Divisive, as usual

ISABELLE Huppert in “Captive”

Initial reviews of Brillante Mendoza’s “Captive” are out and they are decidedly—and expectedly—mixed. OK, the word is ambivalent.

The premiere of the Philippine entry to the ongoing 62nd Berlin International Film Festival was considered “one of the most anticipated” in the fest, according to indieWire. The media frenzy was apparently fueled by the filmmaker and his subject.

Mendoza, who won best director in Cannes for “Kinatay” in 2009, marks his return to the film fest circuit via the German event, with a retelling of a controversial real-life incident—the kidnapping of foreigners and locals by the Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf.

“Captive,” which stars world cinema icon Isabelle Huppert as an aid worker who is held hostage, also casts Filipino actors led by Ronnie Lazaro, Raymond Bagatsing, Sid Lucero, Anita Linda, Rustica Carpio and Angel Aquino.

(Huppert first met Mendoza at the Cannes fest where the French actress was head of the jury that awarded the Filipino the best director trophy.)

Full house

Film Business Asia reported that the film’s premiere at the Berlinale Palast on Sunday “drew a full house.”  Competing in the main section with 17 other films, “Captive” earned “polite applause” from the audience, according to Agence France Presse.

IndieWire put it succinctly: “Captive,” like most Mendoza films, “also proved . . . highly divisive, with seemingly just as many praising it for its captivating realism as those writing it off as a tedious and redundant mess.”

Variety’s Justin Chang praised its technical merits, specifically cinematographer Odyssey Flores’ “hurtling hand-held camera work,” scorer Teresa Barrozo’s “chilling, ambient” music and editors Yves Deschamps, Gilles Fargout and Kats Serraon’s “fleeting, roving” style.

Chang wrote: “With a raw, visceral immediacy matched by the bluntness of its political imperatives, [it] forcefully dramatizes” a true-life hostage crisis . . . “to harrowing, if finally enervating, effect.”

He proceeded to describe Mendoza’s filmography as “serious-minded” and the filmmaker as a “cinematic moralist who revels in dense, teeming portraits of situational chaos.”

Although the reviewer asserted that “Mendoza can be confrontational, even assaultive, in his choice of subject matter and method of execution,” he also insisted that the captors and captives’ “painful journey” is “not exactly an exercise in unmodulated misery.”

He explained: “As long as its characters are on the move, [it] sustains considerable urgency,” but as “the chase becomes a waiting game . . . viewers may come to identify perhaps too closely with the hostages’ sense of limbo.”

Cinevue’s Patrick Gamble agreed, adding that Mendoza’s latest work, at two hours (122 minutes), “is undeniably overlong . . . [and] like its protagonists, you’ll wish to escape.”

Worth watching

But, grudgingly, Gamble conceded: “This grueling experience is certainly worth watching if only for its claustrophobic atmosphere of helplessness.”

Underlining the ambivalence, Gamble said the film is “beautifully shot, using a hypnotic mixture of mesmerizing pans and intense close-ups . . . [but] the visual panache is . . . far too cinematic and epic for the gritty subject matter.”

Gamble pointed out, however: “Mendoza has created a film which pulls you into its victims’ world, taking the audience hostage and submerging them into his horrific world of terrorism.”

Screen Daily’s Mike Goodridge concurred, summing it up as “often powerful  . . . relentless in its action [but] starved of deeper characterization.”

To his credit, Mendoza portrayed the so-called terrorists “with a balance and humanity that is unusual in a story which Hollywood would have told as simple as good versus bad,” Goodridge remarked.

Berlinale awards night is on Saturday.