You have to make a move, you have no choice

This is a review of Four Corners (Die Vier Hoeke) (2014)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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3 September

This is a review of Four Corners (Die Vier Hoeke) (2014)

* Contains non-specific spoilers *

The film only tells you about the 26s and the 28s, but the Internet reveals that there are also the 27s, although it fails to explain what the numbers of these ‘numbers gangs’ refer to : in relation to the 26s, some of whose members in the film refer to being Americans and to the number of stars on the flag (which flag ?), the dollar symbol is shown, which appears to connect (although there are dollars other than US dollars).

This is by the by. The film toys with the idea of neighbourhood, having all the significant characters converge on a tiny area, and, in this microcosm, showing how pointless the sectarian divisions are, not least when one ends up with father against son (though they do not know each other) (and with the undisguised parallel in chess). For all that, it is fairly routine and not all that interesting. What is interesting is that the film-makers expect us to maintain our interest, because everything is shown quite neutrally, in a man who kills another out of a (pretty pointless) family feud – with a grotesque paying of respects afterwards – and then shoots a boy, just because he can claim to be a householder who is protecting his interests.

This is not only a far cry from the utter barbarism of the gangs in prison (a building which gives us the film’s title), but seeks to have us ‘on side’ for the failings and future of the chess-playing son. The film leads us back to the drama with which it opened, and we recognize it for the first time, but the experience in between has been too hollow to make this amount to anything : our only connection has been with unearthing some disappearances, and, later, the shock of realizing how they have been perpetrated.

The chess has been there as a floating symbol of peaceful competition and endeavour, but it is too weak to sustain this narrative, where, we are told towards the end, You have to make a move, you have no choice – in fact, such references test the story beyond breaking-point, and leave us just with a glib quotation about how there is, in life, no such thing as a standstill. Maybe a documentary about the long standing and the elaborate tattooing of these gangs, if that had been possible, would have been a better endeavour…


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)