Of all the French language films I saw at the Cinepanorama this year, Inch Allah (2012) of
screen-writer and director Anais Barbeau-Lavalette must surely count as the most emotionally draining of all.
As the film opens, we see a young child admiring some birds in a number of cages. Behind him, we see various tables and chairs on the pavement of a cafe-bar with Chloé (Evelyne Brochu) relaxing with her friend Ava (Sivan Levy). Then suddenly we hear the noise of a loud explosion and we see frightened doves flying in the air against the blue sky. Later that evening, we see Chloé walking in the cobbled street of Ramallah half drunk with Ava asking her to say something while she takes her photo on her i-phone. Ava did not know what to say. Chloé told her to say "Hello Palestine". She tried but Chloé said she did not it say it with the right tone and she had to do it again. When it's morning, we see Chloé hurriedly grabbing something to eat whilst her mother in Canada watches her through the web-cam of her computer notebook. Then she goes downstairs and gives a knock at the door of the floor below. Then Ava comes out. Chloé drives her to work and then goes to work herself. We learn that Ava is an Israeli soldier assigned to check the identity of Palestinians with permits to cross the city barrier into the Israeli side of the town of Ramallah and that Chloé is a Canadian doctor working for a UN maternity clinic on the Palestinian side.
2013年12月10日 星期二
2013年5月26日 星期日
Mélo ( 淡淡哀傷)
Another film at the French Film Festival I saw was a quaint old film by a very stylish French cinéaste, Alain Resnais. It's a film based on a 1929 stage play by Henri Bernstein but made in 1986. It retains much of the atmosphere of the epoque and the flavor of the French stage: everything took place against two fixed sets with characters moving into and out of them: a patio garden of a violinist and the sitting room and then the bedroom of another violinist.
As the film opens, we see two friends having a good time reminiscing their former days together when they were at the music academy: Pierre Belcroix,(Pierre Arditi) and Marcel Blanc (André Dussollier) a well-traveled violinist and Romaine Belcroix (Sabine Azéma ) a whimsical and fashionable young lady whom Pierre could never praise enough. After an intimate and beautiful evening at the garden, Marcel offered Romaine a chance to visit him despite his busy concert schedule, She took it up and suggested the following day but when he reluctantly accepted, she said she had an appointment with her coiffeur. But then she changed her mind again and they met. She played the piano, and he the violin. It was a piece by Brahms (an echo of the romance between Clara Schumann and Brahms?) and an affair developed. Marcel could not resist her charm and she his and she visits him whenever he returns and before long, the two go on a trip together. Eventually, Romaine poisons her husband but he recovers. However, she could not bear to continue living between two good friends and committed suicide. Three years later, Pierre visits Marcel and presses him whether there was anything between him and his wife. Marcel denied. Perhaps he did not want to hurt his friend. Perhaps he did not want to admit to being a salaud. Perhaps he did so because he did not wish to tarnish the faith his friend had in his wife. What is the truth? Does it matter?
The filmography was very studied, the acting by all three actors excellent and the music good. The film won the César Award for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor.
As the film opens, we see two friends having a good time reminiscing their former days together when they were at the music academy: Pierre Belcroix,(Pierre Arditi) and Marcel Blanc (André Dussollier) a well-traveled violinist and Romaine Belcroix (Sabine Azéma ) a whimsical and fashionable young lady whom Pierre could never praise enough. After an intimate and beautiful evening at the garden, Marcel offered Romaine a chance to visit him despite his busy concert schedule, She took it up and suggested the following day but when he reluctantly accepted, she said she had an appointment with her coiffeur. But then she changed her mind again and they met. She played the piano, and he the violin. It was a piece by Brahms (an echo of the romance between Clara Schumann and Brahms?) and an affair developed. Marcel could not resist her charm and she his and she visits him whenever he returns and before long, the two go on a trip together. Eventually, Romaine poisons her husband but he recovers. However, she could not bear to continue living between two good friends and committed suicide. Three years later, Pierre visits Marcel and presses him whether there was anything between him and his wife. Marcel denied. Perhaps he did not want to hurt his friend. Perhaps he did not want to admit to being a salaud. Perhaps he did so because he did not wish to tarnish the faith his friend had in his wife. What is the truth? Does it matter?
The filmography was very studied, the acting by all three actors excellent and the music good. The film won the César Award for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor.
2013年5月19日 星期日
Le Sang d'un Poet (The Blood of a Poet) (詩人之逝)
Le Sang d'un Poet (The Blood of a Poet) (1930) is another film I saw as part of the Le French Mai this year. In many ways, it's a very unusual film: it's old, in black and white, has some bizarre drawings and jerky photographic images and treats of some very uncommercial themes, done in some formalistic and certainly very innovative ways. It's directed by the famous French poet and novelist, painter, stage designer, actor and director Jean Cocteau. it forms part of an Orphic trilogy including Orphée (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).
This film unrolls in four parts. In the first, a bare chested male artist wearing an 18th century wig, enclosed within the four walls of an empty room, sketches a face of a woman, then her mouth, studies it, absorbed but before long, it starts moving. He tries to rub it off with his hands when another man also in a powdered wig, arrives to deliver him something but after the man leaves,the artist discovers that the mouth has become embedded in the palm of his hands. He tries to wash it off in a basin of water, like Macbeth, but cannot. The artist hands and then feet appear through first one and then another hole in a painting .After a while, he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he goes to a marble statue of a woman and places his hands over her mouth and learns to his great delight that the mouth on his palm has finally agreed to leave it and to reattach itself to another of his own artistic creation, a marble statue of a woman and after that the mouth begins talking.
In part two of the film, the statue begins to talk. He's urged to walk through a mirror and to try look at what he'd find through that mirror. He does and finds himself in a hotel corridor with a number of closed doors. He tries to open the door but cannot but when he leaves, he is unable to, as if his hands and feet were drawn towards the walls of the room like magnet in contact with iron walls. He peeps through several keyholes of the hotel room doors and sees an opium smoker and a hermaphrodite. He's given a gun and a voice directs him to shoot himself. He does so but does not die. He feels he's had enough, returns through the mirror and smashes the statue with a hammer. .
In part 3 of the film, we see some teenage students having a snowball fight. Thinking that he's throwing a snowball when it is in fact a chunk of marble, an older boy kills a younger one. Is the marble a piece broken off from the smashed statue of the female statue?
In the final section of the film, the artist was playing a card game on a table in a court yard over the body of the dead teenager, He was being watched over by a masked man in 18th century costume behind the midpoint of a table with apparent interest amidst the bitter cold of the snow in that courtyard and higher up by certain wealthy ladies or even perhaps a royalty on what looks like two box seats in an opera house. The woman, which looks like the smashed statue, tells him he would lose unless he got an ace of heart. The man steals an ace from the breast pocket of blazer of the dead teenager. Then the teenager's black guardian angel appears and takes back that card from the man's hands also the dead body of the boy and then leaves through the flight of steps by which he came and disappears behind the door from which he originally emerged. Realizing he has lost, the man takes out a revolver and shoots himself. The spectators on the balcony then applaud and the woman walks through the snow, leaving no footprints and turns back into the smashed statue and then into a female figure with a lyre, the traditional symbol of lyrical poetry and later, of poets in general, to her right in a drawing, The film ends.
This film unrolls in four parts. In the first, a bare chested male artist wearing an 18th century wig, enclosed within the four walls of an empty room, sketches a face of a woman, then her mouth, studies it, absorbed but before long, it starts moving. He tries to rub it off with his hands when another man also in a powdered wig, arrives to deliver him something but after the man leaves,the artist discovers that the mouth has become embedded in the palm of his hands. He tries to wash it off in a basin of water, like Macbeth, but cannot. The artist hands and then feet appear through first one and then another hole in a painting .After a while, he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he goes to a marble statue of a woman and places his hands over her mouth and learns to his great delight that the mouth on his palm has finally agreed to leave it and to reattach itself to another of his own artistic creation, a marble statue of a woman and after that the mouth begins talking.
In part two of the film, the statue begins to talk. He's urged to walk through a mirror and to try look at what he'd find through that mirror. He does and finds himself in a hotel corridor with a number of closed doors. He tries to open the door but cannot but when he leaves, he is unable to, as if his hands and feet were drawn towards the walls of the room like magnet in contact with iron walls. He peeps through several keyholes of the hotel room doors and sees an opium smoker and a hermaphrodite. He's given a gun and a voice directs him to shoot himself. He does so but does not die. He feels he's had enough, returns through the mirror and smashes the statue with a hammer. .
In part 3 of the film, we see some teenage students having a snowball fight. Thinking that he's throwing a snowball when it is in fact a chunk of marble, an older boy kills a younger one. Is the marble a piece broken off from the smashed statue of the female statue?
In the final section of the film, the artist was playing a card game on a table in a court yard over the body of the dead teenager, He was being watched over by a masked man in 18th century costume behind the midpoint of a table with apparent interest amidst the bitter cold of the snow in that courtyard and higher up by certain wealthy ladies or even perhaps a royalty on what looks like two box seats in an opera house. The woman, which looks like the smashed statue, tells him he would lose unless he got an ace of heart. The man steals an ace from the breast pocket of blazer of the dead teenager. Then the teenager's black guardian angel appears and takes back that card from the man's hands also the dead body of the boy and then leaves through the flight of steps by which he came and disappears behind the door from which he originally emerged. Realizing he has lost, the man takes out a revolver and shoots himself. The spectators on the balcony then applaud and the woman walks through the snow, leaving no footprints and turns back into the smashed statue and then into a female figure with a lyre, the traditional symbol of lyrical poetry and later, of poets in general, to her right in a drawing, The film ends.
It's a most peculiar film. Is Cocteau telling a moral tale with surrealistic and expressionist techniques, deliberately blurring the boundaries of reality and fiction, life and art, death and life, Thanatos and Eros, appearance and "truth", surface and depth, the conflict between survival and conscience, creation and destruction, chance and destiny? Is he trying to deal with the adventures of the human psyche? Is he trying to tell us something of the functioning of certain unconscious forces pushing us in certain directions, following its own dream logic? Is he making some oblique reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland? Is he trying to explore the difference between sense and nonsense? Is he suggesting that that everything is a spectacle? Is the cloth folding over the couch the fold of art over the psychoanalyst's couch to illuminate it a little, like the little stars surrounding the human figure in the ? Are the hands and feet of the artist which emerge from behind the couch the symbolic "action" of art upon the psychic reality of the artists "true" situation? Do we shape our life by certain images or is it the other way round? The film starts with a drawing and ends with a drawing, passing through images of a statue which starts talking and moving and ends with the same statue and/or drawing sealed in silence. Is he exploring the process of artistic creation itself? In the same way that his hand is the instrument of his artistic expression, is the mouth of the woman he sketches not an instrument of the expression or the "articulation" of art itself? Is he dealing with the paradoxes of art and/or life itself? Is he exploring the relations between interior content and external form, of reference and expression? Is form the materialisation of expression itself, with nothing deeper than the surface of that form of artistic expression itself? There is an image of a vortex at the start of the film upon what looks like the cloth of stage magicians with stars etc, spiralling outwards from an invisible point at its centre, which evolves into a line which makes itself progressively visible in ever bigger spirals in white against a background of blackness until the last one merges from the foreground into the surrounding blackness of the background again:emerging from one kind of invisible darkness, the obscurity of nothingness at its centre morphing and merging into to another kind of obscurity of mystery of nothingness, the totality of that image, as part of a drawing being folded onto the image of the artificial cinema screen? From silence to voice, back to silence through action? From two dimensions to three and then back to two? From the hand, to the eye, to psyche, through certain masks, cloaks or clothes over the naked body of the artist, through a mirror and a door,to certain visible products of art, to life and back? Is he suggesting that after its creation, the art work will take on an independent life of its own, no longer subject to the control of the artist and on the contrary, becoming something which turns back to mesmerize the mind and the heart of the artist himself and perhaps to torture him until he dies?
2013年5月12日 星期日
Jean de Florette & Manon de Source (戀戀山城、恩怨情天)
There was no concert for me this weekend. Instead, I went to see two films based on a 1953 4-hour long film by Marcel Pagnol, drastically cut at the time by the distributors for commercial reasons and remade by Claude Berri in 1986 from the novel which Pagnol later published. It's a story of the epic battles between love and revenge among two generations of certain peasant families in the French Provence shortly after the first world war. The double-bill is featured as part of film offerings of Le French Mai this year.
The first, entitled Jean de Florette, stars Yves Montand as César Soubeyran, nicknamed 'Le Papet', Gérard Depardieu as Jean de Florette, Daniel Auteuil as Ugolin, Elisabeth Depardieu as Aimée Cadoret, Margarita Lozano as Baptistine and Ernestine Mazurowna as Mannon Cadoret and the second film, called Manon des Sources, additionally features the beautiful Emmanuelle Béart as the grown up Manon.
As the film opens, we see a simple minded Ugolin, one of the two surviving Soubeyrans in the region returning from war to his uncle César Soubeyran, an old bachelor and owner of a stone house and farm. He returned with a secret project: growing carnations instead of the traditional potatoes, maize, pumpkins etc. But they got a problem: carnations soak up water like a sponge. They know that their neighbor Pique-Bouffigue, had a partially blocked up spring in his land which they wanted so much to buy for growing his carnations. They decided to pay the old man there a visit but the man wouldn't sell the land to him at any price and said ironically, they could have the land only over his dead body. During the negotiations, they got into a quarrel and the man fell from a tree, hit his head against a rock and died! As they were determined to have the land, the Soubreyrans secretly went to block up the spring completely so that the land would be worth much less in case whoever would inherit the land could be persuaded to sell it to them. They then made inquiries and found out that the man had decided to give the land to his sister Florette de Berengere, Papet's old flame, who married Crespin, a blacksmith in another village years ago whilst Papet was
recovering in a military Hospital in Africa during the war. So Pepet wrote to an old friend who knew both him and Florette well, Grafignette. But the reply he got said that the day she got César's letter, Florette died and gave everything to his son Jean de Florette. Jean, a hunchback with a heart of gold, a Parisian tax collector and a city intellectual with romantic dreams of the bliss of rural life, who soon arrived with his singer wife Aimée Cadoret and their 5 year-old daughter Manon. Jean plunged himself enthusiastically into his plans of raising rabbits, and crepins, tomatoes, carrots, onions and some other crops according to books and agricultural studies about soil type, plant characteristics, statistics about rainfall etc. But he had some problems: he did not have enough water and had to store water in a cistern. But he threw his heart and soul into his project and worked day and night and spent all his savings on improving the farm but fate had it that he had to die during an accident whilst trying to dig a well: he got hit by a flying rock blown into the air from the force of the dynamite he was using to blast the well,. He had wanted to see and hear the sound of water gushing out from the proposed well but he got too near to the mouth of the proposed well for his own good. After his death, Aimée decided to sell the farm and leave. The moment they got the land cheap, the Soubeyrans danced and unplugged the hole blocking the spring. Manon sees them and understands what happened. She shrieks, runs towards the hills and decides to stay. She did so as a shepherdess because she liked the Italian gypsy couple who lived about 2 km from her house who treated her as if she were their own daughter as a little earlier, his father did not evict them from his land.
In part two of the film, Manon had grown up into a beautiful girl. During one of his hunting trips, Ugolin saw Manon bathing and dancing by the side of a pond and could never since get her off his mind. He secretly placed birds in the traps set by Manon in the hills so that she could sell them in the market and get some money and then clumsily but sincerely declared his love for her but she would have nothing to do with him because she overheard from some poachers that Ugolin and César had deliberately blocked the spring in his father's farm. Whilst looking for a lost goat, she discovered by accident the source of the water supplying water to what used to be his father's farm and also to the whole town and decided to do exactly what the Soubreyrans did to her father. She plugged it up. In no time, the whole town was in uproar because of water shortage. An emergency meeting was called during which an expert from the water resource department explained various theories about why the water dried up but could ofter no solution except for water to be brought in from elsewhere in a water truck. Manon realized the serious consequences of what she had done and confessed to a new teacher whom she met by accident but whom she fancied. He encouraged her to undo what she did. When Ungolin saw how she looked at the teacher, he realized that he had no hope of ever winning her and hanged himself on a tree. At her wedding, old César met Grafignette who told him to his surprise that Florette had in fact written a letter to him when he was in Africa to tell him that she was pregnant with his child and that she would wait for him to marry her but that not having received any reply from him, she married the blacksmith to give their child a father. Césa then realized that in fact, Jean de Florette was his own son ! He was crushed and decided that there was no reason for him to continue living. After having made a will in which he gave everything to Manon, his granddaughter, he lay in bed to die.The last hope of any Soubreyran having any male heir had died with the death of Ugolin and his death spelled the end of the Soubreyran line.
The films were excellently made, with beautiful music specially written for it by Jean-Claude Petit its theme music adapted from Verdi's opera "La forza del destino: Ouverture" (the power of destiny) hauntingly played on the harmonica by Jean and later by Manon.The acting by Daniel Auteil, Emmanuelle Béart, Gerard Depardieu and Eves Montand were uniformly good. I like the irony in the film: those who knew the truth could not speak like Baptistine, the mute domestic maid of César and those could speak, like Ugolin and the the townsfolk, the poacher etc. would not speak: it was through the hard-heartedness born of his greed and need to preserve his family name,that Papet destroyed his own and only hope of achieving his dream. He repented. Too late. The film portrays very well the kind of rural attitude prevailing in Provence at the epoque: its conservatism, it hostility towards strangers, the value it placed upon family honor and its land, its superstitions, its petty jealousies and small mindedness and its unwillingness to lift a finger to help someone regarded as an outsider etc. I also like the symbolic images used in the film: the central images of the film are water and land. Neither is fruitful without the other. Cesar left the pregnant Florette (motherhood) for war (masculine aggression) and the needed communication between the male and female part of humanity was lost (the letter which went astray in the war) as a result of which a physically deformed child was born: Jean, a hunchback city folk who would rely upon knowledge and science instead of rural tradition and superstition to till the land (the human unconscious and mother of all growth) to make it fruitful and raise rabbit. He died from the explosive force of modern technology. Their daughter Manon, a beautiful lively, freedom loving shepherdess tending goats (male sexuality) is also associated with the source of the spring (the water nymph of folklore) and for that reason has power over the entire town because of her control over the supply/interruption of the life giving water. What led Manon to the source of water is a "lost goat", deep inside the crevices amidst the hard rocks of the craggy mountains, and the image of the town people sucking from the tap (a phallic symbol) in the town square. Thus the film reveals the complex networks of cause and effect, the conflict and resolution of human dilemmas involving its principal elements: tradition and science, the city and the countryside, male and female, love and revenge, human initiative and the twist of fate operating through chance to produce an ironical result: the one who harms others for the sake of his own family ends up harming most himself and what he most desires; the one who relies on sheer intellectual power without assistance from tradition shall also die by the same and the water nymph of pure innocent love who reneges from her desire for revenge finally inherited both the land and its life-giving water. Only love combined with knowledge and tradition will thrive.
The first, entitled Jean de Florette, stars Yves Montand as César Soubeyran, nicknamed 'Le Papet', Gérard Depardieu as Jean de Florette, Daniel Auteuil as Ugolin, Elisabeth Depardieu as Aimée Cadoret, Margarita Lozano as Baptistine and Ernestine Mazurowna as Mannon Cadoret and the second film, called Manon des Sources, additionally features the beautiful Emmanuelle Béart as the grown up Manon.
As the film opens, we see a simple minded Ugolin, one of the two surviving Soubeyrans in the region returning from war to his uncle César Soubeyran, an old bachelor and owner of a stone house and farm. He returned with a secret project: growing carnations instead of the traditional potatoes, maize, pumpkins etc. But they got a problem: carnations soak up water like a sponge. They know that their neighbor Pique-Bouffigue, had a partially blocked up spring in his land which they wanted so much to buy for growing his carnations. They decided to pay the old man there a visit but the man wouldn't sell the land to him at any price and said ironically, they could have the land only over his dead body. During the negotiations, they got into a quarrel and the man fell from a tree, hit his head against a rock and died! As they were determined to have the land, the Soubreyrans secretly went to block up the spring completely so that the land would be worth much less in case whoever would inherit the land could be persuaded to sell it to them. They then made inquiries and found out that the man had decided to give the land to his sister Florette de Berengere, Papet's old flame, who married Crespin, a blacksmith in another village years ago whilst Papet was
recovering in a military Hospital in Africa during the war. So Pepet wrote to an old friend who knew both him and Florette well, Grafignette. But the reply he got said that the day she got César's letter, Florette died and gave everything to his son Jean de Florette. Jean, a hunchback with a heart of gold, a Parisian tax collector and a city intellectual with romantic dreams of the bliss of rural life, who soon arrived with his singer wife Aimée Cadoret and their 5 year-old daughter Manon. Jean plunged himself enthusiastically into his plans of raising rabbits, and crepins, tomatoes, carrots, onions and some other crops according to books and agricultural studies about soil type, plant characteristics, statistics about rainfall etc. But he had some problems: he did not have enough water and had to store water in a cistern. But he threw his heart and soul into his project and worked day and night and spent all his savings on improving the farm but fate had it that he had to die during an accident whilst trying to dig a well: he got hit by a flying rock blown into the air from the force of the dynamite he was using to blast the well,. He had wanted to see and hear the sound of water gushing out from the proposed well but he got too near to the mouth of the proposed well for his own good. After his death, Aimée decided to sell the farm and leave. The moment they got the land cheap, the Soubeyrans danced and unplugged the hole blocking the spring. Manon sees them and understands what happened. She shrieks, runs towards the hills and decides to stay. She did so as a shepherdess because she liked the Italian gypsy couple who lived about 2 km from her house who treated her as if she were their own daughter as a little earlier, his father did not evict them from his land.
In part two of the film, Manon had grown up into a beautiful girl. During one of his hunting trips, Ugolin saw Manon bathing and dancing by the side of a pond and could never since get her off his mind. He secretly placed birds in the traps set by Manon in the hills so that she could sell them in the market and get some money and then clumsily but sincerely declared his love for her but she would have nothing to do with him because she overheard from some poachers that Ugolin and César had deliberately blocked the spring in his father's farm. Whilst looking for a lost goat, she discovered by accident the source of the water supplying water to what used to be his father's farm and also to the whole town and decided to do exactly what the Soubreyrans did to her father. She plugged it up. In no time, the whole town was in uproar because of water shortage. An emergency meeting was called during which an expert from the water resource department explained various theories about why the water dried up but could ofter no solution except for water to be brought in from elsewhere in a water truck. Manon realized the serious consequences of what she had done and confessed to a new teacher whom she met by accident but whom she fancied. He encouraged her to undo what she did. When Ungolin saw how she looked at the teacher, he realized that he had no hope of ever winning her and hanged himself on a tree. At her wedding, old César met Grafignette who told him to his surprise that Florette had in fact written a letter to him when he was in Africa to tell him that she was pregnant with his child and that she would wait for him to marry her but that not having received any reply from him, she married the blacksmith to give their child a father. Césa then realized that in fact, Jean de Florette was his own son ! He was crushed and decided that there was no reason for him to continue living. After having made a will in which he gave everything to Manon, his granddaughter, he lay in bed to die.The last hope of any Soubreyran having any male heir had died with the death of Ugolin and his death spelled the end of the Soubreyran line.
The films were excellently made, with beautiful music specially written for it by Jean-Claude Petit its theme music adapted from Verdi's opera "La forza del destino: Ouverture" (the power of destiny) hauntingly played on the harmonica by Jean and later by Manon.The acting by Daniel Auteil, Emmanuelle Béart, Gerard Depardieu and Eves Montand were uniformly good. I like the irony in the film: those who knew the truth could not speak like Baptistine, the mute domestic maid of César and those could speak, like Ugolin and the the townsfolk, the poacher etc. would not speak: it was through the hard-heartedness born of his greed and need to preserve his family name,that Papet destroyed his own and only hope of achieving his dream. He repented. Too late. The film portrays very well the kind of rural attitude prevailing in Provence at the epoque: its conservatism, it hostility towards strangers, the value it placed upon family honor and its land, its superstitions, its petty jealousies and small mindedness and its unwillingness to lift a finger to help someone regarded as an outsider etc. I also like the symbolic images used in the film: the central images of the film are water and land. Neither is fruitful without the other. Cesar left the pregnant Florette (motherhood) for war (masculine aggression) and the needed communication between the male and female part of humanity was lost (the letter which went astray in the war) as a result of which a physically deformed child was born: Jean, a hunchback city folk who would rely upon knowledge and science instead of rural tradition and superstition to till the land (the human unconscious and mother of all growth) to make it fruitful and raise rabbit. He died from the explosive force of modern technology. Their daughter Manon, a beautiful lively, freedom loving shepherdess tending goats (male sexuality) is also associated with the source of the spring (the water nymph of folklore) and for that reason has power over the entire town because of her control over the supply/interruption of the life giving water. What led Manon to the source of water is a "lost goat", deep inside the crevices amidst the hard rocks of the craggy mountains, and the image of the town people sucking from the tap (a phallic symbol) in the town square. Thus the film reveals the complex networks of cause and effect, the conflict and resolution of human dilemmas involving its principal elements: tradition and science, the city and the countryside, male and female, love and revenge, human initiative and the twist of fate operating through chance to produce an ironical result: the one who harms others for the sake of his own family ends up harming most himself and what he most desires; the one who relies on sheer intellectual power without assistance from tradition shall also die by the same and the water nymph of pure innocent love who reneges from her desire for revenge finally inherited both the land and its life-giving water. Only love combined with knowledge and tradition will thrive.
2013年5月6日 星期一
Thérèse Desqueroux (弒夫告白)
Thérèse Desqueroux is a novel written in 1927 by Nobel Prize winning French writer François Mauriac about the acquittal of its heroine for the attempted murder of her husband and her flashback about how it all happened. It was turned into a film in 1962 by a famous French director Franju and was remade last year by Claude Miller. This closing film at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival proved to be his swan song too.
The film was set in the Landes in 1920s in south western France near to Bordeaux, famous for its red wine. As the film opens we find two lively teenagers Thérèse Larroque (Alba Gaïa Bellugi) and Anne de la Trave (Matilda Marty-Giraut) playing in the fairy tale like pine forest, blue sea and sunny skies. Anne has a gun and thinks it the most natural thing in the world to shoot at a bird and wring its neck with her bare hands to end its misery. Thérèse, a thinking and reflective girl, was reading a book whilst Anne was simply lying on her back on a boat floating lazily on the water and predicted that her copine would marry her brother. Then the film moves to the marriage of the book reading girl Thérèse Larroque (Audrey Tautou) to her brother Bernard Desqueyroux (Gilles Lellouche), all dressed up in lace, bonnet and finery. Thérèse does not appear particularly happy. She prefers spending the time dancing with a little girl. They had a honeymoon, travelng on the train and Bernard complained of the quality of the wine. Then life returned to normal. Bernard was interested in nothing but the hunt, the pines and their daughter Marie. There does not seem any meaningful love or communication between them. When the two childhood friends wander into their favourite pine forests by the sea, they often see a boat with red sail cruising by with a young man there, whose name they knew but never met, Jean Azevedo( Stanley Weber), the son of another big family of Jewish Portuguese descent owning the huge neighboring pine estate Since they had nothing better to do, they decided to pay this dashing young man a visit and learned that he had just returned from Paris. Soon Anne fell head over heels in love with him but her family did not approve. In any event, Jean had no intention of marrying Anne, whom he regarded as just his summer vacation fling. When her family found out about it, Anne was forbidden to see him again and she was sent away so that she would have no chance at all of contacting him again. But Thérèse continued writing to him after he returned to Paris. She was always complaining, even before her marriage, that that she had too many ideas in her head, which she hoped might be cured by marriage but this is something which Bernard's mother also did not like, apart from the fact that her family had an even bigger pine estate than Bernard's family. But Thérèse could not understand some of the books Jean told her to read. It was obvious that while she did not have to worry about her material life, her mind and her soul was stifling under the conservative, completely boring atmosphere of her family life and was yearning for a more stimulating kind of life. By accident, she discovered her husband who had been taking a medicine containing arsenic for his occasional heart problem might be fatal if the dosage was increased and she set about systematically increasing the same in the sly. When the poison had its effect, a specialist doctor called in from Bordeaux advised the family in confidence that Thérèse must never be allowed to serve Bernard ever again. Before long, criminal charges were pressed against Thérèse for attempted murder but for the sake of preserving the family name, Bernard testified in her favor, blaming the excess dosage on a formula given to his wife by a stranger which Thérèse met. She was acquitted as expected. But whilst her legal ordeal was over, it was the start of a jail term of another kind imposed on her by Bernard and French values at the time. Although she asked for permission to leave the family, Bernard would have nothing of it. Bernard told her that she would henceforth be confined to a room in his estate, like a piece of furniture which had served its purpose, but will be supplied all she needed to live. However she would not be allowed to go out except to church on Sundays and on important market days, just for the sake of keeping the appearance of family solidarity and their daughter, Marie would be sent to the Franco-Spanish town of Biarritz to be looked after by relatives. When Anne finally got married, everybody was amazed at how distraught Thérèse looked. That was not surprising considering that she survived only on wines and cigarettes. The film ends with Bernard sending Thérèse away to Paris. What would become of her? Would she meet up with Jean? Or some other more interesting people? We don't know. It's anybody's guess.
The acting by Andrey Tautou, the heroine was excellent: she portrayed so well her lack of interest in the banalities of rural life, her boredom, her secret longing for something exciting, her desperate hope for liberation from such a dull life, her quiet determination, beneath her calm exterior to end the life of her authoritarian and insensitive husband and how the accumulation of her petty unhappiness builds up in her until they crystallize into an silent but inveterate hatred and a secret desire for revenge. But circumstances were such that there was simply no way her soul could breathe. She had to drown her unspeakable sorrows in nicotine and alcohol. The photography by Gérard de Battista was superb. He brought out so well the natural beauty of the region, the play of light and shadows upon the leaves, the bark of the trees, the reflections of the sea and the image of the red sailing boat against the blue sky: it's
ease, its serenity and its promise of liberation epitomizes the impossible dreams of freedom of Thérèse as she looks wistfully as it glides before her eyes in the distance and the ethereal beauty of the quiet piano music in the background by Chopin and Schumann arranged by Mathieu Alvado seem to give a voice to the stifled desire of Thérèse for salvation from the indescribable boredom of rural life. A film version of Madame Bovary transposed to 1920s settings of provincial France? Whether or not it may be so described, one walks slowly out from the cinema showing this beautiful but bleak movie with a heart of lead, with perhaps the barest hint of hope.
2013年4月8日 星期一
Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os) (銹與骨)
As the weather wasn't likely to be good for outdoor photos, I thought I'd do better to spend time instead on finding out how some cameramen and a director would craft their motion picture. Jacques Audiard 's De rouille et d'os (of rust and bone) (2012) is a film you either love or find intolerable but whichever way you take it, it's packed with power, in more senses than one.
It starts with some dark fragments drifting or swimming in murky water and then cuts to a fun-filled show jump by three orcas to the sound of some rhythmic pop music and cheering crowd in a local Marine Water Park in the Antilles on the French Mediterannean coast. The star trainer was Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), basking in transient aura built upon her skills and self-confident charm. Then we see a young man Alain van Versch ("Ali") (Matthias Schoenaerts) with a 5-year old kid Sam (Armand Verdure ) trying to hitch hike a ride on the side of a French road. He got one and then we see them on a train, with Sam whining that he's hungry. Ali got up after he could no longer stand his whining, rummaged through the seats of various train compartments. We next see them feasting on leftovers by other passengers on their train seat. They got off the train. We see Ali waiting for someone to get a cold drink from a vending machine and then grabbing it and running away before the latter could reach it and then giving it to his son . We learn later that Ali had just lost his job as a boxer because his coach had died and he could not get any decent job. They end up in the working class home of a local Supermarket cashier Anna (Corinne Masiero), Ali's sister who had all the yogurts piled up in different levels of her frige shelves according to their expiry dates, yogurts her boss ordered to be thrown away but which she took home from the supermarket because she thought they were still good within a week of such dates. Then we see Ali getting work as a security guard where he was posted as a bouncer at a bar-discothèque. It was there that he met Stéphanie, who after she was chatted up by one of the customers whom she then insulted, got bashed up. Ali came to her aid, had a fight with that man, and hurt his hand but drove her home, where she was shagging up with her boyfriend Richard. Before Ali left, Ali gave her his telephone number and told her that if she needed help in future she could call him.
Disaster then struck. Stéphane had a work accident. During one of the shows, for some reasons, one of the orcas jumped on to the pool side and crashed her against the glass of the aquarium tank, sending her to the ICU of a hospital.When she recovered consciousness, she discovered to her horror, that she had lost both her legs! We next see her on a wheel chair in a dim small apartment with its curtain drawn. Perhaps out of boredom, she called Ali, who arrived and invited her to go to the beach. At first she refused but then changed her mind. Ali had a dip and asked her to go into the water. She asked him if he knew what he was talking about. But after seeing Ali having such fun in the water, she could no longer resist. She whistled to Ali who carried her to the water. With hesitation, she tried a few strokes. She could still swim! She was overcome by the sense of freedom she regained in the water. The relation then developed.
In the meantime, Ali, an amateur boxer who won some championship in Belgian, was introduced into prize free hand fighting by his gypsy colleague Martial (Bouli Lanners), the unscrupulous manager of a godown where Ali was then working as a security guard, a type who would not hesitate to install spy cameras to survey the workers there and who in his spare time, helped sell and install such cameras for other commercial establishments, against the law, without first asking for the agreement of the workers. Ali was tempted because he thought he was a good boxer. Martial then arranged for him to be trained at a gymn. He had his first fight. He won and with the money he earned from the bets, he bought his son a toy tractor and repaid Anna the money he owed her over the months for his board and lodging. He continued training and fighting. In the meantime, Stéphane also tried on a new pair of artificial legs and eventually regained sufficient confidence to return to the water park to renew his acquaintance with one of the orcas and even to dance again at the club she used to frequent. When he was warned by the school teacher for the third time being too late in picking up his son after school whilst he was engaged in training and on top was being told to leave with Sam the following day because Anna just got fired for "pilfering" from the supermarket because she was caught by a spy camera doing what she had been doing, that proved too much. He dumped his son with Anna without a word and ran away to Strasbourg to train as a boxer. After a while, he asked his trucker friend to bring Sam to see him. Ali brought Sam to do some sledging and had some real fun. But whilst talking on the telephone, Sam stumbled upon a thin patch of ce and fell into a hole. Ali was frantic. He kept on striking his hand on the ice where he could see the shadow of his son underneath the translucent surface of the frozen ice sheet until he broke his bones. But fortunately, he managed to break the ice and asked for help. After some emergency treatment, Sam could breathe again. He broke down in tears when he telephoned Stéphane. The film ends with Stéphane and Sam at his side during one of the boxing tournaments.
It's a story of one aspect of contemporary France we don't often see; the stark reality of poverty and the exploitation of low-paid workers by the managerial class But above all, it's a gripping tale of how a certain kind of beauty may rise from extreme physical pain and disfigurement, a tale of courage, about how two victims of the unpredictable adversities of life and may help one another, with a kind of socially unacceptably "blunt" and searing honesty, and emerge even stronger than ever after a disaster, just like fractured bones, which may in the healing process, grow new tissues which make them tougher than before. Stéphane Fontaine's cinematography which often show in close-up the body parts of the protagonists, seem to emphasize the sheer power and beauty of the human physique and its importance for human emotional relationship. The director uses his cinematic images well. He uses water as his way of talking about human emotional relationship: Sam is always complaining that Ali's hands are cold (implying perhaps that he's cold-blooded?) and Sam nearly drowned in icy cold water: Ali dumped Sam with Anna for months without trying to establish any contact. In trying to reach Sam, Ali had to literally break through the ice and in the process, broke his own bones! Is Stéphane's legs of steel not a complex symbol of her as an emotional cripple because as she confessed to Ali, she enjoyed the sense of power it previously gave her when she went out at night deliberately to seduce men by dressing up as a slut in bars before the accident. Is the "accident" at the marine park not a signal to her that there are risks involved in tempting and exploiting physical power in the service of her ego? Is she not made a cripple when the orca in the water turned against her ? Is the image of Sam seeking refuge from the cruelness and indifference of the adult world by crawling into a dog house not his silent accusation against them? Why is it that Stéphane could only really connect with Ali emotionally, not just physically, after that "accident"? I particularly like the scene where when Stéphane makes love to Ali after she got her artificial legs: she pushed them under her bed but later emerged in another scene when she acted as the stand in organizer of the the prize fights after Martial was arrested for using illegal spy camera at the godown: she deliberately showed her artificial legs to the gawking men around her. It's through such subtle cinematic hints that Audiard ponders on contemporary French life. He doesn't narrate. He shows us. Hence the apparently effortless natural power of the film. I like the way that Audiard refrains from any explicit comment or from overdramatizing this tale of flawed relationships struggling to become whole. The acting of both Cotillard and Schoenaerts certainly helps. A brutal yet touching (not sentimental) film expertly told.
It starts with some dark fragments drifting or swimming in murky water and then cuts to a fun-filled show jump by three orcas to the sound of some rhythmic pop music and cheering crowd in a local Marine Water Park in the Antilles on the French Mediterannean coast. The star trainer was Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard), basking in transient aura built upon her skills and self-confident charm. Then we see a young man Alain van Versch ("Ali") (Matthias Schoenaerts) with a 5-year old kid Sam (Armand Verdure ) trying to hitch hike a ride on the side of a French road. He got one and then we see them on a train, with Sam whining that he's hungry. Ali got up after he could no longer stand his whining, rummaged through the seats of various train compartments. We next see them feasting on leftovers by other passengers on their train seat. They got off the train. We see Ali waiting for someone to get a cold drink from a vending machine and then grabbing it and running away before the latter could reach it and then giving it to his son . We learn later that Ali had just lost his job as a boxer because his coach had died and he could not get any decent job. They end up in the working class home of a local Supermarket cashier Anna (Corinne Masiero), Ali's sister who had all the yogurts piled up in different levels of her frige shelves according to their expiry dates, yogurts her boss ordered to be thrown away but which she took home from the supermarket because she thought they were still good within a week of such dates. Then we see Ali getting work as a security guard where he was posted as a bouncer at a bar-discothèque. It was there that he met Stéphanie, who after she was chatted up by one of the customers whom she then insulted, got bashed up. Ali came to her aid, had a fight with that man, and hurt his hand but drove her home, where she was shagging up with her boyfriend Richard. Before Ali left, Ali gave her his telephone number and told her that if she needed help in future she could call him.
Disaster then struck. Stéphane had a work accident. During one of the shows, for some reasons, one of the orcas jumped on to the pool side and crashed her against the glass of the aquarium tank, sending her to the ICU of a hospital.When she recovered consciousness, she discovered to her horror, that she had lost both her legs! We next see her on a wheel chair in a dim small apartment with its curtain drawn. Perhaps out of boredom, she called Ali, who arrived and invited her to go to the beach. At first she refused but then changed her mind. Ali had a dip and asked her to go into the water. She asked him if he knew what he was talking about. But after seeing Ali having such fun in the water, she could no longer resist. She whistled to Ali who carried her to the water. With hesitation, she tried a few strokes. She could still swim! She was overcome by the sense of freedom she regained in the water. The relation then developed.
In the meantime, Ali, an amateur boxer who won some championship in Belgian, was introduced into prize free hand fighting by his gypsy colleague Martial (Bouli Lanners), the unscrupulous manager of a godown where Ali was then working as a security guard, a type who would not hesitate to install spy cameras to survey the workers there and who in his spare time, helped sell and install such cameras for other commercial establishments, against the law, without first asking for the agreement of the workers. Ali was tempted because he thought he was a good boxer. Martial then arranged for him to be trained at a gymn. He had his first fight. He won and with the money he earned from the bets, he bought his son a toy tractor and repaid Anna the money he owed her over the months for his board and lodging. He continued training and fighting. In the meantime, Stéphane also tried on a new pair of artificial legs and eventually regained sufficient confidence to return to the water park to renew his acquaintance with one of the orcas and even to dance again at the club she used to frequent. When he was warned by the school teacher for the third time being too late in picking up his son after school whilst he was engaged in training and on top was being told to leave with Sam the following day because Anna just got fired for "pilfering" from the supermarket because she was caught by a spy camera doing what she had been doing, that proved too much. He dumped his son with Anna without a word and ran away to Strasbourg to train as a boxer. After a while, he asked his trucker friend to bring Sam to see him. Ali brought Sam to do some sledging and had some real fun. But whilst talking on the telephone, Sam stumbled upon a thin patch of ce and fell into a hole. Ali was frantic. He kept on striking his hand on the ice where he could see the shadow of his son underneath the translucent surface of the frozen ice sheet until he broke his bones. But fortunately, he managed to break the ice and asked for help. After some emergency treatment, Sam could breathe again. He broke down in tears when he telephoned Stéphane. The film ends with Stéphane and Sam at his side during one of the boxing tournaments.
It's a story of one aspect of contemporary France we don't often see; the stark reality of poverty and the exploitation of low-paid workers by the managerial class But above all, it's a gripping tale of how a certain kind of beauty may rise from extreme physical pain and disfigurement, a tale of courage, about how two victims of the unpredictable adversities of life and may help one another, with a kind of socially unacceptably "blunt" and searing honesty, and emerge even stronger than ever after a disaster, just like fractured bones, which may in the healing process, grow new tissues which make them tougher than before. Stéphane Fontaine's cinematography which often show in close-up the body parts of the protagonists, seem to emphasize the sheer power and beauty of the human physique and its importance for human emotional relationship. The director uses his cinematic images well. He uses water as his way of talking about human emotional relationship: Sam is always complaining that Ali's hands are cold (implying perhaps that he's cold-blooded?) and Sam nearly drowned in icy cold water: Ali dumped Sam with Anna for months without trying to establish any contact. In trying to reach Sam, Ali had to literally break through the ice and in the process, broke his own bones! Is Stéphane's legs of steel not a complex symbol of her as an emotional cripple because as she confessed to Ali, she enjoyed the sense of power it previously gave her when she went out at night deliberately to seduce men by dressing up as a slut in bars before the accident. Is the "accident" at the marine park not a signal to her that there are risks involved in tempting and exploiting physical power in the service of her ego? Is she not made a cripple when the orca in the water turned against her ? Is the image of Sam seeking refuge from the cruelness and indifference of the adult world by crawling into a dog house not his silent accusation against them? Why is it that Stéphane could only really connect with Ali emotionally, not just physically, after that "accident"? I particularly like the scene where when Stéphane makes love to Ali after she got her artificial legs: she pushed them under her bed but later emerged in another scene when she acted as the stand in organizer of the the prize fights after Martial was arrested for using illegal spy camera at the godown: she deliberately showed her artificial legs to the gawking men around her. It's through such subtle cinematic hints that Audiard ponders on contemporary French life. He doesn't narrate. He shows us. Hence the apparently effortless natural power of the film. I like the way that Audiard refrains from any explicit comment or from overdramatizing this tale of flawed relationships struggling to become whole. The acting of both Cotillard and Schoenaerts certainly helps. A brutal yet touching (not sentimental) film expertly told.
2013年4月3日 星期三
A Fold in my Blanket (Chemi sabnis naketsi) (岩石的摺痕)
The HKIFF ended, as it began for me, happily. My 21st and last film A Fold in my Blanket (Chemi sabnis naketsi) (2013) comes from East Europe: the former USSR state of Georgia from a new scriptwriter- director Zaza Rusadze.
As the film starts, we see from the perspective of somewhere at the bottom of a dark cavern the light at the vagina-like opening above and we hear the grating sound of someone's shoes trying to find a foothold to get down and also the clear sound of water dripping drop by drop into an underground pool from the roof of the cavern. From time to time, the dark figure climbing down would click on his cigarette lighter when we get a glimpse of his face and the uneven rock face of the cavern.Next we see a long corridor with a row of identical doors which keep opening and closing as people in suit and tie emerge and walk past each other, unseeing, with a file under their arm with almost identical serious, blank and emotionless expressions on their faces. We see the young man entering a room attending an interview, not knowing what to expect and being told by a passing secretary that he could not enter the room just like that. After having seen his file, the young man Dimitrij (Tornike Bziava) who had dug out a suit and tie which he wore at a London wedding expressly for the interview, was offered a position by a man dressed in a black lawyer's or judge's gown and was told to come to work the following day. He did. His job is make photocopies and then to serve court documents. We see him sitting on a chair next to an old fashioned copier waiting for one page after another of the photocopied document to tumble out slowly to the squeaky sound of its worn out mechanical delivery system with a bored expression on his face. We are next shown an old man delivering the national flags to various old ladies that he knows about in various apartments, one of which is that of Dimitrij's relative's house, people who hold tiny boring family party where they talk about old times, eat stale cake and listen to Italian opera singing. In the party are a doctor, a lawyer and some old ladies one of whom, his aunt, is suffering from Alzheimer and would tell stories about how one time long ago, she went on a trip to the countryside together with Dimitrij and a boy called Andrej, with whom he was then sitting in a different part of the house, away from the old folks, trying to interest him in his favourite pastime--rock climbing but the others laughed at her saying that she was always making up stories but she retorted that even if so, her stories are less boring than their lives. In any event, we see Andrej (Tornike Gogrichiani ) agreeing reluctantly to give it a try. When Dimitrij went home, we see him studying an old photograph showing him with Andrej in the company of his aunt, intrigued and also in a different scene, her aunt flipping over an old photo album to ascertain whether or not she misremembered. Then we see the pair of young men rock climbing and how Dimitri showed Andrej his favourite cave at the bottom of which they found a wooden door. We learn later that Andjej was a drunk given to beating up people when he had too much and that he would soon have to face a murder trial. Dimitri was asked to be a witness for Andrej's family and asked if he could do the witness statement with Andrej and was told by his superior that he could not. We are also shown Dimitrij visiting his aunt in hospital for the removal of a tumor. Amongst the tissue removed from her brain was a diamond which she was always accusing one of his relatives of having stolen from her. She asked the doctor who was at the party whether it was possible to put that diamond back into her brain !
It was a very beautifully made film: the pace is slow, the composition of the pictures very meticulously thought out, like painting with special attention to the effect of light and contrast, full of suggestive symbols: old fashioned car running on the road, the old flag promoter being beaten up by a drunken young man, Dimitri going up the craggy rock one hand grip and one foot hold at a time, going down a mysterious cave with a door at the bottom, the bear in the studio for taking a picture for his identity photo for his job, the diamond being found amongst the unwanted brain tissue of Dimitri's Alzheimer suffering aunt, court documents being coughed out from an outdated photocopier machine, two young men walking in the forest and climbing mountains etc away from the dull and monotonous lives of the older folks. Perhaps the folds of the ancient limestone formed at the bottom of the sea is another symbol of how our past is folded into our present? The dysfunctioning of human relations in a small contemporary Georgian town is emphasized sonically by the sputtering of its outdated motors and worn out photocopier and the absence of any meaningful conversation which relates to the present at the boring family party. But whenever Dimitrij is out in the countryside, we hear the sound of some contemporary music either pop or classical and when Dimitrij is in the cave, we hear by contrast, the crystal clear sound of water dripping down from the roof, evoking images of the purity of Nature. The obviously surrealistic images are linked together not by the conventional linear prose logic of cause and effect but poetically, by parallel themes, motifs and variations so that the boundaries between everyday social reality and the reality of the psyche are blurred as the film narrative unfolds with the life of Dimitrij as its focal point. Dimitrij is a stranger, an outsider, having returned from abroad: he obviously finds it difficult to fit into the mundane and colorless social and professional life in Georgia, amongst old men and women, with old habits and old traditions. What is significant is that we don't see him going out with any girl. He seems unable to relate to the old folks, except to his aunt: he appears the only one who visits her. The film leaves us pondering. There are a lot of unanswered questions. Is Dimitri gay? Is he a symbol of the new Georgia fumbling to discover itself ? At one point, he was asked by the photographer taking his photo for his job application his name and he seemed confused! The film presents the problems but does not provide any answers. But it's no part of the job of an artist to provide easy ready-made answers. If that is what Rusadze sets out to do, he seems to have succeeded admirably When I talked to the director after the movie, he appeared so delighted at our conversations that he shook my hands vigorously and told me how he felt very encouraged and wished he had an audience like me for his next film which he said would be about ski-ing. I shall certainly go and see that if I got the chance.
As the film starts, we see from the perspective of somewhere at the bottom of a dark cavern the light at the vagina-like opening above and we hear the grating sound of someone's shoes trying to find a foothold to get down and also the clear sound of water dripping drop by drop into an underground pool from the roof of the cavern. From time to time, the dark figure climbing down would click on his cigarette lighter when we get a glimpse of his face and the uneven rock face of the cavern.Next we see a long corridor with a row of identical doors which keep opening and closing as people in suit and tie emerge and walk past each other, unseeing, with a file under their arm with almost identical serious, blank and emotionless expressions on their faces. We see the young man entering a room attending an interview, not knowing what to expect and being told by a passing secretary that he could not enter the room just like that. After having seen his file, the young man Dimitrij (Tornike Bziava) who had dug out a suit and tie which he wore at a London wedding expressly for the interview, was offered a position by a man dressed in a black lawyer's or judge's gown and was told to come to work the following day. He did. His job is make photocopies and then to serve court documents. We see him sitting on a chair next to an old fashioned copier waiting for one page after another of the photocopied document to tumble out slowly to the squeaky sound of its worn out mechanical delivery system with a bored expression on his face. We are next shown an old man delivering the national flags to various old ladies that he knows about in various apartments, one of which is that of Dimitrij's relative's house, people who hold tiny boring family party where they talk about old times, eat stale cake and listen to Italian opera singing. In the party are a doctor, a lawyer and some old ladies one of whom, his aunt, is suffering from Alzheimer and would tell stories about how one time long ago, she went on a trip to the countryside together with Dimitrij and a boy called Andrej, with whom he was then sitting in a different part of the house, away from the old folks, trying to interest him in his favourite pastime--rock climbing but the others laughed at her saying that she was always making up stories but she retorted that even if so, her stories are less boring than their lives. In any event, we see Andrej (Tornike Gogrichiani ) agreeing reluctantly to give it a try. When Dimitrij went home, we see him studying an old photograph showing him with Andrej in the company of his aunt, intrigued and also in a different scene, her aunt flipping over an old photo album to ascertain whether or not she misremembered. Then we see the pair of young men rock climbing and how Dimitri showed Andrej his favourite cave at the bottom of which they found a wooden door. We learn later that Andjej was a drunk given to beating up people when he had too much and that he would soon have to face a murder trial. Dimitri was asked to be a witness for Andrej's family and asked if he could do the witness statement with Andrej and was told by his superior that he could not. We are also shown Dimitrij visiting his aunt in hospital for the removal of a tumor. Amongst the tissue removed from her brain was a diamond which she was always accusing one of his relatives of having stolen from her. She asked the doctor who was at the party whether it was possible to put that diamond back into her brain !
It was a very beautifully made film: the pace is slow, the composition of the pictures very meticulously thought out, like painting with special attention to the effect of light and contrast, full of suggestive symbols: old fashioned car running on the road, the old flag promoter being beaten up by a drunken young man, Dimitri going up the craggy rock one hand grip and one foot hold at a time, going down a mysterious cave with a door at the bottom, the bear in the studio for taking a picture for his identity photo for his job, the diamond being found amongst the unwanted brain tissue of Dimitri's Alzheimer suffering aunt, court documents being coughed out from an outdated photocopier machine, two young men walking in the forest and climbing mountains etc away from the dull and monotonous lives of the older folks. Perhaps the folds of the ancient limestone formed at the bottom of the sea is another symbol of how our past is folded into our present? The dysfunctioning of human relations in a small contemporary Georgian town is emphasized sonically by the sputtering of its outdated motors and worn out photocopier and the absence of any meaningful conversation which relates to the present at the boring family party. But whenever Dimitrij is out in the countryside, we hear the sound of some contemporary music either pop or classical and when Dimitrij is in the cave, we hear by contrast, the crystal clear sound of water dripping down from the roof, evoking images of the purity of Nature. The obviously surrealistic images are linked together not by the conventional linear prose logic of cause and effect but poetically, by parallel themes, motifs and variations so that the boundaries between everyday social reality and the reality of the psyche are blurred as the film narrative unfolds with the life of Dimitrij as its focal point. Dimitrij is a stranger, an outsider, having returned from abroad: he obviously finds it difficult to fit into the mundane and colorless social and professional life in Georgia, amongst old men and women, with old habits and old traditions. What is significant is that we don't see him going out with any girl. He seems unable to relate to the old folks, except to his aunt: he appears the only one who visits her. The film leaves us pondering. There are a lot of unanswered questions. Is Dimitri gay? Is he a symbol of the new Georgia fumbling to discover itself ? At one point, he was asked by the photographer taking his photo for his job application his name and he seemed confused! The film presents the problems but does not provide any answers. But it's no part of the job of an artist to provide easy ready-made answers. If that is what Rusadze sets out to do, he seems to have succeeded admirably When I talked to the director after the movie, he appeared so delighted at our conversations that he shook my hands vigorously and told me how he felt very encouraged and wished he had an audience like me for his next film which he said would be about ski-ing. I shall certainly go and see that if I got the chance.
2013年3月28日 星期四
Io e te (Me and You) (密室中的我和你)
Bernardo Bertolucci is one of my favourite directors. He has never once disappointed me yet. In his latest film, lo e te (me and you) (2012) he explores the strange relationship between two half siblings inside the basement of their house.
The opening scene of the movie already gives us a hint of the context in which we are to see the film. We see pimple faced 14 year old Lorenzo (Jacopo Olmo Antinori) sitting in front of the desk of a shrink. His face is full of anger. He is rude, un-cooperative and unresponsive and was dying for the session to end. He couldn't wait to stand up once his hour is over. The shrink tried his best to be tolerant and understanding but Lorenzo couldn't care less. Next we see him in the school corridor. Despite some invitation by a girl to join her later in her fun activity, he ignored her and continued to listen to the pop music pouring into his ears from his ear phones. He lived in a world of his own, drowned in the waves of sound from the latest heavy rhythm rock music on his headphone. His ear phones served as the muffer to his psyche, locking out anyone trying to get in. His lady teacher reminded the students to bring the money for the coming ski trip and said the next day is the last day for handing in the money if they did not want to miss the ski trip. The following day, we see him with an envelope with money inside. He took out the money and put it inside his trousers pocket and crumpled up the envelope. After class, we see him going into a supermarket, buying 7 packets of orange juice, 7 canned meat, peanut butter and bread. The following morning he packed his stuff for the school ski trip. He was driven to school by his nagging mother and he shouted at her mother not to drive right in front of the school gate because no kid of his age would be so driven by his mother. His mother insisted on taking him all the way to the school gate. He flew into a rage and shouted at his mother to stop well before she reached the gate. His mother backed down. He got off and continued walking to the school. All the students were preparing to board the big hired coach. We see him dodging his head amidst the crowd and boarding a city bus and returned home. He installed himself in the family basement, listened to his music and read a horror novel about vampires. But he was not alone long. Unexpectedly, his half sister Olivia (Tea Falco) arrived. He asked her to go. She refused. He begged her. She still refused. There was no way she would leave. He tried to push her out. She shouted and threatened to continue shouting until the whole neighborhood would hear her. He backed down. Then his mother called him and asked to to speak to his teacher. Olivia stood out for him and pretended to the his teacher. She saved him from being exposed to further questioning by his mother. Soon, he discovered Olivia shaking all over. She was experiencing withdrawal symptoms. She told him that she was on drugs and wanted to kick off the habit and needed a place to do so all alone. She said that she would stay there a few days and then would leave to a friend's place in a horse farm. She had decided to kick the habit because her former lover would not agree to have her back unless she was clean.
In the course of the film we see all the withdrawal symptoms normally suffered by a drug addict, dizziness, shivering, feeling of nausea, vomiting etc. They got talking. Lorenzo discovered from her that his father had dumped her mother for Lorenzo's and said that their father bought the house at a discount from a down and out woman aristocratic who sold the house but retained the right to continue to live there until she died and that's why he found so many women's clothes in the cellar. She explained that she used to be a photographer who won some award in America and that she wanted to pick up her life again by weaning herself from heroin. Lorenzo then did what he could to help her. She told Lorenzo that she once had an exhibition in LA with the title "The Wall". According to her, we can walk through the wall if we like as if the wall which separates others from us did not exist, the way Buddha taught us. As the film ends, we see the two emerging from the family cellar into sunlight again, in the middle of the street. We see Lorenzo hugging Olivia to bid her farewell under the morning sunlight in the middle of the streets. Each has won their own battle through mutual help. They were reconciled to each other and to the world. And we see Lorenzo returning home. This final scene reminds me of that The Last Tango in Paris, where we see Marlon Brando emerging from the darkness of his hotel, opening the window and letting the rays of the morning sun fall on his face as he surveys Paris.
To me, the family cellar is also a hide out where they may keep everything unneeded there; their memories, their secrets, everything hidden is locked away and concealed, covered over in cloth or plastic sheets or by dust. From time to time, we need to take out stuffs from there and put them to new uses. Is that not what Lorenzo is instinctively doing at the start of the film? It's there that both Lorenzo and Olivia put their lives together again. Is Bertolucci trying to tell us that it's the womb of the half brother and sister from which they may derive secret nourishment, away from the sight of the external world? Is he suggesting that it's the purgatory of their soul, their unconscious? Is it a kind of crucible where they must first suffer in silence and in this case, with support from each other? First Olivia rejected any offer of help from Lorenzo but when she could not sleep, she begged for help and Lorenzo went to see her grandmother in hospital and took some sleeping pills from her for Olivia's use, thus establishing a new family bonding .And when she had overcome the first pains of biological dependence on drugs, she asked for food and again Lorenzo helped him by stealing some from the family frige. The family cellar thus proved to be kind of alchemical crucible of their psyche in which they transformed themselves through their suffering, to emerge chastened and empowered to meet again the pressures of life. It is also literally the cellar where their family secrets are normally kept, where everything is, so to speak , locked away from everyday consciousness.It was in that hole that Olivia promised Lorenzo to stay clean and it was there that Lorenzo promised Olivia never to escape from life again.
The lighting of the settings of that cellar is excellent. it fully brought out the desolate atmosphere felt by Lorenzo and Olivia but there is always hope. They can still access a little sunlight streaming in from a tiny window at ground level. The acting by Antinori and Falco is excellent. They portrayed so well the state of mind of the two half-siblings: their fears, their angers and their hopes. The film is narrated from the viewpoint of Lorenzo. We are enveloped in Lorenzo's mind. We hear and see what he hears and sees. The camera work is obviously the result of some very careful planning. Bertolucci never disappointed me before. Neither has he done so in the portrait of the salvation of two members of that Italian family.
2013年3月26日 星期二
Beyond the Hills (非常教慾)
My 18th film at the HKIFF takes me back to Europe. Beyond the Hills, the third feature film by Rumanian director Christian Mingiu is a neutral look at the plight of certain ignorant Orthodox Catholic peasant nuns in a remote part of Rumania who had little to look forward to except the promised salvation in a next life.
As the film opens we see two young ladies having an intimate conversation inside a room in a convent. Alina (Cristina Flutur), a non-believer who had been with Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) since they met an orphanage in Rumania at primary one and had developed a very intimate bodily relationship with her, has just arrived from Germany where she is working and tries her best to persuade her ex to join her to work on a German cruise ship. But Voichikta says that her heart has now been taken over by God and that she has decided to devote her life to Him. Alina is furious and will not stop until she gets her way. In the process, she got into conflict with the pragmatic autocratic, dogmatic but compassionate head of the convent, the Orthodox priest whom everyone there called "Papa" (Valeriu Andriuta) who genuinely believed that there are 364 types of sins of man. Nobody there seem to understand why Alina is an unbeliever and after having exhausted all the available means they can think of to make her see the "light" and after constantly praying for her soul but without any apparent success and after she tried to set her own room on fire in a suicide attempt, they decided that Alina must be possessed by the devil and then went on to perform an "exorcism" upon her, with the notional consent of Alina's semi-retarded brother, a ritual which involves having to restrain her and tying her to a wooden crucifix. As a result, the fiery and unstable Alina finally calms down. She dies. She is rushed to the hospital, where she is treated without any sympathy or any apparent care and concern. She is pronounced dead before arrival. In fact, the religious community had already sent her to the same hospital once but owing to lack of ambulance, they had to use their own vehicle. There, she was given an injection which calmed her down and was quickly sent back to the convent where the hospital staff said that she would probably haven been better taken care of.
Is Alina possessed by the devil? Or is she just suffering from temporary insanity brought on by her raging hormones? We see the contrast of how she is treated at the convent and at the hospital. At the convent she is treated with respect and there is genuine care and concern for her spiritual welfare but at the hospital, she is treated as just another patient which need to be treated and discharged as quickly as possible. Religious fervor prompted by ignorance, superstition and blind faith unaided by any scientific knowledge Vs scientific knowledge administered coldly, bureaucratically without any sentiments. Ignorant religious and spiritual care and completely secular rational indifference? Which is better? Which is worse? Those seem to be the questions posed by the film. Whatever the true answer may be, at the end of the film we find policemen rounding up all the witnesses who were involved in the last hours of the life of Alina, like an obedient flock of sheep. The last we see them, they were driven back to town, the priest, the sisters and all who assisted the priest to perform the exorcism. to the rumbling sound of the motor of the police van. The acting by Flutur, Stratan and Andriuta is excellent as also that of the mother superior Dana Tapalaga. The cinematographic works by Oleg Mutu is beyond reproach: he fully captures the rural atmosphere and the helplessness of the well-meaning sisters as they collectively ran about and mechanically co-operated with each other in doing whatever the priest or the mother superior said needed to be done, like ants. The film based on a real event, and a non-fiction "novel" by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, leaves us wondering where the truth may lie.
As the film opens we see two young ladies having an intimate conversation inside a room in a convent. Alina (Cristina Flutur), a non-believer who had been with Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) since they met an orphanage in Rumania at primary one and had developed a very intimate bodily relationship with her, has just arrived from Germany where she is working and tries her best to persuade her ex to join her to work on a German cruise ship. But Voichikta says that her heart has now been taken over by God and that she has decided to devote her life to Him. Alina is furious and will not stop until she gets her way. In the process, she got into conflict with the pragmatic autocratic, dogmatic but compassionate head of the convent, the Orthodox priest whom everyone there called "Papa" (Valeriu Andriuta) who genuinely believed that there are 364 types of sins of man. Nobody there seem to understand why Alina is an unbeliever and after having exhausted all the available means they can think of to make her see the "light" and after constantly praying for her soul but without any apparent success and after she tried to set her own room on fire in a suicide attempt, they decided that Alina must be possessed by the devil and then went on to perform an "exorcism" upon her, with the notional consent of Alina's semi-retarded brother, a ritual which involves having to restrain her and tying her to a wooden crucifix. As a result, the fiery and unstable Alina finally calms down. She dies. She is rushed to the hospital, where she is treated without any sympathy or any apparent care and concern. She is pronounced dead before arrival. In fact, the religious community had already sent her to the same hospital once but owing to lack of ambulance, they had to use their own vehicle. There, she was given an injection which calmed her down and was quickly sent back to the convent where the hospital staff said that she would probably haven been better taken care of.
Is Alina possessed by the devil? Or is she just suffering from temporary insanity brought on by her raging hormones? We see the contrast of how she is treated at the convent and at the hospital. At the convent she is treated with respect and there is genuine care and concern for her spiritual welfare but at the hospital, she is treated as just another patient which need to be treated and discharged as quickly as possible. Religious fervor prompted by ignorance, superstition and blind faith unaided by any scientific knowledge Vs scientific knowledge administered coldly, bureaucratically without any sentiments. Ignorant religious and spiritual care and completely secular rational indifference? Which is better? Which is worse? Those seem to be the questions posed by the film. Whatever the true answer may be, at the end of the film we find policemen rounding up all the witnesses who were involved in the last hours of the life of Alina, like an obedient flock of sheep. The last we see them, they were driven back to town, the priest, the sisters and all who assisted the priest to perform the exorcism. to the rumbling sound of the motor of the police van. The acting by Flutur, Stratan and Andriuta is excellent as also that of the mother superior Dana Tapalaga. The cinematographic works by Oleg Mutu is beyond reproach: he fully captures the rural atmosphere and the helplessness of the well-meaning sisters as they collectively ran about and mechanically co-operated with each other in doing whatever the priest or the mother superior said needed to be done, like ants. The film based on a real event, and a non-fiction "novel" by Tatiana Niculescu Bran, leaves us wondering where the truth may lie.
Disconnect (斷了線)
My 17th HKIFF film catapulted me from early 1800s Portugal back to contemporary America. I wonder if the film Disconnect by Henry Alex Rubin might not have been secretly funded by various producers of anti-virus software. It's a story about about how fraud might be committed through that universal and omnipresent, omnipotent media of communication called the internet and how easily what we say on the internet, including our most intimate personal details may be traced and monitored by others and in the wrong hands be exploited. The story traces three of them, emotional fraud, commercial fraud and sex fraud.
The internet really connects people in the virtual world and by the same token it can disconnect people in the real world. In this thriller, we are introduced to the lives of three families. Derek (Alexander Skarsgård), a former marine and now a business executive suddenly discovers that his credit card was rejected whilst working at Sao Paulo. He suspects that his wife Cindy (Paula Patton) has been overspending. She did not. He reports the matter to the police who didn't help much. So he hired Mike (Frank Grillo), a private detective who had been working at the police cyber crime squad for 20 years whose report made a surprise finding: Derek's wife had been communicating with another person Steven Schumacher (Michael Nyqvist) whom she thought was a member of an internet support group and had revealed to Steven the most intimate details of her thoughts about her marriage to Derek, in particular her inability to have another child after the death of their first and how she felt she was drifting away from her husband. Suspecting that Steven was making use of the internet to gain access to her and his personal financial data, Derk decided to stalk him, burgled into his house in the hope of finding sufficient evidence to help the police nail him or alternatively to confront him face to face to demand him to pay back the huge amount of money which he thought Steven had stolen from his bank account to such an extent that he and his wife had to move out from their present mortgaged home for default in payment as all his bank accounts had been frozen. He discovered later that in fact, that Steven himself was also a victim. His name and identity had been also been stolen by the real criminals who used his name as a platform. It nearly led to a killing.
The second story concerns a music loving teenager who is not very good at making friends Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo) who was fooled by two of his school mates Frye (Aviad Bernstein) and Shane (Kevin Csolak) who communicated with him on Facebook under the false name of Jessica with a photo of a girl they picked at random on the internet and then invited him to post a picture of his penis with words that he is prepared to be her love slave. The following day, his photo was posted in a social network so that the entire school population saw it and he was the made the butt of malicious jokes and snickers. He hanged himself in his bedroom. His absentee lawyer father Rich Boyd (Jason Bateman) was surprised and shocked and started to check out the whole thing. He continued to communicate with that fictitious "Jessica" . The real culprits responded as if they did not know that his son was in a coma in hospital but finally Frye could not resist the temptation of seeing how Ben was at the hospital when he was seen by Rich. Rich then tracked him down and gave him a real thrashing, until his father returned just in time to stop him. His father Mike was the cyber detective in the first story.
The third story relates how a TV reporter (played by Hope Davis) of a small local TV network made an exposé about an internet racket selling sex chat services through young male teenagers. The investigative news reports proved a hit and CNN asked for permission to put it through their news network. This caught the attention of the FBI which stepped in. The story is about the delicate balance between need of a journalist to secure the personal trust of persons who are persuaded to give information of how cyber porn network works and the needs of law enforcement. The lady reporter involved knew that she was treading a thin red line but could not completely detach herself from what she thought was the the personal welfare of her informant Kyle (Max Thieriot). She probably felt a pang of conscience about having to a certain extent exploited him for the benefit of herself as a journalist and for her company and tried her best to ease her conscience by "helping" him , after having revealed the whereabouts of his organization to the FBI and nearly got herself killed in the process by continuing to keep in touch with him now under "false pretenses" (?) that she was genuinely concerned about him. But when she finally found him, Kyle who had developed some genuine feelings for her, denounced her for the hypocrite that she was when she rejected his request to go away with him to live another new life.
Though not superb, the three stories do interweave quite well together with the skillful editing by Percy Lee, keeping the suspense going until the truth of the three dramas finally exploded before our eyes. An excellent Hollywood production. It invites us to think a little more both about how cyber networks are corroding any meaningful personal communication and its risks for all kinds of frauds.The director did not offer any solutions though. Can we blame him? With the mounting ease of communicating with others through internet technology, are we not ironically drifting further and further apart because of the "anonymity" of our real personal identities? Are we not losing touch with one another? Have we not become even more disconnected from one another in all sorts of ways? Apart from the cliché that we must become more aware of the potentially destructive power of the internet, are there really any easy solutions?
The internet really connects people in the virtual world and by the same token it can disconnect people in the real world. In this thriller, we are introduced to the lives of three families. Derek (Alexander Skarsgård), a former marine and now a business executive suddenly discovers that his credit card was rejected whilst working at Sao Paulo. He suspects that his wife Cindy (Paula Patton) has been overspending. She did not. He reports the matter to the police who didn't help much. So he hired Mike (Frank Grillo), a private detective who had been working at the police cyber crime squad for 20 years whose report made a surprise finding: Derek's wife had been communicating with another person Steven Schumacher (Michael Nyqvist) whom she thought was a member of an internet support group and had revealed to Steven the most intimate details of her thoughts about her marriage to Derek, in particular her inability to have another child after the death of their first and how she felt she was drifting away from her husband. Suspecting that Steven was making use of the internet to gain access to her and his personal financial data, Derk decided to stalk him, burgled into his house in the hope of finding sufficient evidence to help the police nail him or alternatively to confront him face to face to demand him to pay back the huge amount of money which he thought Steven had stolen from his bank account to such an extent that he and his wife had to move out from their present mortgaged home for default in payment as all his bank accounts had been frozen. He discovered later that in fact, that Steven himself was also a victim. His name and identity had been also been stolen by the real criminals who used his name as a platform. It nearly led to a killing.
The second story concerns a music loving teenager who is not very good at making friends Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo) who was fooled by two of his school mates Frye (Aviad Bernstein) and Shane (Kevin Csolak) who communicated with him on Facebook under the false name of Jessica with a photo of a girl they picked at random on the internet and then invited him to post a picture of his penis with words that he is prepared to be her love slave. The following day, his photo was posted in a social network so that the entire school population saw it and he was the made the butt of malicious jokes and snickers. He hanged himself in his bedroom. His absentee lawyer father Rich Boyd (Jason Bateman) was surprised and shocked and started to check out the whole thing. He continued to communicate with that fictitious "Jessica" . The real culprits responded as if they did not know that his son was in a coma in hospital but finally Frye could not resist the temptation of seeing how Ben was at the hospital when he was seen by Rich. Rich then tracked him down and gave him a real thrashing, until his father returned just in time to stop him. His father Mike was the cyber detective in the first story.
The third story relates how a TV reporter (played by Hope Davis) of a small local TV network made an exposé about an internet racket selling sex chat services through young male teenagers. The investigative news reports proved a hit and CNN asked for permission to put it through their news network. This caught the attention of the FBI which stepped in. The story is about the delicate balance between need of a journalist to secure the personal trust of persons who are persuaded to give information of how cyber porn network works and the needs of law enforcement. The lady reporter involved knew that she was treading a thin red line but could not completely detach herself from what she thought was the the personal welfare of her informant Kyle (Max Thieriot). She probably felt a pang of conscience about having to a certain extent exploited him for the benefit of herself as a journalist and for her company and tried her best to ease her conscience by "helping" him , after having revealed the whereabouts of his organization to the FBI and nearly got herself killed in the process by continuing to keep in touch with him now under "false pretenses" (?) that she was genuinely concerned about him. But when she finally found him, Kyle who had developed some genuine feelings for her, denounced her for the hypocrite that she was when she rejected his request to go away with him to live another new life.
Though not superb, the three stories do interweave quite well together with the skillful editing by Percy Lee, keeping the suspense going until the truth of the three dramas finally exploded before our eyes. An excellent Hollywood production. It invites us to think a little more both about how cyber networks are corroding any meaningful personal communication and its risks for all kinds of frauds.The director did not offer any solutions though. Can we blame him? With the mounting ease of communicating with others through internet technology, are we not ironically drifting further and further apart because of the "anonymity" of our real personal identities? Are we not losing touch with one another? Have we not become even more disconnected from one another in all sorts of ways? Apart from the cliché that we must become more aware of the potentially destructive power of the internet, are there really any easy solutions?
2013年3月25日 星期一
Lines of Wellington (威靈頓戰線)
My 16th film at the HKIFF The Lines of Wellington is a condensed version of what originally was intended as a mini TV series about one of the Napoleonic Wars called the Battle of Bassasco (1810), a project first started by the Chilean director Raúl Ruíz who later died and then completed by his widow Valeria Sarmiento. It centres on events around the Battle of Bassasco (1810). Its cast is literally a who's who in European cinema: Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Mathieu Amalric, Vincent Pérez,
Marisa Paredes, Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud, Michel Piccoli, Elsa
Zylberstein, Christian Vadim. Vincent Lindon, Malik Zidiuopean and John Malkovich.
It's a rambling tale consisting of many interweaving story lines following the very different fates of about a dozen motley characters:a Portuguese soldier poet Zé Maria (José Afonso Pimentel) , a Portuguese lieutenant Tenente Pedro de Alencar (Carlotto Catta), his Sergeant 'Chico' Francisco Xavier (Nuno Lopes) who finally succeeded in winning the woman of his heart, a scholar Vicente de Almeida (Filipe Vargas) who lost his wife Maureen (Jemina West), a teenage boy suffering from Parkinson's disease (João Arrais) who is constantly abused by a tinkler, a portrait loving Duke Wellington (John Malkovich) a teenage English flirt whose father had a vineyard in Portugal, an English Major Jonathan Foster (Marcello Urgeghe), another Portuguese lady who is the wife D Filipa Sanchez ( Maria Paredes) of a rich local merchant (Michel Piccoli) two ladies including the warm hearted Clarissa (Victória Guerra) who had to survive by entertaining soldiers, a local farmer Manuel Penabranca (Miguel Borges) who had to abandon his farm and who helped build the giant fortifications at a place called Torres where the combined English and Portuguese were awaiting the arrival of the advancing French soldiers under Marshal Masséna (Melvil Poupaud) whose troops far outnumbered the combined forces of England and Portugal, and whose son died as a result of a collapsed wall he helped to build from the explosion of a bomb.
We are shown how the army of refugees consisting of rich and poor had to trail along in their retreat further and further inland with the advance of the French soldiers, burning everything along the way so that the French soldiers would have no supplies and hopefully defeated by sickness and hunger, how some soldiers from both sides deserted, how married, unmarried and even old ladies are raped, how some women had to survive by offering themselves as playmates of those who could supply their daily needs, how ordinary people had to harden their hearts against others in need, how rich young girls found the war a chance to break out from strict surveillance by their governesses, how other girls became nun caring selflessly for the wounded and the orphaned, how petty merchants profiteered from the situation by asking for exorbitant prices for their wares, how they offered little for what was obviously worth much more, how the ordinary people would stick together in digging trenches, building fortifications in defence of their homeland, how young kids wanted nothing but to be big enough to become soldiers like some members of their family's relatives when they meet again, how the rich would continue to wine and dine and hold parties, how some generals were concerned merely for winning battles "elegantly" with minimal loss of lives of their own and even their enemies' soldiers, how battles could be won or retreat executed by bluffs and trickery and bluffs and how thinking soldiers could become disillusioned by the realities of war.
The film's dialogues switches without warning from English, to Portuguese, to French and sometimes two of the three languages according to whether we are shown the action of characters coming from which the three countries involved in that tragedy called by revolutionary war. It's scope is that of an epic but we are shown such short snippets in the lives of the different characters that we can never get quite involved or moved with their plight. The only two moving scenes for me are one in which the Portuguese soldier-poet who had become a deserter and the Portuguese lieutenant who lost contact with his soldiers because of two bullet in his head and who escaped from the hospital and later recovered joined hand to kill off two of the solider-poet's men who wanted to commit necrophilian sex with two recently dead women lying at the side of a road and the final scene in which a local farmer asked for permission to build a grave within the fortification for his only son because he helped build it and died within it when the wounded lieutenant who finally managed to rejoin his troops granted his request and gave him a military burial with full honors.
War is opportunity to meet dashing young men in uniform who promise romance and adventure for rich young ladies, an event which force less fortunately placed young women to sell their youth and their physical charm for bread and butter, for aristocratic officers to win glory and honour, and for the rank and file soliders, it meant long marches, starvation, life and death struggle and opportunities for unbridled sex if they got the chance, for the established upper echelon of society, an unwelcome need to be subjected to the indignities of having to leave one's homes, for crafty and opportunistic merchants, plenty of chances chance to make an unconscionable profit, for the religious nuns dedicated to God, opportunities to display self-less sacrifice to glorify his name and for the ordinary farmers and their wives, hard work and loss or separation of fathers, mothers, children and for poets, numerous occasions for reflection on the vicissitudes and hypocrisies of terrestrial life. This is what I gather from watching this 151-minute historical epic done in costume. Apart from the initial battle in which the English and the Portuguese joined forces to fight the French at the Battle of Bussaco, both sides suffering massive deaths and maimings, there is not much real battle. The French withdrew when they saw the size of the fortifications at Torres (three lines of fortification stretching some 47 Kilometer, the idea of Duke Wellington) after having positioned themselves for an attack for a number of days: then planted the figures of some straw soldiers on guard at their camp but under the cover of darkness, silently retreated. What the director seem to want to say is that there are no real victors in a war. But there is a bit of humor too. I now know the origin of the recipe called "Beef Wellington", Wellington himself being portrayed in the movie as a narcissistic and fastidious man obsessed with how he may look to posterity by soliciting the aid of a painter called Leveque with whose portraits, he had nothing but complaints. It's a panoramic view of one of the Napoleonic wars and its effects on the lives of all those affected. It's not a flattering picture. II it shows anything, its shows the emptiness of any pyrrhic "victories". There are really no winners in any war.
Marisa Paredes, Chiara Mastroianni, Melvil Poupaud, Michel Piccoli, Elsa
Zylberstein, Christian Vadim. Vincent Lindon, Malik Zidiuopean and John Malkovich.
It's a rambling tale consisting of many interweaving story lines following the very different fates of about a dozen motley characters:a Portuguese soldier poet Zé Maria (José Afonso Pimentel) , a Portuguese lieutenant Tenente Pedro de Alencar (Carlotto Catta), his Sergeant 'Chico' Francisco Xavier (Nuno Lopes) who finally succeeded in winning the woman of his heart, a scholar Vicente de Almeida (Filipe Vargas) who lost his wife Maureen (Jemina West), a teenage boy suffering from Parkinson's disease (João Arrais) who is constantly abused by a tinkler, a portrait loving Duke Wellington (John Malkovich) a teenage English flirt whose father had a vineyard in Portugal, an English Major Jonathan Foster (Marcello Urgeghe), another Portuguese lady who is the wife D Filipa Sanchez ( Maria Paredes) of a rich local merchant (Michel Piccoli) two ladies including the warm hearted Clarissa (Victória Guerra) who had to survive by entertaining soldiers, a local farmer Manuel Penabranca (Miguel Borges) who had to abandon his farm and who helped build the giant fortifications at a place called Torres where the combined English and Portuguese were awaiting the arrival of the advancing French soldiers under Marshal Masséna (Melvil Poupaud) whose troops far outnumbered the combined forces of England and Portugal, and whose son died as a result of a collapsed wall he helped to build from the explosion of a bomb.
We are shown how the army of refugees consisting of rich and poor had to trail along in their retreat further and further inland with the advance of the French soldiers, burning everything along the way so that the French soldiers would have no supplies and hopefully defeated by sickness and hunger, how some soldiers from both sides deserted, how married, unmarried and even old ladies are raped, how some women had to survive by offering themselves as playmates of those who could supply their daily needs, how ordinary people had to harden their hearts against others in need, how rich young girls found the war a chance to break out from strict surveillance by their governesses, how other girls became nun caring selflessly for the wounded and the orphaned, how petty merchants profiteered from the situation by asking for exorbitant prices for their wares, how they offered little for what was obviously worth much more, how the ordinary people would stick together in digging trenches, building fortifications in defence of their homeland, how young kids wanted nothing but to be big enough to become soldiers like some members of their family's relatives when they meet again, how the rich would continue to wine and dine and hold parties, how some generals were concerned merely for winning battles "elegantly" with minimal loss of lives of their own and even their enemies' soldiers, how battles could be won or retreat executed by bluffs and trickery and bluffs and how thinking soldiers could become disillusioned by the realities of war.
The film's dialogues switches without warning from English, to Portuguese, to French and sometimes two of the three languages according to whether we are shown the action of characters coming from which the three countries involved in that tragedy called by revolutionary war. It's scope is that of an epic but we are shown such short snippets in the lives of the different characters that we can never get quite involved or moved with their plight. The only two moving scenes for me are one in which the Portuguese soldier-poet who had become a deserter and the Portuguese lieutenant who lost contact with his soldiers because of two bullet in his head and who escaped from the hospital and later recovered joined hand to kill off two of the solider-poet's men who wanted to commit necrophilian sex with two recently dead women lying at the side of a road and the final scene in which a local farmer asked for permission to build a grave within the fortification for his only son because he helped build it and died within it when the wounded lieutenant who finally managed to rejoin his troops granted his request and gave him a military burial with full honors.
War is opportunity to meet dashing young men in uniform who promise romance and adventure for rich young ladies, an event which force less fortunately placed young women to sell their youth and their physical charm for bread and butter, for aristocratic officers to win glory and honour, and for the rank and file soliders, it meant long marches, starvation, life and death struggle and opportunities for unbridled sex if they got the chance, for the established upper echelon of society, an unwelcome need to be subjected to the indignities of having to leave one's homes, for crafty and opportunistic merchants, plenty of chances chance to make an unconscionable profit, for the religious nuns dedicated to God, opportunities to display self-less sacrifice to glorify his name and for the ordinary farmers and their wives, hard work and loss or separation of fathers, mothers, children and for poets, numerous occasions for reflection on the vicissitudes and hypocrisies of terrestrial life. This is what I gather from watching this 151-minute historical epic done in costume. Apart from the initial battle in which the English and the Portuguese joined forces to fight the French at the Battle of Bussaco, both sides suffering massive deaths and maimings, there is not much real battle. The French withdrew when they saw the size of the fortifications at Torres (three lines of fortification stretching some 47 Kilometer, the idea of Duke Wellington) after having positioned themselves for an attack for a number of days: then planted the figures of some straw soldiers on guard at their camp but under the cover of darkness, silently retreated. What the director seem to want to say is that there are no real victors in a war. But there is a bit of humor too. I now know the origin of the recipe called "Beef Wellington", Wellington himself being portrayed in the movie as a narcissistic and fastidious man obsessed with how he may look to posterity by soliciting the aid of a painter called Leveque with whose portraits, he had nothing but complaints. It's a panoramic view of one of the Napoleonic wars and its effects on the lives of all those affected. It's not a flattering picture. II it shows anything, its shows the emptiness of any pyrrhic "victories". There are really no winners in any war.
Rhino Season ( Fasle Kargadan) (犀牛的季節)
From Serbia, I was led to Iran and Turkey in my 15th HKIFF, "Rhino Season" (Fasle Kargardan) (2012) by Bahman Ghobadi. It's a story based on the diaries of an Iranian-Kurd poet Sadegh Kamangar. But in this film , the name of the poet was changed to Sahel (Behrouz Vossoughi), a poet who immediately after his release from a 30-year jail term in Iran went about tracking the whereabouts of his wife Mina (Monica Belluccis) whose memories he could and never wanted to erase. He went to a voluntary organization specializing on tracing missing people. Fortunately, they located a file on Mina because she had been sought by a man called Akbar.
Then the film flashed back to the time when she was with his wife during a promotion of one of his books at a book store. We learn that Sahel was in prison ostensibly because he was considered against an Islamic fundamentalist revival and revolution which deposed the more Western oriented Shah but really because his chauffeur had fallen in love with his beautiful wife, who rejected him and for reasons of jealousy, falsely accused both him and her of anti-revolutionary activities as a result of which Mina had to serve a 10 year jail sentence, during which she was given one chance of meeting her husband and to have sex with him with a hood over their faces in a room in the prison but in the middle of which, her former chauffeur substituted himself for her husband, something which she immediately discovered. In the interval, she gave birth to a pair of twins. Upon her release was falsely told that her husband had died in the meantime and was buried in an unmarked grave in the wilderness. The first thing she did when she got out was to visit that grave. We see her in a flowing black gown and hood, crouching , reflecting, touching a slanting slab of stone which served as a gravestone, which she believed to be that of her former husband, weeping silently, like Mary before the tomb of Jesus. In the distance, we see the vastness of the sky and the land behind the deserted piles of stones.
After Sahel got out, he went to where her former wife was then living, a house by the seaside in Istanbul with her two children. She had become a Madame, obsessed with tattooing a line or two of his verses upon such part of the bodies of her hookers as would be prepared to have it done. He went to observe her in his car by the seaside day after day. He did not want to disturb her new life. In the course of such observation, he got to know two young hookers to whom he would give free rides back to town. But he would not touch them until, one day, when the hookers were late and were beaten up by the hooker racketeers and he went to their aid and got beaten too. They went to his house to take care of his lacerations. It was there that he discovered a line of his own poetry on the back of one of the hookers, whom the other told him was tattooed on her by her mother. Then we see him being tattooed by Mina, who did not recognize him after so many years. Shortly after that, we see him meet his former chauffeur whom he asked to enter his car. Then he drove the car over a cliff and the two drowned together. When the film ends, we see him, back towards us, walking on a salt flat following a distance behind what appears to be the back of Mina towards the light on the far horizon.
It's a simple but grueling tale of love, of passion, of jealousy and of revenge, told with magnificent photography, with its impeccable composition, sublime and sometimes sensuous lights, shadows and suggestions of suffocating claustrophobia and of the immensity of space, which is more than merely physical. There is scarcely any dialogue. It's not really necessary. As we see images after images of neutral yet sombre blues and greys and lifeless yellows, we hear in voice-off different lines of Sahel's beautiful poetry about the suffering and the irrational forces of love, its hopes, its longing, the power of its passion and its lingering effects in one's memories.The acting of Behrouz Vossoughi and that of Monica Belluccis was simply superb, both of whom have got that intense and yet far away look upon their face which seem to bespeak the profound desolation and melancholy consuming their hearts and which turns their faces into an eternal blank. Vossoughi has got eyes which seem to understand everything yet throughout the film, he would keep his his mouth and his identity completely sealed. Hence the tension and its power. A beautifully made film which I love.
Then the film flashed back to the time when she was with his wife during a promotion of one of his books at a book store. We learn that Sahel was in prison ostensibly because he was considered against an Islamic fundamentalist revival and revolution which deposed the more Western oriented Shah but really because his chauffeur had fallen in love with his beautiful wife, who rejected him and for reasons of jealousy, falsely accused both him and her of anti-revolutionary activities as a result of which Mina had to serve a 10 year jail sentence, during which she was given one chance of meeting her husband and to have sex with him with a hood over their faces in a room in the prison but in the middle of which, her former chauffeur substituted himself for her husband, something which she immediately discovered. In the interval, she gave birth to a pair of twins. Upon her release was falsely told that her husband had died in the meantime and was buried in an unmarked grave in the wilderness. The first thing she did when she got out was to visit that grave. We see her in a flowing black gown and hood, crouching , reflecting, touching a slanting slab of stone which served as a gravestone, which she believed to be that of her former husband, weeping silently, like Mary before the tomb of Jesus. In the distance, we see the vastness of the sky and the land behind the deserted piles of stones.
After Sahel got out, he went to where her former wife was then living, a house by the seaside in Istanbul with her two children. She had become a Madame, obsessed with tattooing a line or two of his verses upon such part of the bodies of her hookers as would be prepared to have it done. He went to observe her in his car by the seaside day after day. He did not want to disturb her new life. In the course of such observation, he got to know two young hookers to whom he would give free rides back to town. But he would not touch them until, one day, when the hookers were late and were beaten up by the hooker racketeers and he went to their aid and got beaten too. They went to his house to take care of his lacerations. It was there that he discovered a line of his own poetry on the back of one of the hookers, whom the other told him was tattooed on her by her mother. Then we see him being tattooed by Mina, who did not recognize him after so many years. Shortly after that, we see him meet his former chauffeur whom he asked to enter his car. Then he drove the car over a cliff and the two drowned together. When the film ends, we see him, back towards us, walking on a salt flat following a distance behind what appears to be the back of Mina towards the light on the far horizon.
It's a simple but grueling tale of love, of passion, of jealousy and of revenge, told with magnificent photography, with its impeccable composition, sublime and sometimes sensuous lights, shadows and suggestions of suffocating claustrophobia and of the immensity of space, which is more than merely physical. There is scarcely any dialogue. It's not really necessary. As we see images after images of neutral yet sombre blues and greys and lifeless yellows, we hear in voice-off different lines of Sahel's beautiful poetry about the suffering and the irrational forces of love, its hopes, its longing, the power of its passion and its lingering effects in one's memories.The acting of Behrouz Vossoughi and that of Monica Belluccis was simply superb, both of whom have got that intense and yet far away look upon their face which seem to bespeak the profound desolation and melancholy consuming their hearts and which turns their faces into an eternal blank. Vossoughi has got eyes which seem to understand everything yet throughout the film, he would keep his his mouth and his identity completely sealed. Hence the tension and its power. A beautifully made film which I love.
When Day Breaks (破曉時光)
My 14th film at the HKIFF is another film which I like enormously. It's a film about a professor of music. We see him giving a last rehearsal to a choir which he had spent years building up. Then we see the arrival of a much younger lady who would take it over from him. They greeted each other, the new lady thanked him for all that he had done and then promised to continue his work. He went home. We see him training a young violinist in his early teens whose brother, one of his former students whom he trained for free had already gone on to the local musical academy at Belgrade. Then he got a telephone asking him to go to Jewish synagogue saying that they have something for him. He went and was given a box inside which was a yellowing black and white photograph of his parents with a young child and a half finished musical score entitled "When the Day Breaks" signed Isaac Weiss. He asked what it had to do with him and was told then he was not what he thought he was ie. the son of a Christian family called the Brankovs and that his real name was Misha Weiss, not Misha Brankov and that he was given away to his father's friend the Brankov in 1941, when he was barely 2-yea old just before his parents, Serbian Jews, were led into a a truck, called "soul suckers", where unbeknown to its occupants, they would be asphyxiated with poison gas by Nazi Germans and that his father was buried in a mass grave at what used to be the Belgrade Fairground, which was the site of the International Fair there in 1937 with its modernist buildings etc and the pride of Belgrade at the time, later turned into the Semlin Judenlager concentration camp with the arrival of the Nazi Germans but now a deserted and overgrown wasteland about to be resumed by the Government to be turned into a new commercial plaza and that in the course of building works, the workers found that box. He was told that his father was the most well known violinist in Belgrade at that time, just before he died. He could not believe it but was given some names which might help him ascertain what he was told. He checked them out with one of the survivors. He went on to pay a visit to the Brankovs. His half brother confirmed the same in front of his foster father's grave.
Misha Weiss (Brankov) was told that on 8th December, a memorial service for the dead would be held at the site of that mass grave. He promised the rabbi that on that day, he would bring in the best musicians in Belgrade and that there'd be thousands who would hear a new composition in memory of those who died at that former site of the concentration camp. He visited site and discovered an old water tower which looked exactly like the one in the photograph. Some of the abandoned pavilion houses are now occupied by Rumanian squatters. He went to the former address of his parents. The house was now occupied by a young Rumanian couple with a baby, also squatters and was told to get off because he was not going to have it back. He set about to fulfill his promise. He went first to his former choir but heard the new musical director had switched it some rhythmic rock music but in any event had already made prior concert engagements on that day. He then went to the music Academy to look for his son and asked him to help. His son told him he was busy rehearsing for another new concert and really did not have time that even if he were to help, his musicians would have to be paid. After much soul searching, the professor finally decided to sell his good quality piano, only to be told when he returned to his son that that time slot had already been taken. He then went to the countryside to seek out the best tenor that he knew . He was told that he hadn't sang for the past 20 years and that he could not sleep without a bottle of cognac a day. His friend at first refused but agreed after he begged him.
The day of the memorial service arrived. The crowd gathered, barely 20 odd people, including the rabbi. It was time for the singing. His orchestra consisted of just a group of musician with one violin, one accordion, some drums, those who performed at the wedding of his former student. But his two violin students came, his current student and his elder brother. His singer friend came but he could not sing. He had lost his voice despite taking another drink just before he was about to begin. They played the composition his father half wrote and he completed. The film ends.
This 2012 film Kad Svane Dan or When the Day Breaks, by the Serbain director Goran Paskaljevic about this forgotten episode lost amongst the millions of tales of the Holocaust was superbly shot, principally with a yellowish hue and with not too sharp outlines ( like something from old photograph albums). It has everything: restraint and sensitive acting by the leading actor Mustafa Nadarevic as the retired music professor, static but atmospheric camera work by Milan Spasic which fits the mood of something frozen in time and has a very haunting melody. There is only one dream sequence: when Misha dreamt of how when the names of his father and mother Isaac Weiss and Sarah Weiss were called out, the search light of the German soldiers blinded him so that everything within sight turned into a numbing whiteness. But 50 years after it happened, hardly any one cared. But there are still a few. As the professor said, it was as if his father had deliberately left the very sad and yet hopeful music half finished, waiting for it to be completed by his son. If so, it was. And as a result, we have this very moving film. It's a bleak tale meticulously and ponderously told, without sentimental embellishment or any explicit moral commentary, a perfect blend of images and music.
Misha Weiss (Brankov) was told that on 8th December, a memorial service for the dead would be held at the site of that mass grave. He promised the rabbi that on that day, he would bring in the best musicians in Belgrade and that there'd be thousands who would hear a new composition in memory of those who died at that former site of the concentration camp. He visited site and discovered an old water tower which looked exactly like the one in the photograph. Some of the abandoned pavilion houses are now occupied by Rumanian squatters. He went to the former address of his parents. The house was now occupied by a young Rumanian couple with a baby, also squatters and was told to get off because he was not going to have it back. He set about to fulfill his promise. He went first to his former choir but heard the new musical director had switched it some rhythmic rock music but in any event had already made prior concert engagements on that day. He then went to the music Academy to look for his son and asked him to help. His son told him he was busy rehearsing for another new concert and really did not have time that even if he were to help, his musicians would have to be paid. After much soul searching, the professor finally decided to sell his good quality piano, only to be told when he returned to his son that that time slot had already been taken. He then went to the countryside to seek out the best tenor that he knew . He was told that he hadn't sang for the past 20 years and that he could not sleep without a bottle of cognac a day. His friend at first refused but agreed after he begged him.
The day of the memorial service arrived. The crowd gathered, barely 20 odd people, including the rabbi. It was time for the singing. His orchestra consisted of just a group of musician with one violin, one accordion, some drums, those who performed at the wedding of his former student. But his two violin students came, his current student and his elder brother. His singer friend came but he could not sing. He had lost his voice despite taking another drink just before he was about to begin. They played the composition his father half wrote and he completed. The film ends.
This 2012 film Kad Svane Dan or When the Day Breaks, by the Serbain director Goran Paskaljevic about this forgotten episode lost amongst the millions of tales of the Holocaust was superbly shot, principally with a yellowish hue and with not too sharp outlines ( like something from old photograph albums). It has everything: restraint and sensitive acting by the leading actor Mustafa Nadarevic as the retired music professor, static but atmospheric camera work by Milan Spasic which fits the mood of something frozen in time and has a very haunting melody. There is only one dream sequence: when Misha dreamt of how when the names of his father and mother Isaac Weiss and Sarah Weiss were called out, the search light of the German soldiers blinded him so that everything within sight turned into a numbing whiteness. But 50 years after it happened, hardly any one cared. But there are still a few. As the professor said, it was as if his father had deliberately left the very sad and yet hopeful music half finished, waiting for it to be completed by his son. If so, it was. And as a result, we have this very moving film. It's a bleak tale meticulously and ponderously told, without sentimental embellishment or any explicit moral commentary, a perfect blend of images and music.
2013年3月24日 星期日
The Holy Quaternity( 四性一體)
I do not know how it is for others. For me, my 13th film, the Holy Quaternity at the HKIFF is comedy rather than a serious movie exploring the dynamics and implications of a sexual foursome. It's a 2012 film 'Svatá čtveřice by Czech director Jan Hřebejk starring Jenovefa Bokova as Johanka, Gregor Buaer as Adam, Hynek Cermak as Adam's buddy, Viktorie Cermáková as his wife.
We see two women living next to each other working as volunteers at an art playgroup talking about their sex life. They are the wives of two electricians working at the same company both of whom had been married almost 20 years and both with teenage children and were saying how dull the marital bed has become. Then one of their husbands won a lottery and they decided to have a holiday. Since it just so happens that their company wants them to help do some post hurricane remedial power supply work somewhere in the Caribbeans, they decide to take their wives along. The film is about what happens there: wife swapping on two cardinal conditions: they must promise never to fall in love and they can never meet privately without the presence of the other. They think it may work except that they need a little time to get used to the idea. In fact, it does except when by accident they show some parts of the videos they have taken about their holiday which should not have been there to their children and their grandparents and when the two wives have taken a liking to each other and making it in bed leaving the two men drinking beer outside their bedroom of of one of them!
The title says "Holy Quaternity". I am sure that the word "holy" there must have been there as an irony. Not only are parents sleeping around, so are their teenage children, who are initially repulsed by what they saw but later toy with the idea that they might do the same. I understand that in Japan some couples are actually doing this already. It's a real lightweight of a movie, which looks to me barely little more than a flimsy excuse to show some bit of Caribbean sand, sea, sun and lots of skin..
We see two women living next to each other working as volunteers at an art playgroup talking about their sex life. They are the wives of two electricians working at the same company both of whom had been married almost 20 years and both with teenage children and were saying how dull the marital bed has become. Then one of their husbands won a lottery and they decided to have a holiday. Since it just so happens that their company wants them to help do some post hurricane remedial power supply work somewhere in the Caribbeans, they decide to take their wives along. The film is about what happens there: wife swapping on two cardinal conditions: they must promise never to fall in love and they can never meet privately without the presence of the other. They think it may work except that they need a little time to get used to the idea. In fact, it does except when by accident they show some parts of the videos they have taken about their holiday which should not have been there to their children and their grandparents and when the two wives have taken a liking to each other and making it in bed leaving the two men drinking beer outside their bedroom of of one of them!
The title says "Holy Quaternity". I am sure that the word "holy" there must have been there as an irony. Not only are parents sleeping around, so are their teenage children, who are initially repulsed by what they saw but later toy with the idea that they might do the same. I understand that in Japan some couples are actually doing this already. It's a real lightweight of a movie, which looks to me barely little more than a flimsy excuse to show some bit of Caribbean sand, sea, sun and lots of skin..
Gebo and the Shadow ( Gebo e a Sombra) (影兒子)
If one is told that someone who is now 103 year is still actively working as a director, I'm quite sure that the chances of one believing it would be more or less the same as one were told that he has won the first prize of the latest government lottery. Yet that's not a lie. Yesterday, I saw a beautiful film by the famous centenarian Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira. It's a screen adaptation of a drama called "O Gebo e a Sombra" by Raul Brandão. But to me, it's more a filmed version of a stage play than a "motion picture) meeting the strictest requirements of the Aristotelian poetics for drama: the unity of time, place and character. Except for one outside scene which is just outside of the sitting room of where the drama began, the entire film took place within that sitting room of the hero Gebo ( Michael Lonsdale), normally inhabited only by his wife Candidnha (Jeanne Moreau) and his daughter in law Doroteia (Claudia Cardinale) though occasionally visited by their neighbors Sofia (Leonor Silveira) and Chamiço ( Luís Miguel Cintra).
As the film opens, we see Candidnha anxious waiting for the return of his husband Gebo, a poor accounts clerk, saying that she longs to hear from him news about their long lost son João (Luis Miguel Cintra). They lived under difficult circumstances, barely surviving. Finally he returns with a huge trunk full of money and a ledger on which he had to enter the details of all the bills that his company would be collecting. He asked for a cafe and then continues to work. Candidnha asks him to recount to her all the details of his recent encounter with his son. He could give no concrete details. All he could say is that he knew in the dark from his eyes that it was indeed his son but they didn't talk except that he asked after her. Candidnha was ecstatic and wanted her husband to recount everything to her the next day. When she is gone, we hear Gebo telling Dorotheia that he didn't really see her husband but he had to keep his wife's hopes alive. Then the neighbors came, chitchatting about how hard life is for everyone and Chanmico revealed that when he was young, he played the flute and how only art could redeem the dreariness of life. Then unannounced, João arrived and sneered at his theory. He asked them if they knew the taste of hunger and how when one is driven by it one had to steal and rob if need be to stay alive. When he father went to sleep. He used a screw driver to break the lock where his father kept a casket of money that he collected for his company and made off in the dark. In the morning, the police arrived with his son and said they thought that he was the one who stole it from the true owner. At that point, Gebo announced that the real thief was he!
Throughout static tableaux like scenes captured with stunningly beautiful shots from a fixed camera with predominantly yellow candle light to accompany the unfolding action, (more accurately the dialogues) in the dark of the night, we feel a sense of death overhanging everything. It was not until the film ends that we see the light of day when the police brought his son in as the culprit. Until he appears, it seems that João is just a shadow, a figment of the imagination, a myth, a legend and that Gebo is the model of honest hard work. But ironically, it takes a thief to expose another thief, the son to expose the father, the truth to expose the lie. Gebo turns out to be the most despicable kind of liar. He lies to himself, the way he lies to his wife. Is Oliveira trying to say ironically, that all hard work are lies and that only his art is something which deserves to stay?
The quality of the acting is perfect. So is the use of music which helps create the right kind of atmosphere for Oliveira reflection upon the ironies and hypocrisies of life. The claustrophobic space of the sitting room where he constantly pretends to be working hard is almost viscerally suffocating and fits in perfectly with the closure of the mind of Gebo to reality. My hats off to this centenarian. Long may he live!
As the film opens, we see Candidnha anxious waiting for the return of his husband Gebo, a poor accounts clerk, saying that she longs to hear from him news about their long lost son João (Luis Miguel Cintra). They lived under difficult circumstances, barely surviving. Finally he returns with a huge trunk full of money and a ledger on which he had to enter the details of all the bills that his company would be collecting. He asked for a cafe and then continues to work. Candidnha asks him to recount to her all the details of his recent encounter with his son. He could give no concrete details. All he could say is that he knew in the dark from his eyes that it was indeed his son but they didn't talk except that he asked after her. Candidnha was ecstatic and wanted her husband to recount everything to her the next day. When she is gone, we hear Gebo telling Dorotheia that he didn't really see her husband but he had to keep his wife's hopes alive. Then the neighbors came, chitchatting about how hard life is for everyone and Chanmico revealed that when he was young, he played the flute and how only art could redeem the dreariness of life. Then unannounced, João arrived and sneered at his theory. He asked them if they knew the taste of hunger and how when one is driven by it one had to steal and rob if need be to stay alive. When he father went to sleep. He used a screw driver to break the lock where his father kept a casket of money that he collected for his company and made off in the dark. In the morning, the police arrived with his son and said they thought that he was the one who stole it from the true owner. At that point, Gebo announced that the real thief was he!
Throughout static tableaux like scenes captured with stunningly beautiful shots from a fixed camera with predominantly yellow candle light to accompany the unfolding action, (more accurately the dialogues) in the dark of the night, we feel a sense of death overhanging everything. It was not until the film ends that we see the light of day when the police brought his son in as the culprit. Until he appears, it seems that João is just a shadow, a figment of the imagination, a myth, a legend and that Gebo is the model of honest hard work. But ironically, it takes a thief to expose another thief, the son to expose the father, the truth to expose the lie. Gebo turns out to be the most despicable kind of liar. He lies to himself, the way he lies to his wife. Is Oliveira trying to say ironically, that all hard work are lies and that only his art is something which deserves to stay?
The quality of the acting is perfect. So is the use of music which helps create the right kind of atmosphere for Oliveira reflection upon the ironies and hypocrisies of life. The claustrophobic space of the sitting room where he constantly pretends to be working hard is almost viscerally suffocating and fits in perfectly with the closure of the mind of Gebo to reality. My hats off to this centenarian. Long may he live!
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