Arts & Events

Film Review: Aloft: This Chilling Story Might Leave You Up in the Air

Gar Smith
Friday May 29, 2015 - 04:19:00 PM

Opens May 29 at the Landmark Shattuck

After sitting through Claudia Llosa's snow-crossed saga of family alienation in a land of perpetual chill, poverty, and buried emotions, I found myself thinking a better title for the film might have been Adrift.

While the cinematography is gorgeous and the acting is forthright and deeply felt (with compelling performances by Jennifer Connelly, Cillian Murphy, and the young Zen McGrath), the story is sometimes as hard to follow as footprints in a snow bank on windy day.

 

 

For starters, Aloft opens with an extended set-piece that looks like it belongs in a dystopian sci-fi movie. Long queues of shabbily dressed, desperate-looking people assemble in the woods to draw lots in some kind of unexplained healing ritual. Is this happening in the past or in some imaginary, fictitious future? And where are we—on the fifth moon of Saturn or somewhere in Manitoba? (A subtitle or two would have helped.) 

In addition to the performances, Aloft has two major ingredients that distinguish it: lots of ice and falcons. 

For most of the time, the camera hovers close—uncomfortably close—to the characters with an in-your-face intensity. All the while, the soundtrack is breaking loose all around. While the screen obsesses on close-ups, the sounds of bodies, hands and feet wrestling through cloaks, gloves, and boots, banging against furniture, slamming documents on tabletops, are mostly heard but only partially seen, at best. It's a disconcerting approach to filmmaking apparently designed to put an audience on edge. 

While Aloft is abrasively claustrophobic in its interior shots, outside it's often a case of individuals lost in a terrain of snowy, wind-raked vastness. The story (what there is of it) sometimes seems as impenetrable as a blizzard. Near "white-out conditions" in the screenplay made it difficult for this viewer to get his bearings or to know where things were headed. 

There are a few clear elements that tether this winter's tale, however. There is Nana (Connelly), a mother with two sons. Her younger child suffers from some dread, unnamed disease. As Nana becomes an increasingly desperate, angry person, she also becomes (with insufficient backstory or explication) both a gifted artist (or so we are told) and a natural healer (again, we are told this more than we are shown this). 

When Ivan, the older and healthier of the two children takes some unexplained offense at his mother's naturopathic preoccupations, his inexplicably reckless response leads to tragedy. His mother is heartbroken. She goes weeks without speaking and Ivan refuses to offer any comfort. An attempt at breaking down the barriers ends in a new and final episode of estrangement. The child storms off in anger and the mother signs off on her maternal duties to pursue a solitary life in search of… Art? 

Finally, well into the film, the director throws in a single, helpful title card that let's us know it is now "20 years later." 

A French documentary filmmaker (Melanie Laurent) shows up in the frozen north to make a documentary about the now-famous artist named Nana. Showing up at Ivan's door she has a contract ready for his signature but (again inexplicably) she has no film crew. Again, inexplicably, Ivan (who is still seething with an repressed anger over the breach with his mother) agrees to accompany the filmmaker on a long jaunt even further into the cold North to an ice-bound encampment where Nana is engaged in some kind of epic artistic creation. (From what the film showed me, I hadn't a clue as to what Nana's art project might have involved.) 

In one of the film's most unnerving segments, Ivan and the young filmmaker find their northward journey unexpectedly blocked. A large semi-truck stands partially submerged on a road that crosses the frozen ice ahead of them. Everyone on the road is told they will have to turn their vehicles around and head back. 

Instead (against all odds and all logic), Ivan and the filmmaker set off to cross the distant, unmarked horizon on foot. The wind whips about their faces and night falls as they stumble forward into a darkness lit only by the small flashlights they carry. And, throughout this long ordeal, the soundtrack swells with the ominous sounds of ice getting ready to crack open. 

So what happens to them? Well, somehow in the middle of nowhere they find a single parked car with its headlights on, occupied by a solitary helpful stranger who offers them a ride, food and a warm bed. (Perhaps Ivan called ahead? I don't know, I didn't see anyone shouting desperately into a cell phone.) 

By the way, I neglected to mention that, through this entire desolate trek, Ivan is hauling a large wooden crate on his back. It's not filled with snacks, blankets, or whiskey, however. It apparently contains one of Ivan's pet falcons (presumably one very cold falcon). 

And finally, we get the long-awaited consummation: the meeting, after all these years, of estranged Child and distant (literally) Mother. 

The filmmaker meticulously arranges her recording devices and then (inexplicably) does nothing as Nana walks over and turns off the recorder. You might think the filmmaker's greatest concern at this point would be to capture this cathartic moment of reconciliation on tape. Instead, the she simply walks out of the room—apparently to give mother and son some "private time." 

Ivan pours out a world of hurt to his mother, hurling accusations of abandonment (apparently forgetting that he was the one who originally caused the disaffection). Nana responds with a few quiet words of comfort, cradles Ivan's sobbing head in her arms and, and … all is well. 

And how do we know this? Because in the final, closing scenes, we see Ivan, now out on the snowy earth, releasing his presumably chilled-to-the-bone falcon into the Arctic air. Without benefit of an extended dialog to shape and cement the "mother-and-child reunion," Aloft ends with nothing more than a shot of Ivan's face, looking relieved and beaming towards the wintry heavens. 

While it may be hard to care about the human protagonists in Llosa's film, I will grant you this: the falcons are magnificent.