The Auction

  In Sebastien Pilote’s The Auction, the aging sheep farmer’s daughter Frederique (Sophie Desmarais) may be playing Cordelia on a Montreal stage but her father is an anti-Lear. 

Farmer Gaby Gagnon (Gabriel Arcand), his advancing age reflected in the orange sunsets and autumn landscapes, divests himself of his modest “empire” not out of vanity, selfishness, and the desire to keep only the trappings of power, but out of a genuine devotion to his two daughters. Despite their callousness towards him and their known manipulation he gives up everything he has for them. Lear wants to keep taking. But for Gaby, “A father needs to give to be happy.”

At the end Frederique has a sense of his sacrifice but the primary beneficiary, the spoiled Marie (Lucie Laurier), remains blissfully unaware of how much her father has given up for her convenience. 
     The farmer’s trade in sheep gives his farming a Christian reference, which is bolstered when some black Moslems buy a sheep for a sacrifice and feast on his farm. Though Gaby seems to be living for the wide open spaces of his rolling acreage his world is constantly defined by fences and pens. That’s the extent of the good father’s freedom.

Unforgiven (2013, Japanese)

I didn’t think I’d say this but Sang-il Lee’s Unforgiven is at least as good as Clint Eastwood’s 1992 classic. With the same general characters and plot, the remake adds some stunning visuals. The archetypal white horse dead in the snow is as powerful an image of nihilism as we’ll ever see. That’s rhymed later by the white bottle of horse-manure hooch that the reformed and now relapsed killer Jubei drains and tosses to the snow and his old war-mate (the Morgan Freeman sub) tortured, killed then left in the frost.   

The film makes witty nods to the original, like giving the replacement of Richard Harris’ dandy a black bowler hat. A thin, overly buttoned character replaces Saul Rubinek’s pulp writer but he remains an opportunistic coward. 

The Japanese setting — 1880s Hakkaido — makes for some crucial differences. The violence is ratcheted up significantly both because of the gore endemic to Samurai swordplay and from the cataclysmic destruction that the nation’s atomic bombings have stamped on the cultural psyche. 

The film also adds the bitter tribal tension between the privileged Wa and the persecuted Ainu. Jubei has a scene with his Ainu father-in-law who regrets that his grandchildren aren’t learning the language. The remake also makes the swaggering young pretend-killer an Ainu. His itch, cockiness and teary admission of humble origins recall the Mifune character in The Seven Samurai. 

Where Eastwood closed on the possibility that his Will Munny took his children to a merchant’s life in San Francisco, here we get no hint of Jubei’s future. Instead he sends the Ainu kid and the scarred whore to his farm, with the reward money. The suggestion is that with his reversion to his old killer self he no longer deserves to serve his wife’s memory and to father his children. With the reward and the children he gives the young killer and the woman their chance for redemption. She removes herself from the prostitute’s shame and hunger for vengeance, he from the wrong-headed attraction to macho killing.This is a harder moral position than the original, in keeping with the Japanese code of honour.  
     Eastwood’s film brilliantly questioned his own persona’s career of film violence. The Japanese context provides a parallel twist. As it dramatizes the inescapable cycle of violence the film could be read as an argument against Japan’s re-militarizing.   

Salvo

Salvo, written and directed by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, is a harsh, sombre drama of existential self-discovery. In its long wordless scenes and its omission of any music not sourced in the scene it’s bleak, gripping, a work of atmosphere rather than articulated point. This is the artsiest Noir I can remember.

One key lies in the hero’s name. Salvo (Saleh Bakri) is a round of ammunition, a tool or instrument, but he turns into a responsible human individual when he transcends his role as bodyguard and hit man. As in the Camusian ethic, the muscular enigma has no self other than what we infer from his action. 

The film’s first two tours de force establish the hero’s potential development. The first is his defence of his boss against another gangster’s attack. That violent action is followed by the long suspenseful scene in the assailant boss’s house, where Salvo haunts the enemy’s blind sister Rita (Sara Serraiocco). Ironically, the blind girl can still count out money to allot as payouts.

Salvo kills and buries the gangster but saves and hides the blind woman. That’s when he begins to redefine himself. He realizes that he and his cohort “live their lives like a rat’s.” He tells his boss he killed her but he secures her in an abandoned industrial wreck and brings her food. After violently repelling him and his aid she comes to accept him, when she realizes his help has endangered him with his gang.

As Rita unwittingly softens Salvo he brings his howling dog in from the outside and declines his solitary formal meals to join his dry-cleaner/landlord over tins of tuna in the kitchen. He leaves his room to sleep on his paid hosts’ sofa. He beats up a colleague for disdaining the radio music Salvo associates with Rita. Ultimately he dies to give her a new life.
     When Rita realizes Salvo’s sacrifice for her, her lost sight apparently returns. Her eyes move together and her tics are gone. Here realism gives way to theme. His new insight and broader vision than his own survival seem to spread to her. She is no longer blind to his/her/their value and to life. It doesn’t make sense neurologically but it does as presiding metaphor.   

Transit

Hannah Espia’s Transit is a heart-rending story of Phillipine workers in Israel forced to hide their children for fear of their deportation.
One narrative strategy at first appears to be a redundancy in editing. A scene we’ve seen  is repeated, usually with a little more information. This occurs frequently, as the narrative provides the different perspectives of five characters, climaxing with the threatened four-year-old boy’s. This device has at least two thematic effects. It dramatizes the inter-weaving of different characters’ lives. Society is a web of such intersections, which means a single person’s predicament can affect many others. Hence Janet’s criticism of daughter Yael’s irresponsibility. Ironically, little Joshua is deported not as a result of Yael’s selfishness but because the boy rushes out to get help for his father’s ailing Jewish employer. Joshua's new toy plane, a gift from the old man, is both a boundless joy in its promise of soaring freedom and an omen of his deportation. 
Also, the device validates the individual experience over any abstract principle. An incident can mean quite different things to each of its participants. As in the different versions of the Janet-Yael confrontation, we get a different emotional settling in the two perspectives. Our next step is to read the abstract law not as a principle but as a harsh intrusion into individual lives.
While the film clearly criticizes the Israeli government’s policy to deport immigrant children under five years old, the film works as a kind of love song to that nation. The immigrants clearly find a life, freedom and opportunity there. Some like Yael come to feel primarily Israeli. Some like Joshua even want to become Jews. Unlike much criticism of Israel, this film targets a government policy but endorses the culture and opportunities the nation provides. 
     The film might have taken a small step further — providing at least some rationale for the government’s policy. After all, Israel is not the only country wary about its intake of immigrants. And Israel uniquely faces threats -- internal as well as from its surrounding neighbours -- to its very existence. Tthe film does grant that the harsh policy has been softened with some exceptions, but the mass of immigrant labourers still feel compelled to hide their children.
As little Joshua is deported and his father Moises is permitted to stay and work in Israel, the film plays a reversal on the Biblical forebears. Moises can return to the promised land, which Moses I  was denied. But where the Biblical Joshua led his people into the promised land this little Joshua is deported to the Phillipines — even though he was born in Israel, speaks Hebrew fluently and can recite at least the first lines of his father’s boss’s bar mitzvah Torah reading. The reversal of the Biblical names’ signification recalls Israel’s mission to  provide a home for the homeless, a haven for the persecuted -- but what should be done when that openness runs up against the threat to the unique character of the one Jewish state?

Yozgat Blues

Mahmut Fazil Coskun’s Yozgat Blues is about a paradox — a singer who can’t express his emotions. Ercan Kesal (actually a physician, not an actor) stars as Yavuz, an aging performer of French chansons who is drawn to his new backup singer, Nese (stage actress Acya Damgaci), but fails to express himself. She even has to suggest he take her as a vocalist.

A generous man, Yavuz takes her to the unromantic remote city Yozgat to help out an old friend only to find he’s not getting paid and even has to pick up the hotel tab. That's how all the music turns into the blues. He continues to perform for free, even sells his instrument and car, in order to keep working with Nese. But she accepts the proposal of another lonely soul, Yavuz's barber Sabri (Tansu Bicer) whom she advises on setting up his own hairdressing salon. The barber is sensitive to her needs, advising her on her hair and skin problems. Yavuz can only say “Red is a good colour for the stage,” not “Red is a good colour on you.” Sabri lives with his granny but is actively trying to find a life mate.

Nese also proves a muse for the married radio poet, who more openly promotes her. When she sings with Yavuz, she’s in the foreground but he commands the sharp focus.  Singing with the poet she’s again in the foreground but now she has the sharp focus. The parallel contrasts the men’s respective attitudes toward her. 

Yavuz’s one French song is about the Indian Summer of life, the last fading spirit and energy. He shows no emotion at his father’s death, which opens the film, but he uses that death to cover his grief at losing Nese at the end.That loss forces him into an emotional experience he has thus far avoided in life. In the last shot Yavuz is still too frozen to respond to the call for passengers to Istanbul. That same ambiguity — Will he go on or give up? — reflects in his abandonment of his wig.

The woman has an openness to new experience and a vitality that both her suitors lack and a freedom from the radio poet’s pretentiousness. Far from the standard film beauty, Nese has a winning love of life, seen in her comfort at the grandmother’s dinner. She is free from the insularity that characterizes all three men — and the bride and groom in the backseat, who stare stolidly away from each other. The film may also impute an insularity to contemporary Turkey, as the audiences reject the European songs for the traditional Turkish duo who supplant the central characters -- and get paid.

This is a film of small touches, celebrating the emotions amid mundanity. None of the characters is conventionally attractive or especially talented and there are no points of high drama. Instead we get the sense of emotions being either fearfully suppressed or tentatively allowed emergence.

My Sweet Pepper Land

In My Sweet Pepper Land, director Hiner Saleem uses Western imagery to trace the survival of two idealistic outcasts in Iraqi Kurdistan. The film does not parody the American Western, but rather suggests that with Saddam Hussein’s ouster Cowboy Dubya left the area like the lawless frontier of 19th Century America. A tribal warlord rules like the old gang boss. Horsemen appear beside modern cars and under airplanes. But the “honour” to be viciously defended here is the Code of the East, as teacher Govend’s brothers assail her on rumours of sexual activity.

The hero Baran was a Kurdish war hero who accepts a frontier sheriff job so he doesn’t have to put up with his mother’s matchmaking. He has the strength and stolid character of the standard Western hero from Bill Hart to our Clint. But there’s a difference. He likes music, like Elvis, Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. This inflection raises him above the standard US cowboy hero and reminds us this film is about a cultural invasion. Hence Elvis’s “You’re so square, but Baby I don’t care” and “Rockabilly Man,” which contrast to the teacher’s deft play on a traditional percussion.
     In one telling variation on the American western, here it takes a gang of militant Kurdish women rebels to wipe out the criminal gang. The one American-style hero doesn't do it. Realistically, he probably couldn't. The movement has to arise from the people themselves and women need to be liberated and developed to assume full civic responsibilities, even revolution. This puts paid to the Bush delusion that America can by fiat grow blooming democracies in the tribal lords' desert.

     The title refers to the inn from which the heroine is first turned away by the macho sexists, an augur of the symptomatic persecution she will continue to suffer, especially from her own brothers.

The Butterfly's Dream

We hear “God is great” in only one scene in Yilmaz Erdogan’s The Butterfly’s Dream, where it’s a background chant in a crowd scene. That note alerts us to the relative absence of any god or religion in this new film from Turkey. The film is a  nostalgic reflection upon a secular humanist Turkey, where freedom, generosity, loyalty and respect for culture still obtained — and are by implication lost in a Turkey which has forgotten the two young poets who are chronicled here.

The film is narrated by a major modern poet who taught our two young heroes, the historic poets Muzaffer Tayyip Uslu and Rustu Onur. Both are doomed by their romantic love of poetry but also by TB. But they have an effect, leaving behind a notable body of work and converting the aristocrat’s pretty daughter from jock to literature teacher. The boys’ teacher’s generosity, flexibility and personal dedication make him a far superior authority figure than the girl’s brutal father -- and the looming theocracy. The film has given all three poets a resurgent interest. A post-credit scene shows Rustu’s poetry surviving him, as he writes on his wall “What is beautiful is that we’re alive and one day will die."

On the verge of WW II the two young poets make bets on imaginary riches. The sicker Rustu is the more optimistic, finding beautiful ways to express bleakness, and daring to grab a brief ecstatic marriage before his wife and he die.

The title refers to the mystic who dreamed he was a butterfly and then wondered if perhaps he was a butterfly who dreamed he was a man. The heroes’ adventures take them from the squalid depths of the Zonguldak coal mines — which inspire Rustu’s play, Love in an Age of Conscripted Labour — to the heights of the poet’s avian identification.

      Director Erdogan — not to be confused with the current president — delivers a historic memoir that implicitly counters the nation’s current slide into religious suppression.