The Trans Mitzvah

  Little bar mitzvahnik Ruben Singman comes by his first flush of flash honestly. His Buenos Aires parents — the Mosaic Aaron and Miriam — run a showy clothing store that deals in the whole range of upscale style from the elegant down to the athletic. That covers the waterfront. 

Father Aaron is Jewish/moral enough to pause over the propriety of declaring the gift registry and guest dress-style to advantage his store.

Ruben advances that integrity. While preparing for his bar mitzvah he wows his family with a splashy drag version of a Yiddish song. Chirribim. Its cheer and exuberance fade when he rejects his bar mitvzah. To be honest, he contends, that traditional recognition of the Jewish boy’s advent into manhood needs to declare her assertion as woman.  His parents refuse him her bat mitzvah, the initiation rite adapted for a girl. As if to please his father Ruben dons the sad male pale blue suit— but only to cancel the ceremony. Out of the blue he comes out.

A garish montage is our bridge to the adult Ruben — now the internationally famous Yiddish singer and dance phenom Mumy Singer.— played by the fabulous Penelope Guerrero. Get it? Singman sans the man? Now Mumy is what she is, as well as what she does. The real not the assigned. 

She sings that cheery bum song again, now with lavish male dancing accompaniment. As a performer she is now a success of Swiftian substance — that’s Taylor, not Jonathan. Mind you…..

In its energy Chirribim anticipates Mumy’s explanation of her Yiddish success: “I’ve transformed a lament into a party.” “The Kosher Diva” also has a handsome and understanding lover, Sergio. He quotes Lacan, a warning we may be in for some cultural anthropology here as well as all that song and dance. As Aaron warned us, “We’re a culture of symbolism.”

When Mumy brings her spectacular musical show home the song she so sells now, hopefully,  is the King David psalm Hinei ma tov. It luxuriates in the sense of community and warmth. The emotion proves short lived. She easilly reunites with older brother Edouardo. They instinctively fall into an elegant, detached dance across the Claridge Hotel entry hall, before their exuberant embrace. He is now suffering his own marriage’s breakup, his wife’s impatient spurring him to take some advantage of his sister, and his imminent separation from their children. 

Mumy's initially reluctant visit with her parents rekindles their lost warmth but with loss. Her father misses her concert because he is rushed to his deathbed. “This is the second time I’ve ruined your performance,” he quips. “I must need attention.” As her mother does later, Aaron fully accepts his “Mumy” and regrets his earlier rejection of her. He departs with the resonant “My chiquita.”

After her father’s funeral, Mumy's onstage performance of Henei ma tov turns rueful, elegiac. The party reverts to lament. Here Mumy loses her singing voice. It fades into the child Ruben’s voice that opened the film with the line: “Once upon a time there was a childhood. Everyone has one.’ To reconcile with that past child and its overtaking voice Mumy addresses her missed initiation into adulthood. 

But having a bat mitzvah now seems as false to her past as the bar mitzvah felt then. Nor can the rabbi they consult adjust his traditions to her character and needs.

And so — properly to fill the void left by her uncompleted initiation —  Mumy seeks spiritual guidance for a service more fitting for her person. Indeed the eponymous Trans Mitzvah. A service that bends to adjust to the individual beyond the binary of the bar and the bat.

As it happens, this transcendence finds its origin in the most prosaic point in the Singman store — in the safe behind the flash. Merchant Aaron had kept among his grey bookkeeping books an extensive file of Jewish esoterica, steeped in classic numerology, myth, legend, hope, the many archaic Jewish ways into transcendence. 

We’ve had an augur of this spirit. On his deathbed Aaron gave Mumy one of the two silent glass bells she had chosen as the bar mitzvah gift for guests. As Aaron points out now, our music comes from within us, not from any outside instrument. So, too, the two walkie-talkies the children had been given, sans batteries. Their instinctual understanding made the machinery unnecessary. 

So — the reluctant rabbi notwithstanding — has the modern climate changed since Ruben became Mumy that the adult “kids” get those redundant -- but obsolete so treasured -- toy batteries from an old friend. He is now in an openly gay marriage running a fancy wig-store. That store, incidentally, would equally serve the most Orthodox Jewesses as well as drag queens. Again, Judaism draws on a historic range of transcendent spirituality, sexuality, the power that validates and collectivizes individuality. Cue: the upbeat Hinei ma tov.

For Mumy’s climactic trans mitvzvah she and Aaron work through their father’s understanding, not away from him. His esoterica confirms Mumy’s old mentor’s spiritual direction from the gym floor to the family origin in Toledo, Spain. Mumy finally recovers her voice — in service to another young couple’s wedding, isolated in the desert. Her grabndfather echoes in the young shepherd’s citation of his old line, “Feel the merino. It’s the real thing.” This time there is an actual sheep. And in the film’s last shot — which repeats its first —the family store’s neon sign is emblazoned across the Spanish desert.

All this is magic? Special effects? No, not so special.

Not in this context. This is the reality of historic Judaism, a spirituality that drives deeper than social convention, even deeper than religious ritual, indeed deeper than any current reading of that long tradition. It makes convention whether societal or religious not the source of our soul music but the passive, malleable instrument by which to realize our individual own. Like those silent glass bells. Our music comes from within.

When Ruben rejects his bar mitzvah it’s because its form would deny what he is. His service would have been dishonest.  Mumy loses her voice when that gap grows too burdensome to bear. But as she tries to reconnect to her buried Ruben her bat mitzvah seems equally inappropriate. Neither pronoun fits. Mumy's division into two even now harkens back to Ruben's two aunts at the office, who seemed like one divided into two to get the work done. Now Mumy's work is reuniting her selves, as heard in her divided voices.

This film summons up a historic spirituality and openness in Judaism that legitimizes Mumy’s unconventional expression — discovery? — of faith. Fittingly, for that self-realization she has to leave Buenos Aires for the desert. Not Sinai, but her family desert, in Spain. We all carry our own and own people’s histories intact. If not always in tact. 

This is a remarkable film, both in itself and in its time. An unconventional Jew finds affirmation within the breadth of  historic Judaism, beyond but still impelling its current state of global challenge and persecution. Clearly director Daniel Burman is a force to be reckoned with, an artist worth looking forward to. 

Macbeth -- Ashland Oregon Shakespeare 2024

  The Ashland Macbeth was a powerful production especially on the intimate Bowman stage. What lead Kevin Kenerly may lack in bulk he more than made up for in intensity and nuance. Erica Sullivan was a flaming Lady M, sadly broken when the steed she spurred into action ran off without her.

Two details speak to the micro attention this brilliant company gives its texts. 

When Macbeth first takes his seat on the throne we note a telling touch. The top of the left side of the throne is broken off. The broken throne connotes a broken kingship, a broken order, a broken realm. And the king who has yet to realize he is as broken as the symbolic seat of his power. 

It’s easy to miss this on the black-on-black set but it’s there — a reminder of the scrupulous attention this company pays to detail.

If the devil is in the details so are the angels. The other: the mad ranting Lady Macbeth is visited by her concerned doctor. In a glaring anachronism he’s a tall officious man in a 1950s grey overcoat carrying his house call black leather bag. So wrong is so right. He’s the outsider figure of sanity, measure, awareness, discretion, frozen on the fringe of the medieval castle gone mad.  

There are at least two larger inflections in this production. The three weird sisters reappear whenever someone dies. That is, they physically embody the echoes of their predictions. 

I was irritated when their appearance enabled the freshly killed King Duncan (David Kelly) to metamorphose into the Porter. It dulled the dramatic leap from the murder to the — however thematically relevant — comedy. However, their later appearances left the impression of an afterlife, the eternity into which the witches were guiding the newly departed. The evil men do lives after them…. 

As in the Coriolanus production, this Macbeth also turned the wars into dance. If one motive was to amplify the battle register of a very small cast, the primary effect was to amplify the emotional power and the sheer physical beauty of the movements, both individual and en masse. The showdown with Macduff returned to the heavy-sword norm.  

Much Ado About Nothing -- Ashland Oregon Shakespeare, 2024

  The Ashland Much Ado About Nothing was a typically lavish, extravagant celebration on the Elizabethan (outdoor) stage. 

Its most notable twist was a number of original songs, with trio accompaniment, woven through the drama. That maintained the spirit of comedy however tragic the Claudio-Hero subplot shadows the drama. One repeated motif left the entire drama feeling like a dance. 

The most significant lyrical addition was the last. Where Shakespeare leaves the resurrected Hero speechless after her wedding to the remorseful Claudio, here she stands apart from the general festivity and sings a modern assertion of a woman’s independence. She can forgive Claudio for his public humiliation and rejection of her, she sings, but can she ever live with him?  

We’re left with that open ending, which is more contemporary in consciousness than Shakespeare’s patriarchal culture might have allowed. 

Or was that open ending his intention in not giving Hero a verbal response to her unfaithful lover’s distrust and apology? Thus the more modern ending is not incompatible with the bard’s but a fair extrapolation..

Amy Kim Waschke’s Beatrice is exuberantly comic. Jordan Barbour plays Benedick straighter, except for the same farcical extremity they both indulge in their respective, deceptive eavesdropping scenes. 

        However extreme the production’s farce, however, it only serves to heighten the dramatic force of the newly discovered lovers’ bonding scene, Beatrice’s command: “Kill Claudio.” And of course the tragic shadow of Hero’s ostensible death and resurrection.

The title declares the play’s rich focus on nothing, but also noting (declaring and especially eavesdropping) and no-thing, i.e. emasculation. The latter includes Claudio’s by his “ocular proof” of Hero’s sexual experience, Benedick’s by Beatrice’s superior wordplay, which bests him every time, and — in a comic replay of the central characters’ themes — Dogberry’s self-exposure by his pompous malapropisms. 

Paradoxically, Claudio’s over-articulate rejection of Hero and Beatrice’s relentless wit prove the characters’ undoing — or at least the obstruction of their self-discovery and happiness. But the heroes are saved and the villains exposed by the bumbling watch, especially the play’s outrageously incompetent speaker, Dogberry. Language here proves a false agency.

By the way, amidst the significance of the characters’ names, while Beatrice means provider of blessings and Benedick the blessed, the deflationary Dogberry connotes the berry of a dog, i.e., a turd. He embodies the bathos of a presumptuous language.

Oddly, Much Ado bears a striking similarity to Othello. Both feature a heroine of non-feminine assertiveness, the “fair warrior” Desdemona and the whip-smart Beatrice. Both involve a woman’s destruction through a convincing, false report. Remember, that “ocular proof” is what Othello demands — and Iago rigs to provide. The villainous Don John here shares Iago’s “motiveless malignity,” i.e., an evil that goes far beyond any given motive or explanation, and also the undetermined promise of a severe, perhaps unimaginable, punishment. Even beyond the Hero subplot, this comedy early approaches the territory of the tragic. 

Coriolanus: Ashland Oregon Shakespeare 2024

  After last year’s financial challenges it’s great to see the Ashland Shakespeare Festival back — and in first-rate form.     

        The rarely produced Coriolanus is a coproduction with the feminist Upstart Crow Collective and Play on Shakespeare. The latter provided a modern verse translation by Sean San Jose, which proved a quite acceptable stand-in for a Shakespeare text that for once conveys more energy than poetry.

        The former shrank the cast to eight woman/nonbinary performers who seamlessly explored the tragedy of a war hero both nurtured and destroyed by his mother’s living her warrior dream through him. Any fear that the violent text would be diminished by the casting quirk was immediately dispelled by the excellent performers and the poetic infusion of ritualized dance and war-choreography.

The gender casting actually serves the plot. Though Coriolanus is obviously the given tragic hero, a case could also be made to qualify his mother. Volumnia’s tragedy is that she was a woman denied the opportunity to become the heroic, suffering soldier she craved to be. So she fashioned her son into her sunken heartless warrior. That selfishness also leads her to coax him into his own eventual death. Casting women as every Everymen allowed the performers the liberty she craved. They’ve come a long way, baby.

In the event the gender issue didn’t really  arise. The characters registered as people. Jessika Williams was a powerful, strident Coriolanus, as “manly” as imaginable. The other performers provided a full range off civilian characters, gender irrelevant. 

The rarely-produced play immediately speaks to our present politic. The heroic warrior disdains of the common people and declares his purity in an unwillingness to pay any respect to them. Director Rosa Joshi emphasizes the matching corruption of the elected tribunes by a telling addition to the text. Having doled out miniscule portions of corn to the starving, raging populace, the tribunes steal the bulk of the bag for themselves. In this clash between the unwavering militant and the gullible civilians there is little absolute virtue.

The gender casting serves another theme as well, the implicit homoeroticism between the two central warriors. At times Coriolanus’s clash with Aufidius segues into the promise of love-making. War turns out to be yet another arena for obsessive dedication to another person — as well as to a cause or a nation. 

In a brilliant casting, one actor portrayed both Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia and his fatal antagonist Aufidius. (On our night, because of an injury the understudy Ava Bingo played both roles -- brilliantly!) This Coriolanus shows a less erotic connection to his wife than to his enemy soldier. That is the twisted essence of the warrior, a hatred intense enough to turn erotic.So, too,  Volumnia’s exulting in her son’s bloody success often turns sexual. 

Aptly, this intensely psychological politic was performed in the small black box theatre, feeding the intimacy. 

Not knowing the play, I was struck by its echoes of Antony and Cleopatra, which Shakespeare wrote at around the same time. In both a great Roman warrior is destroyed by an intense relationship with a woman. Antony is of course defined by his passion for the Egyptian queen, Coriolanus by his submission to his mother, first by her thrusting him into the suffering of war, then by her compelling him into a fatal peace. Both soldiers are ultimately doomed by softness. The play defined by love has a poetry missing from this more violent one.  But this production was an equally compelling experience in its own range.

The Makioka Sisters (1983)

  Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters is the Seven Samurai of domestic melodrama. The dense relationship between four Osaka sisters foregrounds themes of familial responsibility, personal identity, class tensions and the burbling conflicts at home and in the history beyond.         All this is played against two backgrounds. The more obvious is the beautiful cycle of the seasons, centered on the spectacular.time of blossoming. Here nature and the women are at one. The second is the historic background. The periodic references to events beyond the family drama culminate in the specific date of the film’s closure. 

    In the last scene the oldest sister accompanies her husband’s move for a promotion to Tokyo. But her reluctance has exposed a sinister streak in him. The spinster third sister Yukiko seems finally settled into a relationship with a handsome young aristocrat who promises to keep an eye on the wayward young fourth sister, Taeko, who is happily committed to a penurious bartender.

But. The family relationships are not as secure as they may seem. The oldest sister may find teeming Tokyo a less amenable setting than her rule in small and familiar Osaka. The second sister may be relieved by her domineering sister’s departure but with a lingering and sensitive responsibility towards the rebel youngest. 

The two younger sisters remain less secure. Yukiko is finally in love and properly engaged — but to a playboy of dubious stability.  Also, she has innocently captivated the second sister’s husband, leaving him bereft, bleary and open to infidelity. And how long will the wild Taeko stay contented with her cramped domestica?

One more shadow falls across the happy ending. Some seven months later comes Pearl Harbour. 

That is, just as the long saga of familial tensions appears to have been satisfactorily resolved, international hell breaks loose. Here is an epic drama about self-realization, aspiration, compromise, played out in one family in anticipation of its magnified replay around the globe.

This is a wonderful film.

Alex Edelman: Just Like Us

  The leap from the standard standup comedy special to Alex Edelman's Just for Us is like Shakespeare's advance upon the morality play. Colour it quantum.

The Broadway show comes to us on Netflix. Instead of running gags Edelman unfurls a multithreaded narrative. We know it's going to be personal from the first scene. Instead of opening on the Broadway stage it shows him in his dressing room, then follows his run down to the stage — where the performance conventionally begins. The entire drama will focus on this theme— the continuity between the performer's life and his performance. 

Or: how our life indeed is performance, routines that attempt to connect us to others. Conversely, the willful drives that separate us by our instincts and impede our stabs at understanding, at union.

Arguably the drama's core is the story of Koko, the gorilla taught to use sign language. Long after having met comedian Robin Williams, upon hearing of his death Koko signed an expression of grief. Edelman tells the story at the beginning of his… no, ‘routine,' won’t do… drama. He returns to it at  the end.

The Koko drama is the miracle of inter-species communication, especially through the Williams forte, comedy. Between the versions of that miracle Edelman dramatizes the failures in communication and connection within that apparently inferior species, the benighted human.

Obviously the main example of that gap is the neo-Nazi and the Jew. As Edelman develops the tension of the cell meeting that he crashed, he suggests a couple of possible reconciliations. One is his reflex fantasy of a relationship, even perhaps marriage, with the attractive woman, named — in her own cross-cultural ambition, Chelsea…. “You never know” ….But she ultimately orders him out. 

Also, as he finds himself sympathizing with his persecutors he finds himself even identifying with them — down to a fleeting fantasy of becoming their Klan leader.

But alas no such triumph over malice is humanly realistic. The best our hero can do to thwart this historic enemy is — to steal a piece from the hostess’s monster crossword puzzle.

  But he manages a larger triumph. From all his insecurities, all his vulnerabilities, he salvages —this performance! He wins his theatre audience with his shameless self-exposure. So he confides in us his autism. He recalls overhearing his mother’s remark to the doctor: “What do you mean, ‘He’s fine!’?” So too he tells us his jokes—that didn’t work! He has supplementary tensions with his brother the Olympian, with his father the Orthodox, essentially with life.

Finally, for all the centrality of his Jewishness the climactic counterpoint crops up in his comic memory of his family transcending their faith and identity. Tanks to the generosity of his mother towards a bereft Christian friend, in once celebrating Christmas they discover —through that conflct — the true meaning of that pagan festivity. It is mentschlichkeit. The concept as Jewish as Jesus. The Other is the hidden You.

One must also note perhaps the most dramatic element in Edelman's performance — his animal, possibly manic, energy. From his bounce down those stairs he does not stop moving. He runs, he jumps, he freezes in total-body pathos. 

There is no calm in his story, no peace. Just the commitment of the driven. The compulsive spirit of Robin Williams rides us again. And if he went for the comedy, we’re left with Koko’s pain.This performance lays bare the function of comic performance. Beyond amusement, its ambition is to establish harmony with the Other. That is work. Today that is vital.

Evil Does Not Exist

Od course i paid admission hoping there’s a guaranty.  (There isn’t.)

Evil does not exist. Nature exists. Mankind exists. What evil there is — or isn’t — lies strictly among those elements. 

But nature is nature. Outside the moral arena. The deer are timid, avoid humanity, but can be prompted to harsh reactions that may seem evil but — they’re natural. They are self-preserving reflexes not calculated actions. Even at its bloodiest nature remains innocent in its primitive stirrings. “Red in tooth and claw,” nature remains innocent of evil.

Not so humanity  — “man” as non-gendered. Man has moral awareness, moral responsibility, so there lurks and springs the evil. Evil does not exist — except in mankind. If there is any evil it is in man, not nature. 

That’s the point of the opening and closing scenes. They open with a lengthy meditative view up through tree-veined skies, exalted by the score. The first ends abruptly with little Hanna staring up at the skies. The end closes with her dead. As her handyman father, Takumi, bears off her corpse they disappear into the dark forest. They have returned to nature, dust to dust, leaf to leaf. 

        They achieve a greater non-materiality than the skeleton of the gut-shot fawn.

Not so the city slick. The former talent agent is now touting the corrupt company’s greedy plan to spoil the region and the village by developing a sophisticated camping site on the hill above them. The sewage like the water (and like modern corporate urban man) will inevitably run downhill. The moral antithesis to gravity.

At the meeting the company’s two PR touts fail to win the villagers trust. Instead, the two are genuinely moved to pressure their boss to remake the project. Sent back with a hollow pretence to compromise, they decide to convert to the village life. 

The woman is the likelier to succeed because she has a more realistic sense of herself. She survives her violent encounter with the greenery — a sliced palm, like another culture’s stigmata.

Not so the man, who is still seeking a role he can play in life. The marginal actor converted to talent agent. Now one happy stab at log-chopping persuades him to take an even more dramatic life change. 

But his instincts betray him. The climactic scene is harsh and elliptical. His and Takumi’s search for Hanna seems to have reached a happy conclusion. But then Hanna walks toward the majestic stag. Takumi hangs back, trusting to the deer’s natural gentleness. The city slicker panics and rushes to “save” her. That panics the deer, who fatally gores Hanna. 

Takumi, trying to restrain the hapless transplant, wrestles him to the ground, leaving him possibly dead. But he’s too late to save Hanna so he carries  her off, dissolving into the field. The city guy struggles back to life. 

        But then he stumbles and falls, even now unable to merge himself into nature. Dead or alive he hasn’t the self or sensitivity to be the “at one with nature” he deluded himself he could become. The loner in the human world remains isolated in the field. What life he may still muster is doomed by his guilt about Hanna. 

Arthur Newman (2012)

  This is director Dante Ariola’s dark psychological plumbing of the screwball comedy. You know, like Bringing Up Baby aka What’s Up Doc? Uptight white male hero meets freewheeling femme whacko and it’s love … at the end of the disastrous trail.

Here the laughs are light. This is a sombre examination of identities, how we find them, why we need them, how we’re both bound to them yet compelled to flee them. How we can/can’t recover one.

Wallace Avery starts with a shattered identity. He was a very promising amateur golfer but fell apart on the pro circuit. His golf identity eroded his function first as a husband and more hurtfully as a father. Now he’s a Fed Ex functionary with a one-way committed girlfriend. Cut off from his son, he created a room for him, a shrine the kid has never seen. The connection defines the distance between them.

When he can’t live up to his role as golfer, dad, lover, businessman, what does a guy do? Make himself a Newman (pause halfway thru). Arthur J., to be precise. Wallace fakes his death — by drowning, aptly, for a drama about immersions as self — and drives off to a casually promised job as a Terre Haute private golf course pro.

He’s barely on the road when he encounters Mike — a woman really named Charlotte, but you know how shifty identity can be. Clearly Arthur/Wallace and Mike/Charlotte have something in common and will hotly hit the sack before you can say QED.

Mike is introduced vandalizing her lover’s wife’s car, on some kind of bad trip. Gently concerned, Arthur takes her to the hospital and attends to her there. As they gradually adjust to each other their relationship continues but stiffly, with many jabs and no caresses. Turns out she’s fleeing an identity too. With a psychotic mother and a psychotic twin sister (the true “Mike”) , Charlotte is rootless, unfocused, driven, self-destructive.

        In a supporting theme the unconnected couple witness a diabetic man die at  bus station. Wallace tries to revive him. Mike steals his identification, so he dies as an Unknown. Our central couple take a siginificant step towards humanity when they look up the man's widow and deliver the news. More personally, this extremely odd couple stumble into a mode of relationship that will finally get them into bed. Ok, to intimacy. 

But it’s only through their respective shields. Their sex happens only when they role play. They follow strangers, study them, then enter their homes, assume their unwitting hosts’ clothes and identities and finally make the beast with two backs. Well, as they’re playing others it’s maybe four.They’re themselves only when they’re others so when they’re just themselves they can’t get it together.

Until the end. Even there the uniting is a separation. Both return to their abandoned identities because… well that’s who they are. It’s not like in the movies, where you can just play someone else when you feel like it.

Baby Reindeer

You could call Baby Reindeer the Meet Cute Romance on steroids. Or a new chapter in Psychopathology in Everyday Life. I’ll settle for a triple-threat introduction to genius. Richard Gadd wrote this series, directed it and stars as the failed standup comedian who discovers himself through a Wacko Other, the humongous Martha. That’s about as impressive a triple-threat intro as Orson’s Charlie.

In the beginning. The haggard Donny is a bartender who buys a needy woman a drink. He is then alternately tickled and tormented by her stalking him. What keeps him from firmly and finally shucking her is his own guilt/shame/insecurity that derives from his having been drugged and raped by a screenwriter who’d encouraged his hopes to crack the biz.

The stalker’s intrusion into Donny’s life and mind torpedo his romance with the lovely and generous trans, Terri. It also queers his relationship with his ex, Keeley, and her mother, who has let Donny live in her house until Martha’s violence turns threratening. 

The last scene finds Donny alone and miserable in a bar, sans Visa. He killed his standup career by spending his gig on a humiliating confession. That makes him a brief celebrity. But he has nothing and no-one. The handsome young barkeep pays for Donny’s drink.

Now, there is an ambiguous ending for you. Will Donny revive his sanity, hopes and remnants of self-respect by invading the bartender’s life as Martha did his? Will the stalked turn stalker? 

Or is this revelation the necessary step for Donny finally to understand his nemesis Martha and to embrace her, perhaps even romantically, as radically kindred? After all, it was his first intercourse with Martha that finally freed him to make love to Terri. There’s guilt in them that hills but also maybe hope for a prospector?

When he/we learn what her sobriquet Baby Reindeer means we see she is as damaged by a loveless childhood as he was. This couple lives second generation trauma. Martha’s parents always fought. Donny’s vulgar bullying brute of a father was only hiding from his own childhood abuse by a priest. Father and son finally embrace over their respective rapes. Emerging from those traumas, neither the round lawyer Martha nor the skeletal comedian Donny have an easy path to self-knoweldge and self-acceptance. But they’re mad enough to try.

This dense, tense, shocking melodrama ultimately addresses an unexpected corner of our own humanity. It’s remarkable. And in both Jessica Gunning and Richard Gadd gives us two amazing new stars. 

The Juniper Tree (2003)

  To my regret, I lost touch with the work of Quebec actor/director Micheline Lanctot after her wonderful Handyman (1980) and Sonatine (1984). Happily, a dvd sale just produced The Juniper Tree, which she wrote, edited and directed. She also provided the music. It’s a wonderful reunion.

Lanctot’s familiar theme of two sensitive souls meeting across obstacles of class and culture here gets an operatic rendition. The film opens with a poetic reverie — both in word and in abstract imagery — about the savagery of archetypal motherhood. It closes on an operatic summation. In between we get two very dramatic stories about families fractured by passions and loss. 

Lanctot intercuts a two-hand melodrama with an opulent fairytale production of a typically grim Grimm fairy tale. In the titular tale a stepmother beheads her rejected stepson and is eventually killed by the singing bird that has revived the boy’s spirit. A macabre story of fatal passions finds a happy miracle.

In the main plot a maddened mother drowns her two young sons and is saved from a motor suicide by a highway patrolman. But he is as riven as she is. He’s a reformed commune hippy who has found stability and purpose as a cop. But that career choice cost him his hippy wife and access to their two young sons. He deals with the maddened strange mother en route to visiting his sons to explain why he’s gone. The brief encounter compels him to transcend his professional legality. This is itself an ending of fairytale extremity. 

Leads Sylvie Drapeau and Frederick de Grandpre are unfortunately unknown to me, as I have drifted from Quebec cinema. But they are both excellent. 

Wonderful to see the artist Lanctot at her sustained peak.

The Monk and the Gun

  The moral of this charming fable is loud and clear: Our bellicose international politic has lost all sense of humanity, responsibility, sense, justice. Man’s ostensible progress has proved a disaster. Thus America, the democracy that leads the free world, is defined as “the land of Lincoln and JFK” — and by implication Robert K and MLK and all the other myriad martyrs to even domestic and playground gunshot.

Yet the film is also rich in subtleties. Its quiet narrative frame is Nature. Our young hero monk walks across a field of blowing grain in the first scene. In the last he walks away through an even richer field of flowers. There he leaves a dark lane in the field behind him. But that lane closes over as the flowers bend back. Nature survives man’s passage. It even erases his mark.

In the subplot a little girl’s lack of an eraser gets her a teacher’s scolding and torn papers, as she tries to emend an error with her hanky. The election officer gifts her an eraser but it’s returned because the girl sees the government has more need to correct their mistakes than she has. Out of the mouths of babes….

The child has also lost her playmates and friends because of her father’s choice of politician in the looming initial election. The effect of the “modern democracy” is to fragment the formerly harmonious society, down even to the level of family. The wife is torn between her mother’s politics and her husband’s.

Of course the film’s key “eraser” is the rifle, which the plot amplifies into AK-47s. The plot’s focus on rifles and their escalation sets us up for a conventional Hollywood shoot-em-up. But here the Ugly American is just a Meh American, commissioned to find and buy a rare antique rifle. 

When we expect the Lama wants his guns to shoot up the invading election system we expose our Hollywood mindset. No, this Lama comes to bury gunfire not to praise it. By the plot’s ironic twist, the American falls into step. Bhutan earns the happy ending in its new post-monarchical beginning — preferring peace and harmony over mortal ambition. 

The Unknown Woman

  This unflinching film about sex trafficking is as far from the sentimental nostalgia of the director’s Cinema Paradiso as you could imagine. 

“Hitchcockian thriller,” quoth NYT on the dvd jacket. Sure enough, it has The Master’s obsessive spiralling staircase, the jangling shrill violins and post-Frenzy sexual violence. The graphic sex has to be in that flashes of flashback format or it would be paralyzing.

Irena is a Ukrainian cleaner and maid in Rome. She’s, trying to keep tab on the affluent young couple that has adopted one of the nine babies she has been forced to bear (in 12 years of sexual exploitation). 

The film traces the horror and range of exploitation of women even in cell-phone contemporary Europe. At the mild end, to get the job she has to pay a percentage to the apartment manager who lands her work. That percentage rises to half to ward off his molestation (aka “I love you”).

Irena’s perils surpass any Paulines. To secure that job she has to paralyze the woman she has befriended to replace. The pimp she thought she despatched (and robbed) resurfaces more sadistic than ever, with murderous consequences. Even as she tries to toughen up her young charge Irena herself is propelled into unmotherly brutality. She’s violently mugged by two Santa Clauses! 

Yet Tornatore manages a happy ending. Irena comes out of prison to meet the girl she tended, thinking her her daughter. The girl is beautiful — but in a taut, non-binary way. Instead of the curves the pimps would peddle she’s all muscle and sinew, a warrior, her nursemaid’s protege prepared for the harsh world that almost destroyed Irena.