Cinema is witnessing many attempts to reproduce world famous works in a way that suits modern production techniques and the changing culture of viewers, and perhaps the most famous of these quotes in Arab cinema, for example, are films such as: "The Emperor", "Shams Al-Zanati", "The Prince of Darkness", as well as Some foreign films such as the Nigerian version of "Titanic" and the Indian version of "Pride and Prejudice".
Most of these attempts seemed to pay homage to original creativity, and some presented stories from new and different points of view, or even presented a treatment that gave the events a local cultural color.
This sometimes makes us perplexed about the motives behind this urgent need for American cinema to re-present some films.
Perhaps one of the most recent of these attempts is the movie “The Guilty”, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2021, and was launched on the “Netflix” platform in October 2021 to top the top ten list within a few days.
Danish movie "The Guilty" - 2018
The film is directed by Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by Nick Pizzolato, and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, with the voices of Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, and Elie Goure. It is a remake of the Danish film of the same name produced in 2018, directed by Gustav Muller, and starring Jacob Cedergren, and the voices of Jessica Denage and Omar Sharkawy.
The American film appears to be an exact copy of the Danish film, following the same plot, script, and dialogue, with minor changes.
Did these changes illuminate a new angle of vision, or did they expose the difference between the two films and expose the fragility of the Hollywood version?
The sound paints the picture
The film relies mainly on sound to plot the events and provide us with information. The director of the Danish version, Gustav Muller, tells us in an interview with "No film school" how the idea popped into his head after he stumbled upon an audio clip on YouTube that included an actual recording of a call to the emergency police of a kidnapped woman speaking from a location close to her kidnapper. He was astonished by how the sound was able to convey her condition to him without accompanying him with visual images, and how he felt that he was able to see the woman, the car and the road she was traveling on, realizing that everyone listening to this recording would see different images. He was fascinated by the idea of the voice and its ability. As for the dramatic construction, he was inspired by listening to the famous investigative podcast about the murder case of Hai Min Lee in Maryland. He stated that building the podcast relied on providing new and limited information in each episode, so that his point of view changed time after time.
The story is almost the same in the two films, in each we follow a policeman - Joe Baylor in the American version, Asger Holm in the Danish version - tasked with taking calls at the emergency unit (911), a job he was assigned to as a result of his mistake. The opening of the film and the first minutes of it depict to us an angry person who feels frustrated, and even belittled, about the many calls he receives that do not deserve the police’s intervention from his point of view, and at the same time he anxiously awaits a trial that will determine his career fate on the basis of which the next day, until he receives a call that changes the course of The events of a woman talking to him as if she was talking to her child, and before the line hangs, he realizes that she has been kidnapped, and that the kidnapper is sitting next to her.
Over the course of the film he is obsessed with the task of saving her, after a series of calls with the woman and then with her 6-year-old daughter, we explore the rest of the story with him.
The woman was kidnapped by her ex-husband in a truck, not knowing where to go, and he forced her to leave her two children at home.
The policeman intervenes, trying to save her in any way, and sends a police patrol to check on the woman's two children, only to find that the infant has been stabbed.
Well, all this information that is revealed to us and the policeman at the same moment is weaving a spider web in which the husband is stuck guilty of killing his son and kidnapping his ex-wife, which is confirmed by the husband's criminal record that the policeman has access to.
This is how the policeman thinks, and we think with him that the truth is clear and obvious, until we discover near the end that we are the ones caught in the spider’s web, and that things are not always as simple as they seem, and that the truth is too harsh to look at, and that our imagination that filled the blanks of the audio story is the real culprit. .
Quietly the woman (Emily/Eben) tells him on the phone that the baby is no longer crying after she rips his stomach off to get rid of the snakes inside, only to see the policeman and the heartbreaking truth that the mother killed her child in a fit of mental illness, and that her husband took her in his truck to take her back to an asylum Mental illness, so that the policeman also decides to release his confession that he killed a minor at the age of nineteen, just because he can.
Salvation the American way
"Sometimes the best way to defend oneself is to attack it, and admitting guilt tempts forgiveness as much as it tempts defending it with anger."
(The Children of Our Neighborhood, Naguib Mahfouz)
The ending in the two films is slightly different, but it says a lot. While the Danish version ends with the policeman's confession, his colleagues listen to this confession and Agmen, and he walks out, we don't see his emotions clearly on his face, all we notice is the blink of his eyes, and the sparkle of sweat on his temples. As for the American version, it does not leave the viewer the space to think or question. Jake Gyllenhaal's performance here exposes his remorse, as a confession mixed with tears and trembling about his crime.
Emily, who just stabbed her baby, thinking there were snakes in his stomach, asks him; Why did you kill him? Are snakes the cause? As if this is an indication that each of us carries his snakes inside him, snakes that torment us and push us to the limits of guilt and sin, all the way to murder. Perhaps the snakes were Emily's mental illness and the inadequacy of the health care system that kept her from getting treatment, or her husband's fear and distrust of the police, or Joe Baylor's problems with anger management, or even this truncated sentence he uttered in his confession: "Dad ..." And without completing it, he begins to cry. To enter his father into the circle of guilt, a beginner without news, but he reveals and explains a lot.
After this loud confession, his colleague informs him that the infant (who dies in the Danish version) has been saved, a hope for redemption that Hollywood cinema gives to its loyal viewers of hope-filled ends and salvation, and does not skimp on these viewers in the end with a phrase that fits a canned consumer quote ready to share, comes on The same colleague said, "Only broken people can save the broken people like themselves."
Joe Baylor collapses on the bathroom floor, we see him trapped by the walls of his cramped cabin, crying on the phone with his friend, begging him not to lie in court and even calling the press to confess.
The film ends with a detailed audio commentary telling us that Joe Baylor was convicted of manslaughter after his confession in court, noting that it was the fourth time a police officer had been convicted in a similar incident, a clear indictment of police brutality.
But that conviction seems alien to the main plot. Throughout the film, the events center on Baylor's internal battles, feelings of guilt, anger and frustration, without being concerned with whether or not he is convicted. That is why highlighting the issue of police corruption in the last minutes of the film seemed an intrusive intruder, as if it had to present the issues that the audience is waiting for poorly to satisfy the consumer viewer’s need for a false sense of moral benefit, and as if art itself is not sufficient without a moral burden on its shoulders.
Perhaps the acting performance was one of the most important differences between the two films. While we see Gyllenhaal’s extreme and blatant performance in both the literal and figurative sense, where we see him screaming and banging his fists on the table, his lips trembling and arteries protruding in his face, Jacob Cedergren’s performance came from a different acting school that is almost contradictory, granting The agitation is calculated with precision, closer to the cold.
The heroism here is the performance of El-Ayoun in a worthy way, as Cedergren was able to convey to the viewer his pent-up frustration and anger under the surface without having to scream, which set the rhythm of the performance, and reinforced the power of the impact of the few scenes of tantrums that he experienced during the film.
So even in the shots where the dialogue is identical between the two versions, we can feel the difference clearly through the performance.
13 days of filming and eight weeks of audio tape!
In the Danish version of the film, director Gustav Muller and director of photography Jasper Spanning divided the script into eight parts, each ranging from 5 to 35 minutes, changing the angles between them to build the visual development of events according to the dominant feelings, which also happened with the lighting that changes to become more inclined Red is near the end.
The film was filmed using only 3 cameras, and it was completed within 13 days, and because the film relies mainly on audible sounds, it took eight weeks to edit the audio after filming was completed.
According to Gustav Muller, adjusting the sound was like shooting the movie again, in an attempt to evoke the visual elements of the sites on the other end of the phone call, and some scenes editing the sound in them led to something like rewriting them again.
For example, in the last scene, in Asger Holm's monologue, the director confirms that the scene was not filmed in this way, but the other character on the phone was interacting with him and asking him questions, but he saw that the scene would be stronger if the questions of the other party were removed, so that the scene appears A monologue in which Asgar participates.
On the other hand, the American version of the film was typical for filming during the “Covid-19” pandemic, as it is filmed in one filming location with a limited number of actors, without direct contact between them.The American version was filmed in October 2020, and the funny thing is that director Antoine Fuqua He announced that he had contacted a positive case of "Covid-19" a few days before the start of filming, which forced him to shoot the entire movie from a mobile unit (van) a block away from the filming location.
In the end, Gustav Muller tells us about the main motive behind his making the film: “Some people in law enforcement have a tendency to pass judgment, and I don't think that necessarily comes from bad faith, it may be the result of facing violence and darkness every day.. That's why I was fascinated "Working on this movie. Usually, crime and thriller films have good/evil, right/wrong, and one wins in the end. So it was great to tell a story where there is no obvious good or evil. In a movie that puts forward its hypothesis and then re-disassembles it."
This is how the story is told to the viewer in black and white, and as it unfolds, he finds himself in a gray area.
Yes, it is the same indecisive area that a normal human faces in most of the situations he has to face over the course of his life.