Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Remember

In the first shot of Atom Egoyan’s Remember, Zev awakens to a memory of his dead wife. In the last scene he awakens to a completely suppressed reality. He is not the Jewish survivor we (and he) think he is but himself a Nazi concentration camp killer.
     The closing scene redefines the revenge plot. Instead of a Jew avenging his family, the Nazi hiding behind a Jewish identity kills his evil comrade and then himself — doubly completing the mission assigned him by a dying Jew, Max. Here the hunter as well as the hunted exposes his suppressed identity. Zev proves a “wolf” in sheep’s clothing, pretending to be his erstwhile prey.
For the bulk of the film Zev personifies the struggle never to forget the horrors of the Holocaust and to sustain the commitment to bring evil to justice and to honour the memory of the dead. As his memory drifts in and out, Zev needs his friend Max’s letter of detailed instruction to keep him on track. Ironically, a sweet little American blonde (total it Aryan) little girl reads the letter aloud to him, to recover his purpose. The pathos of an old man losing his wife, then his memory, supports the larger theme of historical remembrance.  
With the conclusion, the theme shifts from the importance of remembering the Holocaust to the importance of remembering one’s own identity, one’s own responsibility for that horror. Ultimately the film’s subject goes beyond the loss of memory, as portrayed in Zev’s dementia, to the willful forgetting of the past, especially one’s own. The title, which we don’t get until the end, enjoins us to remember what we are as well as the enormity of what has happened. More broadly, we all have to remember the evil of which we may well prove capable. The dark side of human nature is not just in others.
Once we’ve seen the twist we can find its earlier preparation. Zev plays Wagner more comfortably than he plays the Jewish-born Mendelssohn. He admits to loving Wagner. “How can you hate music?” he asks. Well, for starters, when that music has been used to orchestrate the genocide of your people, you might. A Jew would feel that. The posh 1945 New York wedding pictures also don’t fit an Auschwitz survivor’s story.
Zev also shows a surprising efficiency with his Glock, killing an attacking dog and then dispatching the modern Nazi — a state trooper, aptly enough — with two effective shots, one to the heart, one to the head. These reflexes confirm the later conversion of avenging Jew to hidden Nazi. Zev’s reflex fear of German shepherds may cohere with his Jewish pose, but it’s also true to the old man’s fragility and the fear that makes him hate shouting and piss his pants on the trooper’s couch. Any old man fears danger, regardless of race, religion, colour or creed. 
As exposing the truth is healthy, the cab that brings Zev to his climactic exposure is Merck — the German (of course) pharmaceutical company. If the ultimate revelations traumatize the two Nazi officers’ unsuspecting American families, they still get off more lightly than their respective fathers’ Auschwitz victims. Max, immobile and constantly on his oxygen, proves the master planner and angel of justice. It turns out he recognized Zev as the brutal Nazi and exploited his dementia to send him and his old mate to justice. 
The trooper reminds us that antisemitism remains a powerful force in the world, in North America and certainly across Europe. A Nazi-fetishizing and Jew-hating rural cop points to the institutionalized bigotry even in Obama’s ("post-racial", right) America. Egoyan, of course, is not Jewish. But he is an Armenian acutely aware of the massacre of his people and its deliberate obscuring over time and by the aggressors’ twisting of history. The historic tragedy that the Jews and Armenians have shared lies at the heart of Remember. We all need to both remember the history and reject the lies that would replace it. 
***
This intricate plot allows for an alternative reading. Perhaps Zev is not demented. Max has the film’s last line: “He knew exactly what he was doing.” Max may evade his own responsibility here, but perhaps he speaks true. Our first thought is that Max played Zev. But what if Zev played Max?
Zev’s truest moments of disorientation are when he wakes up, calling for his wife Ruth. The name evokes “Whither thou goest I will go,” the epitome of familial fidelity. 
Otherwise his lapses and confusions may be pretended. His snapping at the boy on the train may set up his story of innocent dementia. It does lead to the boy’s father finding his limo. Zev’s dependence upon Max’s letter may prepare for his defence:  “I was only following orders”? Writing “Read the letter” on his arm parallels his earlier ploy, tattooing his concentration camp number. When’s he’s angered by the waitress spilling coffee on that letter he may be disturbed by the undermining of that alibi. He shows full command of his senses when he returns to his room and rewrites the erased sentences. 
Zev may have led on Max to encourage him to find the suspect Nazi, to do the research and to prepare and to fund his adventure. His old camp mate — and co-conspirator in the plan to pass themselves off as Jewish survivors— was expecting him to find him. 
When Zev kills himself, it’s not out of guilt but because his son has surprisingly arrived at the scene. Zev does not want to live shamed in his family’s view. and stripped of his false Jewish identity. This reading replaces Zev’s helplessness with agency, strips him of our sympathy, and in its demonstration of cunning and heartlessness provides a chilling characterization of evil. Max’s last line curtails the nursing home residents’ sympathy for the dead — but maybe not deluded — Nazi.
Clearly this film demands a second viewing.
                                                                        ***
Now, here comes a tangent.  A broader reading of the film reflects on the alacrity with which the Nazi mythology is currently being revived, especially anent Israel. 
PM Netanyahu recently provoked global outrage — even among Jewish historians — for stating that the Palestinian leader persuaded Hitler to exterminate the Jews rather than relocate them to Madagascar. In the usual rush to condemn Netanyahu, commentators obscured his essential point: that for almost 100 years the Palestinians have been determined to annihilate the Jews. 
Hence their rejection of any statehood that would require peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. That’s what prevents the two-state solution, not Israel’s intransigence. The Palestinians are constitutionally pledged to annihilate the Jews (Hamas) or they promise (the “moderate” Abbas) a Judenrein Palestine, which includes the present Israel. Such an existential threat might explain some intransigence. 
The current rash of murderous attacks on Jewish civilians is also rooted in that hatred, not prompted by the so-called ‘occupation,’ the settlements, or any other elements of Israeli policy, as her critics claim. As the UN flies the Palestinians’ flag, governments blame Israelis and Palestinians equally for Palestinian murders and Israeli responses. The press slants against Israel, reporting her deeds but not their provocations. The UN declares historically Jewish historic sites Muslim (even after the Palestinians firebombed Jacob’s tomb). The Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their holy city despite its never being mentioned in the Koran, Mohammed never having visited there and their traditional praying with their backs to the city. Now the mufti has claimed the Jews never had a temple on Temple Mount, that there has been a mosque there from the time of Adam. This is the tragedy of people believing their own delusions and fabricating a “history” to serve their purpose. Egoyan reminds us to remember.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

She Comes Back Thursday

The title of AndrĂ© Novais Oliveira’s She Comes Back on Thursday is an emblem of the film. It reveals and it hides at the same time. 
Yes, on Thursday the wife returns to her 38-year marriage from a trip. But she says she’s coming back to her husband only to leave him. He doesn’t have the will to leave her, for his other woman, so she’ll leave him. But she lacks the emotional energy to do even that. She drops dead on the street. We infer that it’s a fatal faint because her family’s response is to gather around the TV screen, no emotional expression, no connection. The images hide the meaning we infer. The absence of a funeral means she’s dead. 
Note this: the film is not a documentary (contrary to the IMDB label). Oliveira stars in the film along with his parents, brothers and friends, but they’re performing a fictional vision of a family whose members don’t connect meaningfully with each other and who live a passionless existence. This is the paradox, for we associate Brazil with effusive passion. The husband fixes fridges but he can’t fix the chill in his emotional life. He says he loves his wife but he’s having an affair with a younger woman. There is no spark to that relationship either. She’s leaving him, but to try to win her back all he can do is cite her new lover’s criminality.
     Though the father loves her little daughter he seems detached even in their one scene of play. His warmest expression is remarking that her doll looks pretty in that chair. That is as arch as his attempt to recover the marital romance by dancing with his wife to an old song. Nobody says “I love you” in this film. The father and mother share a bed but swaddle in their separate blankets. 
True to our image of Brazil, the film abounds with music. But the songs don’t celebrate life so much as articulate the malaise the characters feel but can’t express or acknowledge or escape. After his wife’s implied death the father sings along to a radio song about a deeply grieved heart. But he’s singing it because he’s not otherwise feeling it. The expression takes the place of the feeling. From the unnecessary samba that calls for a new dance, a new love, to Dinah Washington’s This Bitter Earth, the lyrics portray the characters’ life of lost love, lost spirit. 
The two brothers live their own semi-detachment in their relationships. Their greatest excitement comes from watching TV, especially a video that cuts a screaming goat into a Justin Bieber number. That’s another emblem: an animal scream against our vapid triviality. But they’re only amused by it. Hence, too, the sudden eruptions of energy when a dog or a cat enter the scene. 
The characters’ emptiness is not caused by their class, nor by poverty, just by their loss of a will to look for beauty in their world and in each other, their fear of connecting. Even the lads’ football game is played out in long shot. We’re told of the side’s comeback from a 4-1 deficit but we see or feel none of it.
The film has some striking compositions, from the opening abstract to the last family darkness, illuminated by some TV silliness. But the elements in the composition are usually ugly. Peeling walls and climbing pipes  form striking compositions but they bespeak a sordid affront to nature. 
With its lack of dramatic event, its abstemious palette and its prolonged real-time scenes, the film has a documentary feel. What this fiction documents is a modern entropy, a passivity, a withdrawal from life. After the — frankly dull to watch — slow urban scenes, when the family heads out to a seaside vacation, the film suddenly speeds up. But nature doesn't enliven them either. The son enters the water only to flop on his back and drift.  
     This family with their implicit alienation provides a cautionary example of the modern existential dilemma. They have enough to survive, from material goods to career to family connections, but they lack the will or commitment to make anything of them. They float through their lives. The father has the strength to carry fridges up and down stairs and to attract a much younger lover. But that avails him nothing without his lost zest for life.
     Is there any positive character here? There's the woman who loves her fridge and will kick up a storm if it's not repaired and delivered on time. At least she cares about something. But the real model may be the young guy who helps the father carry the fridge down the dangerous stairs. He's game. He's ever hopeful that the next client might be "a hottie," that he might fall in love. He fumbles the fridge, sure, but he's in there trying. He embodies the spirit his boss and his family have lost.

Friday, October 16, 2015

Hyena Road

The last line is the key, spoken by narrator (and writer, director, star) Paul  Gross: “As the Afghans might say, ‘You have the clocks, but we have the time.’” Might say, that is, but probably won’t — they keep their secrets. 
Hyena Road is about the gap between the modern Western understanding/army and the mystique of the ancient remote Afghanistan. They have a large, eternal history, whereas we have our short history and technology. So that’s where modern armies go to get confused and die. The mystique extends back far beyond the Canadian and American mission, back past the defeated Russians, even back beyond Alexander the Great. As the latter discovered, even the sand there is hostile.
This is an expertly made war film, in some ways typical of its genre. The sudden battle scenes are punctuated by throbbing local music, with the occasional reminder of our rock. Our heroes are a small unit who endear themselves with their comradeship and humour. They face terrible attacks from a horde of unidentified insurgents. As the enemy sweeps out from the dunes they seem a force of nature attacking what we consider to be the agents of civilization — as the Indians attacked our settlers, the Axis our Allies, the Cong our forces in Nam. Our wars always seem to be Our Culture against Them Savages. Their films simply reverse those roles. 
Yet in some ways this film is very different, fresh. These are Canadian soldiers we follow, not the usual American, so the unit has a consistency the tradition of the US Melting Pot eschewed. But we swear as much. And we fight as bravely. 
Even a love affair breaks out, with the predictable hope and doom. If the affair seems implausible from the perspective of military rules (of engagement?), it serves a larger thematic purpose. It reminds us that the war does not erase normal human emotions, normal urges, and the hope for a future. So if the dad-to-be dies, the abducted little Afghan girls are found among other caged children and released to what we would like to convince ourselves will be full, normal lives. 
Unlikely. The film’s key insight is the humongous gap between that culture and ours.  We have the impressive technology that shrinks space and has unprecedented destructive capacity.   But that’s no match for that much older culture with its unfathomable ways of thinking, alien values, indecipherable loyalties, and the prime force and result of such a long history, resilience. They take everything that we — and time — throws at them and carry on. The elder with unmatched eyes has a perspective our normal ones can never have.
     The title refers to the road the Canadian army is trying to build to ensure the transit of forces and supplies. It will serve the people as much as the army. It’s so important the insurgents are determined to destroy it. The formal opening ceremony is supposed to forge a partnership — but it blows up in the Canadians’ face. In that world of tribal confusion and hatreds all partnerships may prove a forgery. The laugh's on us.

Monday, October 12, 2015

The Intern

In The Intern Nancy Meyers engagingly blends the old and new in terms of cinema, technology and feminism. 
Hero Ben is a feminist from the outset because his late wife Molly was a middle school principal, i.e., a woman who combined success in family and in administration. So Ben appreciates the old feminism as well as the new that he sees in Jules (a man’s name feminized by its homonym Jewels). As Jules notes, “It's 2015, are we really still critical of working moms?” Well, yeah, so Ben has to teach the other playground Moms the pride they should take in Jules’s success.  
In business Ben unpacks his glass case, clock, calculator, pens, all superannuated — before launching into the computer world. He makes friends in the flesh as well as on Facebook. However new he may be to new tech, his old savvy in business, style and human relations proves a boon to the others. One young guy buys a classic briefcase on eBay. 
Robert De Niro is an affable Old Man in the New Age spirit. He actually weeps a bit, sentimental mush that he admits to being. The established old geezer occupies the same role in the casting as his character does in the plot — he’s the man of experience and wisdom who provides a model for the young bloods. 
De Niro could be on the list of old actors that Jules cites as the lost generation of Men: Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholson. The film clip of Gene Kelly evokes an even earlier generation of softer, romantic men, suggesting the cycle of changing styles in film manhood. De Niro even plays against his own persona, when he serves as Jules’s driver and when, before his interview, he rehearses his looks in the mirror. Shades of “You talkin’ to me?” The heist scene is described as an Ocean’s 11 play but it also harkens back to De Niro’s Scorsese gangster period. 
As Jules, Anne Hathaway exercises her own reputation as a difficult person to work with. Her boss character here is a promotion from the harried gofer she played in The Devil Wears Prada. She’s warmer and more effective than the earlier Meryl Streep character.
Jules’s drunken bar speech is central: as girls have grown into women on the American social landscape  men have reverted to boys. Her husband is as sloppy, effete and juvenile as Ben’s workmates. The husband had a brilliant career ahead of him, prioritized Jules’s to become a stay-at-home father, then slips into the tired old cliche of adulterer. 
     The film is sensible in playing a 70-year-old as a sane, capable person, even still capable of having a sex life. Ben’s affair with Fiona is played with taste and discretion. Some might add “hope.”
     The film’s one weak spot is its treatment of the shorter, homelier, much more wrinkled woman who pursues Ben and gives him the finger when she sees him with Fiona. Both in script and direction Meyers shows such sensitivity and grace in this film that it’s disappointing to see her lapse here into the cliche comedy of the predatory crone. Rene Russo gives Fiona a dignity and attractiveness that might have also been accorded the other woman. Instead Meyers went for the cheap laugh — in an otherwise more serious work.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Sicario

Sicario establishes Denis Villeneuve as Canada’s most prominent director. It’s not quite as profound as his Incendies but it’s still remarkable. 
If he has an auteur theme it’s the loss of innocence in a jaw-dropingly corrupt world. His signature tone is a tightening tension that approaches the unbearable. He never softens the material at the end. 
Here two innocents are sucked into America’s corrupting war against the drug cartels. The black lawyer and blonde kidnapping squad cop witness slaughters beyond their apprehension and acceptance. The losers are families, from the lost wife and daughter Alejandro sets out to avenge, through the corrupt cop Silvio’s family, to the cartel boss’s sons and wife.
The most intimate human relations are trampled by the vicious gangs driven by greed. So, too, Kate nearly gets herself killed when her try for a one night stand tumbles her into the world of bought cops.  
The film’s overwhelming suspense serves its theme, the imminent threat of humanity turned into wolves. Alejandro’s prediction of a society of lawlessness and savagery earns the tension we feel throughout this experience. And it is an experience, not just a good story.
The several god’s eye view shots of the landscape paradoxically suggest this is a godless world. The shots bespeak man’s technology not a higher understanding. The aerials show a desiccated, arid, lifeless nature in which humanity is reduced to negligible, passing specks. They’re like Edward Burtynsky photos — the mangled and ruined nature man leaves in his wake. It’s eerie and nightmarish but with an awful beauty. Their deadness makes them an emblem of the characters’ soul. Even in the innocence of the kids’ soccer game the war lights up the background.
Kate doesn’t belong in this world. She signed up for a career that would restore family lives, recover taken members, not serve such wholesale destruction. But the CIA needs her to legitimize their acting on American soil. She serves as their “mule” the way the cartels deploy their carrier “mules.” She’s denied any will or knowledge beyond what they need to control her. Her directors make a point of denying her information, lest they lose control.
     Amazing that we still have innocence to lose. But we do. We keep finding hope that our humanity and morality will win out. We keep being reminded they don’t.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

The Daughter

Simon Stone’s The Daughter is "inspired" by Ibsen’s The Wild Duck but it’s radically different. Stone gives the Danish Nietzschean tragedy a contemporary Australian setting with an upbeat spiritual ending.
The basic plot holds. A wealthy industrialist’s son Christian returns from self-exile for his father Henry’s marriage to his much younger housekeeper.  Christian’s mother killed herself over Henry’s affair with an earlier Housekeeper, Charlotte. Now Christian learns that Charlotte married his best friend Oliver who thinks the daughter Hedvig  she had by Henry is his. Whether out of bitter despair over his own romantic loss or out of wrong-headed idealism, Christian reveals the long buried secret. His friend is revulsed  by the wife and daughter he has so profoundly loved and rejects them. Hedvig shoots herself.
Stone makes significant changes. His Hedvig frees the duck that Henry had shot down and Hedvig and her grandfather Walter nurtured. Ibsen's Hedvig agrees to her father’s demand she put the duck out of its misery, then shoots herself instead. Stone’s Hedvig is herself a creature of nature. Her science fair project is a study of amino acids, in and beyond the human body. Her eagerness for sex confirms her natural appetite, as she invites both her young boyfriend and Christian. 
     Her sexual initiation in the forest is enigmatic. The boy had earlier postponed this First Time until her birthday. In the event, he -- as university registrars put it -- withdraws in good standing and runs off. Perhaps he felt guilty about not having told her his family was moving away. Perhaps her virginity -- she hurts, despite her claim to experience -- and the unaccustomed  condom embarrassed him with a premature ejaculation. In any case, the scene presents him as a modern, sensitive young man, The New Man, in contrast to the bullish self indulgence of Henry and his generation.
By renaming Ibsen’s Gregers Christian, Stone implies another contrast, between Henry’s pagan self indulgence and the new man of conscience. Christian urges Charlotte to reveal her secret to her husband: "The truth can’t hurt you." But this son can't escape his father’s hold, as his retreat to drink and drug reveals. Embittered that his woman has dumped him, Christian may not be as noble as he thinks when he shatters his old friend Oliver’s happy family. The destructive power of the father is visited upon the son, for all his moral pretensions.
Henry has ruined the family. He let his friend and partner Walter go to jail for their joint scheme. Giving him a pension and helping Oliver buy his modest house is scant compensation. But his destruction of the family is incomplete until his possibly well-meaning son shares his destructive truth. For that even Henry’s promise of a trust fund for Hedvig cannot compensate. 
The film’s last shot poses an ambiguity beyond the play’s solid suggestion that
Hedvig killed herself. The medic has said she has a chance. The last shot shows her in radiant close-up, eyes closed. Does she recover? Does she die? We’re left to our own conclusion. Modern audiences will leap to the hope of a conventional happy ending.
     But Stone directs us to a more complex conclusion. The radiance makes her appear angelic, confirmed by the religious chorale. The implication is that she dies but in a transcendent way. She returns to her quintessential unity with wild ducks, animal appetites and amino acids. Her wounding has shaken her effective father out of his mad self denial, so he resumes his love for her and his wife. And she is finally freed from her brute father Henry’s clutch.
     In this delicate balance Stone respects Ibsen’s tragic vision but allows for the alternative encouragement, the view that we don’t live in an uncaring brutal universe but in a world of material and spiritual interconnection.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Taxi

Although Jafar Panahi’s Taxi seems to record the random adventurers of a Tehran cabbie, it's a carefully structured script.
The major themes are established in the first scene. The opening shot is a cabbie’s view of a Tehran intersection. The first passengers embody the three intersecting elements: a candid teacher, critical of the country’s execution rate (second only to China) and an admitted mugger, who urges the exemplary hanging of even petty thieves. The chubby dwarf’s black marketing of forbidden foreign films makes him the combination of the two: a cultural champion necessarily made an outlaw.
The director/cabbie hero and the persecuted lawyer/flower lady are more serious versions of the outlaw champion of culture and humanity. Their antithesis are the two elderly woman whose goldfish mission makes them emblems of ancient superstition, without human consideration. Their anger at the cabbie demonstrates how in that world no good deed goes unpunished. 
A closeup of the glorious rose attends the film's distinction between the officially acceptable reality and the "sordid reality" that is prohibited screening. Clearly Panahi exults in the colours and energy of life and human/political engagement. That's why he evades the government’s ban against his making films and finds ways to make and release them anyway.
For Pahlavi filmmaking is as vital as life. The activity pervades the film, not just in his own open recording but in his old friend's video record of his torture (by citizens he recognizes), the injured man’s recorded will, the niece’s school assignment and the wedding recorded in the street behind them. 
When the niece coaxes the street urchin to put back the money he found, her moral lesson is secondary to her need for a positive example that would make her film screenable. The boy's father’s  more urgent need for the money and the groom’s indifference to its loss point to the social inequality which the state would hide as its sordid reality. It is real, and the state’s priorities and failure to address it make it even more sordid than the situation.
In his devotion to honesty, to dealing with the sordid reality, the director identifies himself as the filmmaker turned cabbie and explicitly refers to his filmmaking in progress. After we've learned that he too -- like his old friend and the lawyer -- were 'interrogated' -- I.e., tortured -- the ending is inevitable. As the cabbie returns the old woman’s lost wallet, two masked instruments of the state break into his cab and destroy his camera. They'll get to the director later. The black screen and explanation for the lack of end credits confirm the film's nature: a courageous exercise in outlawed art and humanity.
     However harsh the film’s revelations about life under Iran's tyranny, the engaging characters, their warmth, virtue and grace under pressure, gives Iran some wonderful human relations. It reminds us that there is more to a nation than its government. This glimpse into the country’s humanity is almost enough to make us accept Obama's abject surrender to a nuclear Iran. Almost, because the stakes are too high. Still, this film shows the tyrannical theocracy to be as great an enemy to its own people as to us.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Fig Fruit and the Wasps

Prakash Babu’s Fig Fruit and the Wasps is a meditative, abstract film.
  A documentary filmmaker Gowri and her assistant Vittal go to a remote Indian village to interview a musician but he’s engaged elsewhere. They meet a few people, taste the town, see the corpse of an acquaintance, then leave. When nothing seems to happen everything hides its tacit signification. 
Both filmmakers seem dour and troubled. A flashback to Gowri’s unsympathetic husband helps explain her, as Vittal is defined by his perfunctory attempt to seduce her. The village teacher is carried home drunk by his daughter every night, while his wife tirelessly sews for a living. The village men seem to stand around idly whether to wait to be picked up for a job or just to wait. When anything happens, like one man’s work with a mysterious bright welding job, a crowd gathers to watch him. 
Occasional patterns emerge. A drawing-like intersection of power lines in the sky is rhymed by intersecting lines formed by reeds on the ground. Gower and Vittal change music stations on her car radio but otherwise the “music” is made up of the sounds of nature — crickets, birds, a monsoon — or the clatter of mankind, like the woman’s sewing machine. 
That brings us to the film’s central theme, which is the filmmaker’s project. They’re interviewing a musician who contends that musical instruments are influenced by the regional population and their rhythms of life.  That’s this film: an apparently passive recording of a community’s rhythms of life and the music, not necessarily instrumental, that arises there.
We  may not realize it but the film works. Its uneventful process, punctuated by the occasional poetry reading and a death, draws us into a rhythm with which our normal cinema has made us unfamiliar. We have an experience of people, community, nature, both visual and aural, that willy nilly alters our rhythm and awareness. Its effect is more like music than like narrative fiction.
     Sometimes the narrative pauses for an eruption of the surreal. One shot features a row of ceramic vases; in the next they have been mysteriously encrusted. Another sequence presents a wooden chair and table which are oddly blown away. The last scene is totally enigmatic. These fractures in the narrative provide an alternative rhythm or punctuation. 
     The title refers to a scene where a man draws a pattern of circles on a table surface with fig juice, which attracts a few wasps. Preferring neatness, a woman brusquely wipes away his construction but the remnant arc still attracts a wasp. Man makes his mark, watches it disappear but nature persists. The scene encapsulates the creative and transitory human presence amid the larger and uncontrollable rhythms of nature and our life. There's something Indian about that, a sense we have lost.