Sunset Song

Terence Davies’ new film treads familiar grounds despite his shift to the early 1900s Highlands. A violent father is brutally insensitive to his oldest son and daughter — and to his wife, who kills herself and her infant twins when she finds he has impregnated her again. 

The son weds and disappears to Argentina but we follow the daughter, Chris, as she takes over the farm and matures into motherhood and womanhood. 

The mother’s most poignant speech teaches Chris that women are helpless before men. By men the mother has in mind brutes like her husband, not gentle idealists like her oldest son. And like Ewan, the farm boy neighbour Chris weds and loves. 

The film’s leisurely 135 minutes observes the passing of the days and seasons and vicissitudes of life working up to a crucial revelation at the end. Now a father, Ewan is pressured to enlist in the First World War. He comes down the stairs and announces he’s off to Aberdeen the way her brother did when he broke away from home. But Ewan was reluctant to leave his wife and bairn.

We don’t see Ewan’s battleground experiences but we see how they’ve changed him when he storms home for a short leave. Coarse, violent, angry, insulting — he has turned into an irreligious version of her happily departed father. Unlike her mother, though, Chris won’t be cowed. The morning after he’s raped her she holds him off with a knife: “I’m not afraid of you.” He returns coldly to his unit.

Chris continues to run the farm without him. She refuses to believe the government letter reporting he died in battle in France. Then his old comrade tells her she should know the truth: Ewan was shot as a coward and deserter. He’s telling her because he wants her to get on with her young life. 

Then we get the film’s only flashback. That friend is preparing Ewan to face the firing squad. The Ewan we see is the old Ewan, not the brutalized soldier who was so repulsive on his visit home. Finally believing he’s dead, Chris realizes that “He did it for me.” 

That line — and the intrusive flashback — takes some unpacking. Ewan couldn’t stay out of the war for her, however he tried, as he was openly charged with cowardice. Nor could he prevent the war’s brutalizing effect on him. So to save her from having to live with the brute he has become he has himself killed. As we view the firing squad from his perspective Davies implicates the citizenry in the savagery that launches and embraces warfare. 

Not sharing her mother’s cynical experience of men, Chris remembers the Ewan she loved, the gentle, considerate man. So she infers that he had himself killed rather then impose on her what the war had made him. That’s the song she sings to his sunset.  

3,000 Nights

Mai Masri’s 3000 Nights is an expertly made propaganda film. It’s better as a model for how to make one than as history. 

As in any “story,” the particular stands for the general. What may be a freakish occurrence in real life becomes — once turned into a story, film, play, whatever — representative of a common phenomenon. As Aristotle put it, “history” happens just once, “fiction” what happens always and everywhere. 

In this case, the story of one mother’s devotion to her son and to preserving his life despite her imprisonment is intended to speak to the values of her culture. In the case of Palestinians, however, this is a misrepresentation of their cultural values. Palestinian mothers openly extol their sons’ martyrdom. As we see on Palestinian TV and banners, their children are trained to become soldiers and martyrs from a disturbingly early age. Children are being trained to kill Jews.

As in any “story,” too, the meaning inheres in (i) what details are included within the “frame” and (ii) what details are framed out. Here, for example, an end title reveals that 700,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned in Israeli jails since 1948. What is discreetly omitted is why: Since 1948 the Palestinians have refused any offer of statehood that required them to abandon their plan to replace Israel, i.e., that would have required their peaceful coexistence. The current "intifada" is emblematic of their 70-odd years of relentless attacks upon Jewish citizens. 

There are other examples of “rigging” the story to suit the purpose, which in this case is to valorize the Palestinian and to demonize the Israeli. One clue is casting. The Jewish inmates are ugly, the Palestinians pretty. One Jewish warden is a vicious woman who speaks through clenched teeth. To appear even-handed there is a token liberal Jew, the lawyer who represents our heroine, a Jewish junkie whom she saves and is rewarded in return, and the doctor. 

Centering the story upon women emphasizes the drama of innocents victimized. Our heroine is abandoned by her husband, who flees to Canada and only returns to try to steal her son. But the prisoner who helps her and gives her son a carved bird promises a genuine fidelity. Guess you can’t trust the diaspora. 

For all we know, only one of the Palestinian woman prisoners is a terrorist, plus the older woman’s two “freedom fighter”  grandsons. The woman has been jailed for 15 years, has lost an arm, instigates the riot, and lies in the gas at the end, subdued but not conquered, banging her tin cup to restart the resistance. 

The film explicitly promotes the idea of kidnapping Jews to swap for prisoners. In the riot the prisoners capture six Israeli guards and negotiate the freeing of the same number of inmates. Our heroine stays in jail, to stoke our sense of injustice. 

The equal exchange is another misrepresentation. More typically, one or a few Israeli prisoners are exchanged for hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian prisoners. This is the Palestinian, not the Israeli, appraisal of the relative value of a Palestinian life. An end title reports an exchange of 6 Israeli guards for over 5,000 Palestinian prisoners. That promotes this criminal strategy.

By the way, for an alternative view of how Israeli and Palestinian prisons treat their respective charges, check the newsreel footage of the 2011 exchange of the one Israeli Galid Shalit for 1,027 Arab prisoners, of which 280 were serving life sentences for fatal terrorism. Shalit was haggard and under-nourished, the Arabs quite healthy. Of course, the Palestinian prisoners in this film are nowhere near that guilty.  

Some touches are subtle. References to Allah are translated to God in the subtitles, bridging the gap between Arab and non-Arab audiences.They become us. The Palestinians here are completely secular: not a hijab, no prayer, no religious barriers to inhibit our identification with them and our support. 

When the heroine is first taken prisoner she’s hung by the arms in a thin white slip, as if she were at sexual risk. Sex is excluded from the cells here, though a butch Israeli prisoner threatens her.

A couple of touches play on the unconscionable myth that Israel is the new Nazi. In an early scene Israeli guards have vicious German (i.e., Nazi) shepherd dogs. Later the JDF quells the prison riot with — what else? — canisters of gas, killing at least one young girl. 

Less subtle touches challenge credibility, like the Israeli doctor keeping the woman shackled on each hand and leg while delivering her baby. Fun fact: Israeli hospitals treated 180,000 Palestinians in 2015. Number of Israelis Palestinian hospitals treated: 0. Just the facts, ma'am. 

Even the time is carefully selected. The 1982 setting enables the TV news to report the infamous Sabra and Shattila massacres, where Israeli forces stood by as their Christian allies slaughtered Lebanese. 

The heroine’s trial is cut to a single question. When she denies having been threatened by the young terrorist she gave a ride to, she’s convicted and sentenced to eight years in jail. In fact, the Israeli justice system is independent of the government and famous for more circumspect conduct. It taxes credibility to suggest that a Palestinian schoolteacher just married would be convicted without any further questioning or evidence.

Propaganda also ignores alternative possibilities. After an Israeli soldier is killed, a wounded young terrorist is caught near the crime scene, being driven away by a Palestinian woman. Wouldn’t she be a logical suspect? We “know” she’s innocent because she’s played by a beautiful, sensitive actress, but terrorism is rife with innocent looking perpetrators and abettors. In a propaganda film, a plausible trial is sacrificed for the villainy of a brisk unfair one, however implausible.
     And it works. At the Palm Springs Festival screening, the gasps and moans of indignation and shock suggested a palpable swelling of rage against Israel. No matter it was based on lies and distortions. 

The heroine is pure virtue. She is too noble to claim the wounded boy threatened her, coercing her cooperation. Later she’s too noble to abort her child, even after her husband supports the warden’s insistence. She quits the Arab prisoners’ strike to feed and to keep her son, but rejoins it when he’s removed.
     With such a virtuous heroine — and such a stacked deck — it’s hard to watch this film and not be swept along. Propaganda aims to do an end run around your logic and the facts for a direct hit on the emotions. Abandon intelligence and responsibility ye who enter here. 

The Girl King

Mika Kaurismaki’s Queen Christina of Sweden (Malin Buska) is tall, beautiful, and without a hump on one shoulder, but otherwise she’s a fair representation of the historic figure. In her restless spirit, intellectual appetite, impatience with the patriarchy and her lesbianism she’s a much more accurate representation than Rouben Mamoulian’s  (Garbo in Queen Christina, 1933). 

Of course Kaurismaki opts to revive the 17th Century Christina story now because it’s a sharp reflection of our times. I don’t know how Swedes or Finns will see their lives in this film, but much of it rings clear for North America and Europe today. The film bristles with pertinence, like the male advisor’s “Peace doesn’t fill our coffers” and her “Austerity is sadistic.”

Christina’s advocacy of peace, culture, the arts, make her a model for modern leadership. In her refusal to accept male authority, especially not to allow any man to claim her as a field he can plow for his pleasure, she is the prototypal feminist. Sadly, the contemporary also limns through her ultimate defeat by the male authority and their rejection of her same-sex passion as “deviance.” Her male counsellors conspire against her, drive off her beloved, and drive Christina into madness, until she escapes. 

We’re still hung up on the questions she poses to Descartes: what is love, how do we deal with it, how can we free ourselves from it. We still crave the freedom to define our own destiny and escape our inherited structures and strictures. If we’ve moved beyond Descartes’ assumption that our emotions have a physical source, we continue to build upon his confidence in empirical evidence and in the essential use of reason. 

But another Cartesian statement propels the film: To find the truth we must abandon everything we have learned or assumed and establish a new understanding of our world. This is the triumph of discovery over habit, reason over delusion, freedom over “destiny.” This is how this Christina constantly flies in the face of what she has been taught and what is expected of her. 

Her escape is ironic. Her advisors having long insisted she marry to produce a clear heir to the throne, she now proclaims one suitor her son and bestows upon him her royal authority. With a quarter of the treasury she departs to Rome, where she converts to Catholicism and enjoys the life of secular culture and stimulation she has craved. As one counsellor bitterly observes, having rejected all her male suitors she settles into life under the authority of the Pope. The last shots, however, play her as exulting in openness, freedom and the light the Swedish court and “thinkers” denied her. She abandons her throne and power to recreate herself in Rome.
     Now, here’s the crowning irony. Mika and younger brother Aki Kaurismaki are famous for acerbic contemporary stories about inarticulate, hard drinking, ugly and lugubrious losers, steeped in 1950s rock and roll. Nobody in a blind test would guess the sumptuous period drama  The Girl King is a Kaurismaki film. But here the director does what his heroine does and what her healthiest mentor, Descartes, prescribed.  To find the truth, to see how Queen Christina reflects upon our current reality, Kaurismaki discarded his customary period, his familiar genres and his signature style, tone and bathos — to make something completely new. And true to our day as it is to his subject’s.

Mountain

In Yaelle Kayam’s first shot an orthodox Jewish woman Zvia wends up through the flat tombstones of the Jewish cemetery on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. In her last the woman walks down towards her house, on the edge of the cemetery, but disappears among the stones. 

We’ve seen her prepare two pots of stew. One she laced with rat poison, the other not. 

Which did she kill, her family or the prostitutes, pimps and druggies she has furtively watched, then started to feed? The holiest having failed her, she turns to the most secular. We are not told which. That means we’re not supposed to know. Which she killed is irrelevant. We see that she has been pushed to the point where she felt she had no other option but to make a dramatic action. The point is not whom she killed but that she had been driven to kill. That is the cost of an inhumane piety. 

A case could be made either way. She could have killed her family because of her frustration at her unloving and insensitive husband’s neglect and the burden he imposed on her, to raise their four children with him more a hindrance than a help. She could have killed the outsiders to rid herself of their fascination and to protect herself from the one who followed her home. When the sacred is so oppressive the profane has its allure. Either way, she has been pushed to desperation. 

Her meeting with a happy orthodox mother suggests Zvia’s religion is not the problem. The problem is Reuven’s rejection. He ignores her request he return the jam because it’s fattening. He supports the older daughter’s rebellion against her. He stays away late without warning. He assumes extra duties to stay away more. He rejects her affection and overtures.
     But an arranged marriage doesn’t have to be loveless, she knows, so she lies and tells Reuven that the Arab gravedigger told her he has a happy loving marriage with seven children.   

Zvia makes small rebellions. She smokes. She has short friendly chats with the Arab gravedigger. With her back to us she eats, furtively. With no clear motive in mind she spies on the cemetery intruders, then talks to a prostitute, then brings them meals and stays to watch them eat and have sex. Her final rebellion is the mortal one, a more dramatic action than those small ones. She acts in despair.

The setting is crucial. The Mount of Olives is where the Messiah will rise and raise the dead. Here instead of resurrection and a saviour we get the hopeless woman and her group murder. In the distance we can see the holiest mountain of the two faiths, the Jews’ Temple Mount and the Arabs’ Al Aqsa. One mountain, two natures and value systems and histories. But the title’s meaning is a third mountain still: the marital relationship that a couple must climb together for the marriage and family to survive. 

Instead the cemetery movement is usually horizontal here. As the first irritated couple finds, the cemetery is like a maze in which a mouse can get lost and fall prey. Zvia can navigate the cemetery maze and advise others, but in her flat, obscure marriage she finds no other way out but this violent one.

Reuven is completely immersed in his religion, his work at the yeshiva, and his family’s religious rites. He has one secular moment, when he whistles a favourite tune that he heard earlier in the day. It’s the theme of the Sergio Leone Western, The Good The Bad and The Ugly. It’s an odd thing for an Orthodox Jew to adopt. It shows he too has a secular interest that he perforce suppresses. More broadly, the theme from an operatic revenge drama sets us up for Zvia’s climax.
     Zvia’s parallel artistic allusion is the poetry she reads at the poet’s graveside.The poem she breaks down over expresses a neglected woman’s grief and the comfort offered by Death. Like Reuven’s tune, this secular poem suggests being steeped in the Talmud is not enough. We need the solace and the joys of this life too. Whichever group she has killed, she has effectively ended her own life.  

Baba Joon

The title bears the film’s central paradox. “Baba Joon” in Farsi means either/both “Dear father” and “Dear son.” Despite the apparent conflict between this father and this son, the two are the same. But whereas the father Itzhak gave in to his father and went into the turkey farm business he hated, his son Moti won't. The boy relives his father’s rebellion. But where Itzhak buckled in to his father’s tyranny, here he accepts his son and climactically asks his son's forgiveness. 

Itzhak accepts Moti’s resistance after the grandfather hands him the belt with which to wallop Moti. Itzhak remembers suffering that ignominy himself. The memory jars him into finally understanding and accepting his son. Similarly, when Itszhak kneels to ask his son’s forgiveness he echoes the earlier scene, where he insisted the teacher apologize to Moti for insulting him. 

Perhaps three tensions propel the film. One is between the Farsi and Israeli Jewish communities. The Farsi Jews maintain a secure enclave in their desert village. But there’s a cultural clash behind the Ashkenazi Jewish teacher and the Farsi boy. Indeed, father and son, Itzhak and Moti, share a spirited rebellion when they shuck their kippah and tallis koton  for a spirited drive through the desert. 

That tension between the religious and the secular clearly resonates beyond the plot to Israel in general. The three generations of Morgian go to shule — and a congregant criticises Yitzhak when Moti skips — but they’re a secular family. Brother Darius, returning from America, has no religious connection whatever, as he squirms at the idea of having to participate in the altar service.

So too the central tension between the old way and the new speaks to Israel as much as to this family. As the times have changed the old strategies and customs may no longer apply. In the modern state the old generation cannot impose standards on the younger. When Moti spurns farming — especially of those repulsive turkeys — for his gift at engineering he seems to encapsulate Israel’s development from the agrarian kibbutz to the modern technological state. 

     This film about a tight ethnic community in Israel addresses the challenge to modify old standards and expectations. The brother back from America is especially significant as a figure both liberalizing and disruptive.

Body

As an early discussion of Jesus — whether he remained Jewish after being baptized — may suggest, Body is a film about faith. Specifically, about the possibility our existence may transcend the physical limits of our lives.

To this end there is a range of corporeal presences. In some shots the characters appear disembodied, reflected in glass. In a pre-title prologue, the police find a man hanging dead from a tree. They assume it’s a suicide, until the man gets up and walks away. A female apparition stops a character’s car. In a parody of the afterlife, a broken waterman floods a cemetery, breaking open the graves. Our coroner hero has to go identify his wife, which he does by her shoes (i.e., her footing, her contact with this earth). 

The coroner is one of the two central characters who deal with people and their physical nature. He prepares the dead for burial. He assumes life ends with death, so he’s puzzled by doors and windows mysteriously opened, inexplicable sounds in the night and ultimately a letter supposedly just written by his dead wife. 

In contrast, the therapist, Anna, treats bulimic girls, the living who are trying to thin themselves out of existence. In her therapy she uses physical exercises and routines, addressing the body in hope of rooting out the psychological sources of the girls’ rejection of their physical nature. As she cites a mentor, “Anyone who loves cannot be sick.”

In addition, though, Anna is a practicing spiritualist. She runs seances, has visions of the dead, records their messages, in effect extending her psychological approach to bulimia into another dimension altogether. From the mind to the soul is a small hop. Anna has believed in the presence of the dead ever since her own young son died — and she felt his presence continuing. As an emblem of her control over the corporeal, Anna keeps a huge pet dog — which she tries to tame and discipline, ineffectually. 

Of course the coroner is suspicious of the spiritualist, even as she is making advances in her treatment of his bulimic daughter, who hasn’t come to terms with her mother’s death. He is eager to leave his daughter in the hospital for Anna’s conventional therapy, but from the spiritualist he withdraws her immediately.
     As it happens, Anna does bring about the coroner’s reconnection to his daughter and her return to joy and life. Anna conducts a seance with them, to contact the wife/mother, but the coroner’s skepticism prevents it. When Anna doses off, snoring, the coroner and his daughter finally unite — in laughter. By failing but only after trying, the spiritualist does bring the two lost souls into harmony. As the closing song summarizes, they’ll “never walk alone” again. 

Son of Saul

Laszlo Nemes’ Son of Saul is one of the most powerful Holocaust films ever made. He avoids the tendency of cheapening the Holocaust by making it a background for an amenable story, like Life is Beautiful and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Instead he presents the Holocaust as the foreground and threads two thin plot lines into it. 

The film is a very difficult experience because it plunges us into an inferno. Where the German extermination machine is usually depicted as machine-like in its efficiency, here the concentration camp is all noise and fire and chaos. It’s late in the Reich’s life, the war is ending and the Nazis are trying to kill as many Jews as quickly as possible. They reopen the pits and overtax the gas chambers. 

Amid the infernal chaos the film presents two quixotic attempts at rebellion. In the collective effort, a group of inmates conspire to try to blow up the camp and escape. They manage a disruption and a handful of Jews run into the forest and find refuge in a barn. But the Nazis track down and destroy them. This is based on an actual event in Auschwitz (unnamed in the film) in 1944. 

In the personal and fictional revolt, one Sonderkommando, Saul, tries to give a murdered boy a proper Jewish burial. The boy survived a mass gassing. Then Saul watches him killed, then resolves upon the symbolic gesture of a Jewish ceremony amidst the Nazi chaos. He tells some the boy is his son, but he makes no paternal response to him. It’s a strictly symbolic gesture, a reaffirmation of Jewish faith and Jewish service to spite the Nazi operation. (The gesture loses power if Saul thinks the boy is his son.)

As a Sonderkommando Saul is in a compromised position. To eke out a few months of extended life he performs the Nazis’ horrible assignments, herding Jews to their death and plundering their possessions for the Reich. On the sly he manages to make constructive bribes of Nazi guards. Gaza Rohrig”s cleft nose is an emblem of the man divided within himself. So his romantic campaign is important for his conscience.

His search for a cooperative rabbi proves futile. Some refuse to officiate, whether out of lost faith or to survive. One actually escapes Saul’s importuning by running into the lake to drown. Saul hauls him out, but the Nazis shoot the rabbi anyway. When Saul finally finds a collaborator he’s not a rabbi after all; he can’t say Kaddish. 

That prayer becomes an emblem of the overturned order of things. Kaddish is the young man’s prayer for the dead parent. Here it becomes a compromised Jew’s attempt to salve his conscience and serve his God and his faith with a symbolic subversion of the Nazis. In this vision of Hell one man tries to do the right thing — but is thwarted. The attempt is its own reward. In his standing up even the failure is a success.
If Saul failed with his dead boy, the film ends with another boy saved and liberated. A clearly Aryan lad comes upon our escapees in the barn. In Saul’s smile at the boy we read a wider acceptance and feeling of humanity. But will the Jews kill him to prevent his betraying them? The Nazi troops come, silence the boy, kill the Jews, but let the boy run free into the wilds. Dead or alive, the young are our hope for survival, for honour, for amendment of the horrors we leave behind. By not ratting out the Jews the blond boy strikes a note of hope.
     Finally, it's important to consider why this film was made now. As the world faces a renewal in antisemitism -- often in the guise of criticizing Israel's government, i.e.,  for defending herself against annihilation -- and as the deniers of the Holocaust spread their lies and multiply throughout Europe, this film is -- in addition to a vital recreation of the past -- a reflection of the current threat to Jews world wide. Art is always about the here and now, even as it purports to be about the then and there.