A fierce mother fuels Moka REVIEWS

MOKA

Everyone grieves differently, 2

but not everyone gets a gun. That’s the eventual response of Diane Roy (French star Emmanuelle Devos), a resident of Lausanne, Switzerland, whose cycle-riding teenage son was recently killed by a hit-and-run driver on the road between that town and Évian, on the French side of Lake Geneva.

Both French and Swiss police seem to have lost interest in finding the culprits, so Diane has hired her own detective to look into it. After she splits from a lakeside sanatorium, armed with info about a few mocha-coloured Mercedes in the area (hence the title), she decides to track down the owners herself. Luckily for her, the most likely vehicle is for sale and—in a development you might find in a Patricia Highsmith novel—she begins to insinuate herself into the lives of the couple who drive that Merc. (This is actually based on a book by Tatiana de Rosnay, whose earlier Sarah’s Key was made into a so-so historical thriller with Kristin Scott Thomas.)

Diane knows that a blond woman was behind the wheel on the fatal day. So target number one is Marlène, the well-put-together, 60-something owner of a beauty shop in Évian. (She’s played by Nathalie Baye, best known for international hits in the 1970s and ’80s.) Handling the car-vending duties is Marlène’s much younger partner, a handsome, devil-eyed fellow (David Clavel) who also works at the spa of the hotel where Diane is staying. There’s definitely something in the waters. She probes both for information, somehow managing to keep them separate until, well, she doesn’t.

Along the way, our troubled mother also spends time with Marlène’s sullen daughter (Diane Rouxel), who brings out her maternal instincts, and a youngish local hustler (The Love Punch’s Olivier Chantreau), who doesn’t. He’s the mustachioed fellow who gets her that blackmarket gat, and this allows Swiss director Frédéric Mermoud (who directed Devos in his previous feature, Accomplices) to keep pushing the 90-minute movie into Hitchcock-chabrol genre directions while never letting go of the more psychological character study at its centre. The smoothly structured, beautifully acted Moka builds slowly toward a tug of war between thriller conventions and deeper emotions. And the audience wins.

> KEN EISNER

Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.” Despite this and many other bon mots, Stevenson lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower. Twice.

Al Gore knows something about that. But he put the passion he may have been lacking in campaign style into his concern for the environment. Released in 2006, An Inconvenient Truth was a wake-up call for a First World population sleeping through its own demise. Where that was a feature-length extrapolation of his touring slide show, this Sequel is a validation of the earlier film’s projections, most of which show the biosphere much worse off than expected 11 years later—especially when it comes to melting polar ice. That’s familiar territory to directors Bonni Cohen and John Shenk—best known for The Island President, which detailed the effects of rising tides on the Maldives—who take over from Davis Guggenheim here.

They concentrate more on the drama of Gore’s sometimes quixotic journey, occasionally to the doc’s detriment. We spend much time with this veteran glad-hander working with grassroots foot soldiers, and prepping for the Paris Agreement of 2015. That’s fine, but Jeff Beal’s music works too hard ennobling our protagonist when a grittier, less admiring tone would be more effective. And the ending reaches for optimism that can be hard to justify.

The movie is on surer ground when it points out that war contributes to global warming, and that climate change—drought, wildfires, flooding—feeds both war and mass migration. It also makes the case that the anti-science lobby, in ascension since last November, has moved from merely smearing the messenger (“Look. Al Gore’s using a coal-powered cellphone!”) to covering up the falling costs of alternative energy. It’s clear that Trump’s big-oil buddies aren’t going to stop lying anytime soon. So we’ll need lots more serious truth—win, lose, or draw.

> KEN EISNER

middle-aged desperation to the comic artists, who spend much of their downtime with physical exercise, the better to stave off the effects of time and too much deliciousness. The rain in Spain has never looked better, thanks to silky direction by Michael Winterbottom—and this third installment is indeed compressed from the irregular Brit TV series, which they shoot on breaks from, say, the Despicable Me and Huntsman movies. (Breathtaking aerial shots, courtesy of first-time feature cinematographer James Clarke, make those Spanish castles magical, much like the sardines.)

The new film’s dramatic subplots add a melancholic edge, but they also detract slightly from the fun—which consists largely of these two snarky improvisers one-upping each other with stentorian impressions. In the best English tradition, this requires just as much respect for (and memory of) text as it does an ear for intonation. This time, we get not only duelling Michael Caines but more of Roger Moore, Anthony Hopkins, and Richard Burton (Brydon is Welsh, after all), as well as dead-on visits with David Bowie and Mick Jagger. In the real world, it might be a pain to keep hearing the voices in their heads, but for a roughly 100-minute journey, they are good company indeed.

2> KEN EISNER

Moka’s

A documentary by Laura Poitras. Rated PG

It’s hard to know what to make 2

of this. A very haphazard followup of sorts to director Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning Edward Snowden doc Citizenfour, which was the third film in a trilogy, Risk arrives as if it has no real place in the world. The filmmaker began this portrait—if that’s what it is—of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange after the release of the Iraq War Logs over six years ago, and just before his claustrophobic asylum inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London following rape allegations made in Sweden. Heavily re-edited after a reportedly more sympathetic cut screened last year at Cannes, it now exists to seemingly spotlight the charmless demeanour of its subject.

In the film’s most talked-about scene, Assange insists on blaming his predicament on “radical feminists”, to the unambiguous horror of his lawyer, Helena Kennedy. Later, Assange mirthlessly quips that he could increase his celebrity with more sex scandals. These moments aside, Risk brings an odd lack of focus to Poitras’s dour exercise, made no more convincing by her flat voice-over interjections. (“I don’t think he likes me” in the beginning; “I don’t trust him” in the end.)

The director insists that she’s made a film about journalism, and to that extent, Assange seems to be at his most sincere when talking about his “obsession” with the criminality of the global power class. At other times he’s vain, stubborn, haughty—or so it appears once Poitras has turned who knows how much footage into a slim 98 minutes. It’s easy to forget that we’re watching a high-profile enemy of the United States who’s been cornered inside a tiny building for over half a decade. Who wouldn’t be a bit fucking weird?

Most disorienting, if you didn’t already know the story, is the demise of colleague Jacob Appelbaum, seen at first in a rousing public confrontation with Egyptian telecom bosses over spying and censorship, later disgraced after another murky round of sex-abuse allegations. That Poitras admits to a relationship with Appelbaum doesn’t exactly help. Eventually, a clueless Lady Gaga turns up to frivolously “interview” Assange, whereupon the entire muddy spectacle hits a cringe-inducing low, probably taking Wikileaks with it. In Citizenfour, Edward Snowden repeatedly stresses that he doesn’t want to become “the story”. Here’s why.

> ADRIAN MACK

Risk