Tag Archives: Switzerland

A TALENT FOR MURDER – Review

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– By Cate Marquis –

A chilling Helen Mirren stars as thriller novelist Patricia Highsmith, author of “Strangers on a Train” and the Tom Ripley novels in A TALENT FOR MURDER, a cat-and-mouse tale of the reclusive, flinty author and a young editor, Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) sent by her New York publisher to the author’s remote home in Switzerland, with the aim to persuade her to write a sixth Ripley novel.

The story, set in 1995, the year that Highsmith died, is invented but is plausible enough to be believable. The invented meeting serves as a frame for battle of wills, wits and nasty tricks, as the pair collaborate on sketching out a novel about the murderous Mr. Ripley and reveal Highsmith’s nasty personality as well as literary brilliance. A TALENT FOR MURDER was adapted from the stage play “Switzerland” by its playwright, Joanna Murray-Smith, and directed by Anton Corbijn, whose previous works include CONTROL, THE AMERICAN with George Clooney, and A MOST WANTED MAN, based on an John LeCarre story and starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Director Corbijn creates a wonderfully moody and frightening atmosphere for this tense tale, with warm, rich tones and some creative lighting and camera work by director of photography Robbie Ryan. The Switzerland scenes were shot in Italy, and are beautifully claustrophobic, as well as simply beautiful.

The film is more a thriller, like Highsmith’s novels, but it does offer a little exploration of the complex, controversial author. Patricia Highsmith’s novels were influenced by Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus and Freud, and elevated the murder mystery genre to new literary heights, yet the brilliant writer who was also a nasty piece of work, a complex human puzzle known to spout misanthropic, racist and antisemitic views. There is a single line in the film, near the start of the meeting between the author and the young editor, where she voices some of those views but the words linger in the mind after that.

Before he arrives, young Edward Ridgeway has already heard a rumor that Highsmith poisoned a neighbor’s dog for barking too much, and he is uncertain whether to believe that or not. The young editor his boss first sent on this task, Bradley Appleby, has mysteriously vanished. Ridgeway understands that his job is on the line, and if he does not succeed, he need not come back.

On the train to Switzerland, the young Ridgeway meets a young woman, Clementine Balfour (Olivia Cooke), who is also traveling to Switzerland, to visit her wealthy aunt. The two chat and seem to hit it off but part ways when Ridgeway’s train arrives at its station. The meeting as strangers on the train is one of several echoes of Patricia Highsmith’s work scattered throughout the film.

Helen Mirren is brilliant as the difficult, scary aged author, but Alden Ehrenreich holds his own against her, and the scenes between the two of them are delicious fun. Mirren’s Highsmith bluntly tries to turn away Alden Ehrenreich’s Edward Ridgeway at first, but is finally persuaded to let him stay by the gifts he has brought, items she had requested: Brooks Brothers shirts, canned soup, and a large knife for her collection of weapons that she displays on the wall of her study. And by his revelation that he is an orphan, whose parents were killed in a car wreck, a detail that she says makes him interesting. Whether that is true might be something else.

As the two start to plot out the possible story, Ehrenreich’s Ridgeway brings in details of his recent “strangers on a train” meeting with Clementine. As the tale unfolds, Ridgeway reveals that he is an enormous fan of the Tom Ripley stories, and proves it by having the author read a random line from any of the five novels which he can then attribute to the correct one. The stunt softens the prickly author towards him, but only marginally. As the two work together, a Ripley-like side to the mousey Ridgeway emerges, and to underscore that, the director films Ehrenreich so he increasingly resembles Matt Damon in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, even though the actors do not look much alike, a clever bit of camera and makeup sleight-of-hand.

The acting is first-rate, and the film also features Juliet Stevenson as Clementine’s rich Aunt Peggy. The film is at its best early on but in an effort to open up the stage play, director Corbijn has a sequence where Ridgeway leaves Highsmith’s claustrophobic retreat, and ventures into the village where her encounters Clementine and gets invited to a party at her Aunt Peggy’s mansion. The foray lasts a bit too long, and breaks some of the play’s pressure-cooker tensions between the famous author and her young collaborator. While the author spins out the story she is building with the help of the young editor, we see the characters of that new Ripley tale, with more polished Ehrenreich in that role and Olivia Cooke’s Clementine and her aunt in the story Highsmith is narrating, but after awhile, lines blur and it becomes hard to tell what is the new story from what is Ridgeway’s experience.

The film tends to lose steam with the detour into Ridgeway’s own life, and the ending is not as sharp and startling as it should be. Focusing on the cat-and-mouse tale in the fictional encounter also misses an opportunity to explore the complex, confounding, controversial real author at the film’s center, which would have been an interesting side-trip. Still, it is a good film, well-made and lush that evokes Highsmith’s writing well, as well as being a showcase for the always excellent Helen Mirren and the talented cast behind her.

A TALENT FOR MURDER opens in theaters on Friday, Oct. 23, 2026.

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars

NEIGHBOURS – SLIFF Review

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Serhed Khalil as Sero, in the Swiss-Kurdish satiric dramedy NEIGHBOURS, playing at the 2021 St. Louis International Film Festival.
Courtesy of Cinema St. Louis

There is a lot of humor and sly satire in this child-centric tale looking at the roots of hate in the Middle East. Swiss-Kurdish director Mano Khalil’s NEIGHBOURS (“Nachbarn”) is a Swiss film set in Syria 40 years ago, in a small village where Kurdish and Jewish families are neighbors. Actually, at this point, there is only one Jewish family left in the village, although there used to be more, a change due to the increasingly hostile policies of the ruling Syrian Baathist party. Partly based on the director’s bittersweet memories of his own childhood, he captures the joys and heartbreak of childhood and also explores the absurdity of bigotry, antisemitism, and conflict, through the lens of those childhood memories.

“Neighbours” begins with a framing device in the present, where a Kurdish extended family is living in a refugee camp after fleeing the violence in Syria, where they are waiting to hear from someone they reached out to in Switzerland. The reply comes in the form of a picture and a request that the family patriarch (Sherzad Abdulla) identify the people in it. It is not a photo, but a child’s drawing, a drawing that sparks childhood memories of 40 years ago.

The flashback takes us back 40 years to childhood memories, when the middle-aged man was a seven-year-old boy in a small mostly Kurdish village on the Turkish-Syrian border. Starting with the subject of the drawing, little Sero (Serhed Khalil) and his beloved uncle Aram (Ismail Zagros) prank the Turkish border guards by releasing balloons in the Kurdish national colors. It is something sure to enrage the Turkish guards but it otherwise a harmless thumbing their noses at a border that divided Kurdish families, including theirs, and left them outsiders in both countries on either side.

Uncle Aram is Sero’s father’s younger brother, a fun-loving, mischievous young man whom the seven-year-old adores. In their little Kurdish village on the border, everyone knows everyone, and everyone gets along. While the kids tear playfully around the village, the village elders watch and shake their heads about “kids these days.” Sero’s neighbors are a Jewish family who his family has known, and been friendly with, for years. Sero helps them on the Sabbath by lighting the lamps and stove, something his uncle Aram used to do too when he was younger. Once, there were several Jewish families in the village but they are now the only ones left, as others have fled. They would like to leave too but now the Baathist government won’t recognize Jews as citizens or give them passports.

The village is waiting for the arrival of two things: the electrical power and the new teacher. The power lines have been in place for some time and village homes have been wired for electricity but no power has arrived yet. Sero particularly longs for electricity so he can watch cartoons like the kids in the city do – and he continually pesters his parents for a TV.

Still, there is a great deal of humor and the charm in this childhood world of play, although there is a serious side to this dramedy, and tragic events eventually strike. A lot of that charm comes from young Serhed Khalil as Sero, a sweet-faced boy full of mischief and playful joy. But all the cast bring warmth and appeal to their roles, particularly Ismail Zagros as Aram, and Uygurlar Derya as Hannah, the daughter of the Jewish family. The Jewish parents would like to escape Syria, and especially want to get their daughter out, but Hannah does not want to leave her home behind, and particularly her childhood friend Aram.

While there is still no electricity, a new teacher, Wahid Hanouf (Jalal Al Tawil), does arrive. The teacher is a rigid true-believer in Assad’s Baathist party, whose ideology is a mix of communist and pan-Arab ideas, without really being either, but with a big dose of antisemitism. The teacher thinks instilling these antisemitic ideas are as much his job as teaching reading and writing. One of the first things the teacher does is insist that the children only speak Arabic in class and at home. Sero does not much like school anyway but he is really at a loss now when the teacher insists that everyone speak only Arabic, which he neither speaks nor understands. When the teacher starts repeating old antisemitic myths, Sero doesn’t believe what the teacher says about his kindly neighbors, but other children buy in to the lies and other evilness.

The teacher is the outsider who brings hate and antisemitism to the village, and disrupts their quiet lives. He is helped along by a local man who is the village’s sole Baath party member, a membership that gave him a house and a job despite his illiteracy. These two are the primary villains of this child’s-eye-view story but other representatives of the authoritarian government in the story, such as the border guards and bureaucrats, also bring either danger or a callous indifference and corruption. The film has a powerful, satiric punch in its chilling depiction of how hatred is taught, as the teacher indoctrinates his charges in antisemitic ideas that include the old “blood libel.” Sero’s parents and grandparents, and his Jewish neighbors, are the counterbalance to this, with their long friendship and willingness to help each other.

NEIGHBOURS is both a touching, warm human tale laced with humor and childhood appeal, and a pointed satiric look at the roots of hate, not just in Syria. NEIGHBOURS, in Kurdish, Arabic, English and Hebrew with English subtitles, plays at SLIFF on Tuesday, Nov. 9 ,at 7pm and Wednesday, Nov. 10, at 4pm

RATING: 3 out of 4 stars

SLIFF 2017 Review – THE DIVINE ORDER

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THE DIVINE ORDER (Die Gottliche Ordnung) will screen at Plaza Frontenac Cinema (Lindbergh Blvd. and Clayton Rd, Frontenac, MO 63131) as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival. Tickets for the Friday, November 3rd, screening at 8pm can be purchased HERE, while tickets for the Saturday, November 4th, screening at 2:30pm can be purchased HERE.

 

The Swiss film THE DIVINE ORDER tells the tale of a group of ordinary Swiss women in a little village during Switzerland’s fight for women’s suffrage. The shocking part is this story takes place in early 1971, as Switzerland is gearing up for a February 1971 national referendum on giving women the vote. Yes, that is right, Swiss women were fighting for the right to vote as the rest of the Western world was immersed in Women’s Lib and the Sexual Revolution. It is a lot of catching up to do all at once.

Since American women got the vote in 1920, it is easy for us to assume Europe quickly followed. But it seems Switzerland missed out on the earlier wave of women’s rights 1900-1929. Which meant that in 1971, Switzerland was catching up on the whole ’60s – ’70s women’s liberation movement, the second time in the 20th century women took to streets to demand their rights.

There isn’t much marching in THE DIVINE ORDER but there is a good dose of comedy as first one, then a handful,, then more women in a small Swiss village catch up on half a century’s worth of women’s progress in one big bite. Ironically, it is a woman business owner (Therese Affolter) who leads the campaign to oppose giving women the vote in the upcoming national referendum. While the businesswoman solemnly cites religion and the long-held traditional belief that a “divine order” put men over women, no one mentions that her factory dominates the village’s economy and she herself wields great power. The villagers, men and women, defer to her strongly-voiced opinion on the matter

Nonetheless, one ordinary housewife, Nora (Marie Leuenberger), finally does work up the courage to say out loud what other women only think – that women should get the vote. Once it is said out loud, it opens to the door to all kinds of changes for the women – and men – in the little village.

THE DIVINE ORDER is a warm and touching feel-good movie, that is quietly comic at moments – perhaps a bit too quiet and subtle. The tone of director Petra Volpe’s film is decidedly low-key and proceeds at a deliberate pace. Nora is joined by an outspoken widow (Sibylle Brunner) and an Italian immigrant (Marta Zoffoli), and then others. Step-by-slow step, the women challenge the traditions about women’s place, and begin to explore both the feminism sweeping the world and the sexual revolution.

Nora’s husband Hans (Max Siminischek) wants to be supportive but it is a lot to take in. Plus like most of the village he works in the factory too. Gradually, the women find their voice on injustices they have experienced at home. As they do, they also form a sisterhood of sorts. One of the details the film brings out are the inequalities of marriage in Switzerland. Likewise, a rebellious teen risks prison, if her father decides that is what is needed. However, they need men’s support in this fight – as they are the ones who will vote on whether their wives (or mothers or sisters) will get to vote.

The women and their emotional bonding are what gives this story its appeal. The film features some fine performances, particularly by Marie Leuenberger. The film feels sincerely but maintains a sweet, light touch despite some serious subjects, like spousal abuse. While the women explore issues raised by the growing feminist movement (particularly in one rather comic scene with a New Age-y instructor at a women’s conference where they get in touch with their own bodies), it is notable that other topics about women’s bodies, such as birth control, are never even mentioned. At one point, the women go on strike, adding a touch of “Lysistrata” to the mix. Such scenes give the film a little sex comedy frisson, but the tone does not always feel right given the serious topics. We also we do not get much explanation on how Swiss women had remained so isolated from the rest of Europe on this issue (and text at the film’s end notes that while women won the vote in federal elections, but it was 1991 before all districts granted women the right to vote on local issues).

The film does excel in showing the power of peer pressure, particularly in a small community, and how a dominant bullying voice can wield great power, particularly when livelihoods are at stake.

THE DIVINE ORDER wraps up its tale with a feel-good ending. It is breezy, light film, despite its serious subject, but it deserves credit for bringing to light a little known fact of Swiss history.