The Humbling

Barry Levinson’s The Humbling starts with the Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It and ends on King Lear.  That is, it begins with the comic context of all the various roles we play in our lives on earth, then closes on our tragic end.

Simon Axler (Al Pacino) is an actor who lives through the doubts, uncertainties and increasing debility that characterize us all. In the opening scene he appears on opposite sides of the screen, debating himself on the effectiveness of his delivery. When he’s wheeled into the hospital he has the same uncertainty, trying different versions of his pained moan. He theatricalizes everything.

All his life experiences are filtered through film and drama. When he sprains his back his girlfriend Pegeen (Greta Gerwig) calls him Richard III (a familiar Pacino film role) but he calls himself Igor (Dr Frankenstein’s assistant). The switch summarizes his increasing servility to Pegeen, who shifts from adulating girl fan to increasingly monstrous betrayer (leaving him on his opening night of King Lear). Simon can’t even call the lost Pegeen back, pleadingly, without slipping into an allusion to Brandon DeWilde’s Joey at the end of Shane. His roles in life blend indistinguishably into the roles of his drama. Lately he has even been slipping from the lines of one play into another, unsettling his colleagues. But then, all the world’s a stage and we are all but players, remember? 

Whole scenes are exposed to have been fantasy. He imagines talking to Pegeen at the fertility clinic. He imagines Pegeen’s bringing back a beautiful pickup for a threesome, that doesn’t materialize. His imagining of Pegeen’s mother (Dianne Wiest) telling him he’s the girl’s father prompts his killing himself at the end of Lear. Where the character dies of a broken heart the actor with a shattered memory and a mercurial sense of self commits a kind of hara kiri. He who lives by the shifting variety of assumed roles dies by one too. When the vet gives Simon a horse painkiller his brief reduction to stupor anticipates the dementia from which his personalized Lear climax saves him. Never has the valedictory spoken to Lear so movingly applied to the actor.

The film’s ostensible focus on theatre and acting opens into the broader sense of human identity and the individual’s spectrum of self-presentation. Pegeen runs her own range of roles: childhood fan, college prof, an administrator’s lesbian lover, a trans-sexual’s ex-lover, her disappointed parents’ daughter. Even as Simon’s lover she moves through adulator, mistress, caretaker, exploiter and finally abandons him at his greatest moment of need. Pegeen rejects Prince because in his sex-change he spoiled the beautiful body he had as Priscilla. Talk about role-changes.... Simon hears Pegeen reject Prince because she doesn’t have sex with men! He's emasculated by their affair.

Indeed Simon finds his habitual solitude overrun with lunatics: the mental patient who hounds him to kill her husband, Pegeen’s ex who stalks Simon and who implicates him as accomplice, the trans-sexual who tries to make a role for himself in Pegeen’s new life. As all the world’s a stage Simon’s life teems with colourful supporting players, as extreme as the comedia del arte types. His lavish house — in which he only occupies the ground level and even there seems not to have unpacked yet after 14 years — is like a stage set, in fact, the stage set of his Lear, played in modern dress against a spare white abstract set.

As the film is based on a Phillip Roth novel it’s a familiar examination of a famous male persona and his inner conflicts, especially in the sexually Absurd world. Here the kinky is normal, as when the mature housekeeper runs through the care of Pegeen’s sex tools, orderly arranged in a laundry hamper. And the normal — trying to get through life by playing all the roles we need to — is mad. 

     Of course, with a heroic leap of the imagination this 72-year-old critic can relate to the 65-year-old hero’s increasing confusion and diminishing capabilities. In the scenes where his injuries — and painkillers — reduce him to a blithering crippled idiot he anticipates the climax of his first performance: “sans everything.” Having lost his craft, having lost his audience, Simon as Jaques tries to leap out of his role. He jumps off the stage, injuring himself but oddly creating a public appetite for watching him do a Spider Man Shakespeare again. In his fatal Lear he not only recovers his craft and his audience but manages to trump his earlier surprise. That would be anyone’s, not just an actor’s, triumphant exit.

The Two of Us (1967)

Claude Berri’s The Two of Us (1967) proves two critical axioms. (i) A period film is as much about the time it is made as the time it is set. Why else tell it now? The very best are also about the time they’re seen, even decades later. They tap into a continuing, profound truth that transcends the original incident. (ii) The most effective treatment of a large theme is a small, intimate story. Then an issue gets an emotional address in human terms, not abstractions.

(i) In 1967 Claude Berri described the loving relationship that develops around 1944 between an 8-year-old Jewish boy -- sent for refuge from occupied Paris to the countryside -- and Pepe, the antisemitic old man who hosts him. Pepe becomes the boy’s Gramps. As the old Petainiste spouts the cliches of French antisemitism he personifies a tradition that extends from the Dreyfuss Affair to the Nazi collaborators — and down to today, the recent slaughters in Paris and the government's detachment from Israel. As Berri taps a deep and resurgent vein in French culture his film feels as current now as it did in 1967.

(ii) This small humorous story illuminates the global tragedy of antisemitism, as large a topic as one can undertake. Little Victor is a charming miniature of The Jew. He’s bright enough to trounce the old man’s adult son at checkers — consistently. He’s disciplined enough to hide his Jewishness (his circumcision as well as his name) from the country folk. His attempts to fit in — courting a neighbour’s blonde daughter — end in his humiliation. A city schoolmate calls him a dirty Jew. The rural kids don’t know he’s Jewish but bully him anyway, for no reason other than they consider him an outsider. That’s the basis of the Jew’s perpetual persecution.
     But Victor also has the Jew’s indomitable spirit. In the city he gets into trouble by refusing to accept the inhibitions his frightened parents feel and try to impose. He won’t be intimidated or suppressed. He impishly probes old Pepe’s prejudice, urging him to spout the stereotype then charging the old man with the very qualities he declared Jewish. He calculates how to get to share the old couple’s bed the way he did his parents’.

The ending is poignant. After Liberation Pepe feels “the world has passed me by.” His beloved Petain is defeated and the nations he considers France’s enemies have won the war. His dear old dog has died, his son has turned against his politics and his authority, and now he loses the lad he has come to love. Pepe and his wife stand in the rain as the bus taking away Victor and his parents drives off, their faces against the back window. Pepe doesn’t have to reconsider his antisemitism in the light of his love for Victor. We know the boy loved him, despite that prejudice. He felt the old man’s love despite his words. Pepe has an emotional connection truer than the bigoted myth he believed.

     The film has a nostalgic feel, confirmed by the fact Director Berri gives young Victor his own family name: Langmann. The English title seems an improvement on the French original. “The Old Man and the Boy” suggests an outside perspective on the pair. “The Two of Us” speaks from within the two -- for either one. The English title emphasizes the connection, the French their difference. Sad to say, recent events suggest the world has not passed the old bigot by after all.

Cake

In Daniel Barnz's title and closing credits almost all the ‘A’s’ are lying down. That’s an emblem of heroine Claire who has been scarred and crippled by the loss of her young son and her own physical injuries in a car accident. She lies back when she’s driven by her housekeeper Sylvana, even when her posture leads to investigation at the Mexican-US border. Lying back makes her seem like she's in her coffin already. It also saves her from looking through the windshield, where she might relive the vision of that accident. Only at the end does Claire exert the will to sit up straight. The film shows the process by which she rises from her collapse. 

In the chronic pain management group Claire lacks the others’ emotional engagement and empathy. She alone refuses to risk an emotional engagement with the leader, when she portrays the recent suicide Nina. Claire alone refused to cry at the living Nina’s regret at not having made a birthday cake from scratch for her six-year-old son. Claire assumes her pain gives her the right to be a bitch or “the evil witch.” Expelled from the group, she works around to apologizing to the leader she’d abused. Her peace offering — a Costco vat of vodka — shows her new sense of the pain management group leader’s own problems. 

Claire works through her issues by becoming involved with the suicide. She imagines visits with Nina’s ghost, visits Nina’s widower Roy and meets their little son Casey.  After visiting the scene of Nina’s plunge she dreams of her own suicide. As she starts to relate to Roy and Nina Claire pulls out of herself and starts to care for others. When she’s visited by the repentant man who caused her loss Claire’s violent attack embarrasses her before Casey and Roy. That marks a turning point away from her self-absorption. She picks up a runaway girl, hires her to bake a cake from scratch — then lets her get away with the theft of her purse and cash. Finally Claire can feel for others.

Roy’s engagement with his son and his patience with Claire contrast to her self-concern. So too his balance, as when he says “I’m not bothered” whether or not the strange woman is a stalker. He pointedly does not take advantage of Claire when she needs to sleep chastely with him. As Sylvana notes, Claire’s self-concern drowns out any sense of her ex-husband Jason’s suffering.

In a potential suicide scene with Nina on the railway tracks, Claire finally manages to deal with her unearned guilt over her son’s death. “I was a good mother,” Nina’s ghost forces Claire to admit. The same scene triggers Sylvana’s overdue outburst at her employer’s selfishness. If Claire is the film’s subject and emotional center, Sylvana is the moral centre, an employee who knows her daughter is right about Claire’s stupidity, bitchiness and exploitative nature, but feels for her and stands by her nonetheless, until she sees the railway suicide attempt. With an unemployed husband, a disrespectful unwed nurse daughter and her own underpaid job Sylvana is a model for subordinating her own misery to others’.  She understands Claire's loss and confusion enough to retrieve the boxes of toys Claire gives the handyman.

     There’s a foreshadowing of Claire’s ultimate reform in the Tijuana lunch scene. Claire sees Sylvana embarrassed at her girlhood friends’ insulting attitude and rescues her by thanking her for the lunch and taking her off. The potential to feel and to feel for others has been in Claire, but stifled by her indulgence in grief and self concern. Until the actual cakes are mentioned or seen, the title is an emblem of her self-indulgent pain. For Claire the indulgence is initially negative, selfish grief, until her gifts to the runaway and Casey show her finally reaching out to feel and to care for others. The proper indulgence of cake is celebratory, generous and the enjoyment of life.

Unbroken

Louie Zamperini is not broken by an impressive range of challenges: vicious rejection as an Italian immigrant by his schoolmates, his lack of confidence, an unconditionally loving mother, a race competitor who tries to trip him, the interruption of his Olympics dream by WW II, a plane crash, 48 days floating in the ocean, the temptation to hog the chocolate ration, the temptation to despair, then torture in a Japanese POW camp, the chance to turn pampered turncoat. Any one of these could have ruined an ordinary mortal but Louie gets through them all. That's the immigrant American way.

The film uses a WW II survivor for a model lesson how to deal with current war. A period film is always about the time it’s made, as much as about the time it’s set. Otherwise, why tell THAT story now? It’s not named explicitly here, but the current war and temptation to submit is radical Islam -- which means "submission" -- and its intention to destroy Western Civilization and all its freedoms.  Louie’s repeated lesson — “If you can take it, you can make it.”— seems more heartening against the old Axis than against the new ISIS. As the evil commander knows, torturing a third party breaks the will of those who can take torture themselves. The rampant sacrifice of the innocent is what makes Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS so savage.

A postscript adds a second moral. When the war is over forgive your enemies. We’re told the real life Louie went back to Japan to make peace with bis captors — and was only refused by the camp commandant The Bird. Initially The Bird sees in Louie a kindred man of strength — and breaks down trying to break him. So the lesser man’s refusal later to make peace is predictable. We may expect to see the commander’s ceremonial suicide, but instead he skulks off to hide until he’s forgiven in a wider amnesty. 

The film’s most heartening shot is of the real 80-year-old Zamperini running with the torch at the later Tokyo Olympics. All things come to those who survive. Rocky goes to war.

     Director Angelina Jolie shows her chops in the most macho material, especially in the opening air battle, the crash and the drawn out suspense in the close-space raft scenes. But in narrative and thematic terms the film retreats from her masterful, more complex and astonishingly neglected earlier war film, In the Land of Blood and Honey (see my separate blog).

American Sniper

The debate over whether Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper is pro- or anti-war seems to miss the point. When civilization is threatened by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and especially ISIS that question does not arise the way it did over Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, and back to WW I. After 9/11 America unavoidably felt under attack and could not simply turn the other cheek or two. Eastwood’s point is rather the cost of the individual soldier’s duty in war, not whether it is currently necessary.

The film gives no sense of what cause the enemy may be promoting. The 9/11 attack and the subsequent guerrilla warfare are presented simply as a murderous threat to America, pitting lethal civilians, women and children against the US forces. After killing one child, Kyle is relieved not to have to kill another, who drops his rocket launcher in time.

Even as the film traces Chris Kyle’s growth into The Legend, America’s all-time greatest sniper, it limns his hardening as a human being and the war’s traumatic effect on his psyche. While his kids play, in front of a blank TV screen he hears a war movie going on in his head. He erupts at a playful family dog and when his infant daughter isn’t treated fast enough in the hospital. The sniper hero returns a time bomb. When he reluctantly visits the crippled vets their shattered limbs and prosthetics are emblems of his psychological damage. Though he manages to pull himself back into norrmalcy his murder by another troubled American veteran leaves Kyle still the example of the war’s damage to its heroes—and by implication the country’s failure adequately to provide for them. 

The opening shot is the classic war movie shot of an invincible tank crushing everything under its cogs: the war machine. Kyle’s story reminds us that wars are fought and won and suffered not by machines but people. The Legend is also a man, whose war doesn’t end when he gets home, whose wounds and even crippling aren’t necessarily physical. 

The epilogue shows how closely the film’s central couple resemble the originals and focuses on another war machine: the funeral cortege and Kyle’s real memorial in the Dallas football stadium. The imagery cuts two ways. It celebrates American patriotism and its hero. But the brightness and rah rah spirit ring hollow against the suffering we’ve seen the vets carry.   

The film works in a couple of old traditions. The collation of deer hunting and war recalls the metaphor for the loss of innocence at the heart of Michael Cimino’s 1978 Vietnam classic The Deer Hunter, as well as Norman Mailer’s 1967 hunting novella Why Are We In Vietnam? Here Kyle’s first kill — of a child and his mother — is paused for a flashback to his first kill as a hunter, shooting a deer with his father. Both are examples of his “losing his cherry.” He repeats the cycle by taking his son hunting between tours of duty. As the country boy who goes off to war as a champion shot he also recalls Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York (1941), a similar biopic without the psychological investigation and graphic suffering. Moving from the latter Howard Hawks film to this is like moving from Blake’s Songs of Innocence to Experience.

The film’s first key scene is the family dinner discussion where Kyle’s father divides people into three: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. “We protect our own,” he insists, warning his sons not to be either the sheep or the wolf, the victim or the predator, but to act as protector. As he hides his emotions,  the traumatized Kyle insists he feels less guilt about the people he killed than about the comrades he failed to protect. In his last encounter with his shell-shocked and disillusioned kid brother, we see how rare the successful protector is. 

     In the key later scene Kyle imperils his comrades by taking the long-shot to kill his enemy sharpshooter Moustapha. There his vanity may get the better of him. To confirm his own Legend against his rival perhaps here he shifts from sheepdog to wolf. Avenging his fallen comrade Biggles and knowing that Moustapha had US soldiers in his gunsight may not adequately justify the carnage that Kyle’s brilliant and successful shot caused. That’s the point where he realizes he’s ready to go home. In war even more than in peace the hero has to know when to quit.

The Italian (2005)

Andrey Kravchuk uses a six-year-old orphan’s quest to find his mother to project a corrupted, predatory and deracinated Russia. 

Little Vanya resists adoption by an Italian couple because he wants his mother to be able to find him. Against all odds he finds her. In an improbable happy ending, she takes him in and his friend Anton from the orphanage is sent to the Italian couple in his stead. Unlike his other friend’s desperate prostitute mother, who ends up a drunken suicide, Vanya’s mother has a home and a job as nurse, so she can now take care of him.

The film’s key theme is the predatory nature of everyone around Vanya. As an orphanage staff member reads from Kipling’s Jungle Book, Vanya is the Mowgli figure raised amid jungle beasts with an occasional kindness to remind him of what humanity should be. There's the girl who teaches him to read, the kindly first orphanage's caretaker, the occasional sympathetic stranger. But the good here is the individuals not groups.

In the orphanage the older boys have institutionalized their predation, with vicious beatings and the exploitation of the vulnerable. The girls are sent out as prostitutes and the young boys have to turn in their meagre carwash earnings. It’s a parody of the socialist community, as the girl who helps Vanya escape says the pooled money belongs to all of them so she could take it. It’s the empty form of socialism without the generous spirit. Though she virtuously teaches Vanya to read and tries to rescue him, her instincts are also predatory as she seeks to exploit anyone else she can. For all her criminality, the image of her in high heels, shot skirts, negotiating the winter ice is of fragile waifhood.

The toughs who rob and beat Vanya at the train tracks are an outlaw version of the orphanage’s young exploiters. They won’t give him any break but in the bones. The teenage gang that saves Vanya from the orphanage’s manager are a third group of semi-organized violence, hanging out bored, eager for a fight. The three groups of young people form an aimless, spiritless and needy generation with no values or purpose. That's a bleak vision of Russia’s future. 

The orphanage administration comprises three adults. Madam is a corrupt capitalist, obsessed with profiteering from the adoptions, happy to spread bribe money around to get her way. One colleague is a beaten man, rueful of his failed chance to have been a pilot. The other is a more aggressive brute, with a sexual interest in Madam, but Vanya wins his sympathy by slashing open his own arm in desperation. His beating by the gang may have eased his brutality towards Vanya.    

The title — Vanya’s new nickname at the orphanage — is ironic because the boy doesn’t want to leave cold wet Russia for the warmth of Italy. He wants his mother, who ultimately provides a warmth deeper than the climate.

The closing closeup on Vanya evokes the famous last shot in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. Where Jean-Pierre Leaud stares out on an empty sea, uncertain, here Vanya beams at his beautiful blonde mother and spells out the happy ending in a voiceover letter to friend Anton. 

     Against the bleak social landscape the film finds a surprising hope in the young star’s performance. His face and body provide emotional animation and he proves of increasing resourcefulness in making his way back through enemies and abusers to his maternal roots. In finding his mother he finds the old Mother Russia, an ideal lost amid the current corruption.

Imitation Game

Morten Tyldum intercuts two Alan Turing stories, which play variations on the title, The Imitation Game. 

The first, in 1951, has a cop interviewing the suspected Commie or gay. Turing sets this up as a game, where the interrogator is the judge asking questions and inferring from the answers who/what Turing is. Man or machine? A machine can’t think but can imitate the man who can. As Turing is human, unlike a machine he’s unpredictable and full of quirks, some debilitating, some empowering. But Turing can’t pull off his imitation of normalcy. When he’s defined as homosexual he chooses chemical castration over jail so he can continue work with his ur-computer, Christopher. He commits suicide within a year. Having failed to play the game of “normalcy” Turing loses. 

But he wins the major game, from 1939, when he leads a small group of cryptographers to crack the Germans’ Enigma machine and (spoiler alert) win WW II. This is a high-risk game but it’s still imitation. He invents a machine that will imitate and thus subvert Enigma. When Joan at the end summarizes the magnificence of Turing’s achievement— not just winning the war and saving millions of lives, but establishing the foundation of the electronic revolution — she is sadly bolstering the man already broken by the cruel state he so brilliantly served. By starting the later story first Tyldum introduces the tragic victim and then fills in the story of his heroic success — which renders his abuse all the more terrible.

Young Turing discovers the larger resonance of Enigma. To him everything human is enigmatic, a mystery he can’t understand. When his only school friend — and first love — Christopher introduces him to decrypting codes, Turing reflects on the everyday social codes he can never understand: “When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean.They say something else and you're expected to just know what they mean.” The young boy intuits this when he poignantly denies being close to his friend, who just died. This is the essence of all the misfit Turing comic scenes — e.g., the lads’ ambiguous invitation to lunch, his lessons from — and relationship with — the brilliant Joan, his interviews with the antagonistic Intelligence director, when he’s dragooned to abet a flirtation, etc.           Having saved his nation he’s shocked to discover the web of lies and hypocrisy that define British politics at the highest level. Honor is as fakable as  normalcy — if you’re unscrupulous enough. 

Of course Britain has a tradition of eccentricity and nonconformity — belied by its rigid social layering and prejudice. So Turing is the typical British hero, a stiff upper lip outcast chap whose solitude leads him to brilliant discovery. But he’s equally the victim of a society that punishes the outsider, that until only recently hounded to death tens of thousands of men whose sole crime was being gay. Men compelled to walk on the Wilde side.

The real Commie spy in the unit is played by Alan Leech, who is better known as the promoted socialist of Downton Abbey. Acting is the pervasive imitation game.
     For an exposure of the film's liberties with the truth see Christian Caryl, "Saving Alan Turing from His Friends," New York Review of Books, Feb 5/15.

The Treatment

There are two central themes in Hans Herbots's Belgian tres noir The Treatment: the need for closure (an important form of treatment) and misogyny.

Inspector Nick Cafmeyer's investigation of some pedophilic murders is driven by his own childhood experience. When he was nine his younger brother Bjorn was kidnapped and has not been heard from since. Nick is still harassed by Ivan Plettinckz, a suspect released for want of evidence. Nick’s obsession with solving Bjorn’s disappearance both advances and hinders his pursuit of the current killer. By solving the present crime and saving another child Nick finally puts behind him his unwarranted guilt for not having protected his brother. 

His chase of the killer brings him back to the physical site of Bjorn’s disappearance — the railway tracks — which is also the psychological site. The film begins and ends with shots of the two boys walking along those tracks, playing cowboys and indians, with cowboy Nick poking an arrow at Indian Bjorn. Within this image of innocence the theme is already the hunter and the hunted, reversible.

Plettinckz is himself in need of closure. He teases Nick with promises of information about Bjorn. His inability to leave Nick alone is as compulsive as Nick’s guilt. His last clue takes Nick to a buried box of videos of criminal pedophilia. He finally admits his guilt when, after sending Nick to dig up this buried past, he hangs himself. By initially withholding the criminal videos and by both attending and not reporting Plettinckz’s suicide Nick seriously compromises himself as an investigator. So, too, when he pulps the killer seeing Plettinckz’s laughing face. Nick's decision to move away finalizes his distancing from his past.

The killer inflicts an additional torment on his victims. Impotent, he forces the fathers to rape their little sons. Every attack spreads the trauma rendering those victims in need of perhaps an impossible closure. The impossibility of complete closure is also reflected when Bjorn (who is still alive so many years later) is left to die in a remote caravan, his “friend” Nancy in jail because of the videos Nick finally passed on. Having carried an unwarranted guilt about Bjorn for so long, now Nick is blessedly unaware his sending of Nancy to jail causes his brother's death. In the novel Nick finds Bjorn. The film’s solution avoids an improbable happy ending in this most noir of worlds. Not that Nick's discovery of the broken Bjorn would have been a "happy" ending for either.

As Nick “treats” his guilt by preventing recurrence of the crime, the killer “treats” his impotence by a sick misogyny. He blames a mysterious female hormone for weakening him and wards it off with his urine. Hence the urine pouring under the door at the victim mother in his last crime. Hence, too, his storage of his urine as a disinfectant. His theft of  (feminine, dangerous) milk sets Nick on his trail. The killer is a split personality. One self considers giving the police the pictures he found. The other believes himself to be a more evolved human being, hindered only by the weakening impact of woman. Of course fear of le petit mort and the vagina dentata is a terror as old as manhood itself. Here it’s displayed in psychopathic proportions.

     The themes converge in the urine. Urine is like the past, something we go through (or that goes through us) and that we properly leave behind. The villain’s storage of his urine is as debilitating as the hero’s storage of his guilt.
     The film's other resonant metaphor is the porn gang woman' Nancy's tattoo. The heart in a cage differently emblematizes each character. For  Nancy and Plettinckz it expresses a passion forbidden, jailed. For Nick it represents his love for his brother, which cages him still. Thus it also personifies Bjorn, the innocent kept prisoner first as a child and now as a damaged adult.
     Those exemplify the poetic resonance in this compelling, gripping trek through the darkest corners of our psyche.

Afterlife

The Afterlife here is the life the characters find not after their own death but after the death of the man who has tyrannicaly ruled this classically dysfunctional family. Director Virag Zomberacz denies any political context, declaring its psychological themes primary. 

The mother persists in her quiet service and devotion to her children, a boy and a younger adopted Roma girl, through their respective stress and humiliations.

The pastor’s sister is freed from her claim to have dedicated her life to her brother. Him gone, she expands her authority in the house. She advises the mother to send her children away. She starts an affair with the other local pastor, suffers through his embarrassment and abandonment, then impetuously runs off with him, just before he’s arrested for defrauding the church.

The son Mozes occupies the film’s centre. His name suggests one who leads his people out of slavery, but here it’s mainly himself. He has felt most thwarted of growth and self-realization. In his first appearance, as he is released from a psychiatric clinic, Mozes clings to the doctor not his father. The pastor admits he hasn’t met the boy’s needs. He says he’s happy to work out a new relationship with his son, but still turns off the lights as he leaves the boy’s bedroom, ending his reading. He respects his son’s new vegetarianism by slapping a thick slab of meat on his plate, which ends up puke in the wastepaper basket. The father’s way of letting his son make his own life is to drag him off fishing and announce he has “volunteered” him to go work in a leper colony.

The father’s death seems to pause nature. The fish he caught with Mozes refuses to die. The dove released at his funeral, intended to signify his soul’s flight to heaven, stays ground bound despite the pastor’s kicks. And as the auto mechanic/spiritualist advisor explains, Mozes is visited by his father’s ghost because something has yet to be finished. Given any son’s need to come to terms with his father the ghost probably embodies Mozes’s unpreparedness to give up his father yet.

Mozes tries to move into a fuller life despite the ghost’s inhibiting presence. He tries a folk dancing class but flees, feeling inadequate. He falls in with Angela, the young girl in rehab capitalizing on the church job and halfway house life his father arranged for her but that his successor has cancelled. By consigning the father’s ghost to the closet Mozes finally has sex with Angela, but she shortly dumps him for the fireman at the community center’s destruction.

Mozes has extended Angela’s stay by having her help him assume his father’s community service role. The father died while counselling an engaged couple. The groom was trying to proceed despite having found the bride deflowered by a buddhist. When Mozes resumes the counselling, he’s too late. The couple has married and the woman has already run off with the buddhist. It’s too late for the groom but Mozes still has time. In a major advance he asks his father “Can’t I do anything wrong without you telling me?”

Mozes’s greatest success, however ambivalent, is taking over his father’s direction of the Christmas pageant. Before it begins Mozes locks his little sister's bully in the closet, an act of familial support. So he has to play the Virgin Mary himself. As yet uninitiated by the unangelic Angela, Mozes might fit the traditional role — in the blue robe, lipstick — had he not added the graphic representation of Mary having sex with the invisible holy humping spirit and then sporting a huge pillowed pregnancy. When the nativity straw catches fire and burns down the community centre Mozes is not entirely to blame. But he is credited with having given the community its liveliest entertainment.  

The ghost is finally freed when Mozes is ready to stand alone. He refuses the other adults’ pressure to return to the clinic “to rest.” Instead he breaks out in the aggressive car-ride — which includes confronting the police, another domineering authority — at which he failed when his father was there. He gives the ghost the pleasure his father missed and the car this time holds together.

     Mozes’s empowering is paralleled by his little sister’s. She quietly suffers the father’s loss and the kids’ bullying. Mozes sends her away when she first seeks his comfort. But in the school pageant he has her soar above the others as the angel Gabriel. She later despatches the other pastor’s wounded dog with a rifle.

     After the dove finally flies off, with the father’s spirit, Mozes puts the stubborn fish out of his misery by returning him to the lake. Still inept, his rowboat leaves without an oar. But his father completely gone Mozes can expect some normal luck. An attractive young girl in her own rowboat draws up, presumably to return him to life’s adventures ashore. Mozes's life proper begins.

24 Days

Even if we set aside the reality of this film, it’s a compelling police procedural. 

In France a 24-year-old man set up by a honeypot, then kidnapped for ransom,. The family would pay what they can but the police don’t want to encourage further kidnapping. They prevent any publicity, fearing the kidnappers would kill the man once they know they’re involved. The police specialists enforce their strategy. Sometimes the family’s women fall out of line because their emotions are stronger, making them more vulnerable. Our best nature is our weakest; the brutes’ worst is their strength.

The negotiations drag on. The investigation is slowed by concerns for citizens’ privacy and by the absence of clues or any witnesses’ testimony. The police stop the head man for an identity check but have no reason to detain him. That scene probably provokes the indignation of every cinema audience in Western civilization. But we know the guy’s guilt because we saw the movie; the police haven’t so don’t. A possible arrest is bungled by another police division. That ends negotiations. The man is dumped in the countryside and set afire. He’s found near a highway but dies en route to the hospital. He had been brutally tortured for 24 days and not fed for 14. Finally a salesgirl coaxes a woman friend who knew of the operation to turn herself in. The culprits are arrested, convicted and jailed. 

It’s a thrilling suspense story, impeccably performed and produced. It raises the appropriate issues about kidnapping and ransom strategies, the victim family’s interest vs the public’s, the balance between a vigilant police and an intrusive one. Good film.

Then there’s the reality. It raises this genre thriller to a cultural document.

It’s the story of the 1986 abduction, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi by a Parisian Arab gang who targeted Jews because they supposedly have more money. A rabbi admits the community has paid some ransoms in the past, so the stratagem continues.

Still, Ilan was targeted because he was Jewish. His abductors’ antisemitism is clear in his torture. When the mother initially fears the Muslim abductors will repeat the Daniel Pearl story her husband assures her: “This is not Pakistan.” He proves wrong. 

The police refuse to acknowledge it as a race crime so stick to their normal ransom playbook. Because the victim is a Jew the shopgirl ignores the case. She could have saved his life. The race element could have engaged the entire Paris police force, not just the local division. Even after Ilan has been found and his horrible abuse noted, the chief prosecutor denies race was involved. Buckling under pressure the magistrate finally accepts antisemitism but only as an “aggravating” circumstance. A year later the mother has the body exhumed and moved to Jerusalem. His torturers would soon be released and she didn’t want them to find his grave in Paris where they could spit on it.

Clearly the French government wants to avoid any suggestion of a cultural war with Muslim radicals. They’re also embarrassed by the resurgence of French antisemitism, which seems higher now than at any point since the Nazi occupation. Otherwise how could they vote at the UN Security Council in favour of granting the Palestinians unilateral statehood and compelling the Jews to leave Judea, Sumeria and Jerusalem (all of which were clearly part of the promised Jewish state of Palestine), which would expose Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to short-range Hamas rockets. In France Muslim votes far outweigh the Jewish.

This denial of reality is not limited to the French. Ottawa insisted its recent jihadist attacks were just lunatic not terrorist, despite the jihadist rhetoric. North American campuses are rife with antisemitic rhetoric and violence that are excused as political discussion. What US  networks are showing the satiric cartoons that the current Paris slaughter is intended to punish? Muslim terrorists are winning by intimidation.

     When the gang leader is finally arrested in the Ivory Coast and extradited, his last words are “I’ll be back and I’ll kill you all.” The “I’ll be back” may be an angry but idle threat for him. But it’s true for the antisemitic bloodlust that has returned across Europe and North America and encourages the Palestinians to continue their 90-year-old plan to drive the Jews into the sea.

Today

Reza Mirkarimi’s film has a bifocal address, to her beleaguered Iranian compatriots and to the outside world. 

To us the film says Don’t believe the headlines. Iran is a society of people who can care for each other. We’re not callous murderers bent on world destruction but ordinary humans, capable of generosity and kindness. 

That’s the story of cabbie Youness. In a pre-title scene, he reveals his extraordinary integrity when he orders a corrupt lawyer out of his cab, forgoing the fare. 

At the end of his working day Youness picks up a woman, Siedighah, who’s pregnant, incoherent and beaten up. For her honor’s sake she doesn’t want the shame of going in alone, so he takes her in. He becomes increasingly involved in her case, even as he periodically checks in with his wife. He pays what the hospital requires. Out of integrity he disqualifies himself from insurance reimbursement. After the woman dies in delivery — from previous beatings — he steals her file — and takes her baby girl to raise.

Youness is silent. He says nothing to disabuse the hospital personnel of their assumption he is her husband — and beater. He quietly suffers their abuse — even when he’s knocked down by an angry doctor after his supposed wife’s death. This is the true Iranian, silent, generous, not the impression we get from the bellicose windy ayatollahs. We should avoid leaping to conclusions when we read what seem like obvious signs. Here the nuclear threat is reduced to a night guard’s joke: “Is it a centrifuge?” Youness is wounded, having apparently lost a leg in the Iraq war. 

To Iranians the film has another message. Like that crippled veteran the hospital has fallen from its glory days when its heavy use made it well funded and well equipped. Now it barely makes do. Patients with special needs have to be taken elsewhere. A poster reads “We need more midwives.”

There’s also the sense of a patriarchal sexist and cruel society that Iran needs to emend.  As the matron tells the apparent wife-beater, “Here is a paradise for men like you.” “You take better care of your car,” a guard says. Even when the matron has deduced he was only the woman’s cabbie she stays suspicious: “What’s in it for you?” She scolds a fill-in: “You let others not answer for their responsibility.” 

The matron herself seems to perpetuate the suppression of women. Her curt treatment of her little daughter contrasts to Youness’s warm exchange with the girl. He finds her numbed. She doesn’t like to do anything and goes nowhere. Clearly the society needs a massive effort to help itself. There’s an urgency in the film’s title: Today! 

They’re like the little bird that took a beakfull of water to put out a forest fire. But that also describes the tired cabbie’s reflexive engagement in a stranger’s life and his heroic generosity. He’s a fixer, whether it’s his broken side-mirror or the new baby’s life. But even the huge thing he does is small in the face of the nation’s internal problems.

Youness wanders into forbidden territory when he roams through the hospital storeroom. That provides his escape route when he again breaks the law to steal the file and child. When the laws are inhumane and restrictive justice lies in their violation. The government may reject that principle for its citizens but they advance it in world affairs.

The Farewell Party

The Farewell Party was probably the funniest film at this year’s Palm Springs film festival. It had to be. It’s about euthanasia. By making it equal parts farewell and party the comedy made the sombre reality bearable.

In an Israeli retirement home a modest inventor Yeheskel devises a machine to add a mortal combination to a hopeless patient’s IV. The delicate operation is done by a heavy combination of gears and chains that looks like it would raise a drawbridge. That’s a comic paradox akin to “mercy killing.”  He makes it for his old friend Max, who begs for release. The only doctor who will help is a vet, another resident.

Yeheskel and his accomplices do not take their enterprise lightly. At every step it’s a battle of conscience, to determine whether they're taking a life or saving it. It’s a fight between the law and justice. When the home’s administrator scolds them for an indecorous generosity, her piercing, personalized insults make their justice superior to her law. They’re also supported by an incidental news report, which features the daily traffic mortality count — an unsolved problem larger than mercy killing — and the story of an 80-year-old man who with no other alternative killed his suffering wife then himself.

Yeheskel’s wife Levana is at first the most strenuously opposed to the death machine. But as she slips into humiliating dementia she comes to crave it herself. At the first sign of that Yeheskel destroys his machine. He won’t use it on her. Or rather, for her. Then he remembers serving his beloved’s needs should trump his own, so he rebuilds it to let her die in comfort and dignity.

The framing story of one Zelda provides the religious context. In the first scene she gets ostensible phone calls from God, advising her to continue her treatments because there’s not yet a vacancy in heaven. At the end she lets on that she knew it was Yeheskel all along. When she gets his treatment it’s interrupted twice by power failures. She takes that as a sign from God and resolves to live on. Thus we contrive a higher power to direct us, i.e., to let us do what we want.

Even these modest saints remain human, too. The vet’s lover — who literally comes out of the closet — is venal enough secretly to collect a fee for the service. He’s banished from the group and the affair.

When Yeheskel gives his Levana the last “duckie kiss,” it’s what he gives his granddaughter. The characters’ playfulness expresses their essential childishness, a vestigial joy and innocence. As Levana tells the administrator, “Their bodies are old but they’re still children inside.” To their credit. Retired from work and responsibility they’re free to be young again however they can. That’s the last joy in life. So, too, the old veterinarian is still trying to find a way to tell his mother he’s gay.

The fall setting outside reminds us that death is just a part of the natural cycle. That continuity also impels the musical interlude where the dead join the living to sing about Neverland.

This marvellous film is required viewing for governments considering regulations to allow for assisted suicides. They all should be.

In Order of Disappearance

Every country lives by its particular myths, even its borrowed ones. The American myth of The West — pioneers and solitary lawmen bringing civilization to the wilds, turning the desert into a garden — is a story as quintessential as the Eden of Genesis, which it reverses. It has grown from national legend into archetype. Now it’s universal. So Norway can claim and tell it too. Hey, replace the vast desert with a cinemascope snowscape and it’s a Western — mutatis mutandis, as we used to say in Dodge.

When Nils Dickman (and yes, his name provokes those jokes) receives his Citizen of the Year award in the small community where he runs the vital huge snow blower, he even modestly admits to preserving “a patch of civilization” in the wild. When his son dies in an apparent overdose, Nils’s first impulse is suicide. But when the son’s friend reveals he was killed by a drug gang, and the police won’t investigate, the Centrist Party’s potential candidate wreaks his one-man vigilante justice.

The Western spirit pervades the film without horses and sagebrush. It’s the atmosphere. There are allusions to the modern vigilante sheriffs Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The characters have colourful nicknames. e.g., "The Chinese" is a Japanese Dane. The score features Morricone strings and a C & W ballad. Fargo is evoked in the landscape and the finale, where a flier falls into a kind of chipper. The snowblower leads a convoy like the old wagon train. 

The plot gives us a vengeful outsider restoring justice with his gun and noble steed (the snowblower, whose headlights give it the eyes and smile of a sinister face). He has a brother, a gangster who’s now going straight, the reversal of this ideal citizen now going virtuously amok. The hero is quiet and steely but brutally effective, like every Shane. Like Shane Nils attracts the innocent, as the villain’s kidnapped son snuggles up to him and asks “Do you know about the Stockholm Syndrome?” The kid is as self-aware as the film's genre is.

Nils finds himself caught between two drug-dealing gangs, with opposite leaders. The locals are run by a Dan Duryea type, a cackling psychotic of mood extremes and violent outbreaks. He’s a fop, with an opulent modernist mansion and lavish contemporary art, including a wall of Fischli and Weiss hand sculptures and a huge fractured horse painting. He calls himself The Count, dotes on his young son and is locked in torment with his divorcing wife. Like the classic moustache, his layered ponytail makes him a comic villain. The other gang is Old School Serbs led by a Dock Tobin type played with a rasp by Bruno Ganz and named Papa. He lives in a warehouse crammed with chandeliers and antiques like an Easterner’s mansion. He’s the Old Testament father — “a son for a son” — pitted against the modern Nils, a man of peace who can turn on the violence when necessary (e.g., to cleanse the temple). After the final gunfight at the snowplow corral the two old men ride off together, survivors of a war they didn’t want but fell into. The old guys survive like the myth they relived.

     The title comes from the formal device of marking each death with a memorial title, the character’s name and a burial cross. The repetition recalls the John Ford line, “plantin’ and a-prayin’, plantin’ and a-prayin’.” That’s how justice comes to the frontier, civilization to the desert — any frontier, any desert.

Eyes of a Thief

Sad to say, Eyes of a Thief is not a very accomplished film. The performances are uneven, with the worst the male lead who doesn’t act so much as pose. The plot is shallow and predictable. There is no layering of significance, nothing beyond the basic melodrama. We know immediately that the spirited Malak is the hero’s long lost daughter, that he will win over her foster mother and that the older man who wants to marry her will be exposed as a villain. Villainy, of course, is collaboration with the Israelis in their theft of the Palestinians’ water.

The latter argument is, of course, a well-disproven calumny, not that that matters in the Palestinians’  campaign against Israel’s existence. Along with: "All we want to do is plant our potatoes."
     But the film’s most serious lie is the total omission of any references to Islam or its aberrant terrorist extreme. Instead the hero is a Christian, indeed the heroic sniper who killed 11 Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in 2002. 

There are two problems here. One is why the villain thinks that information would demonize the Christian marksman among the Palestinians. The guy would be a hero. Two, Israel is the only guarantor of Christian freedom and life in the whole Middle East. Everywhere else Muslims are slaughtering Christians and conversions to Christianity and attacking their churches. As a historic film is as much about the time it’s made as the time it’s set (see Aristotle’s distinction between mere History and the more meaningful Fiction), this misrepresentation of the religious dynamic undermines the film.  It does the Palestinians no good in helping to perpetuate their present painful impasse.

Human Capital

The opening shots are high angle looking down first on post-festive detritus, then on the driveway of a lavish estate. Is this a bird’s eye view or that of the gods? Paolo Virzi’s drama is about a venal, godless society. Its opening perspective is the vulture’s.

The title phrase is explained in an end title. It’s the compensation calculation an insurance company makes for a dead person’s survivors, based on age, earning potential and emotional bonds. Until then it’s an implicit metaphor for the reduction of people to commodities, to be bought and sold, invested with and abandoned.

Across the social range the characters reveal a predatory humanity (if that were not a contradiction in terms). At the low end the impetuous young druggie Luca appears to have been exploited by his rough, seedy but ostensibly protective uncle. Luca took the rap on a drug possession charge. At the high end Giovanni Bernaschi lives opulently on his profits from a notoriously successful hedge fund. In the middle, a small real estate company owner and eternal patsy Dino wants a big score. Taking advantage of his daughter Serena’s relationship with Giovanni’s son Massimiliano, Dino coaxes him to let him invest 700,000 euros in the fund, all of which he borrows, reducing his business and risking his house as collateral.

Once he has hooked his prey Giovanni’s friendship with Dino oddly cools. Then two disasters strike.

The first disaster — for the hedge fund that thrives by selling short, counting on companies’ failures — is a surprisingly buoyant economy. Gino’s holding shrinks to 70,000 and his public psychologist wife announces she’s pregnant. Blessings can be afflictions. Then Massimiliano gets bombed at a party and his family’s SUV causes a fatal collision with a bicyclist. The hedge fund is threatened with bankruptcy and Massi seems set for jail. His only alibi is Serena’s insistence that she drove him home. A reduction in the Bernaschis’ social circle looms.  

Dino finds the truth on his daughter’s email. She’s covering for Luca, who driving back the SUV hit the cyclist. As any responsible father and citizen would do, Dino threatens to destroy this evidence and let Massimiliano carry the can to the can unless Giovanni pays 980,000 euros (his investment plus 40% profit) into Dino’s new Swiss account — and wife Carla Bernaschi gives Dino “a real kiss — on the mouth.” 

So everyone gets a happy ending — especially when (oh joy) the economy collapses and the short-selling hedge fund triumphs. There is no mention of the ordinary folk whose lives are ruined when the economy collapses. Even Luca, whose arrest curtails his suicide attempt, serves out his manslaughter sentence and has Serena waiting for him. 

The victims are as clear as the vultures. Wife Carla is a complicitous victim bird in her gilded cage, subject to her husband’s demands and exclusions. He promises to fund her resurrection of an old theatre, then sells it for condos instead. She’s again victimized when the theatre professor she makes her artistic director exploits her vulnerability for a one-night stand, then vituperates her for refusing to have an affair. Then she has to kiss the repulsive Dino, who starts out a victim then gloriously grows into a vulture, profiting from others’ tragedies. 

     The only solid characters are Dino’s partner and his daughter Serena. They by reflex and faithfully protect the victims they meet. Only they genuinely care for anyone but themselves.
      The original novel was set in Connecticut, but it translates well to Northern Italy. It probably would work as revealingly in any Western society and in the Chinese and Russian oligarchies, that is, anywhere in capitalism.

Behaviour

Alonso Ruiz Palacios's Behaviour may seem to be about classroom deportment — whether student or teacher — but it casts more interesting light on how Cuba should be conducting itself in its current transitional period.

When the elderly teacher Carmela becomes too engaged with the underprivileged students Yeni and Chala she runs athwart of the school authorities and is pressured to retire. When administrator Sonia suggests she has taught too long, Carmela asks whether she thinks the government has been in power too long. That would make the film seem reactionary, pro-Castro and opposed to change.

But there’s more to that picture. Yeni marks a classmate’s death by posting on the class bulletin board a Catholic card that he had given her. Sonia wants it removed because the government inspector would condemn the school for such a religious display. Carmela insists on leaving it till the girl is ready to remove it. She values the student’s emotional support over the government’s policy on religion. That suggests a change from tradition.

Sonia herself is presented as a woman of modern style, wealth, slickness, in short, perhaps a harbinger of the looming capitalism. Her values are efficiency and modernity, even if that disadvantages the school’s troubled charges. As she represents the incoming Cuba and Carmela the outgoing, then the film’s concern may be how to preserve the best of the old Cuba — its education, medicine, socialist ideals — while still admitting the new and progressive. Thus Carmela is supported by two former students now on staff, and a young black woman she trains to continue her values.

     The film also mobilizes the feminine sensitivity against traditional machismo. Yeni insists Chala dissociate himself from his mother’s partner Ignazio’s dog-fight business. She encourages the feminine sensitivity he shows with his pigeons. As a corrective she assigns him Jack London’s White Fang. Carmela insists Ignazio accept responsibility for both Chala and his druggie mother, significantly reducing the man’s swagger.
     As the school is obviously a microcosm of Cuba, Palacios is balancing social realism with some pointed reflections on how Cuba might preserve the best traditions and move away from the worst.

Beloved Sisters

Beloved Sisters is a Romantic epic about the failure of Romanticism. It needs its 138-minute sweep because it’s a love story that parallels the sweep of modern history.

From our current perspective Romanticism is splendid in literature, exhorting readers to huge ambitions, untrammelled individualism, unleashed emotions and the full embrace of nature. You can’t complain about a movement that gave us Schiller, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, John Lennon. But off the page and stage it can be bloody brutal. The Romantic ideals of the French Revolution soured into the anarchy, mob violence and slaughter that ensued. German Romanticism bred nationalism and we know how many lives that cost the world in 20th Century Europe and around the globe still today. 

The story of Schiller’s passionate affair with two sisters replays those inevitable schisms on the domestic plane. In the ironic title, the sisters start out beloved — by Schiller but more importantly by each other — then end up antagonists. Their dying mother tries to reconcile them, to more disputatious result. Their passionate triangle left several marriages in ruin, even if they remained apparently intact.  

     The girls take a roaring waterfall as the emblem of their anti-conventional wills. Though Schiller   can’t swim he saves a little girl from drowning in a tamer current, but he has to be saved by one of the sisters and warmed back to life by both. The scene proves prophetic because all three lovers fail to navigate the tumultuous current of their pledged manage a trois. Our emotions don't always prove servant to our will.
     Nice place to visit, Romanticism, but  it’s hard to live there. Our need for social order and responsibility and our variable feelings won’t accommodate it.

Two Days, One Night

Typical of a Dardennes brothers film, the central character valorously pursues a simple quest that proves character defining. Also, everything feels real, natural, unstaged, their remarkable artistry notable only in its emotional and intelligent effect.

The opening shot is  a close-up of Sandra asleep amid a barrage of coloured patterns. In the closing long shot she is walking away down a bright street, her confidence and self-worth restored, a figure of new agency instead of the company’s passive victim. There’s now a spirit in her step. The first shot shows her in herself, barely coming out of depression. The second places her in the outside world.  

Here’s the film’s central irony. The company makes solar cells. That is, a modern forward-looking company publicly intent upon saving the ecology has no concern for the individual lives of its workers. The new righteous capitalism is as heartless as the old. To the film’s credit, no-one here states “We workers have to unite against the heartless greedy bosses.” But that’s one subtext.

Sandra is about to return from sick leave. The bosses have given her unit a choice. If they vote to fire her each will get a 1,000 Euro bonus. The foreman’s suasion led to a 14-2 initial vote against her, but she and a friend have persuaded the boss to hold a second, secret ballot. Sandra has the weekend to persuade seven conversions. She falls one short. 

The workers’ responses reveal the hardship that the current economy and business practices force on workers. They all need the money, so few will serve her need. Few will stand up against the brutal choice the company has forced on them.  

Some of the responses are remarkable. The immigrant kids’ soccer coach cries in shame that he had voted against her. He remembers she saved his job by taking the blame for his accident. Another man cries when his need for the money prevents his doing what he knows he should. A man changes his mind after his hothead son knocks him out, furious that Sandra should be claiming their hard-earned bonus money. 

Another immigrant, on a limited term appointment, decides to support her, changes his mind when he realizes the foreman’s revenge would cost his extension, but ultimately votes for her. That helps her to refuse the company’s compromise offer. They would pay the bonus and lay her off now, then rehire her in place of one of the limited-term people. Rather than continue in the company’s unnecessary pressuring of its employees she walks away. 

To reach that growth Sandra has to overcome several problems. She feels emotionally exhausted. She doesn’t want her colleagues’ pity. She feels she is begging for their support. She dreads the work climate if they should lose their bonus for her to keep her job. Yet she needs the money, for her two children and to handle the mortgage she shares with her short-order cook partner. Her insecurity even leads her to doubt her partner’s love. Despair prompts her to a suicidal overdose, which she aborts when a worker comes over to support her. Indeed, she’s leaving her husband because he refused to let her support her.  

Two songs on the radio mark her growing spirit. The first her partner turns off to protect her spirit, but she turns on full blast: It’s All Over. The second the couple and new divorcee sing exuberantly together, Gloria. Sandra grows from resignation to glory.

     If the eight supporters provide some hope, more is offered by the children. They instinctively want to help, like her kids wanting to carry the pizzas and the little black girl wanting to escort her to see her father in the laundromat. People want to help each other, to work together, if only their bosses wouldn’t find profit in pitting them against each other.

Timbuktu

The opening montage establishes the targets of the religious fundamentalists who have taken over the Mali area. The first is life: men firing at a frightened gazelle are instructed “Don’t kill it; tire it.” The second is culture: they shoot up a row of African sculpture, especially blowing off heads and breasts. 

The local imam orders the soldiers out of his temple, preferring the jihad of prayer over that of weapons. Later he gently corrects the jihadists’ leader, pointing out their divergence from Muslim principles like fairness, humanity, leniency, a respect for life. That's a healthy distinction between Islam proper and the extremist aberration that unfortunately predominates today.

But the jihadists persist. A man gets 40 lashes for playing the verboten football. So the lads gather to play a game without a ball, with remarkable agreement on which shots are stopped and which score. A woman gets 80 lashes for being participating in a home musical evening. A woman is punished for not wearing gloves even though she’s selling fish. Women are ordered to wear socks in the market and men to roll up their pant legs. The jihadists are all in khaki and black, their faces usually hidden. The colours erupt and the faces bared in the bedouin’s tent and in the music scenes. 

That bedouin lives blissfully in the desert with his wife, daughter and a young herd-boy, the only family that has not yet fled the jihadists. He thinks they’re secure from their extremism and violence. A jihadist officer has designs on the man’s wife, so doesn’t help when the bedouin faces death for the accidental death of the fisherman who killed his pregnant cow (named, with a nod to modernity, GPS; when he loses his GPS he loses his bearings). The bedouin stands trial, fails to win the widow’s pardon and can’t pay the sharia court’s requirement of 40 cows blood money. That was the levy after he says he has only seven cows left. His wife dies with him in her rush to see him one last time. The film ends with the bedouin’s two children running, their family killed, Their helpless flight parallels the gazelle’s. They too will be profoundly tired if not killed, as the sharia marches righteously and murderously on.

As the blood levy demonstrates, the sharia court flexes mightily to serve its soldiers. A tortuous logic justifies why a soldier was allowed to steal away in the night and marry the girl her mother had refused him permission to marry. The officer lusting after the bedouin’s wife steals an elaborate private dance, apparently with voodoo roots, at the local madwoman’s. He even gets away with smoking.

     There are scenes of breathtaking beauty, in tragic contrast to the suffering of the people. The lusting officer pauses to machine gun a pudendal shrub amid the dunes. In a stunning long shot the bedouin moves through the lake away from the man he’s just killed, leaving his trail in the water as in the sand and in his now doomed life. After his gun goes off both men lie in the water, as if both are dead, which they effectively are as the bedouin faithfully accepts his plight as Allah’s will. The bedouin’s testimony is as movingly beautiful as the judge’s justice is venal. This film remarkably combines aesthetic beauty and moral indignation.

Speed Walking

Speed Walking is far different from director Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But it’s as engagingly and movingly told and it too deals with sexuality, its power and abuse. 

Fourteen-year-old Martin’s growth through the film can be summarized by the two framing songs: Love Hurts and This Is My Life.  As his confirmation takes him into manhood he plumbs the meaning of the cliches in the first song and adjusts to handle the last one’s sense of responsibilities and maturity. The plot traces his learning the truth of phrases he has only heard, like the first song title, puddle whacking, "my condolences," love, betrayal, and adulthood (aka adultery).

The film presents a pragmatic view of sexuality. The widowed father addresses his needs with the obliging hairdresser Mona. When Martin objects she passes her friend on to a prostitute in a nearby town. Another man offers condolences along with a bottle of scotch and some porn magazines, for “when you feel up to it again.” A close relative puts up with an abusive, unfaithful drunk husband, but quietly rebels (as in servicing Martin’s older brother). 

Martin also experiences his first sexual impulses. He feels drawn to both his male friend Kim and the pretty Kristine. She values Martin because only he did not tease her about her braces. She cautions him against “going too fast” just before naming him her boyfriend. Because Martin didn’t go fast enough Kim beats him out (instead of off).

The title reference to Martin’s sport is a metaphor for the difficulty of growing up. Speed walking is not running slow but walking fast. It’s a matter of balance, timing, restraint, control, stretch — like life. Visually it also includes an element of strut, style, so it gives Martin a ready outlet for his increasing confidence when his romance seems to be going well.

At the end Martin sets his life course by winning the speed walking race, which sets him up to compete in more ambitious contests. He’s comfortable with his two missed lovers, the alliteratively destined Kim and Kristine, jointly cheering him on.

The drunk Rolf said “Sometimes it doesn’t pay to get ahead of yourself.” That would be the walker who lapses into running.  

     The film movingly plays on the cycle of life. Martin’s mother dies but he doesn’t know that when he cycles past all the pitying neighbors, his indiscreet ghetto blaster warning Love Hurts. A pregnant teacher’s water breaks in the midst of her class on frying mackerel. The class wheel her to the principal’s office. Events happen with unsynchronized responses. Martin doesn’t fathom or react to his mother’s death until her burial, when he insists she’s still alive. Amidst the grief his grandmother berates his father for neglecting and forgetting his wife, oblivious to his suffering. That’s our life.

Gett

The explicit statement of Gett is clear: The Israeli justice system is completely patriarchal and of a smothering misogynous tradition. The 45,000 cases of women denied divorces typifies that.

The fictional Vivian Amsalem is put through a trial lasting over five years because her husband refuses to grant her a divorce (a gett). Even then the rabbinical court can only recommend he grant her one; they can’t impose it. A husband, of course, has no trouble unloading an unwanted wife.

As directors Ronit and Schlomi Elkabetz told the Palm Springs festival audience, they focused the film entirely on the courtroom because that is to what plaintiff Vivian’s life was reduced. There are no objective or director’s shots in the film; every shot is from a character’s perspective. This film is the third in a trilogy with the same actors/characters, that was initially based on their mother’s life but moved further away into this general social issue. 

The last shot is of bare feet in sandals leaving a room and a heavy black door slamming behind. Vivian is going back into the room where her Elisha will finally grant her gett on condition she will never be with another man. The shot suggests she is only entering another prison. As soon as the 15-year-old girl was married she began to feel she was in a prison. She suffered thirty years of marriage and bore three children before finally walking out. But the trial for a divorce only proved another prison. Now she enters a third, caged in the promise which her cruel but very religious husband exacted.

The judges are three old men, rabbis, old school, with no tolerance for the woman, her arguments, her emotions. They instinctively side with the husband and expect the wife’s traditional subservience to him. Even some of Vivian’s family witnesses side with him. The neighbour’s wife is so submissive to her husband that he stays and contributes to her testimony. Only when he leaves does she under cross-examination let slip his tyranny. In contrast, a brash woman only alienates the judges by the indecorum of her language and observations.

The divorce trial opens into two larger issues. Not just divorce but the entire Israeli social landscape is affected by the power of the orthodoxy. The rabbinical court’s sole authority over marriages and divorces is a powerful emblem of the larger problem, a secular state still throttled by religious orthodoxy. Hence the assault on women riding buses with the haredim, presuming to pray at the Wailing Wall, daring to take office in the outcast Reform movement. In short the Jewish orthodoxy is as inhumane and dangerous as the Moslem orthodoxy. In fact, the traditional misogyny is not limited to Israel or even most powerful there. It holds worse sway over the Arab nations around her.

     But the film has a larger address still. At one point Vivian says “It’s easy to blame the one who yells. Those who whisper venom are innocent.” Even in our more liberal societies women are seriously disadvantaged in marital matters. The genders are wired for us to expect the men to be rational, quiet, unemotional, and when their wives turn emotional, express their feelings, want to be heard and heeded, they’re dismissed as hysterical. This was the key issue in Vivian’s marriage. Her husband’s detached silence drove her to throw crockery at him. It’s apparent in the three judges’ anger and disdain at the two women who speak with emotion. We may have a better justice system but our marriages are rarely free of the dynamic targeted in Gett. Here divorces may be easier to get but mutual respect in marriage? Not that much.