Nope

 

Notwithstanding the spectacle of the low-concept, high-suction flying saucer attack, the guts of this film lies in the title.

The “Nope” is first heard when OJ and Emerald note that everyone knows who made the very first film: white guy Edward Muybridge. But does anyone know who rode the horse in that film? There Muybridge sought to determine if a running horse leaves the ground. That man was black so of course: “Nope.” OJ repeats the word when he refuses to surrender to the invasion, to give up.

It’s writer/director Jordan Peele’s film mission to say “Nope” to the American tradition of marginalizing or omitting the African American from its history, values, consciousness. As in Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) he inflects the familiar genres by centering on the black experience and reversing its traditional suppression. Because he’s liberating a long vilified -- hence frightening -- force he naturally works in the horror genres, whether Monster or Sci-Fi.

As Emerald points out, “Since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game.” Not just in the pictures, but throughout the fabric of American life — where permitted. The skin in their game was black so outre.

The Hollywood horse-training family supposedly descends from Muybridge’s unnamed rider. It names the unnamed and empowers the suppressed with a history.

This film is especially self-referential in the number of references to film-making. That is explicit in the opening scene and in the later attempts to film the outer space phenomenon. Jupe Park’s pitch for his neo-Western live entertainment show promises to transform the spectator by providing a manufactured new background. Though not in his intended way, it does — elimination. Kara Hagedorn reads Emerald's name as evoking the green screen by which film provides its performers with a literally different background.  

Indeed the theme is introduced in the Biblical epigraph:"Nahum 3:6: I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle." That could reflect upon the white’s oppression of the Black. And as film is the predominant spectacle of our age, if not our predominant filth, it is the proper field for rebuttal.

In the alien monster’s final attack the saucer is replaced by a flowery shape (more Georgia O’Keeffe than Melies) that keeps erupting into cinema-screen rectangles. Here again, films beget films. Emerald triumphs by feeding that creature a huge balloon winking Fat Boy — that she fatally explodes. As historic lies and myths eventually must.

The palimpsest narrative includes flashbacks to the TV sitcom that Jupe Park created and starred in as a lad. It also summons Peele’s own background in TV sitcoms, before he found his satiric voice in sketch TV. In this sequence the tamed chimp center of the TV series runs amok and slaughters the show “parents.” Figure Cheetah bloodily offing Ozzie and Harriet. 

That apparent tangent actually parallels the major plotline. Given the traditional racist equation of African American with monkey, the sitcom comic butt's revolt replays OJ’s and Emerald’s reversal of the reduction of the Black experience in American history and mythology. The sitcom family has treated their black pet as a comic tool. Its murderous revolt suggests the racist terror that underlies that attempt to diminish the Other.

Similarly, in naming his hero OJ, Peele provides a precise antithesis to the OJ we immediately recall. That’s the Simpson who was the college, NFL and Hollywood House N-word, who beat a murder rap, vowing to pursue his wife’s killer through every golf course in the land, and was finally jailed for the armed theft of — what else? — OJ memorabilia. Talk about self-referentiality. 

        Peele replaces that OJ in our consciousness with a reticent, courageous, shy, noble, generous and sensitive servant both to horse and to humanity, to art and to life. This OJ rides a real Bronco with stakes even higher than his forerunner's famed slow-mo TV chase. Hence perhaps the key in the horse's flank -- ignition for the parallel. In humanity, principle  and efficacy Peele's OJ ranks second here only to his sister, Emerald. In her character gender as well as race are freshly empowered.

In short, the titular “Nope” is a firm denial of the American abuse. neglect and denial of the Black experience. The heavenly sci-fi playground makes it a true (apres Melville) “No, in Thunder!”                         Guess Nope too springs eternal in the human breast.

     

Life According to Agfa (1992)

As the title reference to a German film manufacturer reminds us, memories are depicted, recorded, inflected, possibly even created, by our visual records. From beginning to end, this film is rooted in the cinematic. This is a film about the irreality our perspectives give our “real” life. True to Brecht’s verfremdunseffekt, or “alienation,” the constant reminders that we’re watching a fictional film — not the real — confirm its plausibility.

The first shot is the fullscreen scream of an Asian kung-fu match on TV. That’s an imported war and its fascination. So, too, the wartime romanticism of the Casablanca film poster, in Hebrew — Americana Israelized. The American screen ethos returns uninflected in the Manhattan poster (in English) and the recurring Leonard Cohen songs, in the 1990s popular soundtrack fare. But the America to which the junkie here hopes to flee is where a cocaine fix is cheaper.

As the drama largely occurs in the single setting, Dahlia’s all-night bar, the spirit stays theatrical, evoking dramas like The Iceman Cometh and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? —  which Dahlia cites when her lovelife has sunk to “George and Martha.” The bar’s name, the Barbie, comes from the local mental institution, not from the US glamour doll a couple of tourists seek to buy. The film’s main setting thus matches Eli’s description of his home as “my catatonic house.”

Maverick cop Bennie fancies himself a Clint Eastwood. His Dirtier Harry tactics include corruption, violence, exploiting the helpless, in short, unbridled self-service. His demotion to a Northern posting will not cost him in title, pay or public rep. His superior’s dismissal as “a shitty little nothing” echoes his girlfriend’s earlier reduction of him to less than a zero. But this nothing wields damaging power.

The army comes off even worse. The soldiers seem to be storming an enemy when they approach the hospital to take their commander out for a break. Brazenly citing the (usually unfounded) allegations of Israeli army torture, the commander feels like “a hostage after we’ve ‘taken care’ of him.” In the bar the soldiers grow louder, more vulgar, more bestial with every drink and song, even ignoring Dahlia’s order to leave. 

The corrupt Bennie wins our brief respect when he stops commander Nimy’s assault on the Arab kitchen worker Samri: “You have no authority here. This area is Israel. We’re all Israelis here.” Similarly, Bennie halts Nimy’s sexual assault on the helpless Ricky, then coldly seduces and abandons her.

The film’s violent opening leads to the plot’s conclusion — an all-out assault on the defenceless Barbie. First the Mizrachi pot-heads return to avenge one member’s having his head (not unjustly) scalded in humus oil. The original trio has accrued a Rambo. 

They’re immediately followed by the soldiers Bennie expelled. Their attack on the Tel Aviv bar is filmed like an invasion of an enemy, especially as they attack rooms with grenades and spray the space with automatic rifles. They kill everyone, starting with the cop and ending with Dahlia.

Director Assi Dayan deliberately presents the action as filmed not lived. When film producer Eli walks away with his wife, he imagines himself in a film. He describes his last shot — the couple walking resigned into the dark — as they do. Eli has been running on his own “story.” He uses cancer as his excuse to visit Dahlia, but tells Dahlia the disease is his lie to be be free for her. Significantly, it takes an erotic TV scene to start Eli and Dahlia making love.

In another film convention. the poet/pianist Cherniak is a Dylanesque Hoagy Carmichael character, from his keyboard acerbically reflecting on the scene. He sings an open-eyed paean to the Arab Samri, whose people from among all people Allah has chosen to “f—- us up.” As Cherniak sings his song, “Right Here” — applying to the Barbie and beyond, to Tel Aviv, Israel, the Western world — “Wherever I went, I didn’t get anywhere. Everyone passes through accidentally, like in a short story or a monologue in a play.” No-one gets anywhere. “Whatever is to come, Nothing is going to happen.” Repeated at Dahlia’s request, this song concludes the film. To Dayan’s credit, he manages to end on a downer more down than Leonard Cohen.

Confirming the theme of film, Yarden is asked to shoot news photos for an absent photojournalist. Our flow of moving images often freezes on a stlll, reminding us that we’re watching a movie. Indeed the last shot is of the string of Barbie photos that have been posthumously preserved. That’s the afterlife film gives events. 

The film references climax in the very last shot. That pan across Yarden’s still photo proofs moves out to the window, where the rooftop cityscape turns into colour.

Of course, when we watch a black and white film we accept the convention that it is a realistic representation of a colour world. When this entire black and white film ends on emerging colour we’re reminded that we’ve been indulging in an irreality.  

Hence Bennie’s “annoying dream”: I dreamt I was asleep but I knew I was asleep.” Robbed of a dream, his waking career covers every corruption he can collect. 

The self-referentiality goes beyond film, as we saw when Cherniak sang about a monologue. Even as we are constantly reminded we are watching a film, we are also in the wider area of storytelling. Dahlia summarizes her Eli affair as “the longest short story I ever told.” 

This Tel Aviv is sunk in stories of downfall and loss. The common element is loneliness. The suicidal Ricky drifts through her one last abuse. Where Israel was born in the idealism and community of the kibbutz, here that ideal has shrunk to the taunting photo of her lost son and husband. Now Ricky finds “the city smells rotten” and “Being alone is a kind of landscape of this city” — anticipating the dull roofed lives of the ending. Her doctor finds this loneliness “a disease’  but Ricky shares it with the others. Her death is a fall into an un-Edenic garden.

Similarly, Dahlia may seem the social queen, as she warmly presides over the bustling pub party scene. But her one love is the cancerous married Eli. So every night Dahlia takes home some different soldier for stud service. There is no joy in this Mudville. 

What’s especially intriguing is that these stories defining Israeli despair are told by Assi Dayan, son of the legendary leader of Israel’s founding army, Moshe Dayan. How does the son view the heritage? The film was made in 1992 but set “one year from now” — as if it projects an imminent future and is determined not to look back on the storied past. For Dayan fils 1992 Israeli life replays not the nation’s heroic past — whether Biblical or national — but the menial stuff of commercial film genres. And imported genres at that.

    

The Innocents (2021)

  Eskil Vogt’s The Innocents is an even more powerful film than his The Worst Person in the World. It has an even deeper moral mission. With miraculous performances by the central four children, it’s a gripping horror story with ever widening implications.

The title recalls Jack Clayton’s 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s The Turning of the Screw. There a governess — emblem of Restrained Civilization — discovers  a harrowing evil in her young charges, subverting the usual equation of children with innocence. In Vogt’s film, four children discover an ability to communicate telepathically, to initially constructive but ultimately disastrous end.

The drama occurs in a summer lull, when many neighbours are away on holiday and the school-free kids roam the playgrounds and forests. The setting is an apartment complex on a beach, i.e., the modern urban edging into the primeval source of life. 

The central figures are a family with two daughters, the observant young Ida and the older Anna, whose autism has suspended her ability to speak. As the opening shot is of a dozing Ida the whole story can be taken as her dream or as her narrative of moral awakening.

The two girls’ family is the film’s only complete unit. Against Ida’s wishes, they have moved to a new city for her father’s job. The sisters’ adventure and discovery derive from their relationship with two children from immigrant families, neither of which has a father. In contrast to Ida’s family blondness, the sinister Ben is East Indian and the sensitive Aisha African. Aisha’s facial pigmentation is a swirl of light and dark, heightening the theme of racial identification.

As if personifying the richness of imported racial and cultural diversity, the abnormal mental powers are introduced by Ben and Aisha. But any human power is ambivalent. Ben’s evil treatment of a black cat is an extension of the child’s amorality we see when Ida early pinches her unexpressive sister and — even worse — places shards of glass in her sister’s shoe. Aisha is the positive force, understanding, enabling, caring for the others and eager to oppose the evil.

But with the innocence that still emanates from children, Ben is as much the victim as the proponent of his evil power. At first he’s bemused by his ability mentally to move bottle caps. When he meets Aisha and her telepathy they bring Anna an ability conventional science couldn’t. She begins to speak. Instead of her chaotic etch-a-sketch swirls she draws the shark in the distant Aisha’s thoughts. 

Ben’s power turns against him when he finds he can control other people. He sends one stranger to kill a playground bully. Another is unknowingly locked out of his mission to kill the sisters. 

With the moral order thus upset, one of the mothers is killed, another mother kills her daughter, and the third seems on the verge of being despatched to kill hers. The murders among the mothers reveal a human nature run amok. Yet at the peak of his power Ben recoils on his floor, crying “Mommy!” He is himself the tragic victim of his own unnatural strength. 

During the climactic mental showdown between Ben and Anna, several other children in the complex, newly returned to end-of-summer real life, show an awareness of the event that the adults lack. So this story is not about individual freaks of nature but of a lurking, potentially assertive class. Specifically, the film allocates this power to our most powerless, our children. The adults here don’t know what forces they are suppressing in their ostensible control of their kids.

Here the film shows its political dimension. In The Birds Hitchcock undermined human complacency by unleashing a natural force that mankind usually controls. The film revived the Copernican revolution by dislodging man from the the center of his universe. Here Vogt attributes a monstrous, ambivalent power to a suppressed underclass. These children can be read as the suppressed, the oppressed, the neglected, in any contemporary society. The film reminds us that such forces need not stay helpless victim but can collectively assert a power we might well be advised to start treating with sensitivity and generosity instead of oppression.     

As the genre classically works, this is a horror story about the disruption caused by some monster. But here the monsters are not from outer space, or the Hydean beasts within that disrupt the Jeckyll order. The monster here is not even the supernatural force that occupies the children in Villlage of the Damned. Even more chilling, the evil here is an obviously hopeful good, the mental power that could liberate the helpless, that instead is turned to the evil of selfish abuse. Ben’s suffering from how he uses his power should be a global warning.       

 

 

You Don't Know Me (Netflix series)

  Sarmad Masud’s four-episode drama is a remarkable achievement: a searing exploration of racism that doesn’t mention the term. In this courtroom drama the British social system is the implicit villain and the drama’s characters its victims. Nowhere is the West's white persecution of the black stated but it pervades. 

The series opens with the prosecution lawyer (white, stern) lengthily detailing the young black accused man’s apparent guilt. The evidence is overwhelming. As this is TV-land we sophisticates may immediately conclude the guy must therefore be innocent. But it’s not that simple.

For the ensuing drama the defendant recounts the events that led to the drug-dealer’s murder and his own imprisonment. We may be tempted to reject the implausibility of a judge allowing such a lengthy statement by the accused. But if we stick with it — and each episode’s closing cliffhanger makes that easy — the payoff is considerable. 

The sweeping conviction of the prosecutor’s opening summary makes the drama’s title the hero’s defence. “You don’t know me.” From its secure perch the white world cannot know the underclass.  

The cast is largely Black. The jury is melting-pot mixed but the prosecuting team and the judge are white. The defendant fires his white lawyer because she won’t adjust her systemic process to his needs. Hence his four-episode monologue, enacted. He continually tries to set himself outside the black stereotype: “I sell cars.” They’re high-price cars, for a supportive white boss. Here the power is implicitly white, swallowing the stereotype of the criminal black.

That underclass turns into underworld. The black criminals wage their own internecine war. Smalltime dealer Jamil rises to relative kingpin because he hasn’t the hero’s will to detach from the street corner career. Even the flashy Jamil falls prey to his (black) overlord, the deceptively amiable Face. 

Jamil provides another play of the drama’s title. His own family is hitherto unaware of his drug career. If it’s a wise father that knows his son, it’s a wise society that truly knows its underclass, knows what has shaped it and responds with support not oppression. 

In contrast to Jamil’s family, the hero’s comprises a generous, loving mother, a sister tellingly named as a positive verb — Bless — and an old childhood friend, Curt, who tersely leaves the enemy’s thrall to support the hero. Out of respect for family, the hero endangers himself by alerting Jamil’s family to his whereabouts.  

These loyalties and challenges are amplified in the hero’s lover Kyra. She is an entirely engaging character — a sensitive, moral, beautiful, avid reader! —  who challenges her lover, his family — and us — with her own moral ambiguity. Her support for her jailed brother Spook, who betrayed the powerful gang, gives them an ineluctable grip on her. When they pull her back into prostitution the hero risks all to retrieve her — and with his family’s support. Bless reduces his dilemma to the simple but central question: “Do you love her?” That answered, he knows what to do.   

The drama’s ending is a Gordian knot that plays on our moral and racial judgments. We read the conclusion through a miasma of betrayals, rationalizations, compromises. It’s not a simple black and white.  

 

The Outfit

  Graham Moore gives this tight gangster film the feel of a stage play. Everything takes place in one space, the tailor’s shop. Characters enter and leave in a stagy manner. You’d think it was a filmed play but that’s not the point. The theatricality suggests an artificiality that coheres with the central theme: the thin veneer that civilization places over our innate and indomitable savagery. Fine clothes may make the man but the beast still lurks within. Within the individual and within the mean streets of the urban jungle. 

Within the nation too. As the graduate of Savile Row, master cutter Leonard seems a class, a world, apart  from the Chicago gunsels. Hence their sneering dismissal as “English,” as if he has no other identity than that arch of class. 

As he responds to the shifting incidents we’re impressed by Leonard’s mental agility and resourcefulness. Only towards the end, when he rolls up his sleeves, do we see that the classy cutter (“Not a tailor”) is cut from the same cloth as the Chicago killers. The arm tattoos reveal his natural fabric, the skin corrupted. 

Leonard ostensibly fled classy Britain to sell his classy suits in gangland Chicago. Boss Boyle was his first customer. As we learn, though, the London he fled was itself the thuggery and arson he finds in Chicago. 

As the senior Boyle observes, the difference between monkeys and men are tools. That’s evolution. Boyle has used guns to kill people — to “build” his rep, his gang, the neighbourhood. Leonard’s shears symbolize his traditional British craftsmanship (plus his lost wife’s devotion) but ultimately he turns their use to murder too. When he arrests his final thrust upon the fallen thug in midair Leonard saves those shears from an ultimate conversion to savagery. He keeps some control.  But they have killed a man as well as carving cloth.  

The opening narration proves a theatrical performance itself, one of the two recordings that will seal the poetic justice the cutter will deliver. Indeed his various ploys against the hoods are a dramatization of the many separate pieces the cutter must devise and wield to make the perfect “outfit.” Making a film is of course like that itself.    

Mabel proves another wolf in sheepskin, an apparent naif who plays her own games to con the cons, to escape the neighborhood that belatedly respects her thug father. Her scheme is an alternative craft to the tailor’s that she declines. 

The second fire is both a second end and a second new beginning for the cutter. Veneers and other fine suits are like that. They hide the embarrassing reality — but only for a while. Perfection is impossible because it can only be skin — or suit — deep. 

Crimes of the Future (2022)

  David Cronenberg’s striking explorations of the flesh work in three ways. Obviously, the spectacle of the various operations is unnerving, even revolting. This is the shock cinema we expect of Cronenberg.

But they also represent a celebration of our fleshly existence. Our insides are logically as beautiful as our outside. Especially during the years of covid the film luxuriates in the body corporeal. Even as it assumes a future from which pain has been banished it asserts our fascination with our flesh and fleshly experience.

Third, the sprit of this film is essentially comic. The spectacle wittily materializes the most common expressions of artistic inspiration. Repeatedly the dialogue cites inner beauty, the artist opening himself up, the power of internal experience and connection. This theme makes the script one of the year’s wittiest. However personal Cronenberg’s visual vocabulary, he is dealing with — and refreshing — the most traditional metaphors both for artistic creation and for human connection. 

This revived commitment to the flesh, to the organic in man and in nature, is a pointed response to the loss of the natural in our current lives. This is represented in extremis by the young boy who has grown dependent upon eating plastic — and is naturally (?) murdered by his mother. He literally eats a garbage pail, a metaphor as pertinent to our debased cultural lives as to our diet. An abandoned sea-hulk amplifies the definition of the manmade world as garbage.

So, too, the performance artist’s story plays against the background of a world whose loss of the natural extends beyond pain.  As his name suggests, Saul Tenser is the patriarchal soul of a future tense, drawn taut in resistance to the decay around him. Tenser looks like the resurrection of Bergman's Death. In shaping internal organs out of his creative ideas he revives the New Testament ideal of the Word Made Flesh. He is about a business far more serious, probing and profound than his aide’s name, Caprice, suggests. Of course artists always hide their seriousness. That’s how they penetrate us.

P4W; Not a Love Story -- reprint, Cinema Canada

 

"The victims' only hope is an indomitable seJf.

Bonnie Sherr Klein's

Not a Love Stoiy

AFilmAbout Pornography

Not a Love Story is a sensitive and sensible survey of pornography. Bonnie Sherr Klein directed the film, with a major contribution by Linda Lee Tracey, for the National Film Board's Studio D, founded in 1974 as a filmmaking forum for women on social issues.

The film is structured on the princi- ple of expanding range. We are eased into the subject, then gradually con- fronted with an increasing sense of its scope and danger. Of our two guides, Ms. Klein is the innocent outsider be- coming introduced to the porno ter-

rain, and Ms. Tracey the more experi- enced explorer, extending her under- standing.

Linda Lee Tracey is the former strip- per who started the Tits for Tots strip- pers' benefit in Montreal. In her old act, as Fonda Peters (!), Ms. Tracey played a comic insouciance against the usual straight-lace of strip. An excerpt of her act establishes the frankness of the film and infroduces the topic on a note of comforting humor.

But there is cold comfort from the en- suing revelations. First we are shocked by the size of the pom business. To wit: there are more hard-core peep shows in North America than there are MacDon- ald's outlets. With an annual gross of $5 billion, the hard-core pom industry out- grosses the sfraight film and music in- dustries combined. Those are compel- ling stats.

The greater shock comes from the kind of things shown in pornography. Klein was careful to select moderate material, within the pale, but she still shows a horrifying pattern of torture, mutilation, and violence against the female form.

Very clearly, pornography cannot be excused as celebrating female beauty and natural, open sexuaUty. As Kate Millett puts it, "We got pornography when what we needed was eroticism." Pornography is opposed to eroticism, not its aid and support. It slavers for the notion of torturing and dominating the female figure. Hence the recurring im- age of women under two kinds of relat- ed suppression : in chains and gagged. The implicit theme of this monstrous machinery is that women are objects of sadistic violation.

Klein's larger point, and the principle on which her material is organized, is that pornography exerts a pervasive in- fluence. Obviously one is affected if one participates in the sexuality business; so Linda Lee Tracey quit. One is^ more grossly affected if one cashes in on the exploitation of others; hence the inter- views with merchants and clients of sleeze.

But Klein's key observation is that pom damages people who never ex- perience the thing itself For even non- indulgers are affected by the recurring images that wash over from hard-core to soft. Worse, we all suffer the insidi- ous habits of thought, associations, re- flexes, that this dominating imagery projects.

In this light, Klein sensibly includes male victims of this pornographic abuse of women. One member (so to speak) of the Men Against Male Violence Group admits that men are victimized by these fantasies, "the male myth of perform-

Holly Dale/Janis Cole's

P4W: Prisonfor Women

The title establishes a process of hu- manizing, of fleshing out a formula. "P4W" is the formula, an adminisfrative convenience, a reduction. The second part reveals the humanity behind the formula: "Prison for Women." The film itself celebrates the humanity of the tx)nvicts in Canada's only federal wo- men's prison, in Kingston, Ontario. By film end we have fulfilled the order of convict Susie's closing song: "Look and see what you have done."

P4W: Prison for Women is an examin- ation of the effects of prison upon fe- male convicts. Co-tUrectors Janis Cole and Holly Dale interview several in- mates who were convicted of major crimes but are extremely engaging chai^ acters. The message is two-fold: the de- humanizing horrors of incarceration and the marvels of the human spirit that still survives.

The film celebrates the women's sur- vival instincts. Forced into uniformity, they sustain their individuality by pe:^ sonalizing their cells. These are plucky gals. But the last image threatens to run out of control. The liveliest of our con- victs sits cockily on a washing machine and spits out a defiant and exfravagant optimism. Her wrists are taped. The quavering voice, the dreary setting, and her slightly mad spirit may lead us to read the tape as a sign of slashed wrists. But no. This gal remains hale and reso- lute. Cole and Dale say the wrists were|

taped for tennis.

Although the directors see their film as being primarily about the inmates' spirit of survival, a firm feminist voice emerges more strongly. We don't see any men in the film, but enough men are bitterly mentioned to make the prison signiiy the oppression and restriction of the patriarchal macrocosm.

So the only rehabilitation the convicts get is training to be a hairdresser. One lady bridles against serving three years in the laundry. Frequent complaint is made agafnst the powerful and un- s)Tnpathetic warden, a Mr. Caron. One

convict is told she upsets him because he can't stand her impression of happi- ness and security. A male judge vetoed a convitit's writing to her children. The convicts complain that when a riot broke out the male guards stood aloof and apart, watching amused as the female guards struggled to curtail the riot. The male aut^iority is not seen but it is felt — cold, commanding, compelling.

More dramatically, all the crimes we hear about are directly related to the women's oppression in a patriarchal so- ciety. One woman was sexually exploi- ted, another habitually beaten by her two men. A third, who was sentenced to 25 years after her robber husband killed himself, seems to have been damned for standing by her man. In sum, the wo- men's prison becomes a powerfiil meta- phor for a society in which men rule and repress women. The victims' only hope is an indomitable self And their bond.

Of course, any honest and thorough film about life in a women's prison must do something about lesbiansim. It will either skirt the issue or address it. Dale and Cole do something else. They trans- cend the issue of sexuality by showing— with an almost unbearable intimacy — two lovers preparirig for their separa- tion when one's time is over. This tender, dramatic episode typifies the delicacy and discretion of the film as a whole. The issues are explored, but with neither coyness nor sensationalism,

From this romantic relationship the film cuts to the convicts' relationships with their children. One recalls recent meetings, after the courts forbade their communication. Another makes a video- tape to send to her little girl. We get a close-up of her singing to her child. But for her telling a Peter Rabbit story we shift to a long-shot of the videotape machine and monitor.

The medium and the message are much improved over what convicts used to be able to do. But the dominant impression remains of a cold, mechani- cal, remote interference with the warmth of human normalcy,

36/Cinema Canada-November 1981

REVIfcWS

Maurice Yacowar

•

P4W ! PRISON FOR WOMEN d./p. Janis Cole, Holly Dale cam. Nesya Shapiro sd. Aerlyn Weissman ed. Janis Cole & Holly Dale asst. ed. John O'Connor original mus. Susie & Kas asst. to p. Beveverly J. Whitney p.c. Spectrum Films running time 81: 23 min. disL Pan-Cana- dian Film Distributors Inc.

ance, goal orientation." In one of the most moving scenes a writer and her l^usband probe — to the point of tears - their battle for a reasonable sexuaUly in a world of subversive excess.

JVot a Love Story is a sober, respon- sible film. It achieves a balance and restraint that seem positively saintly, considering the enemy. And yetfliefilni has aroused a furious opposition.

This attack upon pornography has been censored by the Ontario Censor Board (although one uncut screening was allowed at Toronto's Festival of Festivals). So the film suffers the ir- rational fate of Al Razutis' A Message From Our Sponsor in Ontario. The pom flows on, but a thoughtful analysis of (and warning against) the pom gets censored!

On other fronts, there has been some newspaper editorializing against the NFB spending taxpayers' money on a film about pornography. To this com- plaint there is a simple response: go see the film.

But there is no such simple answerto the irresponsible hatchet job done by , Jay Scott, film reviewer for the Globe and Mail. Scott called the film "boui^ geois, feminist fascism." To Scott it must be feminist to include males discussing their victimization by pornography; fas- cist to complain about continually see- ing one's gender fragmented, exposed,

tortured; and bourgeois to undertake critical analysis of a major social phen- omenon. His real objection to the film seems to be that it omits gay pom. By that principle he would attack a west- em for omitting ships and a pirate fihn for leaving out sagebrush. All in all, Scott's review was his worst job (and of a telling piece) since he used Altman's A Perfect Couple as an opportunity to deride Marta Heflin's rib-cage. Such in- sensitivity to the image and such dis- respect for the predicament of women are astonishing in a film critic who quite often commits responsible film criti- cism.

Even more astonishing was Scotfs closing salvo, a call for the Board to censor this film for its hard-core insets. Scott's shriek validates the film's point about the pervasive attempt to silence completely the voice of victim women. As Susan Griffin remarks, "Pornography is filled with images of silencing wo- men. Our silence is the way in which our status as objects is made real." In this line of thought, women must be obscene and not heard.

Not a Love Story is a search and a report that had to be done. It should have been made long ago and it shouitf be seen and discussed as widely as' possible. We are fortunate that the film was made by such responsible and intelligent artists.

But this film is one of those delicate, afflicted roses that must be defended against the invisible worms that fly in the night, be they defenders of a sick status quo, senseless censor boards, or wrong-headed personality-peddling c^ umnists.

Maurice Yacowar (

NOT A LOVE STORY d.Bonnisj Klein with participation of Linda Lee V assoc. d./ed. Anne Henderson p. Dorothysl H e n a u t a s s o c . p . M i c h e l i n e Le G u i U o u c a m . W Letarte 2nd cam./asst. Susan Trow loc. id.„ Gendron loc. business man. Andr^e "•^'"•J Jackie NevveU asst. picture/sd. ed. MichellT Guillou graphics layout Gayle Thomas ttU tion cam. Baymond Dumas original mu»,/M d. Ginette Bellavance lyrics Tina Home vocW Cathy IVIillermus.rec. Louis Hone eiec. p.K*'''

'• Shannon p.c. A National Film Board of Cfl (Studio Dl production, r u n n i n g time 70 nm^