C'est la vie

This hilarious French comedy was originally titled Le sens de la fete. For some reason, that was translated for the international market to C’est la vie. Who knows why. Perhaps to impose a more reassuring, because familiar, attitude.

For this is life, where the best planned parties run disastrous. A lavish wedding in a 17th Century mansion goes manically awry. The anatomy of a crumbling posh wedding evokes Altman’s The Wedding, of course, but the new film is not as biting. 

This aims for humour rather than satire. It soft-pedals any political themes.  The waiters’ spokesman fails to serve his comrades, when they’re required to wear heavy period costumes and wigs. The union leadership fails. The workers give in but without anger. Indeed, despite the event director’s furious tirade against his staff, the “magic” of the event takes hold and he abandons his plan to sell out and retire. 

Though the groom is an upper class twit, the film ignores class prejudice. The servants slip easily into the guests’ activities when it appears necessary for them to hide from a supposed labour inspector. The groom’s mother has a fling with the photographer with whom she has been squabbling. 

So, too, the romance that erupts between the seedy substitute singer and the director’s angry assistant. Their relationship moves from antagonism to love, with dramatic effect. It's enough to make the groom lose his grounding.

Through the evening even the event director loses then wins back the assistant he has been having an affair with. Happily, his wife calls to suggest they separate because she has her own new lover. It's a wedding, so there's romance -- and the groom -- in the air. The event, through all its chaos and frantic adapting, manages to achieve love on several fronts, to change discord into harmony. 

The ex-teacher waiter who still adores the bride is a familiar French type, the grammatical pedant correcting everyone. For all his punctilious language, though, he slops around in what look like pyjamas (“They’re hybrid”) and encourages the director, his brother-in-law, to leave his marriage. 

France’s immigrant class is acknowledged in the Sri Lankan dishwashers, who periodically joke about their new society but are happy to integrate. Passing references to their having their own band and a confusion between two kinds of flute set up the late-night jam between the booked band and the dishwashers’ that closes the night and the film on a note of high harmony. 
     This is a feel-good film. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Dark River

A Yorkshire farm family lives out a curse as harsh and ineluctable as a Greek tragedy.

The life here is elemental. There are threats of fire and purges in rain. The living quarters are primitive, dark, basic. The men are rough-hewn and violent. The sex is brief, impersonal and urgent. The only modern device is the buzzing shearer. When the guard dog breaks its tether it straightaway mauls a sheep, what it was supposed to protect.  

This is no Wonderland that this Alice ploughs through, stolid and capable. We see her shear and dip sheep efficiently as a man. For dinner she skins and guts a rabbit, but is drawn from its domestic cooking by her brother Joe’s drunken aberrancy. She has to fight off his attempt to burn her Range Rover. As Alice, Ruth Wilson is most expressive in her harrowing silences. 

The primeval sin is the father’s habitual violation of the young Alice. He is all the more sinister for his gentle, tender mien. He didn’t need Joe’s violence. 

In shame and anger,  Alice spent 15 years working sheep farms wherever she could find them, before her father’s death enabled her return. As Joe notes, she is still frightened anew every time she enters a room. Her father haunts her still.

And yet…. She has to return to the land. She draws on her father’s promise to leave it to her, however poisoned it is by her experience. She applies for its tenancy. She fights Joe in an attempt to bring her new savvy to the operation. Ultimately she loses when he wins the tenancy on the promise to sell out to a developer. 

The Joe we see is a drunken incompetent lout with his father’s male authority. He is violent but has no sand. For he is as scarred by his father’s sin as Alice is. He doesn’t realize that until she spells it out: “Why didn’t you stop him?” His rage and self-destruction are based in that guilt. 

Joe gets his redemption at the end. He assumes the guilt for the murder Alice accidentally committed. Finally he protects her. 

  Both are strengthened by this cleansing, the confrontation of their curse. So the film closes on an idyllic shot of the two siblings, as teenagers, walking out of the shadowed barn down into their realm of shining fields. It’s probably not a memory but a metaphor for the relationship they have now snatched away from their father’s shadow.
     The title has no literal representation in the film. It’s antithetic to the waterfall in which Alice twice goes to cleanse herself. Another generation of teens repair there too, possibly without her curse to ablute. The dark river is the family’s secret guilt that has rushed through their lives ever since. The regional folk song plays against the tragedy the way the waterfall does against the dark river.
 

The Swan

The opening shot establishes the film’s primary value: the powerful force of nature. But the film shifts from the untrammelled ocean tide to the more stable, sweeping fertility of the land. That’s what provides the humans with sustenance and grounding. 

The central family’s three generations have different relationships with nature. Consequently, they differ in their self-knowledge and integrity. The oldest, Karl and Olof, live modestly but comfortably off their land and cattle. Their marriage is also easy, tender, solid. They have been taking in wayward kids — like Olof’s niece’s nine-year-old daughter Sol here — in hopes that they will find meaning and maturity in the rhythms of farm work.  

They’ve had better luck with these charges than with their own daughter. Asta has lost their harmony with the land. She’s gone to university, lost her husband, has slept around, and comes home pregnant and having blown her final exams.  She ridicules her parents’ small scale of dairy farming, asserting they will be doomed if they don’t go to larger-scale robotic milking. Of course, automated milking loses the immediacy of the hands-on relationship with nature.  Even the city has failed to steady her restless spirit. She has no patience for Sol. Even Asta’s ardour for the black stallion is intermittent and selfish.   

The itinerant hand Jon is more comfortable with nature but shares Asta’s hunger for something more. She ridicules his dedication to writing and capriciously takes him as an occasional lover. She ultimately drops him, possibly to his death. 

Jon romanticizes Asta and thinks he could free and satisfy her passionate nature if only she would let herself go.  But that is a writer’s fantasy, not an effective response to her mercurial wildness. With no grounding or self-acceptance, Asta takes her husband back for a fervid, disappointing one-night stand.

Jon’s scenes with Sol show him sensitive, caring, understanding. When she comes upon him masturbating in the meadow we see his loneliness, his comfort in nature, but the very weakness and indulgence that will drive him into his drunken stupor at the fair. 

These adult worlds are a mystery to young Sol, whose perspective governs the narrative. At her oceanside home she had stolen and lied. In the fields she encounters the serious cycle of life. She witnesses and is bloodied by the birth of a calf. She is heartbroken at its inevitable slaughter and eating. She witnesses the puzzling to-and-fro of Jon’s relationship with Asta, who constantly denies Sol the connection she craves. 

Asta’s fullest conversation is her frightening story of a monster at the lake who will try to seduce Sol into death. In the climactic scene at that lake, the monster Sol experiences is the magnificent swan that swoops down from the heaven, regally sails toward her in the water, then soars back away. In addition to its beauty and grace, the swan represents a natural integrity lost to the generation that has detached itself from nature. In that model Sol may find the lesson she needs to live a natural, integrated life.

We might be tempted to read the swan in either the Leda or Ugly Duckling contexts, but this film seems rather to luxuriate in the Icelandic mythic force of the land.
     Much of the film’s power and effectiveness derives from Gríma Valsdóttir’s performance as Sol. Her child’s face seems to grow ageless as her experiences deepen her emotional range and expose the aspirations and failings of the generation she is about to grow into. She seems to have the potential to embrace the passion of that wild tide, yet rooted in the soil. 

Newton

This good-natured satire of India’s democracy unfortunately has a wider pertinence. World-wide, the once ascendant democratic movement appears in possibly mortal retreat, eroded by the rise of right-wing tyrannies and oligarchs pretending to populism. This danger appears throughout the Third World, of course, now including the USA.

The hero is an idealistic but incompetent civil servant who against all odds strives to meet the literal requirements of an election poll in a small remote rural community, under threat from Maoist terrorists. He is often framed within the shot as if in a box or an isolated nook. He defines himself by the restrictions he accepts, in contrast to the other characters' assumption of license. 

When Nu Tan Kumar changed his name to Newton he unwittingly assumed the persona of democracy. As his senior manager informs him, the historic Isaac Newton proved the democracy of the physical laws of nature. In physics, he demonstrated, the same laws apply to everyone. 

But not so in the realities of the world’s largest democracy. The citizens are far from equal. Isolated communities are disconnected from the political debates. For knowledge of the voting conditions themselves they are susceptible to misdirection or disqualification by democracy’s enemies or abusers. The new tech stymies them.

The punctilious Newton is at constant odds with Aatma, the commander of his protective military unit. The general’s pragmatism makes Newton’s even modest success possible but falls short of the ideals and principles of the movement. 

Aatma himself is the victim of hierarchy when a senior officer steals his spotlight before the press. Aatma acknowledges his advantage that undermines the democratic ideal: “When spoken wearing a uniform, even a request seems like a big threat.” 

When Aatma fakes a terrorist attack in order to close the polls before night will endanger his troop, he acknowledges the vulnerability of the free and open government system. Equality may be a supreme value but it’s more an aspiration than any reality. 

Aatma’s men pay lip service to the democratic Newton. But frustrated with his simple-mindedness, they are driven to beat him up. Newton himself turned gun-wielding despot to enforce his principles. The scene demonstrates the fragility of the democratic ideal, even among its defenders.  

If Newton falls short on his official undertaking, at least his personal life retains some promise. The idealist offends his family by rejecting an arranged marriage to an uneducated minor. The film closes on a hopeful note. Newton is visited by the attractive, smart, resourceful woman who assisted him on his rural mission. They will go for coffee — but not until Newton spends another five minutes typing something, when his official coffee break formally begins. However vulnerable and doomed, bureaucracy reigns. 

Double Lover

Although this is a riveting, spectacular, wholly engaging thriller, upon reflection we can conclude that almost everything that happens is in heroine Chloe’s mind. 

One key pointer is the surreal museum in which she works as a guard. The ex-model — an object of vision — now watches people. The setting is where people read the art around them for improved understanding of themselves and life. The “Blood and Flesh” exhibition, the monstrous sculpture of overhead roots, the gallery’s vast white spaces, the sculptures that anticipate the fetus-like cysts later removed from Chloe’s womb, all point to the fantasy element in her psychodrama. 

In the pre-credit shot she is having her hair cut. She transforms herself into a more androgynous look. Her hair covers her eyes, then is trimmed to expose them. Her androgyny anticipates her later using a dildo on husband Paul.

The action opens on her medical exam, first with a shot of a vagina, then a close-up of her eye, registering pain, perhaps tears. The establishing shot shows Chloe in the stirrups, her doctor peering between Chloe’s legs. This establishes her central tensions: her sexuality and her vision of herself. When she goes to her first psychiatric appointment she climbs a vertiginous eye-like spiralling staircase. 

The stomach pains her doctor can’t explain turns out to be a psychological issue around her womb. Chloe is a divided psyche, harbouring a profound sense that she consumed the twin in the womb when she was born. For that she is driven to punish herself.The cause isn’t known until she herself is found to have a fetus-like cyst beside the fetus in her own womb.

Her relationship with therapist Paul operates on the level of event. But his twin brother, fellow shrink and more violent, effective and punishing lover Louis is Chloe’s projection. She imputes to Paul the divided and conflicted self she herself bears. That elaborates her admission that “When you look at me that way, I feel I exist.” 

So, too, her mother is doubled by the Madame Schenker she imagines visiting, who discloses the supposed twins’ ruin of her innocent daughter Sandra (whom Chloe also sees as herself).    

Minor doublings abound. The same actor plays Chloe’s gynaecologist and the therapist Dr Wexler she claims to visit. The imagined Madame Schenker is herself doubled by Chloe’s neighbour Rose, another woman with an invalid daughter, the girl’s bedroom frozen in time, with cats both stuffed and statues to echo Chloe’s missing Milo. Louis’ office is a glossier double of Paul’s, unrealistically opening into the bedroom for his advanced therapy. Chloe in particular is often shown with her doubling reflections off windows and mirrors. 

The Christmas party discussion of phantom twins explains Chloe’s sense of having absorbed a sibling in the womb. The background of American pop songs concludes with a particularly pointed lyric, sung by Elvis Presley. Presley himself admitted to a lifelong connection to his twin brother Aron, who died at birth. 
     The film itself has a doubled kind of twin. It’s adapted from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which David Cronenberg filmed as Dead Ringers.   

20th Century Circuit Suspects

What a director frames out of his film often illuminates the reasons for what is included. This Iranian documentary about a gang of young thieves is a primary case in point.

Director Hesam Eslami traces six years in the collective life of the thieves he met when they stole his car. Instead of turning them in he befriended them, won their confidence then turned them into the subject of his film. 

We come to it with a firm set of expectations of “Iran.” You know Iran. It’s the corrupt, renegade theocracy that funds international terrorism, plots to become a nuclear threat to the world, vows to destroy Little Satan Israel and Great Satan America, oppresses its citizens, persecutes women and gays, and suppresses any independence.  

  Nothing of any of that appears in this film. There is no reference to religion, to theocratic or misogynous oppression, to sharia law, to anything specifically “Iran.” 

Instead, the story of life on those streets ignores that national context entirely. The gang-life in this Iran could be set anywhere in the world. This film averts the clash of cultures in which Iran is usually viewed and instead discovers the universality of the street-level life. 

Eslami confirms what I overheard an American tourist in Spain (around 1970) observe to her husband: “I tell you Sam, wherever you go, anywhere in the world, people are people.” Easy to say that, somewhat harder always to feel.

The film’s driving thesis is what the director does. Instead of punishing his offenders he wants to investigate their humanity. Instead of packing them off to jail he gets to know them. He keeps in touch with the ones who do get jailed. He follows the gang’s attempts to spring those. And in the case of Ehsan, Eslami gently promotes the young gangster’s shift into honest citizenship.

If there is any religion in this film it’s the Muslim director’s implicitly espousing the Judeo-Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, forgiveness and generosity towards the afflicted. The scarcity of this value in current American Christianity only amplifies the power of this director’s choice.

Of course we can’t ignore the forceful context of the film, even if it’s not cited. Eslami’s example — its character and its albeit limited success — is an instructive alternative to our customary response to “Iran.” Whatever the rhetoric and plotting conducted by our respective governments, their people are not just our enemies but part of our common brotherhood of mankind. This is a counter to our bellicose governments but also a corrective to the citizenry perhaps too eager to buy into their leaders’ prejudices. 

In this light the film’s details resonate meaning. The music embodies the interface between traditional Iranian and global pop. So too the premium placed on stolen car stereos confirms the society’s sire for cultural outreach. 

The film opens and closes on Ehsan’s new job, cutting and securing strips of veneer in construction. What’s the veneer here and what the substance? Is Eslami’s reminder of our brotherhood with Iranian gangsters a deceptive cover over our political gap, or is our leaders’ antagonism the disguise of our shared humanity? The film’s sentimental power supports the latter.

When Ehsan’s wife gives birth to a son she is surprised that Eslami would visit her. In her life, her husband’s friend is still an outsider, a social superior, and she is surprised and flattered by his attention. Perhaps that catches the Iranian citizen’s feeling of isolation from the populations their governments have forced upon them. As Willy Loman’s wife reminded us, too late, “Attention must be paid.”  

The Insult

   The original Lebanese title, “Case No. 23,” plays to the domestic audience because it emphasizes the courtroom drama. That's the personal story. 

      The English translation works better for the international audience. The broader reference suggests the film’s application to the whole of the warring Middle East. That society is so obsessed with honour that it is paralyzed by any “Insult,” real or perceived. The Palestinians’ shame at the Naqba, their failure to have prevented the creation of Israel, still prevents their negotiation of a peaceful coexistence.

     Israel hovers at the margin here, cited as the Arabs’ common demon. Ariel Sharon is a curse. The Palestinians’ ultimate insult is to declare the Christian Arab a Zionist — or at least, an enabler of Israel. The film’s central insults are exchanged by a Christian Arab mechanic, Tony, and a Palestinian refugee, construction foreman Yasser.   

     Their war starts small enough: Tony has an illegal pipe, which soaks Yasser. After insulting Tony Yasser repairs the pipe, which Tony smashes. Now they are on the eave of war.

     Both heroes win our understanding. The Palestinian may get the greater sympathy and he’s played as a more thoughtful, flexible figure. But the revelation of the Christian Tony’s past enhances his character too, by explaining him. Both men prove victims of their respective people’s history. For both, their history tempts them to blame all their own failures on that unfortunate history, on their old enemy.

     The two trial scenes are superb drama. In each the magistrate conducts an intensive, searching examination of the case. The first bogs down when neither the plaintiff nor the accused stoops to repeat the insult that prompted Yasser’s attack.

     The second trial reaches the same conclusion but with more satisfactory effect. Indeed, the losing side now seems as satisfied with the verdict as the winner. That’s because Tony has had his story told too, his anger and indignation explained in context. In the lawyers’ summary, each makes the other’s case. The antagonism turns into understanding.

     Apart from the trials, the principals’ true reconciliation happens in two scenes outside the court, before the verdict. In the first Tony casually helps his enemy restart his car. In the second, Yasser baits Tony into punching him, so he goes into the court with his own aching pair of ribs. An eye for an eye, a rib for a rib. At the end, after all the screaming, indignation and violence, the reconciliation is the men’s silent, long-distance lock of the eyes. There is the bare threat of a smile. 

     Both heroes — and their respective gangs of followers — carry the weight of history. Both have suffered violence, prejudice, victimization, which their self-respect challenges them to remember, to flaunt like a flag. Both men suffer  increasingly harsh consequences for their intransigence. 

     The film’s message is the need to acknowledge the historic conflict, to recognize the long period of inhumane abuse, but to find a way to make a mutually respectful peace. Again, the implication is that this message extends beyond the film’s conflict between Palestinian and Christian to include the Jewish state as well. 

     There’s an additional frisson when Yasser’s lawyer is revealed to be Tony’s more famous lawyer’s daughter. This generational tension replays the theme of moving on from the past. Both the woman lawyer and the woman chief judge tacitly personify the new Middle East, the emergence empowered woman in that archly patriarchal society.