a certain tendency in world cinema

The Party and the Guests (Jan Nemec, 1966)

2007-05-13T15:52:23Z

The Iron Curtain may now be a construct of the past -- symbolically and ideologically torn down with the collapse of Communism across Eastern Europe in 1989 -- but little seems to have changed to alter the biased and marginalized view of Eastern Europe. Popular misconceptions are such that Eastern Europe remains economically, and therefore culturally, stunted vis-a-vis their Western brethren. Few non-sequiturs are in desperate need of rectification as much as this last statement. Even under Socialist control, culture oozed from the wounds of repression, and paradoxically the totalitarian shackles served to spur on the flowering of man-made artifacts.

One of the cultural fronts that deserves more widespread investigation and appreciation is the arena of cinema. "Films made in Eastern Europe seem of little or no interest to people in the West. The audiences in western countries find them as antediluvian as the battle for workers' rights in England in the time of Marx," once remarked the Polish master director Andrzej Wajda in his autobiography (Double Vision, My Life in Film, 1986). More than twenty years on, this lamentation seems as true and self-evident as when it was first ventilated. Outside their places of origin, Eastern European films remain confined to film festivals, art-house cinemas, and film societies.

If there is one bright hope on the horizon for the plight of marginalized cinema, however, it must be the emergence of new forms of distribution, most notably digital technology and internet commerce. The DVD format, abetted by the split-second availability afforded through e-commerce, is quickly changing the paradigm of distribution. Of late, DVD companies like Second Run, Clavis and Kino and other non-specialized companies have undertaken the task of making available classic films from the hub nations of Eastern European cinema, like Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia. (This is not counting the domestically produced titles in Eastern European countries themselves. If only everyone was a polyglot...). It's a genuine moment of plethora for the cineaste, as well as those who are looking to broaden their cinematic horizons.

One of Second Run's recent releases is Jan Nemec's The Party and the Guests. Jan Nemec is more popularly known for another film entitled Diamonds of the Night. He may not be as well-regarded as the other Czech New Wave directors canonized by the West (namely by Criterion), to wit, Jiri Menzel (Closely Watched Trains) and the duo of Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos (The Shop on Main Street), but he is no less accomplished. What is probably his drawback -- evident in The Party and the Guests -- is the subtlety (his censorship-circumventing use of allegory) and allusiveness that might be lost on audiences not familiar with the Czech experience.

Wilderness scenes open this seemingly innocuous film, not unlike the idyllic picnic that opens Jaroslav Papousek's Ecce Homo Homolka. A group of middle-aged couples sprawl on the grass like Monet figures and partake indulgently of slices of cake and wine. Changing into their Sunday best and sauntering through the woods, they stroll straight into something disconcerting, something untoward. They are overtaken and manhandled by a group of thugs, who escort them to a clearing in the forest, where a man named Rudolph presides over them, perched behind a desk, a prop conjured out of nowhere. Their captives? They are imprisoned in an imaginary closure drawn on the sands.

Middle-class folks trapped in the woods? Held hostage in an absurdist scenario? Wasn't this all dreamt up before? We are flush in the beginnings of a seemingly Bunuelian conceit. But the real demiurge of these Bohemian woods soon makes an appearance, the host of the eponymous party -- a wedding reception -- where the buttonholed guests, it becomes clear, are en route. The Prospero-like host orders his Caliban-like minion, Rudolph, to undetain the guests, who are soon escorted to a picturesque lakeside reception.

But the the theater of the absurd is just starting to thicken (literally: the scriptwriter, Esther Krumbachova, reveals that she patterned the film's dialogue after those found in the plays of Eugene Ionesco). It becomes strikingly clear that we are in the middle of socialist allegory (a prophetic satire of the increasing Soviet intrusion into Czechoslovakian affairs, culminating in the 1968 invasion) as the host, who bears a striking resemblance to Lenin but acts and preens autocratically like Stalin, holds forth in fulsome platitudes, underscoring a comic ridicule. When one of the guests is discovered missing, he takes it an an insult and all but declares the party a big fiasco. A search party is organized, sniffer dogs deployed, but everyone joins the search: a wasteful notion that no one seems inclined to contradict. Totaliarinism, anyone?

Probably the most absurd moment of this film is when all the guests suddenly discover that they are seated at the wrong table and like a confused herd of aninmals, everyone reshuffles to find the table with their names. It's the confusion, it seems, of the overly ordered lives in this socialist state. The host, who wears a resplendent and magisterial white attire reminiscent of Stalin's aggrandizing portraiture, and his minions, wearing their familiar raffish, gangster-like get-ups, are not impressed. And the fugitive guest, who seems to be the only dissenter in this increasingly repressive state of affairs, must be brought back to the fold. These are the streaks of Fascism that Jan Nemec seems to be telegraphing to us. (His other harrowing but paradoxically lyrical film, The Diamonds of the Night, reveals the objects of this pernicious force, the effects of such malevolence.)

The Party and The Guests is one of the signature films of the Czech New Wave, and touted for its oblique political barbs to be the most controversial of the pack. The Czech title translates as About the Celebration and the Guests, but this title that has come down to us -- one that smells of cadre and Communist bureacracy -- seems more apt, more resonant with connotations. When this film was screened in its homeland, the caustic satire was all too obvious that it received an immediate ban. There are a lot of domestic references, it appears, in the original language which are lost in translation. What we inherit today is a document that foreshadowed a dark era in Czech history; few films are as visionary as this.

Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge, 1966)

2007-05-11T17:07:18Z

Godard's My Life to Live (1963), emphasis on the ironic title, took us through the pitiful and helpless last moments in the life of a woman descending into prostitution in order to survive. The German director Alexander Kluge never lost sight of this French character study when time came to fashion out Yesterday Girl, an account of one woman's struggle -- a braver and more dignified struggle than its French paradigm -- in order to get by. What we ultimately get in Kluge's film is its social relevance, its wider national resonance -- not just the plight of its titular hero but through her struggle the unflattering portrait of old Germany -- its unsavory past -- being swept away under the carpet, in the wake of its economic miracle.

Rendered memorably and sympathetically by Alexandra Kluge, the director's sister, Anita G. is portrayed as a drifting refugee from East Germany left alone to her own devices, but she is not entirely a helpless individual, a foregone statistic. She is sensitive and smart, a streetwise operator who will do whatever it takes to survive, committting petty crimes when push comes to shove but stopping short of selling herself. In scenes reminding us of Godard's Nana, Anita tries, in funny and matter-of-fact ways, to do a number on her landlords and escape without paying for her lodgings. But we get a sense of Anita G.'s common dignity and nobility, balking at the idea of prostitution. Even when she finds a wealthy lover, she stops short, perhaps foolishly, of asking him for money. When Anita is not engaged in some petty crimes, we follow her in some diverting scenes about her efforts at self-improvement, as when she sits in on classes at the local university.

But the State is about to catch up with her. Bounced off between society's cold and unfeeling institutions, Anita G. vows that help from the government will be her last resort. (True enough, when she is made pregnant by her lover, we see her in an almost maddenned state, shut in and helpless within unnamed institutional walls.). Each time she is turned out like house vermin, we see her silhouette trudging on against a towering skyline fraught with signs of economic progress. Her plight is emblematized as a dark spot, dwarfed by tall skyscrapers, bridges, the presence of cranes, all manner of daunting infrastructure.

Kluge does not narrate his social commentary, however, in a grim and cheerless tone. If nothing else, Kluge employs montage at its most playful and Brechtian, lessons learned well from Godard and the French New Wave. There is an often contrapuntal relation of sound and image in Yesterday Girl -- i.e sad visuals are wedded with often comical background music -- that accomplishes two things: (1) it prevents its material from deteriorating into sentimentality and melodrama, and (2) it seems, in retrospect, to preserve the film and give it an ever-contemporary freshness. More than forty years on since its first release, Yesterday Girl remains a highly viewable film; its relevance has not faded; its message remains resonant in a world where the horrors of history repeat themselves all too oftenly and frighteningly.

Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2006)

2007-05-10T16:00:32Z

Man in crisis. More man than woman. More contemporary man than not. More universal man than Turkish man. Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan explores this existentialist turn in Climates, continuing to comment on the sex that he has taken a dim view of. We have seen this unflattering view of the privileged male, this male-bashing of sorts, in earlier films like Clouds of May, and Kasaba, culminating in Uzak (2004), but here it is brought into relief, seemingly beyond redemption by the other half of humanity. In Climates, Ceylan exposes the cold and bankrupt interiors of its characters like a Pandora's box: the world -- its landscape, its faces -- reflects this warpedness, frozen and buffeted by unrelenting inclement weathers.

Climates follows the downward spiral of Isa, a middle-aged college professor in Istanbul who seems to have emotionally and spiritually shortcircuited; like a Sartre or Camus character, he seems to have stopped feeling any emotion, let alone romantic ones. In a brief scene on a sunny beach, where he and his girlfriend spend an increasingly confrontational holiday, Isa practices the words to end the relationship; the film cuts immediately to an aftermath that almost kills the two of them in a motorcycle crash. Violence seems to be the only way to get through to Isa. This is carried over in a scene where Isa and a former flame engage in an almost brutal sex scene on the latter's livingroom floor. There is clearly no passion, no love. Looking for the missing parts of his jigsaw soul, Isa will retrace his steps -- if they have not been erased by the metaphorical gusting, howling snows -- to revive his last shred of humanity.

Climates is a labor of love for its director who served in multiple capacities as writer and editor. It is also perhaps a labor of hate. Self-hate. Ceylan has made no mystery of his own existential angst in real life, prompting critics to peg the male characters in his films as his alter-egos. With Climates, Ceylan has shown the courage of his convictions and taken on the role of its central anti-hero. For good measure, Ceylan's real-life wife, Ebru Ceylan, assumes the feminine other, Bahar, the casualty of this male moral paralysis.

Climates is not simply about anomie either, but also about the new morality of contemporary times, about urban mores. There seems to be a mechanization of feelings that's not confined to either sex. The same sex scene featuring Isa and his old mistress, Serap, might remind us of Antonioni's treatment of sex in L'Eclisse (arms and hands flailing madly like those of puppets), but this time more animal, more brutal. The woman seems to be on the receiving end, all but sexually assaulted; but she seems to give her tacit approval; she is no less incriminated.

Climates, as many critics have noted, has echoes of the work of Antonioni. The treatment of landscapes -- their function as objective correlatives -- is perhaps what Ceylan learnt from the old Italian master. As a filmmaker out of Turkey, Ceylan seems to naturally embody the influences of both East and West. We've already heard how Ceylan's early works, Kasaba and Clouds of May, seem to reference Kiarostami and Tarkovsky. In Uzak, Ceylan even inserts a humourous nod to one of his ancestors: one scene shows how the central character switches between watching Tarkovsky's Stalker and a porn film. But the truth is, Ceylan is a filmmaker starting to come to his own. These may be early days, but here is one prodigy worth following .

The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, 2006)

2007-04-03T15:37:53Z

It's almost always as an afterthought that Ken Loach's name was considered for the Golden Palm at Cannes or the top prizes at the world's other prestigious film festivals in recent memory. The English director won the minor awards but seemed condemned never to win the big one. If one were to speculate why he often seemed bypassed and relegated as a perennial also-ran, it's probably due to the seeming precedence of content over form in his films, story over style, politics over aesthetics. Cosmetically, Loach's films couldn't seem to contend; his brand of social realism and his stories of the down-and-out and marginalized in his native England lacked the gloss and glamor of previous winners, it seemed. Yet much like his riff-raff characters, Loach had built such a devoted underdog following on the festival circuit that if he just kept working on his craft this critical mass might eventually tilt the balance in his favor.

Enter The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Loach's entry to last year's Cannes Film Festival, a movie accordingly built with epic resonance, downtrodden characters and historical themes. True enough, when the dust had settled and the jury had decided, the uncompromising director was triumphant, securing his first Golden Palm.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley starts in 1820 in Ireland during the height of the Anglo-Irish War. Destruction and bloodletting mark this internecine war as the Irish Republican Army engage the British Army and its paramilitary units known as Blacks and Tans in a bloody tit-for-tat. It's a war of attrition that spares no one; in some instances pitting Irishmen against fellow Irish men. Civilians are often caught in the crossfire; the IRA execute those suspected to be informers for the occupying forces. In turn, the British Army burn villages and torture civilians to extract information on the rebels.

Ken Loach takes this cataclysmic historical premise as his entry point and crafts a poignant story of two brothers within the IRA ultimately divided by their differing convictions on the fate of the Irish Republic. The two poles of this guerilla dialectic are Teddy, a leader of the IRA and his younger brother, Damien, a student of medicine who must forego his studies after witnessing how elements of the Blacks and Tans bludgeon one of his childhood friends to death.

His fault? An apparent disrespect of the Blacks and Tans by furnishing his name in Gaelic, the ancestral language of the Irish that was effectively outlawed in favor of English. Reprisals and counter-reprisals are prompt in those volatile times: daring raids on British barracks, the burning of villages, the execution of boyhood friends, the arrest and escape of the revolutionaries.

No side seems to have the right to assume moral ascendancy. Both camps demonstrate inhuman and cruel attributes that condemn their means and methods. If the Blacks and Tans appear to be more bloodthirsty and sadistic, they come across at times to be exaggerated figures, always actuated by outsize motivations to kill, torture, maim, destroy life and property. By contrast, Damien and his group are merely forced to be almost as ruthless as their oppressors: they take to heart the news of arrests and executions of their fellow rebels and experience pangs of guilt at the neccessity of killing those who inform on them. In another sequence, another moral dilemma plays out as Teddy must override the decision of a people's court to convict a local landlord because of the latter's support for the IRA.

Ken Loach depicts the two brothers in clear-cut terms, not unlike parabolic characters. Both of them, however, are characters one can sympathize with. Damien plays the more idealistic and absolutistic of the two, while Teddy seems to be the more pragmatic who is compelled to follow the party line. This opposition of beliefs fuels a heart-wrenching resolution, illustrating a heavily divided Ireland.

Ken Loach portrays the war scenes with odd touches. Voices are louder than bombs, literally. The warring characters seem more strident than belligerent. Many of the violent moments are carried out offscreen; the torture of Teddy, his fingernails pulled out with a pair of pliers, is the only authentic instant of graphic cruelty; the rest is routine violence. Loach is the master of depicting small, marginalized characters; this affection shows in this film when he allows characters making impassioned speeches to flub some of their lines. They are instantaneously humanized.

The Wind that Shakes the Barley might be about grand gestures and heroism, but Loach does not forget that his characters are the dispossessed, the downtrodden, the oppressed. It's a film on the grand stage, with all the trappings of the epic and of history, but in truth, Loach has been making such a film for years and years. It's only now that jurors have taken notice. Not that -- to Loach -- it's what matters.

kiarostami @ 2007-03-23T20:47:00

2007-03-23T12:47:29Z

Wim Wenders shot The State of Things almost for sport. To blow off steam. While vacationing in Portugal after a disruption in the shooting of Hammett (1982), the German director came across a film shoot running low on supplies, and promptly had a brainstorm. Making a deal with its makers to help in its completion if he was allowed to borrow the cast for his own film, Wenders crafted a film that imitated life. Taking inspiration from the abortive shoot of Hammett and the one Wenders came across, The State of Things is all but autobiographical, born out of the director's restlessness and frustration.

What do we make of The State of Things from the foregoing? Pastiche? Perhaps. The good kind.

Some of the seams are readily apparent to the practiced eye -- e.g. the almost programmatic shifts in genre, the bric-a-brac construction of its parts -- but Wenders treats it all with a sense of humor, attaining the sublime at times, in this hit-or-miss effort. This film is at its best when Wenders de-dramatizes the action, digressing from the strictures of the genres, which recall the best passages in his earlier, superlative road movies like Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). He calls this film, self-deprecatingly, a b-movie, but like with all good directors, he transcends the restrictions of such a definition.

Begin, then, with a post-apocalyptic vision: what appear to be survivors of a nuclear holocaust trudge wearily through a desolate landscape. (They seem more like survivors from an Ed Wood movie.) To shield the lack of budget and the shoddy production values -- i.e. the futuristic look is laughable and dated, circa 1950s: flimsy-looking masks, visors and overalls -- the look is filtered through a yellow hue. These survivors are desperate to reach a sanctuary of sorts, but they are in a race against time; this is a kind of death march.

We realize quickly enough, as the film segues into black-and-white photography, that we are in a film-within-a-film, in the middle of a remake of Roger Corman's The Day The World Ended. Not unlike Corman's guerilla ways of making a film, this remake is battling a serious lack of budget. Film stock is just about to run out as the cinematographer informs Friedrich the German director; and the producer is nowhere to be found to replenish the finances. Without a choice the shoot is suspended, leaving the cast and crew high and dry on this scenic seashore near Lisbon, Portugal.

The lull in the filming provides the most riveting moments involving the cast and crew and their families. We observe de-dramatized moments where the characters pair off in different improvisational combinations, interact, talk and listen. It's an impasse that could just as well be a holiday by the sea. The pieces of conversation we gather are various and amusing: children talk in intellectual musings; lovers attempt an intimate exchange; diaries, journals and quotes from books are read aloud; a mother instructs the child about the world; half-drunk characters liven up the local watering hole; a monologue about a lifetime of insecurities is ventilated while the laundry is hang out to dry. In Kings of The Road and Alice in the Cities, we come across similar couplings, unlikely meetings that produce an antidote to our modern-day ennui, and genuine human connections.

Wenders could have anchored his camera on this riveting state of things all the way through; it would have provided a kind of pseudo documentary, but the last act of the movie is intent on paying homage to the b-movie genre, with Friedrich trying to track down Gordon the producer, all the way to Los Angeles. When he finally pins him down, the producer is a bankrupt man and cannot produce the funds to finish the movie. Instead, we hear the litany of many an independent producer, how he can't help secondguessing himself: why he had to choose Friedrich, a German director, instead of an American director who could have turned out a commercially viable movie. We also gather that the mafia has put a price on his head presumably over money matters.

We do get the tribute finale -- a gangster flick ending -- but it's a film that deserves almost any kind of ending; we still would have come away with the pleasures just described. The State of Things is quite an achievement given the circumstances under which it was made. It's a free-wheeling movie that remains as fresh by today's jaded standards as when it was first released more than 25 years ago. Meditative, discursive, a hybrid of several genres, The State of Things embodies all the positive aspects of these adjectives, a real modernist film and a worthy addition to an impressive list of credits for its director: A b-movie to end all b-movies.

Kardiogramma (Darezhan Omirbaev, 1995)

2007-03-13T16:49:56Z

Think where Truffaut's 400 Blows leaves off, replace Antoine Doinel with a young farm boy and transplant the setting to a cold Kazakh institution -- this is how director Darezhan Omirbaev must have conceived of Kardiogramma. He makes one more modification: instead of a boys' reformatory, Jasulan, the young hero, is condemned to a sanatorium for children with heart ailments. Before this feature is over, the heart will be near collapse, the sense of claustrophobia and asphyxia will have become unbearable, the cold, institutional walls conjuring the dimensions of a prison.

Jasulan is by all accounts a loner, by nature and by circumstance, hailing as he does from the desolate outskirts of this former Soviet state. In his natural habitat, there are no houses for miles around, the plains of the countryside are wide open spaces. A painful contrast soon becomes apparent with his place of exile: a cold, dimly lit edifice populated with children who speak a different tongue. While this is a place for convalescents, it is not unlike a regular school, complete with the cruel hierarchical structure and strata.

Jasulan, not the least for not speaking a word of the sanatorium's lingua franca, is soon singled out for humiliation. His tormentors are unforgiving; they even have a foolproof way of inducing urination during sleep and Jasulan falls prey to it. Otherwise, the hectoring takes on more straightforward varieties.

Jasulan's one remaining solace is an unrealistic one, too, developing a crush as he does on the sanatorium's nurse. We find Jasulan frequenting the clinic for various cuts and bruises, only to discover that the nurse is being courted by one of the doctors. A number of sequences ensue, desperately chronicling his attempts to look in on them. Subsequently, we perversely rejoice with the naturally-voyeuristic Jasulan when a secret is made known to him: a peephole into the women's showers. (In an earlier scene, his father rebukes him for addictively "watching tv programs of nude women.") But just when he gets the chance to see the woman of his dreams in the nude, the bullies get in the way yet again.

Voyeurism seems to be this film's humorous metaphor for freedom. For Jasulan who is exiled in more ways than one, held incommunicado among culturally different peers who only speak Russian, the curtailment of this "right" is the last straw. His prison-like situation has been untenable all along. We have witnessed a stark contrast between his unfettered life at home and the regulated, often hostile existence in a cold city institution.

Kardiogramma's simple tale of a young boy in exile also seems to explore a bigger, darker parable: the continuing legacy -- and perhaps even the imperialism -- of the former Soviet capital in the affairs of this newly independent state. There is a kind of estrangement sustained in an environment that privileges the Russian language. All in all, Omirbaev's latest film is an affecting tale of alienation, a portrait of the seeming dichotomy between urban and rural spaces, and a child's truncated sense of wonderment, all his myths coldly withheld from him, in an increasingly quasi-totalitarian universe.

Black Cat, White Cat (Emir Kusturica, 1998)

2007-03-10T15:12:10Z

Emir Kusturica returns to the territory he knows best, the world of Yugoslavian gypsies, and comes up with his most highly imaginative and perhaps his most self-indulgent film yet. This Serbian writer-director does not hold back and acknowledge the intimidation of the blank canvas: Every frame here is chockfull of vibrant and irreverent imagery spun straight out of a fanciful and surreal turn of mind. Picture a musical tree, with the different pieces of an orchestra tied along the stretch of its trunk like a musical totem pole. Think of an obese folk singer whose posterior can pry loose a deeply embedded construction nail with a hammer's ease. Then imagine an attic full of dead, old patriarchs coming back to life -- like avenging angels or dictators who must return to power to restore order to their unruly countries. Who else can conjure such hallucinatory and dreamlike images? No wonder that Kusturica is drawing more and more comparisons to Fellini and his fantastic excesses.

Nothing on paper surpasses the magic realism that Kusturica meticulously and restlessly portrays onscreen -- so much so that the storyline is a mere expedient, an incidental aside to help him indulge in pictorial madness. In Black Cat, White Cat, Kusturica revisits his long-standing fascination with gypsies (evidenced by such films as Time of the Gypsies, and Life is A Miracle), but this time divested of any overt social commentary or crypto-political allegory, painting his subjects instead with loud and colorful strokes -- as out-and-out caricatures who imbue the screen with highly entertaining action.

Matko and his 17-year-old son Zare are Kusturica's gypsies of choice, small-time racketeers on the banks of the Danube, who deal in petrol and barter goods with passing merchant ships. Complications arise when Matko's business deal with the grenade-juggling, gun-toting gangster Dadan falls through. In order to write off his debts, Matko is forced to marry off his son to the gangster's homely sister. There is the amusing subplot too of two elderly gypsy friends and war veterans, Matko's father and his pal Grga, the warlord who loans Matko money for his failed business venture and is likewise looking to find a suitable wife for his son. Meanwhile Zare, Matko's son, despairs, his thoughts turning elsewhere -- to his trysts with Ida, a beautiful gypsy girl who operates a refreshment stand on the banks of the famous river.

Throughout his career, Kusturica has demonstrated an affinity for mixed tone, but more and more recently, he has favored the comic turn over his dramatic shifts, most notable in his most highly acclaimed work, Underground. Black Cat, White Cat belongs in the same category, albeit seemingly without a purpose, a shaggy-dog story used to showcase how rambling and free-ranging Kusturica is capable of becoming. For all its excesses -- did I mention the presence of some toilet humor too? -- Black Cat, White Cat sustains its brand of stream of consciousness for two highly entertaining hours, and for that duration of the viewer's life, that's all that matters.

Clean, Shaven (Lodge Kerrigan, 1994)

2007-03-10T14:52:08Z

Kerrigan's first film is a frightening depiction of someone spiralling out of control into the depths of schizophrenia. Few films can match the sense of unsettlement and pathology in this unflinching depiction of disease, centering on Peter Winter, a man who appears before us out of nowhere with fevered eyes and psychical imbalance. We see him feverishly attempting to clean a car he has just stolen -- unexplained sequences mostly of emptying the car of all perceivable inessentials -- interwoven with shots of him crouched maniacally in a corner of a padded room of what appears to be an insane asylum. We are thrust headfirst into the proceddings: whether he has escaped from confinement is unknowable to us.

Clean, Shaven is not just a frontal, gruesome portrayal of mental sickness, another dimension of its story involves a detective's investigation of murders committed against children. Peter Winter, who is painted as abnormally drawn to children (e.g. he is forever examining the busts of missing children on milk cartons, he spends endless hours in libraries poring over catalogues of children's pictures), is soon singled out as a suspect. We are kept guessing to the end whether the suspicion is not unfounded, even as we learn along the way that his regard for children is a concern for his own daughter he has not seen for years.

Even as the mutilated body of a small girl is clinically examined before us, someone who looks like the child Peter encountered in an earlier scene, we can't be too sure of Peter's culpability. The damning coincidence, however, seems to be the pristine state of the child: she has "clean" clothes and fingernails and all. We are as bewildered and unsettled as Peter; Kerrigan's fractured and paranoiac view of the world is contagious. Disturbing images of Peter trying to extract imagined objects -- a radio receiver and transmitter we learn later on -- embedded in his body (both under his scalp and fingers) are accompanied by the ever-present, all pervasive presence of radio static, sometimes interspersed with voices whose provenance we don't know.

Even the detective on Peter's trail, named McNally, is depicted as someone whose methods and intentions could be nothing if not blameworthy. We see him befriending Peter's former wife and bedding her down; we see him furiously pounding his steering wheel in his frustration to track Peter down. It's almost as if Kerrigan is pointing up the myopia of prejudice: Peter must be guilty of the murders because he comes from the nuthouse. Extreme close-ups of Peter cleaning himself to the point of contusing and incising his body are juxtaposed with extreme close-ups of evidence incriminating Peter being gathered by McNally. It's the metaphor for the film: someone desperately strives to start all over and the world is unforgiving, pining crimes on him. He is a marked man for life. Now the threat does not only come from around him; he will feel it inside him, he must be "clean, shaven" inside out.

Rosso (Mika Kaurismäki, 1985)

2007-02-27T18:19:46Z

Rosso was the brave new film that put the fledgling country of Finland on the world cinema map upon its release in 1985. It's this small, independent effort that catapulted its makers to more viable international careers and gave their films wider distribution -- not just for its director Mika Kaurismaki, but the other members of its cast and crew, including his now-more famous brother, Aki. In a recent interview made for the film's dvd release, the director reveals how the film came together in a freewheeling fashion, how it was conceived on a modest scale: how, in particular, the film was cobbled together from scraps of film stock, the different amounts of which dictated the lengths of scenes. Rosso is an experiment that went right.

Experimental is how Mika Kaurismaki describes his film's methods. Rosso is a product of such rueful and impoverished circumstances that constructing a halfway decent film was almost improbable; the end product proved to be a hit on the European festival circuit. While it is a modestly funded effort, Rosso is daringly shot and confidently directed. Some of the sequences are shot so fortuitously that it's hard to imagine that they can be duplicated. Kaurismaki recounts in the same interview how one flooded dirt road proved to be a serendipitous, symbolic moment for a film about a search and a journey, and how a cult's cemetery was such an irresistible shooting spot that they encroached on the grounds at an unholy hour.

Rosso is about an aimless search for someone but more metaphorically a search for the right direction for its wrong-headed hero. The plot is almost a convenient excuse to frame the loose, anarchic nature of a road movie. Much of what happens on the hero's nihilistic journey along the Finnish countryside has little to do with the story the film begins with. Rosso, a Sicilian and Mafia assassin, comes all the way to Finland on a contract to rub out Maria, a woman not unknown to him. She happens to be his ex-girlfriend for whom he still keeps a torch burning, and Rosso's real motive in accepting the job appears to be to protect her and make up with her.

Rosso is not alone in his mindless forays in a bleak and desolate landscape that is the Finnish countryside. Martti, Maria's brother, is his willing although uncomprohending sidekick. Neither understands the other: Rosso exclusively speaks Italian, while Martti appears to have never ventured out of his homeland. In a scene that must go down as an absolute classic in world cinema, the duo sing the same song simultaneously in the solitary language they know. Like the barren plains and the rest of the inhospitable landscape they must cross to find Maria, the lyrics reflect their inner states, Rosso's in particular. In its penchant for humorous but revealing lyrics and its affinity for the road, Rosso resembles an earlier Kaurismaki film, the more humorous Arvottomat.

The deadpan ending of Arvottomat, however, is replaced here by something less neutral, something in keeping with the gangster genre that this film also touches. What starts out as harmless fun for the seemingly uncommunicating duo, inexplicably becomes a concerted effort to wreak havoc: the guns that Rosso is furnished for the hit are used for robbing roadside establishments. For a character who seems listless and dispirted, who seems ready to get away from crime to nurture an old love, Rosso is infused with a newfound malevolent influence. One can only surmise that he will need money for a new life, money to elude the Mafia assassins who will come looking for them. Rosso surprises us to the end, the love and death conceits are haunting.

Buongiorno, Notte (Marco Bellocchio, 2003)

2007-02-20T15:17:59Z

The year 1978 in Italy's supposedly peaceful modern history resounds as the year when Aldo Moro, the doyen and president of the Christian Democratic Party, was abducted by elements of the Red Brigade, a leftist extremist group that would eventually try and sentence him to death for crimes against the proletariat. For more than three months of tense and curious twists, Moro's captivity was played out in the press and on television, a period of drama that saw his letters published in the press while his friends and allies, including the Pope, pleaded for his release. Buongiorno Notte is Marco Bellocchio's fictitious but theoretical account of these days, his version of what transpired between abductors and abductee that might help to explain how no one was left unaffected by this encounter.

Bellocchio's version of events reverses commercial cinema's portrayal of abductors. This film does not show us ruthless and maniacal stereotypes, incapable of remorse and reason. Quite the contrary -- this film may tell of these abductors' cold-blooded side -- i.e. they shoot down five bodyguards and policemen in the process of nabbing Moro -- but Bellocchio invests them with very human traits. We see them looking after each other like siblings; we see how hiding out is making them stir-crazy, even more so than their captive; we see how they remonstrate and debate with their captive in a very civilized fashion.

But no one is more humanized by Moro's captivity than the lone female member of the group named Chiara, a thoughtful young woman who seems freshly indoctrinated to leftist thought. We see her forever carrying around Marx's Das Kapital like a textbook, wherever she goes. She serves as the the antenna for the group to the outside world and lives the most normal life among this group of four that includes three men. She cooks meals for them, buys their groceries and dailies, and even holds a regular job as a librarian. It's no wonder that she starts to see and weigh things from the outside world's perspective, and to feel sympathy for their captive.

Aldo Moro is depicted here in a way that contradicts our ideas of someone who is always in the public eye. He is neither demanding nor loud nor perpetually inconvenienced by his new circumstances. His is the face of resignation, a haggard old man who thinks little of his cramped quarters, the cold, unappetizing food served to him, but of those who must worry for him. Even when he realizes a chance to cry for help, he curiously keeps silent. There seems to be a healthy exchange of ideas and respect with his captors but he must defend the ideals he represents even if it would mean his guilt in the eyes of his captors.

The most touching aspect of his abduction is when he writes letters to his friends and family -- and towards the end, to his two-year-old grandson, who is still beyond the reach of his grandfather's precarious situation. In a theatrical, but no less touching scene, Moro asks how he could improve this last message to someone who will grow not knowing him other than through this letter.

The Red Brigade portrayed here are not altogether unsympathetic, not raving lunatics, nor rigid hardliners, although they feel compelled to follow their mandate when passing their final judgment on Aldo Moro. We hear about how they stage the daring abduction, how they are branded as murderers, but we see them as serious individuals instilled with a sense of duty to perform. They must make sacrifices too, and must stay in hiding -- away from their families and loved ones.

The movie ends with what seems to be Chiara's wishful dream: she laces the dinner soup with a soporific dose, and scrawls a message to Moro not to touch it. We see Moro walk through the door that Chiara has unbolted, put on his overcoat, walk out free in the first light of day, his face not betraying happiness, but perhaps a thoughtful gladness of one who has kept his dignity and constancy in the face of adversity.

Cat's Play (Károly Makk, 1972)

2007-02-19T10:53:43Z

Sibling love and companionship are the all-encompassing themes in Karoly Makk's Cat's Play, a movie that captures felicitously and bittersweetly a nostalgia for more carefree and youthful times -- for a world that can no longer be recovered. Two sisters -- through the rapidly-outmoded medium of handwritten letters -- conduct a faithful and conscientious correspondence that belies the great distance that separates them. But it's not all a portrait of intimate sisterhood that we witness in Karoly Makk's universe; other dimensions of feeling, other aspects of relationships -- in particular, their seemingly contrasting if not clashing personalities -- find expression in this finely crafted film founded on what might be called sisterly billets-doux.

Cat's Play is centered -- sometimes confusingly until the story hits its stride in midstream -- on the voice-over readings of letters between Erzsi and Giza, two sisters who seem destined to live apart and for the most part, alone. Their intimate letters almost always hark back to an innocent and idyllic place in their childhood: a virtual time capsule for us as Makk intersperses soft-focus images and vignettes -- compositions that are redolent of old photographs -- of younger lives and innocence. In their letters, the sisters broach photographs and mementos, how they can no longer be found, or otherwise frayed by time and remembrance.

It is not all nostalgia, however, as we hear the consequences of sharpened familiarity and candidness. Erzsi is a music teacher in Budapest who seems fiercely protective of her independence, relishing her city life even as her one romantic flame Viktor has been less than faithful. She has a younger helper at home, Mousey, whose very nickname suggests a note of condescension from the house's mistress. An amusing aspect of their relationship is how they communicate endearingly by making cat's miaows, but their intimacy remains limited.

Giza lives in a distant but undisclosed place, bedridden and paralyzed by an accident. Her letters to Erzsi often assume the tone of an older sister, at times repelling the younger and stubborn sibling. Giza does not make a mystery of her desire for Erzsi to reunite with her no matter how many times she has been rebuffed.

Makk charts with realism the emotional ebb and flow between the two sisters through their letters, their mutual love for one another contrasting with their strong personalities. Makk's thematic obsession has been to depict the whole spectrum of female relationships, loves of different kinds: lesbian love in Another Way and that of a daughter- and mother-in-law in Szerelem. In Cat's Play, Makk portrays a love that reflects the brutal pace of modern times, a love that refuses to transport itself to the pragmatics of the present.

A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang, 1991)

2007-02-05T16:11:34Z

Feral youth, tragic lives. Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day

tries to coax a coming-of-age story full of innocence and wonder

from its premise, but the turbulent currents of the times in which it is

set -- Taiwan in the 1960s -- will not allow such a rendering. Early

in this sprawling, but masterfully orchestrated film, an engrossing

but lacerating 237-minute tome, the image of its main character

summoned before his school's headmaster for frightening atrocities

is established. This is the heartbreaking refrain in the young but

troubled life of Si'r, a young Taipei teenager, and while we are

afforded glimpses of blissful moments that befit his age, we realize

that the rites of passage he is meant to negotiate are far from the

normal, the blissful.

Epic in its scope and sweep, novelistic in its details, A Brighter

Summer Day sets the tone with a portentous preface: its story is

set at a time of a great social upheaval, it encompasses a relatively

short span of time but is nevertheless an uncompromised saga

of those concerned, those who escaped the civil war in mainland

China in 1949, particularly their children who are brought up in an

atmosphere of insecurity and must struggle for identity and

direction. They comprise the clean slate -- rather, the rapidly

smearing and smudging register -- that mirrors the new country

and its growing pains.

As the 1960s unravel, Taiwan is in turmoil. Many of those too

young to remember their parents' mass emigration neveretheless

reflect the unease of their parents who fear the specter of the old

country, Communist China. These directionless, disoriented youth

form gangs and claim the streets for their own. But if these rebellious

youths are portrayed to be capable of crimes, they do not appear to be

the hardened kind, incapable of turning their lives around. Si'r, for

one, is not without hope, who, although embroiled in gang activities

for the most part, attends a night school in downtown Taipei.

With his Elvis-singing diminutive friend Cat, and a samurai-wielding,

general's son named Ma, they ricochet from one juvenile paroxysm

to another. Yang suspends judgment on them, allowing their lives

to unfold freely, by shooting them from long shots, an uncommenting

distance. But there is a tug-of-war of fate at work, a Manichean

color scheme: the pitch-black and dangerous cover of night

contrasts with light, almost white, colors of the background in

daytime scenes.

Much like anyone their age, music, movies, girls and other youthful
interests figure prominently in the lives of these juveniles, but so

do their gang activities, the control of their territories, violence. No
one is spared, not their elders, not their teachers at school, there are
few authority figures to speak of. More ubiquitous than authority
figures are baseball bats, pistols, samurais. Like Hou Hsiao-hsien's
autobiographical 1986 film, A Time to Live and A Time to Die, Yang's
film incorporates scenes of gang violence, but avoids sensationalism
by elliptical reference and, in one crucial scene, by shrouding an act of

revenge by samurai-wielding gangsters in the cover of night at the
height of a typhoon. As if to reflect this youthful cataclysm, Yang sets
some scenes against ominous backdrops: the rumble of armored tanks
and the arrests of Secret Police are a constant, ominous presence,
giving strong, unmistakable impressions of a militarized state. All the
throwaway details and the ethos of 1960's Taiwan are painstakingly
recreated by Yang, something that can only be rivaled by another Hou
film, City of Sadness.

Si'r, his family and his gangmates are a reflection of the Taiwan of
those times. They seem helpless at the crossfire of outside influences.
We see and hear many references to Western influences, mostly those
of Americanization: the movie title itself derives from Elvis Prestley's
"Are You Lonesome Tonight?" Movies like Rio Bravo and The Misfits
play in the local theaters; Si'r sister is a convert to Christianity and
transcribes English lyrics for Cat, and Honey, a legendary gang figure
in hiding for killing a rival, recounts his favorite novel to Si'r, Tolstoy's
War and Peace, just days before the enemy gangs catch up with him.
From the hollows of ceilings, a wealth of Japanese weapons and other
leavings come pouring down. In any other movie these details may be
left out in the reckoning, but these details are the fine threads that are
weaving the fabric of this new society in a cataclysmic transition.

Si'r's own fate swings uncertainly from one apex of the pendulum

to the other. Forces -- both evil and good -- are bargaining for his

soul. At one moment, he either shows pious love or waxes poetic

and earnest with his feelings for a girl. The next moment, he shouts

down his teacher and bludgeons another with a baseball bat.

His fate hangs precariously in the balance. It seems to hinge on

a young but earnest love with a seemingly pure teenage girl named

Ming. It seems to hinge on finishing his immediate education. It

seems to depend on avoiding his sometimes mercurial aggression --

to a large degree an influence of the violence around him. But his

elders are preoccupied with their own dilemmas, Si'r's father, for one

even overprotects him. Everything around Si'r is breaking his heart:

he has no remaining refuge, not his friends, not his family, not his
young, pure love.

Offside (Jafar Panahi, 2006)

2007-01-30T17:04:37Z

Jafar Panahi's latest film, Offside, may situate itself among the

heady throngs that passionately love and support the sport of football,

but it soon veers away and narrows its focus on a forbidden brand
of spectatorship. In fact, football stays mostly at the background in
Panahi's scheme of things, skirting what would have certainly become
yet another entry to the much-investigated phenomenon of football
mania. Panahi instead probes the distaff side, in a thinly-veiled
exposition of their civil liberties -- or rather, the lack of it -- choosing an
opportune time and place to do so: Iran's final game at the Azadi Stadium,
against Bahrain, in a bid to qualify for the 2006 World Cup.

All roads lead then to Azadi Stadium, a hallowed temple to the Iranian

man’s worship of the sport in question. But this supposedly national
pastime forbids women from watching at the stadium. (There are no
comfort rooms for women in this edifice, a subject of a comic set piece
along the way.) This proscription, however, is under siege, the subject
of circumvention by women who are not doing it for political reasons

but for the sheer love of the sport. At the stadium, however, it would take
inordinate bravery to slip past security and scrutiny; ultimately several
of these intrepid women are caught and herded to an enclosure within
the stadium – within tantalizing earshot of the football match.

The impassioned dialogue between the youthful security men

and the football-obsessed women that ensues forms the edifying

and humorous core of the film. While trying to do their jobs, the

security men nevertheless show vulnerability to be swayed from

official position. The discourse is forthright for the women: what

sort of baleful influence can be absorbed by watching a football

game? Why is the accident of nationality and gender determinants

of who can watch the game? Why, for instance, could Japanese

women watch at the revered stadium? It’s street-level reasoning

but it cuts to the heart of the matter. All the poor security men can

offer is officialese and knee-jerk putdowns that demean women as

worse than "cattle" for their recalcitrance. So when one of the girls

manages to escape, it's a moment of great hilarity for the rest of

the girls in custody.

We are never afforded even snapshots of the football match. But

instead we get all the zeal and excitement, the flag-waving passion
and all the paraphernalia of worship and allegiance. For the delectation
of the captive women, one of the obliging security men even volunteers

a running commentary of the match. We witness the brand of

enthusiasm and boisterousness of women, how perhaps Iranian

women can be as fanatical – and therefore as human – as Iranian

men in their love of the sport.

This brand of women is shown as legion, coming from all walks

of life, seemingly unafraid of the repercussions of their audacious act.

It is the height of boldness that one of them dresses up as a military

man and usurps the seat reserved for a high-ranking official. But in

the din of celebrations in the streets, is it this easy to challenge

and interrogate the patriarchy and the theocratically entrenched

patriarchal foundations in Iranian society? It’s the mark of intelligent

circumvention that such a serious social issue is addressed in

a warm and funny comedy. The humor it offers goes down easily,

while forwarding fundamental and commonsensical arguments.

Flanders (Bruno Dumont, 2006)

2007-01-13T15:37:32Z

                                  We are the Dead. Short days ago
                                  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
                                  Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
                                  In Flanders fields.

                                       -- John McCrae, In Flanders Fields

Flanders, as a geographic region in Europe, has had a long

and convulsive history since time immemorial, shifting and

changing boundaries according to the dispensations in power.

At various times, Flanders has referred to parts of Netherlands,

France and in a more contemporary time, a region of Belgium.

It’s not at all anecdotal that poets have been inspired by its often

sanguinary and turbulent past. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn

that Bruno Dumont had frightening lullabyes about Flanders sang

to him as a child.

Bruno Dumont’s vision of Flanders, however, does not encompass

a daunting piece of history or geography but instead whittles

down its focus on a small fictional village, unnamed but might as
well be the titular one. Dumont’s eye zeroes in on small-town

lives whose passions are a virtual battlefield – with concrete

repercussions, and, in modern parlance, collateral damage.

Dumont’s Flanders is a tale of pent-up passions, jealousy and

revenge. There are few discernible heroes here, except for men

and women who follow the dictates of human desires and needs

to the detriment of virtues. Characters are actuated by primal –

even primitive – compulsions that we might associate with those

who have little to go on, little to call their own and little to hold

sacred.

Demester is one such character. Like Pharaon in L’Humanité and

Freddy in La Vie de Jesus, he is the prototypical Dumont hero:

a farmer with limited prospects, his emotions in check, his eyes

brooding with unreleased passions. There is a war halfway around

the world and Demester is one of the conscripts from the village

called for a tour of duty. Days before call-up, Demester has one last

roll in the hay with Barbe, a girl who excites lust but also what little

sense of romance the men of this village harbor. Barbe has the

proverbial loose morals and entertains the new man in town,

Blondel. This happens with the least secrecy imaginable; all under

the smoldering eyes of Demester.

It also happens that Blondel is one of the conscripts and we

almost sense that there is war-within-war about to take place.

There is an air of inevitability surrounding this film’s spare story.

In the confusion, death and destruction of war, there will be

casualties along the way. But the mayhem that ensues catches

us off-guard. Rape, cold blooded executions and other atrocities,

with little regard for life, take place.

Dumont creates tension like a coiled spring. Instead of the

cheap currency of words, the pregnant silences bespeak the

burning passions of its characters. When the bombs explode and

bullets thud on impact, one can feel the dissipated emotions, the

deadening of tensions. It is almost anticlimax. But we almost

nod in agreement: the war-torn landscapes, the war atrocities

exteriorize what the dry, gray farmlands are too mute to express,

the pent-up rage of characters. When Dumont projects these

uncurbed and uncurtailed emotions of a small-town love triangle

into a full-fledged war, we might also begin to receive the

dishonor of actual wars, the hair-trigger emotions of those who

rule us. When we hear the confession at movie’s end, we can’t

seem to take these words at face value. Words might belie

what other readings we might have of Flanders. Maybe not.

Derecho de Familia (Daniel Burman, 2006)

2007-01-13T14:56:47Z

Like father, like son. The Perelmans, a family of well-regarded

lawyers, take this adage to heart. We catch them at a curious

point in life as the younger Perelman contemplates his familiarity

with all of his father’s daily routines and mannerisms. It’s the son’s

perspective we are witnessing, but the father is no less reverent

when it comes to his son. While the son is not about to “slay” the

father, the son gradually starts to notice something different in his

father, something that makes him reevaluate his own ways, his life,

the family law.

There’s a stiff formality that governs the Perelmans. They drop

familiarity and intimacy and call each other in a professional

fashion in each other’s presence – by their last names. In law

circles where they circulate, it’s common practice, but when the

younger Perelman comes home to his wife and son, the appellation

strangely carries over.

It’s amusing, even comical to the casual viewer, when a toddler

calls his old man in overly familiar tones that adults assume

and the latter finds nothing irregular about it. But at some point

in this low-key and slow-burning story, the younger Perelman

becomes aware of these idiosyncracies in his being: the

Perelmans way of doing things can be too detached and

business-like.

The younger Perelman is on the surface a success as a young

and budding law professor. His students are almost unanimously

fond of him; his beautiful wife was a former student who saw his

lectures as beguiling ‘performances.’ But as a married man, the

younger Perelman can’t seem to settle down and seems to hold

back even on his wife. The most telling symptom of this is

illustrated at bedtime – he gets in bed when his wife is long asleep,

and lies next to her distantly with his shoes and tie untouched. We

also glean how he suspects that his firstborn might not be his.

What masks this aberration is his wife’s tolerance, presumably

glossing over it as part of his idiosyncracies.

It’s the family law, as the title indicates. But the younger Perelman

soon realizes it as an aberration, made more pronounced by his

father’s transformation into a more compassionate and personal

man. Gone are the impersonal façade and the business-like persona.

The younger Perelman suspects it’s love, as he catches the old man

intimately holding hands with his secretary. The old man also begins

to put a premium on family meetings, turning up, too, where the

younger Perelman least expects it. The old man also starts to take

the son on all his rounds, introducing his son to his circle of

associates and friends. The old man is the son’s idol, but there is a

profound sense of disorientation when the off-kilter character starts

to normalize and grow mellow. Is it a function of age? It’s almost an

affront to the son’s own being, so that the son has a vague sense

that something must be wrong.

Although this film seems to hold back and reflect the reserved

nature of the characters populating it, Derecho de Familia must be

appreciated for its integrity. It keeps melodrama to a minimum, and

we appreciate this film more in retrospect, as the turns in the plot

begin to fall into place and make sense when the final developments

in the story have unfolded. A story like this has the potential – even

the tendency – to be sentimentalized and milked for its inherent

pathos and poignancy but Daniel Burman deftly avoids these

emotional loopholes. The story is far from narrating anything new,

but the subtle treatment of the material is what separates it from

similar fare. Judging by this film and his other, much more tightly

constructed film (Waiting for the Messiah), Burman is carving a

respected niche for himself in Argentina’s formidable film industry.

With films that pique the mind and tug at the heartstrings, Burman

is en route to building a strong and impressive filmography

Still Life (Jia Zhang-Ke, 2006)

2007-01-04T17:17:02Z

The Three Gorges Dam is undoubtedly an amazing human achievement,

a masterpiece of science and engineering. Started in 1993 and

scheduled to be completed in 2008, it’s been a long grandiose dream

by the progress-conscious Chinese leaders in power. All the monumental
superlatives befit this megaproject that it invites comparisons to other

human marvels throughout human history. The comparisons do not

stop at the sheer magnificence and their positive impact, but also

encompass the enormous human cost that attend their construction.

The Three Gorges Dam is an awe-inspiring sight but it conceals the

high price that has to be paid to make it a reality.

This is what, in essence, Still Life tries to dramatize. We are

forewarned with the title. Still Life not merely denotes a genre of

painting, it also connotes lifelessness, the stunning of life. By focusing

on the literally dwarfed lives who suffer displacement and separation

and are made to fight for their traditional way of life, Jia Zhang-Ke

continues his faithful documentation of the common Chinese divided

between their resistance to sudden and bewildering change and

those who join the nation’s rush towards development and

modernization.

The future is here, and it is an unstoppable juggernaut. The past –

and everything attached to it, cultures, values, traditions – are

doomed to be overwhelmend and submerged by the torrents of

a new dam. This reality is captured in the old city of Fengjie, the film’s

setting, one of the unfortunate paths for the dam, where many people’s

fates hang in the balance. We witness the marking of the buildings

condemned for demolition and we get poetic and naturalist images of

walls crumbling down, side by side with glimpses of concretization as

it starts to encroach on people’s lives. The city is divided, almost in

chaos, those who take advantage of the employment the dam-building

has brought, and those who will be soon displaced, divested of all

imaginable property, abstract and concrete, their concepts of hearth

and home. This is all for progress and the greater good – but at what

price?

The human cost is dramatized in two sections of this dramatic diptych.

One involves Han Sanming, a coal miner who is in search of his ex-wife

and daughter whom she hasn’t seen for 10 years. Their last known

address is already deep in water, no longer on the map, and Han must

make a living as a demolition worker, while trying to find out the

whereabouts of his lost family. His family’s story is one that will try

to brook disintegration.

The second section of this film is devoted to a nurse from out of town

looking for a husband who seems to have abandoned her in favor

of his perpetually hectic job overseeing the demolition and reconstruction

of Fengjie. These two souls might be drifing apart, a sacrifice at the

altar of the Three Gorges Dam.

In Still Life, Jia’s directorial trajectory seems to be heading inexorably

toward glossy artifice, notable in his latest works like The World

and The Platofrm. It’s a stupefying contrast to the rough-hewn

documentary-like realism of Artisan Pickpocket, his first film. But

Jia’s themes and compelling way of telling his stories remain his strong

suit. The only seams in Still Life are the insertions of incongruous

images – U.FO.s and space shuttles, of all things – that seem to

try to break the starkness of human drama or just to see if we are

watching. This playful gimmickry nothwithstanding, Still Life deserves

all the accolades it has received, including the 2006 Golden Lion

at Venice.

Elena and Her Men (Jean Renoir, 1956)

2007-01-04T17:10:36Z

All Jean Renoir ever wanted to accomplish in directing the films

he did in the mid-1950’s was to get his feet wet again in the
French film industry. After being forced into exile in America during

the Second World War and directing in Hollywood, these were,
for all intents and purposes, his comeback films. When all was
said and done, however, the three films made in quick succession
(The Golden Coach (1953), French Cancan (1954) and Elena and
Her Men (1956)) coalesced together as though into a constellation,
prompting film historians to bundle them together under the rubric
of a trilogy. Running through them are similar threads that might
not have been apparent even to Renoir: the director’s obsession
with the theme of life-as-theater and the apotheosis of strong female

characters.

Capping off this putative trilogy is Elena and Her Men, a grand

pageant that’s part romantic comedy, part musical and part

farce. Set in 1880’s France among the military brass during Bastille

Day festivities, this Ingrid Bergman vehicle follows the sagging

fortunes of a Polish princess in search of a suitable and wealthy

husband to prop up her aristocratic family. What transpires,

instead, is how personal idealism and involvement in politics might

see her sacrifice herself in order to inspire a military general to the

pinnacle of ambition, the seat of presidency. (For the Polish

princess, it has the makings of a selfless act worthy of theater, a

kind of performance that mirrors those of female leads in The

Golden Coach and French Cancan.)

But there are many romantic permutations afoot, as the title

suggests. When the story begins, she seems doomed to a cynical

marriage of convenience to a shoe magnate, an old suitor to whom

she thoughtlessly betroths herself. This shrewd businessman

would ultimately leverage her feminine charms – and much more,

it is hinted – in order to clinch a business deal with the military

general who becomes smitten with her. Almost oblivious to her

future husband’s shady manipulation of her, she nonetheless

throws herself into the breach, egged on by the general’s

approving think tank.

Among this advisorial committee of the general is an aristocratic

bachelor who also has romantic designs on her, and shows his

pure, even heroic, albeit often jealous, intentions by engaging

potential rivals to duels, including the battle-tested general. His

dynamic love propels him to perform wildly romantic gestures,

mirroring the idealism and heroism of the princess.

Will she marry for love, for her political ideals, or for the security

and practicality of it all?

Renoir revels in the improbability of this story, magnificently

conjuring up the tumultuous ethos of the film’s locale. Rich and

sumptuous colors go hand in hand with the festive atmosphere

of its setting, no more apparent than in the street festivals and

the period costumes. Adding to the beautiful chaos is the farcicality

of the plot and its characters: a princess almost prostituting herself

in her deep-felt political beliefs, a tycoon practically selling his wife

to sweeten a business deal, an aristocrat doing a contortionist’s act

of sorts to get the woman of his dreams. Watch it to see how all

the engaging and entertaining twists finally come together. But this

film leaves us, too, with an unflinching satire of military and

political ambition, and how love can actuate the most grandiose

gestures, how women might have more to do with man’s

achievements and sucesss than sheer inspiration.

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (Errol Morris, 1997)

2007-01-04T16:58:45Z

Four singular men, four oblivious but intrepid sentries at the lonely

outposts of their chosen field: Topiary gardener, wild animal

trainer, robot scientist, mole-rat specialist. What similarities bind

them together? Not much, it seems. We might even be reminded

of the story involving the elephant and the blind men: the stories

waiting to be told are bound to be as wildly distinct and different

as chalk and cheese. But take away the outer trappings and boil it

down to human experience and something unexpected emerges.

Montage and careful juxtaposition are the tools of choice for Morris
here, weaving together words and manners of these four human
souls in a very lighthearted, comical tone, interspersed joyously
with archival footage of films and other supplemental clips that
augment what is already a riveting account of four colorful
characters. When Morris allows each of these personalities to
expound on themselves while simultaneously overlapping visuals
pertaining to another of this motley group, the viewer begins to
understand and discern their commonalities and the intersections
of experience.

Sociopolitically, however, Morris stops short of asserting parity and

advocating the removal of distinctions among jobs, prefering to keep

the proceedings in a light, but fascinating and entertaining tone.
What’s clear is how this film might encourage diversity, uplifting our

perspective of what are heretofore dismissed as unglamorous jobs.

Their dreams, their pride in their work, their single-mindedness

in performing their tasks, their sense of wonder towards their
chosen vocations, the source of their longevity, their natural
gravitation to their jobs, their humility and their urgency to pass
down their professions, the unknowable dimensions of their daily
calling: Morris documents all of this, paradoxically, with both
reverence and comicality. The steady stream of visuals and the
infusion of carnival-like and playful music on the soundtrack make
sure that the mind is engaged even as the narration comes in a
forthright, relaxed and insightful fashion from the subjects themselves.

Did Morris ask the same set of questions in getting a seemingly

uniform set of answers, or did the shock of serendipity in discovering

their kinship only come to the documentarist during the editing

process? A unique individual himself pursuing a unique job, Morris

must have known all along and intuited the answers beforehand.

Perhaps he could have chosen his subjects at random, and the

results would have been the same. Morris, after all, is one of them

– a kindred, quixotic spirit.

Remember how Herzog made a bet with Morris to eat his shoe if

the fledgling aspirant ever managed to make a film? Well, suffice to

say Herzog lived to regret it. Morris has been proving everyone

wrong all his life in his usual maverick way – fast, cheap and out

of control.

The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Yasujiro Ozu, 1947)

2006-12-13T03:13:08Z

Also known as:
Nagaya shinshiroku (Japan)
Runtime: USA:72 min / Japan:72 min
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Color: Black and White

Pillow shots depicting laundry hanging out to dry in the sun, blowing
in the breeze, are easily among Ozu’s favorite transitional shots. They
neither enhance nor provide an establishing shot for the scenes that
they precede but they comprise moments of silence that allow meditation
and reflection on the whole of a film --as the silences are as organically
important as those that encompass human action. They feature no
human presence, the better to induce tension with our anticipation of the
progress of narrative. For this film, however, Ozu seems to delight in
inserting a visual pun, as the long shot of a clothesline gives way to a
close-up revealing a mattress out on the line with urine stains. (It’s that
Ozu earthiness – the humanizing kind and not the vulgar variety -- that
sometimes one overlooks but can definitely be found in many of Ozu's
films, as in the abundant references to breaking wind in Ohayo or the
many times we see Chishu Ryu, one of Ozu’s mainstays, paring down
his toenails.)

But this is not about toilet humor. This is about human warmth. The
metaphor embodied by the urine stains best sums up the emotional
residue of this film: the stains are the marks of indelibility that could only
emanate from a child, someone who will leave a lasting mark not just on
a plain mattress but on those who will have the distinct chance to know
him. Seemingly abandoned by his father and wandering the streets, this
child is brought home by the titular but nominal hero to his lodgings. But
he is a painter who has little time to spare, so that it is the stern and
humorless old lady next door who is asked to put up the child for the
night – perhaps until a suitable home can be found or until the child’s
father can be located.

The neighbors are no different from the old lady. They would just as soon
dispense with the child as any unconnected stranger. They can only
agree to draw lots in order to decide who will take the responsibility
to locate the child’s missing father. The lots are rigged, of course, and
the old lady is again left to assume responsibility. This prolonged
moments together with the child start to grow on the old lady.
While she warns the child that she would expel him if he keeps
peeing on the mattress in his sleep, nothing could prepare her
for his self-imposed banishment. At some irrevocable point of the film,
she asks the child to call her mother.

The characters, specifically the dyad of mother and son, are heart-warmers.
The transformation lies with the old lady who starts with cynicism and
and gradually becomes sensitized and ultimately humanized for knowing
a child who awakens all the maternal instincts within her. Although he
weeps as much as the next child, this story’s young character seems to
be as near tabula rasa as can be – still untainted and practically angelic.
(Perhaps even biblical: His father we come to learn is, wink, wink, a
carpenter). The sometimes-unneighborly neighbors we get to meet
may embody streaks of cunning, but they are all likable.

Record of a Tenement Gentleman comes just after the Second
World War and midstream in the directorial career of Ozu, and
it seems to reflect that transition. For those who prefer Ozu’s
pre-war films, there is something here to recommend. “Warm
and human” are certainly applicable adjectives to its scenario and
cast of characters. For those who enjoy the home dramas in Ozu’s final
cycle of films, this film also qualifies with flying colors – vis-à-vis,
say, the “nonsense/light comedies” where the director got his start.

Two Men In Town (Jose Giovanni, 1973)

2006-11-25T17:14:09Z

Also Known As:
Due contro la città (Italy)
Two Against the Law
Deux hommes dans la ville (France)
Runtime: 90 min / France:100 min / USA:100 min /
West Germany:96 min
Country: France / Italy
Language: French
Color: Color (Eastmancolor)

Doing hard time is merely the first of rigors a criminal may have

to endure as he attempts to turn a new leaf. When he is released,

genuine freedom might be elusive; social stigma might drive him

to commit the very things he would like to avoid. Such is the dire

fate befalling Gino Strabiglli, a former bank robber who had to pay

his debt to society with ten years of his life. He is like a modern-day

Jean Valjean, liberated but pursued no end by a law that wouldn’t

forgive.

He has, however, one steadfast champion: Germain Cazenouve,

the prison educator who has taken Gino under his wing and has

witnessed his transformation in jail. Through him, Gino’s sentence

has been trimmed down and his release couldn’t come sooner for

the reforming criminal whose only thoughts are to resume life

on the straight and narrow with his loving wife.

Once out of prison, we witness a telling image of Gino overwhelmed

by the powerful sensation of freedom. Dizzy and swimming in

the thick atmosphere of oxygen – “tasting the air,” as criminals

witihin hailing distance empathetically comment – Gino takes time

to adapt to an unshackled life.

A life of bliss – marital and personal – ensues. It’s a bed of roses,

almost literally, as Gino tends with his wife a flower shop. We get

the idyllic montage befitting a loving couple, but we sense almost

immediately – the title gives it away – that these picture-book

images are provisional: an untoward twist is inevitable before this

film is halfway through. Fate’s cruel blow is a car crash,

and Gino’s first act, overcome with utter grief, is to call his old

protector Germain. His wife is dead.

Germain does what’s expected of him. He convinces the disconsolate

Gino to relocate with him to a distant town. He helps him find a job

at a printing press and before long Gino begins to recover –

through the nursing of Germain’s family (particulary his daughter

who must carry a torch for Gino to the very end) and a new lover.

But the world seems to condense in this town: the old cop who sent

him to jail ten years earlier has been installed as the town’s chief

inspector. To aggravate matters, Gino’s former crime associates

have converged on the town, too, and try to convince him

to join their crime spree.

Circumstances begin to conspire against the reforming man’s favor.

Although Gino manages to keep on the narrow path for a while, the

chief inspector is a formidable chiseler and proceeds to erode Gino’s

resolution, trying to pin a crime on him. Something has to give.

Most of what happens in this film is narrated by Germain

in a dispirited voice-over, one that’s grown jaded with the French

legal system and perhaps life itself. With an air of resignation,

Germain’s words constitute a personal indictment of the

French legal and penal system. He laments how Gino deserves

more understanding from a law that has punished him and has

withheld true freedom from him and might punish him one last

time. There are courtoom scenes towards the end but

the long indignant speeches (from both sides of defense

and prosecution) are avoided. It may have reduced

speechiyfing but it seems to defuse the drama surrounding

a criminal under trial. But with dexterous direction and some

fine acting from the leads (Jean Gabin and Alain Delon),

Two Men in Town arrests our undivided attention – our

sympathies -- to the bitter end.

Funeral Parade of Roses (Toshio Matsumoto, 1969)

2006-11-25T16:20:13Z

Also Known As:

Bara no soretsu (Japan)

Funeral Procession of Roses (USA)

Runtime: 107 min

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

Color: Black and White

There is something almost consciously and intentionally Godardian
about this movie that goes well with the grisly and astonishing
details embodied in its spare but eventful storyline. All of the French

director’s trademarks answer the roll call: Jump cuts, nondiegetic
inserts, negative exposures, face to face interviews, fast motion.

(It’s an eclectic collage that incorporates all manner of visual

influences and ultimately matches the restlessness of the free spirits

populating this film.) But to those initiated into the mysteries of

experimental film, this is unmistakably the handiwork of one of its

staunchest exponents: Toshio Matsumoto. It’s his feature debut and

it gamely reflects the ethos of its time, coming as it does at the

tail-end of a youth-oriented era in film, the Japanese New Wave.

Fierce rivalry between two homosexuals, who work as entertainers

in a Tokyo gay bar, is at the center of proceedings. Their mutual

hatred and enmity is fueled by their common romantic passion for

Gonda, the proprietor of the gay bar they work for. It doesn’t help that

they are professional rivals too: Eddie, the young and beautiful

upstart, is encroaching on Leda’s preeminence as the bar’s main

attraction and lead performer.

But a lot is going on behind Eddie’s glamorous exterior; skeletons

in his closet unfold for us in violent and bloody flashbacks that might

explain why the life of a night performer and a transvestite suits him

well. These flashbacks reveal his sexual awakening and the abuse he

had to endure at the hands of an unfeeling mother. This is compounded

by the disappearance of his father, whose return he envisions with

a strange and unnerving anticipation. His father’s face is a cindered hole,

a cigarette burn in the only picture Eddie has of him. It’s this plot that

suddenly and shockingly assumes centrality towards the movie’s end,

lifted with a gender twist from a Greek myth (to identify it will spoil the

stunning, blood-soaked ending).

Matsumoto is at the peak of his powers here, marshalling well

film techniques that he had finetuned and mastered with his earlier

avant-garde films. His troupe of non-professional actors are naturals,

a fact that shouldn’t be surprising as they are in their element. The main

lead who plays Eddie, for one, does not stray far from his real-life

persona as a cross-dressing, gay entertainer. Matsumoto’s

disorienting utilization of visual pyrotechnics is well-justified,

verging on a playfulness and unpredictability that prepares the viewer

for a powerful conclusion.

Man of Iron (Andrzej Wajda, 1981)

2006-11-16T17:00:00Z

Also Known As:
Czlowiek z zelaza (Poland)
Runtime: 153 min
Country: Poland
Language: Polish
Color: Black and White / Color

Gdansk, Poland, at a crucial climacteric of this country’s

history, serves as the living and breathing locus for this film.

Forged by a hard life as a worker in the Lenin Shipyards of

this city, the main protagonist, Maciej Tomczyk, takes up

his father’s ideological beliefs and his working class convictions

to lead the first labor strikes against the Communist regime

in power.

This film charts the first stirrings of the Solidarity Movement,

the workers’ trade union founded in 1980 that eventually

forced the State to capitulate to its demands, and later on
eroded communism and swept to power with Lech Walesa

as president.

Tomcyzk, the eponymous hero, is a fictitious character,

but his exploits are unmistakably those of Lech Walesa,

who appears as himself at certain points in the film to

reinforce the point. At film’s beginning, we are given to

understand that much of the screenplay is faithfully lifted

from actual events in Polish history, and it becomes clear

that it’s a thinly veiled reference to the historical figure

and movement. What is fictionalized, however, is Tomcyzk’s

father, who in an earlier Wajda film (Man of Marble) served

as an exemplary worker figuring in state propaganda

and became a model after which state-commissioned

statues were modeled.

Man of Iron, its mostly factual sequel, traces the titular hero’s

emergence as a full-fledged hero of the working class,

transcending the unfulfilled ideals of his illustrious father. It is
not so much a metamorphosis that changes him, but living in
Gdansk, a hotbed of working class ferment, has forged his
ideals and concerns in life. His father, whom everyone reveres,
is an influence on him, although Tomczyk momentarily grows

disillusioned with him over his refusal to support workers’ strikes.

Man of Iron portrays a man of praxis, while Man of Marble

depicts a theoretical figure.

Andrzej Wajda fleshes out Tomczyk’s personal history

almost too sensitively and idealistically, however. His only
fault it seems is his impetuousness, his youthful exuberance
that leads him to question his father. Yet in the end, his youthful

sacrifices are all vindicated, with the victory of the movement

he almost singlehandedly brought to life.

Enveloping this historical story is the fictitious account of

a journalist who is under duress by a Communist publication

to manufacture a damning report against the labor leader
while battling bouts of alcoholism. This subplot provides
the structure to encompass the labor leader’s life, but his fate

seems incidental compared to the larger interest in the

eponymous hero.

The Keys To The House (Gianni Amelio, 2004)

2006-11-14T14:13:31Z

Also Known As:
Le Chiavi di casa (Italy)
Clefs de la maison, Les (France)
Hausschlüssel, Die (Germany)
The House Keys
Runtime: 105 min
Country: Italy / France / Germany
Language: English / French / German / Italian

A child is a grief rather than a joy.

-- Federico Garcia Lorca

Fathers and mothers -- the whole lot of them -- suffer through
the maddening early years of a child with the abiding faith and
reassurance that it grows up according to potential – a fully realized
human being. Certainly there are many joys and delights in the
smallest gestures of a child: everything from his first words to his
first steps as a toddler is a source of pride for any parent. But what
happens when a child is nipped in the bud at birth and is consigned
to live a life in suspended childhood?

This premise, laden with a motherlode of pathos, is literalized and

explored in Gianni Amelio’s latest film. Keys To The House features
a father and a son born with physical and mental disabilities, following
their fluctuating dynamic with much subtlety and winning affection.
After years of long neglect and abandonment, Gianni, a young father,
is called on to accompany his teenage son, Paolo, for much-needed
therapeutic care in a distant hospital across the continent. (Paolo’s
mother died before he was born, leading to complications that have
adversely affected his body and brain.) On this journey, a drama rife
with joyful discovery and harsh realization will unfold between father
and son, the ebb and flow of emotions tempered by their meetings
with a mother who knows firsthand the predicament of having a
handicapped child.

Told from the perspective of the confounded father, Keys To The
House tells an affecting tale that brings home to the viewer the
bewildering harshness of life -- the ineluctable fate of parents.
To be sure, there are consolations to be had: special children are
christened with such a superlative for a reason. In this movie, Paolo
strikes the viewer as a charming and articulate teenager who, minus
a gnarled exterior and childlike habits, has an engaging and
beautiful personality. It is Gianni, the father, who ironically seems

more troubled, sulking like a surly teenager at certain points in the
film as he ashamedly contemplates fatherhood, and seems only to
be brought to life by his interactions with his son.

This story is by no means new, but what has the potential to be
a tearjerking melodrama is deftly avoided by the director's even-
tempered and well-controlled treatment of emotions. Even when
characters are meant to weep, the tears are shed from medium
shots and hidden behind foreshortened faces. Many films – a slew
of tv dramas in particular – have treaded similar territory before but
few are as subtle and laden with well-nuanced performances
(especially that of Andrea Rossi, who plays Paolo) and as sensitively
scripted. The relationship between this film’s father and son
reminds us of similarly-themed films like Alexander Sokurov’s
meditations on the subject: Mother and Son, as well as Father
and Son, minus the homoerotic overtones. Bahman Ghobadi’s
A Time for Drunken Horses also comes to mind with its depiction
of sibling love for a seriously-ill brother. Another film from Iran that
has affinities with Amelio's film and worth mentioning is Majid
Majidi’s Color of Paradise, at whose emotional center stand
a blind child and an estranged father.

Mesto na Zemle (Artour Aristakisian, 2001)

2006-11-10T16:32:22Z

Also Known As:
A Place in the World (International: English title)
A Place on Earth (International: English title)
Runtime: 126 min
Country: Russia
Language: Russian
Color: Black and White

Maria, wide-eyed woman wrapped in the regalia of rags,
what provenance do you come from, bagwoman
who lugs around the refuse of Moscow, limping,
inch by painful inch, on feet festering from gangrene,
about to give out, about to give up on this world?
Take heart, Maria, you whose dignity is laid so low
that you must roam with the cats, lie prone on doorsteps
seeking alms or merely directions to a refuge you long for –
but how they shoo you away like dirty pigeons,
how your words weigh like droppings smearing their monuments.

Take heart, Maria, when they deem you touched,
half-mad, half-beatific because you can almost taste
this utopia on earth, a rumored eden for the sick and homeless,
a place promisingly called the Temple of Love –
are you perhaps otherworldly, mongering the trinkets of religion?

When finally, at the end of your tether, you come to this condemned
building teeming with men, women and children, they take you
in without question – these unlikely occupants of this promised land:
cripples, drug addicts, hippies, the down-and-out dregs of skid row.

Nothing’s plenty here in this poorman’s paradise: food is
meager, each one on spoonful rations; space isn’t fit for sardines,
narrow as coffin. There are no floorboards to speak of.
The walls are signatured by wrecking balls, emblazoned with
the bloom of graffiti.

This temple reeks.

Except for Love. This place preens itself on a curious brand.
Sex is a big part of it. Love is instilled this way: asleep or in
need, you are bodily carried from off the streets. You, newcomer,
are fed, bathed, and suckled by women’s breasts like a hungry
infant. In turn you must do the same, pay forward.

Maria, how quietly you take it all in, but how suddenly it seems
you are converted to this hybrid of religion and hedonism –
how you pledge yourself like a biblical Mary or Magdalene
to the man who dressed your wounds, the hippie Messiah
presiding here. Perhaps this is all born of desperation, this
kinship kindled by having no one and nothing at all. What else
do you call it when, day after day, the police rouse you all from
sleep to ferret out the drug addicts and criminals? Where is peace?

Soon enough, this experiment starts to unravel. Desperation
does not become your Jesus: he cuts his penis to dissuade
dissenters from leaving. But we see how some faithful remain
– the newcomers at least, while the old hands grow
disillusioned – and worship at this altar to hippiedom: how you,
Maria, for one, spreads kisses to all the cripples and needy
you meet. But how to sustain? All seems empty goodwill.

Above this crumbling dream, this dilapidated fantasy, we see
the majestic vision of Kremlin, its towering spires piercing the
sky. Had you glanced up, Maria, you’d have murmured
about its remote beauty, how near it is to heaven, and yet how
unreachably so, how forbidding.

Photographed in black and white, this is a documentary disguised
as a poetic, fictional movie. It’s a living nightmare, and it’s hard not
to flinch from watching sometimes. The faces of impoverishment –
the cripples and the woman who essays Maria in particular – appear
to be authentic people culled from the streets, lending this film the
earmarks of neo-realism. Audiences might read an anti-authoritarian
message into this urban dystopia, but we are in an era of skepticism,
witnessing evangelists fall from grace. We can zero in on the
failure of doctrines and dogmas, their seeming infallibility, instead.
The usual suspects are held to account for these neglected souls:
the contrasting grandeur of the Kremlin skyline at movie’s end is
worth repeating.

Paris Is Ours (Jacques Rivette, 1960)

2006-10-25T16:21:07Z

Paris has never looked and felt this eerie, this sinister, surcharged

with quiet hysteria. For a dark moment, all the lights seem to have

gone out on this eternally illuminated city. This city is in the grip of
a maelstrom -- of paranoia, mystery and suspicion, erasing our bright,

flood-lit preconceptions about it. Rivette conjures up this benighted

setting out of nothing, a shoestring budget, but succeeds in pulling
off a psychological thriller worthy of Hitchcock or Lynch. This feature
debut by another Cahiers du Cinema critic, however, is not for
everyone: it’s been described variously as “too hermetic” and
“too impenetrable” for its own good.

The Paris depicted in this film is one inhabited by shadowy
and marginalized figures: exiles, intellectuals, suspected spies
and revolutionaries, struggling artists and immigrants, and sundry

other characters with suspicious motives and sanities. The Paris
of this film, however, is not to be outdone: it's a dark presence that
pervades this film like a repeating motif, like another character.
Whenever the camera probes its streets, a sensation of vertigo
creeps in, heightened by an ominous soundtrack, full of dark
foreboding. This defamiliarized city is made more pronounced
with its choice of a central protagonist: a young literature student
named Anne Goupil, a seemingly impressionable youth who

becomes embroiled in the thick of dark intrigue and the influence

of mysterious characters who may or may not be involved in

affairs that have sinister, international repercussions.

Taking place among student circles and Paris intelligentsia,
the story is set into motion by the mysterious death of a Spanish
exchange student named Juan, a death rumored to be a case
of forced suicide or murder by a shadowy international group.
The subsequent disappearance of his sister, a student leader
leading a campaign against the Franco regime in Spain, deepens
the mystery.

But it is the angry and half-coherent ramblings of Philip Kaufman,

an American writer exiled by the Mccarthy witch trials, that increase

the sense of paranoia permeating the story. He is convinced that the

death of the Spanish student is not suicide and his missing guitar

recordings might provide a damning clue that will reveal the unseen

hand (can you spell MacGuffin?). Anne meets the babbling writer in
a student gathering and immediately comes under his influence,
seemingly made credible by the fact that he is a Pulitzer Prize awardee.
When the student visits his hiding place, however, his bedroom walls
are lined with manic sketches of cartoon-like figures.

Another character who seems to know more about the Spaniard’s
death than she lets on is Terry Yordan, the dead student’s American
girlfriend. It turns out, later on, that she, too, was previously involved

with the American writer. The connection between the two Americans

runs deeper -- this becomes clear soon enough, as we catch them
conversing in riddles, something that only the ending will finally illuminate.

Terry Yordan’s present boyfriend, Gerard Lenz, a theatrical director

trying to put together Shakespeare’s “Pericles,” adds another element
of mystery. In the course of the film, Anne also enters his inner circle
as an actress in his play, and as a close and concerned confidante.
The American writer is convinced that Gerard, too, will suffer the same

fate as the dead Spaniard. Before long, Gerard begins to show signs

of breaking down, coming to a head when Anne receives a suicide

note apparently from him.

Part of this film’s miracle is the fact that it was made at all. Some of the

credit must go to Rivette’s friends at Cahiers du Cinema, who in true
"la politique des copains" fashion – the Cahiers brand of solidarity –
bankrolled part of the capital and provided technical assistance for this
film’s completion. Everyone on the cast and crew were hired on credit,
until the film’s eventual release in 1960 underwrote it. It’s a labor of love

for Rivette, who had to juggle production as well direction capacities in

its making, suspending shoots on Sundays to raise additional funds,

before filming resumed on Mondays.

As with many of Rivette films, there’s more than meets the eye when

we watch Paris Is Ours – more levels and intricacies than the

literal one. Rivette’s fascination with theatre begins with this film,

to be further explored in films like L’Amour Fou and Va Savoir, that

film-within-a-film structure that provides a counterpoint to the themes

of its movies. Politics is not the subject of this film, but there are
enough references in it to derive an allegory: one that points to the
harrowing consequences of fascism on a highly democratized

society like France. The allusions to McCarthyism, Nazism and

Falangism make sure of that. The casualty is measured not so
much by a body count, but a massacre of minds.