this part of Germany.

The movie is long and deliberately paced. There is a lot of creative cinematography, but it lost me before it was over.

Romania

Kontinental 25

⭐️⭐️

Orsolya is a bailiff in Cruj, Transylvania. She is assigned to evict a homeless man, a former Romanian athlete who became an alcoholic, from the boiler room of a building that will be demolished. Given 20 minutes to pack his things. He kills himself instead.

Orsolya cannot get over it. In conversations with the police and with friends she expresses her guilty feelings. Everyone who asks and some who don’t hear the same story of how he tied a wire to a radiator and put it around his neck.

The movie offers up some interesting story lines. There’s ethnic tensions between Romanians and Hungarians dating back to where Transylvania belongs. Orsolya is of Hungarian descent living in Romania and she is trolled by online nationalists. There’s talk of politics, of Gaza and Ukraine and Viktor Orban. There is a wave of sympathy for those down on their luck and the lack of government support is bemoaned.

But the film falls flat. Orsolya pulls out of the family holiday. She visits and fights with her mother. She pets animatronic dinosaurs in a park. She has a drunken night with a former student and prays in a cemetery with a priest. Nothing moves the needle. Neither for Orsolya the character nor for the viewers of this movie.

(Available to rent on Fandango at Home)