4.5 stars

The Best Man (1964)

André Crous

USA
4.5*

Director:
Franklin J. Schaffner
Screenwriter:
Gore Vidal
Director of Photography:
Haskell Wexler

Running time: 95 minutes

Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, which dates back nearly half a century, is as relevant to our understanding of the American political system as ever. As of this writing, the 2012 GOP candidates have not been narrowed down to a single front-runner yet; since many have speculated about the likelihood of a brokered convention, I thought a film that deals with this term might be rather apropos.

What is a brokered convention?

A convention is the party in the big tent with all the delegates (and, if it is the Democratic Party today, all the superdelegates as well), usually held in August or September in a big ol’ sports arena or convention centre, where the candidate who has survived six months of primaries and caucuses formally accepts his party’s nomination as candidate for the presidency and the election in November.

A brokered convention occurs when no such candidate has obtained a majority of the votes and has to undergo the added stress of being put on a ballot during the convention and surviving round after round, with candidates dropping out one by one, until one candidate remains. The delegates of candidates that drop out have to realign themselves with the remaining candidates; thus, a lot of dealing inside back rooms goes on in the process.

In The Best Man, there are two clear front-runners for the presidency: A former Secretary of State, William Russell is a careful politician who seems to overthink every problem before making a wholly informed decision and therefore is perceived to be passive, even weak. Think Obama without the charisma. The other candidate is Joe Cantwell, an anti-communist anti-mafia, religious activist whose rhetoric is enough to hordes of screaming fans who mistake fundamentalist zeal for patriotism.

In the film’s first minutes, we learn that the former president, still a major force in this political party, which is never named and whose platform is never stated, is about to endorse either Russell or Cantwell, and obviously both candidates are courting his approval.

It is also made quite clear that Russell has been a very unfaithful husband, though his wife is prepared to become first lady and therefore go along with Russell’s bid for the White House for the time being. Cantwell has also discovered some unsavoury records of Russell’s mental state (think Thomas Eagleton), which he is ready to release if it would be politically expedient.

Despite Russell’s philandering, his questionable mental stability and his atheism (oh, yes, a big negative for a presidential candidate in the 1960s and arguably even worse today), he is a likeable character who seems to want to lift the country up, not just himself. It certainly helps that the character is played by Henry Fonda.

Eagleton, Clinton, Obama and the 2012 Republican candidates for the presidency are just some of the real-life political figures I had in mind while I was watching the film. The succession of 36 faces during the opening credits, from Washington to Johnson, all leading up to a full-screen shot of the White House, always impresses the historical scale of the office on the viewer, and in this case we are reminded again there are no perfect candidates: only candidates who will be more preferable or less embarrassing holders of the office.

The film’s background is peppered with catchy slogans (“Hustle with Russell”, “MerWIN to WIN”) and the action is set over a very short period of time: less than 48 hours. The characters and the party they belong to are vague, but being politicians this quality makes them specific enough to be entirely credible and representative of all kinds of recognizable political personas.

With a screenplay written by Gore Vidal, based on his play, this film has an ear for great dialogue and a very vivid sense of reality. One excellent moment among many others belongs to the former president, Art Hockstader, who, upon learning of Cantwell’s devious plans, gives him a look full of hate and proclaims: “It’s not that I object to you being a bastard… It’s your being such a stupid bastard that I object to!”

This film is better than the other well-known political films from the early sixties, such as The Manchurian Candidate or Seven Days in May, because it comes to the point very quickly, is filled with people and events that we recognize, even today, and the story contains a big conundrum that the characters need to resolve before a satisfactory conclusion can be reached — and this is exactly what the film pulls off, with significant consequences. There are few scenes between the candidates and their wives, but what we see is to the point and reveals a great deal about the domestic politics of the presidency.

The mudslinging and the possibility that a ludicrous attack just might stick also hit close to home, as the recent (2012) GOP primaries have shown. In one comment, a character mentions that once, in the South, “a candidate […] got elected for claiming his opponent’s wife was a thespian.” This comes on the heels of a discussion about the alleged homosexuality of one of the candidates for the presidency, and Vidal’s use of this theme shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — it is handled well, discreetly, but the scenes with a, erm, whistleblower, a guy called Sheldon Bascomb, are excruciatingly uncomfortable and make the film drag at the only point during its 95-minute running time.

Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson are both excellent in the main roles, but it is charming former president played by Lee Tracy who really makes an impression as someone who is playing the system with a good political head, even as he loses faith in the system because he knows what corruption is possible (and permissible). Fonda’s character has some of the same insights, though he is slow to react and it is very sensible on the part of Vidal to make us wonder whether we should support him despite our misgivings — a timeless question.

Z (1969)

André Crous

France
4.5*

Director: 
Costa-Gavras
Screenwriters:
Jorge Semprún
Costa-Gavras
Director of Photography: 
Raoul Coutard

Running time: 127 minutes

It might be dialogue-heavy and overtly ideological in its unashamedly anti-establishment approach to historical events, but director Costa-Gavras’s Z is passionate, personal, and pushes the envelope the way very few films dare to. Based on events in the director’s native Greece  in the early 1960s, where freedom of expression was threatened, and democracy ultimately supplanted by dictatorship, the film is a direct depiction of the assassination of a Greek political figure in 1963 and the subsequent investigation that shook the government. The title, which stands for “ZEI”, meaning “He lives”, refers to the Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis, who was assassinated under circumstances almost identical to those shown in this film.

The opening credits make clear that the film is not in the business of subtle allegories: “Any resemblance to actual events, to persons dead or alive, is no coincidence — it is deliberate.” One doesn’t have to dig very deep to notice the parallels between the historic events in Greece in 1963 and the blood-curdling hunger for control and suppression of a pacifist opposition that Costa-Gavras puts up on the screen.

Yves Montand appears as the anonymous “Doctor”, probably a reference to Lambrakis’s profession as a physician, a calm but determined man who is set to deliver a major speech against the bomb – he obviously has some influence in the public sphere, because the government puts every possible obstacle in his way to ensure that the venue for his speech can accommodate as few people as possible. He has a small group of very loyal supporters around him, including Manuel (Charles Denner) and Georges (Jean Bouise).

Though the film is set in an unnamed city where all the characters speak French, the Greek music on the soundtrack, by left-wing exile Mikis Theodorakis, leaves no doubt about the film’s real-world underpinnings. Costa-Gavras also cast the famous Irene Papas as the Doctor’s wife – a casting decision that has theoretical soundness but since she is barely given any dialogue, her performance becomes a bit schmaltzy and seems out of place given the aggressive nature of the story.

The two characters at the centre of physical violence in the film are named Vago and Yago, and the former is portrayed as a real creepy fellow with suggestions of homosexual paedophilia. At the same time, the police force is not only heavily anti-communist (though they have no objection to anybody attending the Bolshoï ballet), but anti-semite and anti-Chinese. The man at the top is the Chief of Police (Pierre Dux), whose disgust for the peaceful opposition protesters is equalled by the violence with which he attempts to suppress them. Comparing their “ideological illness” to mildew, he states in the opening scene that the “treatment of men with appropriate solutions is indispensable”, and thereby pre-emptively washes his hands of all wrongdoing.

The person tasked with establishing the truth is the inquest judge, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who learns both sides of the story and needs to weigh his own sense of justice against the possibility of prosecuting persons at the highest levels of government. Working separately but with the same goal of finding the truth is the photojournalist played by a very youthful Jacques Perrin (here he reminded me of Diego Luna).

This highly ideological film is certainly much more willing to take sides than a film such as Oliver Stone’s JFK (about another assassination in 1963), and yet it easily ropes us into the political malevolence and sinister conspiracy taking place in a foreign country. Director of Photography Raoul Coutard, known for his work with a filmmaker who would like to see himself as politically savvy yet producing films of cerebral rather than entertainment value, Jean-Luc Godard, records the events with a sense of intimacy that produces images both informative and deliciously suggestive. Two significant examples are the arrival of Papas at the hospital, when past and present alternate in fragments (the result of a certain kind of jump cuts called “faux raccords”), making her own confusion very visible and teasing us with moments from her life with Montand, and the final sequence of close-ups on uniform medals and ribbons that build to a very satisfying conclusion.

It is refreshing to see a director who goes big, both ideologically and cinematically, and Costa-Gavras succeeds in capturing our attention on both counts. Z is a spectacular film that provides a window on events in Europe in the 1960s (don’t forget that the film was made around the time the student riots shook Paris in May 1968) and reminds us, as did Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, that authoritarian regimes find imagination suspect, for it signals a lack of control on their part.

Why Competitions (2011)

André Crous

Poland/Germany
4.5*

Director:
Christine Jezior
Screenwriters:
Christine Jezior
Oskar Jezior
Directors of Photography:
Phillip Kaminiak
Theo Solnik

Running time: 78 minutes

Original title: Dlaczego konkurs

Ivo Pogorelić thinks a lot of himself. In 1980, after an unconventionally spirited performance at the revered International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, this young Yugoslavian pianist was eliminated from the contest – upon this announcement, members of the jury, including world-renowned pianist and former winner of the competition, Martha Argerich, resigned in protest. He became a sensation overnight and achieved much greater fame than the eventual winner of the competition that year, Đặng Thái Sơn.

The title asks (though without the question mark — Robert Zemeckis once remarked that no film ending in a question mark has ever done well at the box office, and therefore his own, very successful, Who Framed Roger Rabbit omitted this punctuation mark) what purpose these kinds of music competitions serve and the experts that are interviewed have very different opinions. Most of them agree, and point to Pogorelić’s subsequent career, that competitions do not ensure success for the winner. Of course, his case is a little different from the context of the other performers every year, and the film also looks at a range of other pianists to examine the validity of the experts’ statements.

Why Competitions is an insightful document of the world of competitive piano playing: using the quinquennial Chopin competition in Warsaw as a starting point, the filmmaker interviews all the major players, including many jurors past and present, and tries to piece together the varying opinions about and reactions to the jury’s decision in 1980. The film also looks at the decision in 1975 to award the first prize to the young Pole, Krystian Zimerman, instead of the Russian players who would receive the second, third and fourth prizes.

From these conversations with the different pianists, a range of political issues arises, for example we learn that Russian players, whatever their accomplishments at the competition, would not be allowed to perform outside the USSR afterwards. In the meantime, another player from outside the country – even Poland’s Zimerman – would have the opportunity to play around the world and establish a great career.

The human dimension of the jurors is also underlined and pianist Jeffrey Swann makes a very valid point when he states that the current system of points allows jurors to punish more than it rewards: A maximum of 25 points may be awarded, and often the jurors would give 16 or 17, but if they want to make a point by punishing a player because of style of appearance or whatever, they could give 0 (as happened with Pogorelić and many others), effectively ending that individual’s chances of going through to the next round. Lidia Grychtołówna, who is both a pianist and a juror, makes a similar point when she acknowledges: “At competitions, both candidates and jurors make mistakes. The difference is that jurors go unpunished.”

The more general question of the need for juries and competitions is also treated to some screen time, and Jeffrey Swann is particularly amused by the fact that he received 25 from one judge, while another gave him 0. The possible political motivations behind such decisions are cited, but one juror, Kazimierz Kord, warns us not to read too much into the disconnect between the audience’s reaction and the judges’ reaction to a piece: “Sometimes the public will applaud a performance anyway, even if they don’t understand the requirements [for interpreting Chopin].” I found this statement a little condescending, though perhaps well-intentioned.

But time and again the film comes back to the very vain, pouting Pogorelić, stroking a small dog on his lap, who claims that people are envious of his beauty and his talent, and while some might debate the latter, his claim that he is beautiful (or rather, “well-preserved […] Look: no wrinkles!”) will certainly generate some laughter. The only slightly frustrating part of the film was the otherwise agreeable Kevin Kenner who speaks for a long time in very American-inflected German before finally switching to his more natural mother tongue of English. I also would have preferred to see more of Martha Argerich, who contributes a single sentence to the discussion, or Krystian Zimerman, who is completely absent from the film.

Why Competitions manages to cram a lot of political, social and historical commentary into its 85 minutes and does so with a sense of rhythm and storytelling that is truly breathtaking, and without ever using a voice-over or explanatory text. It is a film whose theme is universal and whose specifics are always interesting.

A must-see.

Viewed at the Jihlava International Film Festival 2011.

Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991)

André Crous

Mexico
4.5*

Director:
Alfonso Cuarón
Screenwriter:
Carlos Cuarón
Director of Photography:
Emmanuel Lubezki

Running time: 94 minutes

Original title: Sólo Con Tu Pareja

In 2001, Y Tu Mamá También, Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece, would open with a shot that is almost an exact replica of the first shot in his first feature film: a young man and woman are having sex on a mattress while the camera slowly tracks towards them amidst their passionate shrieks of pleasure. Cuarón has a penchant for mixing comedy with much more serious reflections on human nature, and his first film, though much more broadly comical than any of his other projects, gives the viewer a taste of things to come.

Love in the Time of Hysteria shares a great deal with a 1980s Almodóvar classic such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and at many points, the film had me in stitches. If you remember the running joke about the Shi’ite terrorists in Almodóvar’s film, you will love Cuarón’s recurring references to a gringa who put her French poodle in a microwave.

A young playboy called Tomás Tomás works in the advertising industry and has stuck it in so many places he has all but lost count of his conquests. When some white spots appear in his throat, he goes to see his friend, Mateo de Mateos, who is a doctor. Silvia, Mateo’s nurse, falls for Tomás and in the blink of an eye, they have arranged to meet at Tomás’s flat that evening. The only problem is that Tomás’s boss and part-time lover, Gloria, is on her way over to discuss the latest ad campaign. When the two women arrive, Tomás has his hands full to ensure that they are both satisfied without finding out about each other.

Unfortunately, a third woman piques his interest: a young flight attendant named Clarisa, who has just moved in next door. And so, Tomás loses track of time and poor Silvia leaves in a huff the next morning. In fact, she is so beside herself with frustration that she decides to play a trick on Tomás: we have already established that she is a lascivious little sadist, but now she informs him that his HIV test has come back positive.

But while this turn of events in Tomás’s life could potentially have terrible consequences, all of which Tomás seems to consider very seriously, Cuarón’s use of the colour green – as in so many of his other films, most visibly in Great Expectations – hints at the victory of life over death, whatever the red arrows of Cupid (that serve as accents on the green text of the opening credits) might otherwise indicate.

This is a film full of incidents of varying hilarity, staged with a magnificent sense of direction and energy, and while one could easily fault the film for a lack of real substance, it certainly holds the viewer’s attention, because the chaos does not overwhelm the storylines. Also, Cuarón’s use of mostly classical music on the soundtrack (which often consists of Mozart – predictably, the “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” aria from Don Giovanni) gives a slightly heavier, though perhaps only ironically, gloss to the events we witness.

Love in the Time of Hysteria doesn’t take itself too seriously – exhibit one is the opening quotation of the film, from e.e. cummings, which states that “mike likes all the girls […] all the girls except the green ones”, but these quotes ranges from such nonsense to Newton’s Third Law; its characters usually have the same first and last names, and Tomás’s friend Mateo uses cliché Latin sayings in most of his sentences.

Nonetheless, the film certainly entertains and while the characters of the two Japanese businessmen have no real place in the story, this film showed the great promise on which Alfonso Cuarón would soon deliver. His cameraman, Emmanuel Lubezki, would continue to work with him on most of his subsequent projects, as well as the films of Terrence Malick, while his other cameraman, Rodrigo Prieto, would work with the other great Mexican director of the last decade, Alejandro González Iñárritu.

The Wedding Banquet (1993)

André Crous

Taiwan
4.5*

Director:
Ang Lee
Screenwriters:
Ang Lee
Neil Peng
James Schamus
Director of Photography:
Jong Lin

Running time: 106 minutes

Original title: 喜宴
Transliterated title: Xǐ yàn

The Wedding Banquet, Ang Lee’s second feature film, was released in 1993, right in the middle of a movement in American filmmaking that would come to be known as New Queer Cinema, consisting of films with gay themes, treated openly, mainly produced by gay filmmakers such as Todd Haynes and Gregg Araki. The Wedding Banquet is quite different from the rest of the films of the time in that it is infinitely more accessible to a mainstream audience and was not made by a gay director.

However, as Ang Lee would prove more than a decade later with his elegant adaptation of Annie Proulx’s short story, Brokeback Mountain, he is perfectly attuned to the human complexity of his films’ gay characters and seeks to portray them as ostracised despite their similarity to the average straight viewer, rather than pretending that they are different in any particular way. Another point that is noteworthy, given the film’s release in 1993, is the lack of any reference to AIDS – instead, the filmmakers have decided to make a film about secrets and the unnecessary tension (indeed, chaos) that develops when someone is more ashamed of themselves than they are afraid of their parents’ potential reaction to the news that their son or daughter is gay.

In New York, Wai Tong is a Taiwanese American who’s been with his American boyfriend, Simon, for the past five years. Wai Tong has not told his parents, who are living in Taiwan, that he is gay, but since they want a grandchild, they constantly sign him up for singles’ clubs, and forward the questionnaires, which he dutifully fills out, albeit with criteria that seem impossible to meet.

The film does not concentrate on the issue of sexuality as much as it draws our attention to the ubiquitous – and unnecessary – secrecy, from all sides. Everybody has secrets and yet they all refuse to share these secrets for fear that they will be rejected as a result of their honesty. Naturally, when Wai Tong and his tenant Wei Wei decide to get married – he so that his parents can see their son married, she so that she can get a green card – and his parents turn up for the big day, this secrecy eventually leads to tension between him Simon, who only wants to impress his boyfriend’s parents, even though they have no idea what role he plays in their son’s life.

“It’s kind of stupid – all these lies. But I’m used to it,” admits Wai Tong to Simon, but once his parents arrive the situation quickly spins out of control and he becomes entangled in his own web of lies. Luckily, most of these scenes are in Taiwanese, for actor Winston Chao is very unconvincing in English, having a painful elocution of simple words that have no emotional resonance coming from him. But while the acting might be sub-par, Ang Lee’s direction is flawless, as shown by his masterful handling of giant groups of extras during the scenes at the wedding banquet, as well as his decision to film many important dialogues (between Wai Tong’s mother and Wai Wai; between Wai Tong and his mother; and between Wai Tong’s father and Simon) in single takes.

What makes the film so special is the care it takes with its characters – and not just Wai Tong’s parents. The small gestures that Simon makes, sometimes in the background, barely visible to the camera, are striking when seen within the context of his place in the film. He has been marginalised by his boyfriend, for the sake of pretending that all is well even though the whole narrative that develops – including his presence at his boyfriend’s wedding to a girl – is close to farcical, but he keeps a straight face and always wants to make sure that Wai Tong is feeling as comfortable as possible, that he is taken care of. The interaction is beautiful and the fact that Ang Lee focuses on such details is impressive and enriches the human dimension of a film that could easily have been filled with comical caricatures.

It’s not always easy to empathise with Wai Tong’s self-pity, but Ang Lee’s story is full of twists and turns, and even the smallest scenes have either narrative of physical energy. It is a film that anticipates the director’s subsequent work on the plains of Wyoming and while it might not confront LGBT issues as aggressively as other filmmakers from the early nineties, it makes gay characters seem more human than they do in the films of these other militant filmmakers.

Cairo Station (1958)

André Crous

Egypt
4.5*

Director:
Youssef Chahine
Screenwriters:
Abdel Hay Adib
Mohamed Abu Youssef
Director of Photography:
Alevise Orfanelli

Running time: 77 minutes

Original title: باب الحديد
Transliterated title: Bab al-Hadid
Alternate title: The Iron Gate

The acting could be much better, and the climax requires an enormous suspension of disbelief, but Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station is compact and those parts that might seem random at first all fit together in the end, underlining Chahine’s skill as a storyteller and a craftsman.

Chahine stars as the main character Qinawi, a young man who lives at Cairo’s main railway station and whose limp either scares other people or makes him the object of their ridicule. He sells newspapers and has his eye on Hanouma, a woman who doesn’t let herself be ordered about, but she seems destined to be married to Abu-Serih, who wants the workers at the station to form a union and stand up against their boss, Mansour, in whose employment they struggle to make ends meet.

The film is very frank about Qinawi’s sexual frustration, and the first time we see the inside of his little home, it is plastered with magazine cut-outs of scantily clad women in braziers. Referring to Qinawi, the voice-over ominously asks us “How could anyone have foreseen his end?”

While Qinawi is infatuated with the feisty Hanouma and sometimes leers at her obscenely, a gesture she does not take very seriously, two others stories, seemingly insignificant, are taking place in the background. In the first one, a young girl’s boyfriend is about to leave for four years and the small part of their story that we are privy to seems sincere and romantic. The second story, of which we learn indirectly whenever the main news vendor, Madbouli, talks about it, is a grizzly tale of murder: a woman was discovered in a trunk, her head and arms chopped off, and her killer unknown. These two stories will slowly come into focus towards the end of the film and tie in with Qinawi’s obsessive idea of romance.

The film doesn’t have many surprises – we can spot the dénouement from a mile away – but the final reel does contain a nail-biting sequence of events that is breathtaking to behold and even if you know what you are in for, the full cinematic experience is truly amazing. In many respects, this final part of the film is the culmination of the art of the filmmaker, whose film starts off on some shaky ground. Another scene that is a stand-out takes place on a stationary train at the station, where Hanouma starts dancing along to the music being played by the passengers. It is a raucous affair, upsetting some of the more conservative onlookers, and at the end of the number, Hanouma turns to the camera and winks at us, signalling our complicity in this unconventional bit of fun.

Some of the direction is magnificent, including a moment when a boy is saved from an oncoming train and narrowly escapes when Hanouma pulls him from the tracks. The film sometimes struggles with the post-production studio dubbing and it is particularly audible whenever Abu-Serih speaks and produces a very loud echo even when he is outside. One brief shot caught my attention: when Hanouma and Qinawi are sitting next to the fountain, one quick image shows them clearly defined in the foreground, separated from an indistinct background by the haze of the fountain. It is beautiful – much shorter, unfortunately, than the strange long take that precedes it, which shows these two characters speaking at length without looking at each other.

Chahine’s film is short and creates tension by means of a play between light and darkness, and a quickening pace at the end that will leave you breathless. Its climax relies on us to believe that Qinawi is literally blinded by obsession, but the rest of the film makes up for this bit of extreme simplicity and succeeds in presenting a story that is truly riveting.

Ajami (2009)

André Crous

Israel
4.5*

Directors:
Scandar Copti
Yaron Shani
Screenwriters:
Scandar Copti
Yaron Shani
Director of Photography:
Boaz Yehonatan Yaacov

Running time: 120 minutes

Original title (Hebrew): עג’מי‎
Original title (Arabic): عجمي

The film opens with a senseless act of violence: a completely innocent teenage boy, repairing a car, is shot dead by someone who passes behind him on a motorcycle. This boy wasn’t the target of the assassins, but even the actual target had not done anything wrong except for belonging to a certain family.

Ajami, which takes its name from a suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel, is a film that focuses on the tension between many different characters, all somehow connected by blood, circumstance or location. The film takes its cue, in content and structure, from many other films, including Crash and City of God (Cidade de Deus), but the most illuminating parallel can be drawn with Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 drama set in the low-income residential areas (banlieues) of Paris, La haine – a film whose ending has the same emotional resonance as the resolution of Ajami.

The film was developed and directed by two Israelis – one a Christian Arab, the other a Jew – and the collaboration has born fruit that make for dynamic and balanced storytelling that is never contrived for the sake of pandering to a specific ideology or religious group. A comparison with a film such as Julian Schnabel’s Miral makes the raw realism and the real-life significance of Ajami very apparent.

In terms of structure, the film is divided into a prologue and four chapters that deal with different aspects of the narrative, either chronologically or geographically distinct from each other. These time shifts initially make for a slightly jarring experience and the necessity of this reorganisation of the timeline may be debatable, as characters whose deaths we have witnessed suddenly reappear on-screen à la Travolta in Pulp Fiction, but the film’s particular strategy manages to create expectations along the way. In this way, the film may also be compared to the collaborations between the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, especially 21 Grams.

At various points throughout the film, the voice of a young boy called Nasri, introduced by means of a meaningful close-up early in the film, contextualises some of the events we see unfold, and for once, a film uses the voice-over the way it should be used: he says enough so that we can understand the situation better and everything he says is immediately relevant, and the filmmakers only use his voice to communicate summaries rather than long-winded reflections, as is so often the case in the cinema.

After the shocking opening scene, it takes Nasri a mere sixty seconds to summarise the build-up to the event, which makes it appear that revenge is alive and well in the world of the film and one death is not avenged by another death. Rather, there will be blood to spill for years to come as an entire family might see its members taken out as revenge. All of this information is presented to us by means of a very effective fast-paced sequence of events that borrows from Fernando Meirelles’s City of God.

The film is about money and the lengths individuals will go to in order to ensure their safety and survival, and the film’s intelligent screenplay gradually reveals the extensive network of characters who all create a kind of butterfly effect in the neighbourhood of Ajami: the actions of one character could have far-reaching consequences for many other people. In this film, a boy is shot by Nasri’s father. Nasri’s father is shot in return, but not killed. Nasri’s brother, Omar, becomes the next target of this revenge killing, but when a local judge decrees that Omar pay 38,000 Jordanian dinars (about $53,000) in damages within 45 days, he realises that he will have to get hold of the money in a way that cannot be legal.

His need to get hold of a large sum of money is shared by another young man, Malek, who is from the Palestinian territories and works illegally in the restaurant of a man called Abu Elias. Malek’s mother needs a bone marrow transplant and he takes it upon himself to find the money needed to take care of her.

In the meantime, Omar has fallen in love with Hadir, the daughter of Abu Elias, but since Omar is Muslim and Hadir is a Christian, their relationship has to be a secret.

These details all create a very rich tapestry of characters and intentions, and it is remarkable to see how we change our minds about events as the focus slowly shifts from one group of characters to another. The characters are acting according to their needs and while they try to maintain a level head in the process, coincidence, love, and many other factors play a role, as they do in life, to complicate an already chaotic state of affairs.

Directors Copti and Shani have succeeded in producing a genuinely sincere representation of the complexities of life in Israel and filled it with characters who are accessible to (though never simplified for) audiences around the world.

The Wild Child (1970)

André Crous

The Wild ChildFrance
4.5*

Director:
François Truffaut
Screenwriters:
François Truffaut
Jean Gruault
Director of Photography: 
Néstor Almendros

Running time: 87 minutes

Original title: L‘enfant sauvage

The Wild Child is one of François Truffaut’s best films, and the key to grasping its significance for Truffaut himself lies in the film’s opening dedication: “To Jean-Pierre Léaud”. Léaud was Truffaut’s alter ego in his feature film début, The 400 Blows, in which he starred as the 12-year-old Antoine Doinel. The character of Doinel in this film had much in common with the young Léaud, and Truffaut took the actor under his wing, eventually becoming a father figure to the troubled youth.

In The Wild Child, Truffaut stars as Jean Itard, a physician who is confident that he can make a cultured human being out of a young boy who has spent his entire childhood fending for himself in the woods. The story is based on a real case treated by Itard of a boy found in the French countryside in 1798.

This treatment may also be described as training, and it is this uncertainty about the exact nature of the procedure that makes the film so interesting, for, while Itard is not presented with very much complexity of character, he uses his experience with deaf-mute children to instruct the young boy, whom he names Victor. When Victor is discovered, he is dirty, seems to be deaf and employs the most basic of gestures to express himself since he never learned to use his mouth for anything besides eating and drinking.

It is impressive to watch Victor’s development, which Itard is in a rush to complete, but which naturally takes much longer than he anticipates. In the process, Itard is rightfully scolded by his housekeeper, Madame Guérin: “You want him to catch up in one fell swoop!” Also, since Victor has no experience with the ways of people, he acts out whenever he is frustrated by dropping to the ground, waving his arms and flailing his legs about in a way that reminds one of a seizure. If he encounters resistance from someone, he is also prone to sinking his teeth into an unsuspecting arm. Itard has many clever strategies to conduct his experiments and gain knowledge about Victor’s capacity for learning, but very often he seems to ignore the bridges between one stage and the next, for example, the difference between a picture of a book, the word “book” and the book itself, which Itard takes as something quite self-evident.

Truffaut is excellent as Itard, who shows a remarkable level of commitment, patience and humanity throughout, even when it is very difficult to judge what the wild-eyed boy wants from him. We can understand both of them, both their positions, and the reason for their frustration with each other is clear because there is no easy way to bridge the communication gap that divides them. It is clear that Itard observes without taking as much trouble to learn Victor’s customs as Victor takes to learn his.

The film is a sequence of small incidents charting Itard’s progress with Victor and there are a few very moving moments that make our and Itard’s hearts beat fast with excitement at the possibility of rehabilitation. Unfortunately, the film does not sufficiently address the nagging question of whether it is appropriate to try to integrate the child into society, nor does it even question the legitimacy of erasing the useful skills that Victor had acquired on his own in nature. These are important questions in the background that Truffaut could easily have touched on, but he aimed for a more inspirational film, albeit based on historical documents.

Almendros’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is perfectly suited to the story, as is Vivaldi’s “Mandolin Concerto”, which accompanies most major events in the plot. Truffaut engages our attention throughout, as actor and as director, but one scene that fails to convince takes place when the wild boy is captured at the beginning of the film. While dogs bark and growl on the soundtrack, the images we see are of the boy’s arm grasped very gently by a dog’s mouth, and if the sound were removed, it would appear that the two were just amicably horsing around.

Jean-Pierre Cargol, who stars as Victor, the titular Wild Child, never overplays his part and is a great attribute to the film. While almost never uttering a sound, Victor will find sympathy with most viewers because of our curiosity to see the development of a boy for whom most experiences are “firsts”, including the use of clothes, shoes, a spoon, a mirror and many others. He also displays many remarkably touching characteristics in a subtle way, such as his love for the countryside that is made clear when he goes to the window every time he takes a sip of water. The film is a touching tribute by Truffaut to the boy he wanted to teach about the world, and even if it was always just a work in progress, The Wild Child makes it all somehow seem worthwhile.

Aparajito (1956)

André Crous

India
4.5*

Director:
Satyajit Ray
Screenwriter:
Satyajit Ray
Director of Photography:
Subrata Mitra

Running time: 113 minutes

Original title: অপরাজিত
Alternate title: The Unvanquished

This review is part of a series on the Apu Trilogy that also includes:
– Pather Panchali
– The World of Apu

With a tighter focus on Apu, the trilogy’s main character, and his mother Sarbajaya, the second film, Aparajito, substitutes the episodic nature of the first film, Pather Panchali, with a strong narrative that is a journey full of love and loss, presented in an unforgettably cinematic way that takes the best of Eisenstein and uses his approach in a new context without the film ever seeming self-indulgent.

Watching this film in sequence provokes the same kind of emotions I had when I first saw the series of Antoine Doinel films years ago: One feels privileged to watch a character grow in this way, for it is a kind of divine perspective, and it is the medium of film that enables us to appreciate this possibility.

In Aparajito, based on two novels by Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, we meet the young Apu and his parents in Varanasi, where they were headed at the end of the first film. They are still living from hand to mouth, but Apu has made a few friends, including a boy with whom he speaks English. When Apu’s father falls ill and dies, Apu and his mother move back to the countryside, having only each other to lean on.

But let me dwell on the father’s death for a moment. In a fusion of striking images, potent sitar sounds and a very emotional undercurrent, Ray creates the most stirring five seconds of his first two films, and in cinematic terms I would rate it close to the cut from the match being extinguished to the sun rising on the horizon in Lawrence of Arabia. Here, Apu’s father’s face is in close-up, his mouth open, receiving water from the sacred Ganges. When he loses consciousness, a very audible gasp is heard on the soundtrack. There is a cut to birds leaving a rooftop – literally released from their terrestrial bonds; first from up close and then, in another shot, from farther away – and the metaphor of escape should be fairly obvious. But it is the combination of these three shots, and the addition of the sitar, that brings about a very moving moment that does not inhere in the shots considered separately.

The film is about Apu’s journey towards becoming an adult, and besides the death of his father, there are two very general themes I wish to touch on briefly. The first is his relationship with his mother, who has already endured the loss of her daughter and now, of her husband as well. She has little hope of living a prosperous life and wants to hold onto her son as long as possible, but then, in the countryside, there is a major turning point in Apu’s life that would forever change the trajectory of his story: He catches sight of a school and decides that he wants to enrol there.

What follows is a sequence of events that deal with the second theme – Apu’s education – and demonstrate Apu’s aptitude for learning. We quickly become caught up in his progress at school, which includes very clearly defined snippets of schooling; this sequence culminates with a scene at the headmaster’s office, where Apu, now all grown up and about to leave school, is informed that he has received a scholarship to study at university in Calcutta.

One can feel the heartache of the mother, but one can also comprehend Apu’s position, and Ray does not choose sides: Rather, he presents both characters in all their human complexity. In one instance, a shot of Apu’s mother, sitting under a tree, desperately waiting for her son to come visit her, is intercut with a shot of Apu lying leisurely under a tree in Calcutta, studying for his exams. This is life, and people have their reasons and seen from the outside it might seem tragic, but we fully understand how the situation has come to this.

As in the first film, Apu is introduced in a very significant manner, his big black eyes immediately captivating our attention when he peers around a wall in Calcutta, playing hide-and-seek with a friend. As a young man, he seems to be responsible and quite shy, but his intelligence and desire to learn create expectations that the last film, The World of Apu will challenge – and make us realise once more that stories don’t always work out the way we expect. On the contrary, they have a mind of their own.

The African Queen (1951)

André Crous

USA
4.5*

Director:
John Huston
Screenwriters:
James Agee
John Huston
Director of Photography:
Jack Cardiff

Running time: 104 minutes

Today, John Huston’s African Queen might seem tame and innocent, but I can imagine that it was quite a different story when it was released in 1951. It tells the story of a very tightly wound church organist in German East Africa (present-day Tanzania, Burundi and Rwanda), a woman named Rose Sayer, who in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, flees her small village in the jungle when the Germans are rounding up the villagers with a scorched-earth policy to turn them into soldiers and thus protect the area from outside forces.

The only way out is with Charlie Allnut, a Canadian mailman who is used to travelling from one village to the next on his little fishing boat, the “African Queen”. He is played by Humphrey Bogart, and Katharine Hepburn stars as Rose Sayer. In the very first scene of the film, during a service at the church of Rose’s brother, it is made clear that Allnut and Rose are quite different. While she plays the organ, dressed like something out of a Victorian novel, and sings with her brother, who tries to conduct the congregation from the pulpit, the villagers merely mumble along. The service is crudely interrupted by the loud steam whistle of Allnut’s boat, and we see him interacting with the locals in their native tongue.

So, when these two board the same boat, it seems unlikely that it would be the start of a beautiful friendship. And yet, soon enough, we discover that they both have strong, assertive characters that are nonetheless willing to compromise. Most importantly, they are both very likeable. Rose refuses to stay hidden in the forest until the war is over and insists that they make their way downriver to a large lake, where they would blow up the “Louisa”, the German ship patrolling the body of water, and thus make their escape.

Much of the film was shot on location, a remarkable feat for the time – as it would still be today. The cinematography is gorgeous, as is to be expected from Jack Cardiff; the rivers are either sapphire-blue or pitch-black, and the greens of the lush forest foliage are spectacular. For some of the more animated scenes on the river, such as those in which Charlie and Rose have to make their way across the rapids, rear projection was used, making for a less than credible combination of real and staged materials, but luckily these scenes are kept to a minimum. Rather, our attention is directed at Rose, who surprises (and is surprised herself at this revelation) with genuine excitement at the dangers they face together: “I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!”

How she deals with the river and the quirks of her companion, especially his fondness for Gordon’s Gin, is entertaining because we like to see what conflict results from their inescapably intimate living conditions on the boat. While I didn’t much care for the brief scene in which they are apparently “drunk on love”, including Charlie’s imitation of the animals in and out of the water, their romantic camaraderie is rather affecting.

It was a pleasant surprise to find Peter Bull, who starred as the Russian Ambassador in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, as the German captain of the “Louisa”. His deadpan delivery of very contrasting ideas are hilarious and fit in superbly with the kind of humour that Hepburn and Bogart do so well, and it is a testament to the acting ability of Hepburn and Bogart that they leisurely carry almost the entire film on their own.

With the exception of the rear projection, which is below par, as well as a scene in which the main characters are attacked by buzzing insects, both scenes visibly more defective because of the film’s use of colour, The African Queen receives full marks in every aspect of the film’s production and entertainment potential. Hepburn’s tongue is not as sharp as in some of her other films (such as Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story in particular), but while she certainly stands her ground against the dry wit of Humphrey Bogart, she does not overpower him, which makes the romantic union all the more convincing.