Between Valleys (2012)

In film about the same man (or is it two different men?) in divergent situations, hysteria takes away from what could have been an insightful take on how similar we are.

between-valleysBrazil
3*

Director:
Philippe Barcinski

Screenwriters:
Philippe Barcinski
Fabiana Werneck Barcinski

Director of Photography:
Walter Carvalho

Running time: 80 minutes

Original title: Entre vales

The two men look identical. One is an economist and lives with his wife and child in a nice house in São Paulo, Brazil. He is called Antonio. The other, looking much more haggard but otherwise an exact copy of Antonio, works on an enormous rubbish heap outside the large metropolis and sleeps wherever he can. His name is Vicente.

Between Valleys (Entre Vales) cuts between the two characters throughout its 80-minute duration, running out the clock by making us ask more and more questions about the two characters’ relationship to each other. Director Philippe Barcinski also uses his camera in a peculiar way that emphasises the instability of perception when it comes to a specific object, but in the end, we can feel satisfied that we have been given all the information we were looking for.

The film’s pre-credits opening scene shows us Antonio (played by Ângelo Antônio) drunk behind the wheel of his car, racing down an empty road in the dead of night. We don’t know who he is yet, but this does not bode well for the character. The first scene after the credits comprises many shots of workers on a seemingly endless landfill, as truckloads of rubbish are being dumped and spread out over a vast area, and the workers scurry across the discarded trash in seemingly random patterns, picking here and there and salvaging a piece of plastic that can be exchanged for a few reais from the recycling companies.

But before we can know what this scene means, Antonio appears with his son a short distance from the site to inspect a potential location for a new landfill. Antonio seems to have it all, but over the course of the film, he will lose almost everything that he values and end up drunk in the car.

At the same time, we see the journey of Vicente, who works on the landfill but whose beard is surprisingly short for someone who appears to be homeless and who has little knowledge of the operations on the landfill. Who is this man? Is it really Antonio, at some point in the future or maybe even the past? Will we eventually see at what point Antonio became Vicente or vice versa?

These are questions that are at the forefront of our minds as we watch the film, and the film has few surprises. The two worlds collide forcefully at critical moments, as Between Valleys tips its hand very heavily by cutting back and forth between the two characters, showing the one to be shaken by events in the other one’s life.

In the end, we do get an answer, but the truth of the story is not really the goal of the director, as, by the time we reach the end, we will already have formed a very clear understanding of the notion that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately, the character arc is not entirely believable, but it is certainly more palatable than the two scenes of hysteria that first Antonio and then his wife provoke. These two scenes actually do more harm than good to the characters, as we may easily have empathised with them, had they not wallowed in their grief with such extravagance and persistence.

But Barcinski’s one visual trick that has some weight has to do with the presentation of his close-ups of a model of a landfill, which Antonio constructs with his son. The shots often rack in and out of focus, and although we at first have no idea why such shots were allowed to appear in the film, toward the end of the story, we come to realise the full significance of this approach.

Between Valleys is not an extraordinarily thoughtful film, and its moments of high emotion elicit no such feelings in the viewer, but it is an enjoyable and unsophisticated portrayal of the unexpected course a life can take as the result of a tragedy.

Viewed at the International Film Festival Bratislava 2013

Horses of God (2012)

Les chevaux de dieuMorocco
3.5*

Director:
Nabil Ayouch

Screenwriter:
Jamal Belmahi

Director of Photography:
Hichame Alaouie

Running time: 115 minutes

Original title (French): Les chevaux de Dieu
Original title (Arabic): يا خيل الله‎
Transliterated Arabic title: Ya khail allah

Horses of God, a tale of two best friends who grow up in the slums of Casablanca and eventually escape a life of poverty at great cost, is one that is entirely true, and it offers us a glimpse into the lives of a few men from one neighbourhood who would turn to terrorism to give their lives a sense of direction.

Multiple explosions rocked Morocco’s largest city on May 16, 2003, when suicide bombers wreaked havoc in the city centre, setting off their bombs nearly simultaneously in restaurants frequented by non-Muslims (or apostates, according to them, because they are Muslims mixing with people from other religions). Although the reasons for their actions are not entirely clear, there is enough evidence to support at least a loose connection to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq following the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the general sentiment in the Muslim world that the invasions were an attack on a religion rather than a search for so-called terrorists.

Horses of God does an excellent job of depicting the living conditions of the eventual killers. All of them hail from a squatter camp on the outskirts of Casablanca called Sidi Moumen where, even at a young age, life for everyone seems destined to go nowhere, except through brute force. In the opening scene, we meet a boy who calls himself Yashin, after the sportsman he wishes to emulate, the Soviet-era goalkeeper Lev Yashin. His real name is Tarek, and he spends most of his time with his only friend, Nabil. Tarek’s brother, Hamid, is slightly older but full of anger and criminal ambition, and he protects his brother whenever he can by using a chain he carries with him.

But despite Hamid’s aggressive nature, we quickly realise he cares both for his brother and for his place in the family, as he tells his brother not to follow him into the underworld of crime, as he wants to be sure Tarek would take care of his mother if something ever happened to him. Sooner or later, something does happen to Hamid, and when he comes back, many years later, he is calm, accommodating and noticeably more religious.

As a child, he had admonished his brother about his relationship with Nabil by telling him not to “follow [Nabil] around like a monkey.” The importance of these words cannot be overstated, as they are key to our understanding of the events in the last act of the film, and in particular Hamid’s attitude toward his brother’s fast-growing fanaticism. This brand of religious activism, sponsored by an imam with a soothing voice, attracts Tarek because he had been disoriented and unmoored and had little to give his life much meaning (the storyline of the migrant worker Wasim who becomes a suicide bomber in Syriana is equally compelling without eliciting empathy). Tarek had always been the brunt of others’ jokes and actions, and Islam offered him a path on which to walk with others and feel like he had strong support.

Another very significant line is spoken late in the film by Fouad, the brother of Tarek’s love interest Ghislaine, whom he adores but whose attention he always shrinks from out of timidity or fear, contrary to his later views of life (“Whoever fears Allah will not fear any man,” he says). Fouad, who is around the age of 18, is driven through the city towards an area in the mountains where he and his friends will train, when he says, “It’ll be my first time in the city.”

These words should punch us in the gut, as we realise what a complete bubble of isolation these boys have inhabited all their lives in the slums, and the actions they are about to take all spring from the knowledge they have gained without experiencing the real world, and yet they are on the verge of invading that world and blowing it to pieces for completely selfish reasons: to be martyrs and go through the gates of heaven where “hundreds, thousands of Ghislaines” are waiting for them.

But while the depiction of the socio-economic crisis in which all these men find themselves is accomplished, and the cinematography is highly commendable, especially thanks to a sprinkling of breathtaking shots obtained through the use of a Flying Cam that zips across the shantytown as it pursues a particular character, the main character Tarek lacks the depth and expressiveness that would at least interest us in his personal development.

The film is notable not only for its representation of complex reasoning behind the decision to become a martyr in the name of a religion but also for its treatment of some very thorny issues in the Muslim world. It is surprising to see scenes in which the consumption of alcohol is shown to be widespread, and in a hair-raising scene early on, a moment of child-on-child rape is reminiscent of the equally harrowing scene in the 1981 Brazilian film Pixote. At another point in the film, the teenage Nabil looks in a mirror and tries on his mother’s lipstick. The camera doesn’t linger on him, and we don’t get any further explanation, but this sole indication that he has some gender issues, whatever the reason, is a fascinating revelation in an Arabic-language film.

Such scenes enrich the context of the boys’ living environment and go some way towards explaining, or at least illuminating, their reasons for choosing to turn their lives around by blowing themselves up. In this respect, however, it is not the trajectory of Tarek but of his older brother Hamid that is the most interesting, as he shows real self-doubt. Perhaps it is because he is more wise, having experienced much more hardship and dealt with more people in his time. By contrast, Tarek is always serious, never smiles and doesn’t get much of our empathy.

Director Nabil Ayouch’s use of the camera to tell his story is exceptional without it stealing the show, and his development of Hamid’s character is strong and credible. His film also breaks a number of taboos in a way that never has the look of sensationalism, and despite the desperate nature of life in Sidi Moumen, the universal aspects of family, survival and respect ensure the tale is at times very touching, even though we never empathize with the terrorists’ goals.