The Charmer

The Charmer is a poignant contribution to the European — indeed, Western — debate on the management of immigration. There are regulations, of course, but there are also basic human needs and aspirations those regulations should be humane enough to accommodate.

Iranian director Milad Alami worked with a Danish co-scriptwriter to detail the damage political systems do to normal human relationships, to reasonable needs and desires. 

Hero Esmail is a charming Iranian man who has come to Denmark in hopes of establishing residency. By day he works as a casual labourer with a moving company. He lives in a cheap tenement so he can send money back to his family. A familiar story.

He earns his (i.e., the film’s) title at night when he trawls the bar scene, picking up one-night stands that he hopes will quickly convert to the formal co-habitation that will satisfy the Danish government and secure his visitors’ status. He’s in one when we meet him, but he moved (“fell in love”) too fast for the woman’s comfort so she dumps him.

The opening scene is mysterious — a blonde woman’s suicide. We eventually learn she left her husband for Esmail. When he wouldn’t marry her she went back to him. After having sex with him she jumped out the window.

As Esmail learns from Lars, the stranger who joins him in the nightly hunt, his exoticism gives him an advantage over the Danish men. Lars’s function is to remind the charmer that his actions are not free from consequences. 

The script carefully frames out his and his family’s religion and any subversive political intentions. He simply wants to get his family a better life. That urge and innocence — and the specious terror it encounters — make this film equally pertinent to the theatre around America’s  Southern border.    

Now the spoiler: Lars is the suicide’s husband, embittered by his loss to what appears to be an unscrupulous exploiter of women. Also, Esmail can’t marry anyone in Denmark because he has a wife and two daughters in Iran, whom he hopes to resettle in Denmark once he establishes himself.

 The rigours of the immigration rules makes him use whatever he can to gain residency. The “charmer” might have been titled the “male prostitute.” Typical embarrassments occur, like neither party being able to bring the date home or a woman’s young son interrupting the act thinking Daddy’s home. The run of coarse love never did smooth true. 

Before we learn Esmail’s marital status we’re rooting for his success with the spirited, Westernized, modern Sara, an Iranian girl studying — unwillingly, “law” — in Denmark. She lives opulently with her mother in the Iranian expatriate community. When that community meet Esmail they reminisce glowingly about the country they fled — and sniff around for signs of his social status. Could he be Afhgani? 

Sara immediately twigs to Esmail’s predicament. “Don’t hit on my friends.”  Later, when she is falling for him: “I won’t marry you just so you can stay here.” But when she decides to marry him it’s for her own escape — from her famous mother — and the all-seeing all-judging portrait of her General father, who — whether living or dead — enabled their comfortable transplant. 

In the perverse morality of government regulation of lives, Esmail is doomed when he falls in love with Sara. “This is not how it was supposed to work.” He can’t just live with her and he can’t marry her so he returns home. 

He has open emotional reunions with his daughters and father-in-law. But there’s an apparently new abyss between him and his wife, who stands apart. “Will you still be my husband?” “If you let me.” The modesty in his response bears the hint of confession, regret, tentativeness, enough to cloud her eyes. To recover his life here he will need more than the charm that took him so far — yet nowhere — in Europe.

The character’s name obviously draws on two literary references. Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar, his first, is the patriarch of Islam. Melville’s Ishmael is part of — and our portal into — the madman Ahab’s pursuit of the great white whale in Moby Dick. Esmail derives from both, the questor from Melville neutralizing the religious threat from the Bible. Here the great white whale so many seek is the better life democracies have to offer the global oppressed. 
     The defeated Esmail passes his fine suit on to another man, a younger man, for him to deploy when he sells what he has in Europe in hopes of admission. For the exotic we fear is also the exotic we desire. Similarly, the harshness the immigrant faces is less than what he would leave behind.  

Dogman

The opening shot declares the film’s subject: a powerful raging vicious snarling white beast strains against the chain preventing his attack. 

That elemental topic can be read in the abstract — the existence of Evil in the world — or in human particulars, whether in the individual psyche, the social network or — dare one suggest? — the community of nations, especially today.

The dogman Marcello in a quietly heroic manner tries to clean the beast, to calm him, to cool him. The chain provides his only chance.

Meanwhile, a  community of dogs uniformly watch that drama, quiet, dignified, perhaps remembering that wildness once in themselves but now secure and peaceful in their separate cages. Perhaps feeling he still has something to prove, a little chihuahua yips a scolding. 

Marcello works his small career — grooming, healing, tending dogs — to sustain his modest life and provide exciting holidays for his young-teen daughter, on the holidays his Ex allows. Their deep-sea diving is a metaphor for his sunken hopes, virtues, away from his dusty village life.

How good is Marcello? He’s bullied into playing getaway driver on a two-man burglary. He’s given a few modest jewels as his “share.” When one of the thugs gloats that he left the victims’ yapping dog in the freezer Marcello actually goes back, climbs into the house — and revives the almost dead pooch. 

Of course, we expect him to be arrested there and left to carry the can. But that will only happen later. His doom is too preordained to happen early.

In the opening scene Marcello works his civilizing magic on this white beast. He’s not so lucky or effective with the village bully, Simone, a hulking cocaine-addicted ex-boxer who terrorizes the community. As Marcello flatters him, when Simone beat up two Romanians it took 10 cops to restrain him.  

As in Billy Budd, here an incredibly innocent hero confronts an elemental villainy — and must be sacrificed. The extremities of absolutes and the rule of law allow no compromise.  

But — spoiler alert — there are differences. Marcello is innocent enough to believe he can survive contact with evil, even abetting it. He provides the brute Simone with cocaine, despite his irregular payment, even despite his ignoring Marcello’s pleas not to take it during the daughter’s visit. 

He enjoys some rewards from abetting evil, like his coke-driven night at the disco. This compromises him enough that when Simone is gunned down in the street Marcello exhausts himself to save his life. His reward is to become even more profoundly Simone’s patsy.

The shooting was clearly on contract. Marcello’s besieged community of merchants met to discuss how to handle their common threat. A contract killing was considered, but without unanimous support.  

Marcello enjoys that community. He eats with them, jokes with them, plays football with them. “They all like me,” he futilely pleads, against Simone’s coercion to betray his neighbour jeweller. 

Simone forces Marcello to enable his robbery. He promises to make him rich. Marcello suffers a year in jail rather than squeal on his bully. We don’t see what he suffers in jail but we see he emerges changed. 

Certainly his station has. His daughter and pet dog are happy to see him but to his neighbours he is a pariah. He is banished their games and their bar. 

Now Marcello is operating on irrational instincts. When Simone refuses to pay for Marcello’s prison time, he batters Simone’s motorcycle. Not a wise move, for he can’t support that rage. Simone beats him up even worse than before. That turns the worm.

Marcello used to talk to his dogs as if they were people, sweeties to be wooed. Now he treats Simone like a dog: flattering him, baiting him with coke, luring him into a cage, then locking and chaining him up. 

What he wants is unclear. As if to recover a dignity he never had he requires an apology. He wants his sacrifice recognized and rewarded. At one point Marcello and Simone seem locked in a mutual death-grip. In effect, Marcello only appears to escape.

After killing Simone, Marcello abandons his plan to burn the corpse. Instead he lugs it to the football field — in deluded hopes of winning back his friends.  But they’re not there.
     In the last shot Marcello sits alone, the corpse on the ground, in the crudely patterned field, having achieved his personal revenge —but at the inevitable cost of his freedom. Where the title initially referred to a man who cares for dogs it ends up with a man reduced to one. As Billy found and accepted, the pack won’t readmit its maverick. 

Before the Frost

This harsh, elemental story dramatizes a Danish freeholder farmer’s hard-scrabble struggle to survive in 1850s Denmark. “Before the frost” ends up meaning the urgency man  has to prove himself as he approaches the big chill, death. That moral imperative shadows all his worldly drives.

Cow Jensen (named for his deft hand with cows) lives in constant urgency. At the beginning he rushes to complete the harvest. Then he rushes to bring in the hay before the rains rot it. 

Add the vertical urgency to maintain his social status. After he’s forced to sell his cow Merna to feed his family, the church deacon — who represents the civil as well as religious law and order here — moves him back a pew in church, because of his reduction in possessions and status. 

Jensen is a widower, responsible for his blossoming daughter Signe and two young nephews, Peder (about17) and Mads (about 6). As his crops fail and his resources and prospects dwindle, he negotiates Signe’s marriage to Ole, the neighbour’s strapping young son Signe likes. That procures a new cow and a share of Ole’s father’s pension. But it fails to secure his nephews’ future, so Jensen looks beyond.

The rich Swede Gustav wants to buy a swamp portion of Jensen’s land to cash in on the new “white gold,” sugar beets. Mads and Peder have never tasted sugar. Jensen initially rejects the offer because he needs the land to feed his cows. To Gustav’s manager, Jensen’s rejection of the deal shows he knows more about cows than about business. 

Jensen proves otherwise when he breaks his deal with Ole and proposes a sweeping sale to Gustav: all the land, the cattle, the barn home, but also responsibility for Jensen, his nephew labourers — and marriage to Signe. 

The deal closes with a shady rider: the old home will have to be burned completely and the hefty insurance payment turned over to Gustasv. The family moves in with Gustav to prepare for the wedding. The boys get their own sparse rooms. Signe learns to play a classical piece on the piano, a step up from helping her father deliver cows. Jensen gets to wield authority over the workers. But this family doesn’t name its cows. 

The story shows the way one dirties one’s hand in getting ahead in life. Arguably Jensen’s hands are never cleaner than they are when he shoves an arm up a cow to help deliver a new calf. After he washes that one up, he sinks into the swampy trenches of social advancement. 

  In the final scene the severely soiled old farmer is dressed more finely, boasts a better seat in the church — ostensibly closer to the alter, deacon and God — and he’s the happy father dancing with his beautiful well-dressed wife at her wedding. Signe radiates joy, transformed by her new station and life. 

      But Jensen’s face is a freeze of moral paralysis. The feet are bouncing but the face is stern. His ambition, proper for a father, has severely compromised his soul. Gustav’s prim and stately mother puts a gloss on the murderous consequences of Jensen’s deeds: “The things we do for our children.”  

The Summit (2017)

The central metaphor of Argentine director Santiago Mitre’s political thriller is a montage of four aerial views of a long winding mountain road. As viewed from above the road seems flat, like a tapeworm winding back and forth on the surface. 

That surface is deceptive. On the ground the road winds dramatically up a mountain and it winds down that mountain. It’s a tortuous deception that — to hijack Polonious — by indirection finds direction out. The metaphor works on both the political and psychological levels. In both, an apparently flat surface may conceal profound hidden depths and unsuspected rises.

Politically there are several tortuous paths exposed. Argentinian President Blanco is a provincial mayor that a radio commentator dismisses as “invisible” and ineffectual. He will prove hapless on the imminent international stage. His presidential campaign played on his eponymous whiteness, his virtue and innocence. But the plunging winding road of his political exposure here reveals a politician as worldly, self-serving and corrupt as the others. That white proves foul. 

At the summit the South American countries gather at a Chilean mountaintop to formalize a plan to create a multi-state oil production company. The fraternal or communal pretence is initially a veneer over the Brazilian president’s imperial ambition. The long and winding road digs deeper to expose the other state heads’ conniving and reciprocal betrayals. 

The given intention is to escape American domination. But as the road deepens Blanco submits to a covert American plan. Christian Slater plays the deliciously slimy American agent. Blanco will pretend to oppose the applications from America and from the Central American countries to join the group. But the latter’s eventual admission will pave the way for America’s eventual entry as well. 

Proving the countries are — in one head’s argument — neighbours not brothers, Blanco will sell his fellows out for a secret bribe of six million yankee greenbacks  deposited in a secret Bahamas bank account. 

  In an early scene Blanco refuses to discuss a colleague’s proposal unless he stops using the term “gringo.” What seems like political sensitivity prefigures his sellout. Similarly, upon landing he walks briskly past a dark-haired beauty — who is then revealed to be his impatiently waiting mistress. The still-water hero runs deep — and turgid.

The psychological descent is dramatized in Blanco’s daughter Marina’s breakdown, which proceeds from marital to mental. Her name evokes the innocent, beguiled daughter of the omnipotent Prospero in The Tempest. 

 Marina’s lover has left her and threatens to expose her father’s corrupt past. On the eve of the summit Blanco’s “people” (i.e., staff, henchmen, hand-dirtiers, etc) resolve to deal with this danger so that it won’t upset the important meeting. The deep murk won’t reach the summit. As the main business proceeds on the mountain top, that threat is disposed of in the marketplace. It’s a “stroke” likely of covert action. Despite the public and medical explanations, Marina is certain her lover’s fatal stroke is attributable to her “assassin” father. 

Her breakdown may be triggered by her lover’s leaving, but it’s rooted in her profound suspicion about her father. Under hypnosis she “remembers” a trauma that may or may not have happened to her. Blanco denies it. She may have heard a rumour and embraced it as experience: her father’s arson attack on a neighbour, her loss of a horse she never had. When Blanco pauses roadside, sees three wild horses grazing below, and impulsively leaves without his attendant minister, he acts like he’s seen Banquo’s ghost. Marina’s fantasy may bear truth. 

The stifling atmosphere she addresses by throwing a chair through the hotel window represents the terror of a woman discovering her father is far more and even farther less than he seems. White is the colour of death as well as emptiness.