In many ways, the film Jauja is one of a kind. It's made by a Dane who was born in Argentina: Lisandro Alonso with a script co-written by him with Fabian Casas about a little known region of the earth, Penatgonia, an enigmatic land full of mystery, myths and legends and for the Spanish, gold, a kind of Eldorado.("dorado" being a Spanish word meaning "gilded"). The name of the film "Jauja" is a Spanish word of Arabic origin, connoting "plenty". At the start of the film, we are given a quotation in a legend about a land dominated by Zulualaga, a lone hunter and the story of a captain dressed as a woman roaming in the wilderness of that land, apparently looking for someone. Is he really looking for someone or for something rather more ineffable?
As the film opens, we see two people, a young lady in an 18th century dress and a bonnet, Ingeborg (Villbjørk Malling Agger), her head against the shoulder of an older man in a bowler hat and suit Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), each facing a different direction, the man towards the sea, the girl towards the land. They are discussing about what they like or dislike. The father, an engineer, dislikes the land and wishes to return to Denmark as soon as possible, the daughter says she likes the land, the desert and feels comfortable there. Her father asks her what she most wants to have. She says a dog. He asks why. She says that she would like a dog which would always follow her around, wherever she goes. In the distance, we see a naked fat man in a rock pool, relaxing, his clothes at the edge of the pool, masturbating. All across the screen in the old 4:3 aspect ratio, we see tuft grass on clumps and clumps of volcanic rock.It looks spacious, calm, peaceful. Soon Dinesen changes clothes into those of an army captain, complete military uniform with sword, pistol, rife and long spurred riding boots but appears to have a slight difficulty mounting his horse. Another army officer Lieutenant Pittaluga (Adrian Fondari) approaches (the man observed earlier to be masturbating in the rock pool) asks if he would like to go to the governor's ball and asks for for permission to take her daughter to the up-coming ball. He offers to give her daughter a horse at his ranch. The father refuses. Unbeknown to her father, her eyes were set on a younger soldier Angel Milkibar (Esteban Bigliardi?) whom she meets earlier on the salt marshes. He has given her a wooden toy soldier found floating on the surface of a small rock pool which she carefully keeps with her. Later we see Dinesen inspecting some engineering works where some trenches are being dug. But soon after that, Ingeborg disappears with the young soldier. Dinesen embarks upon a search for her, alone, with hardly any preparation by ways of food and water. The film documents that search, in beautifully shot images, with hardly any dialogue to speak of.
2015年4月5日 星期日
2015年4月4日 星期六
3 coeurs ( 3 Hearts) (三顆痴痴的心)
Blaise Pascal (1623-1622), mathematician, physicist, theologian and philosopher once said that the heart has reasons which the head knows not. And for Marc Beaulieu (Benoît Poelvoorde), an otherwise non-remarkable tax accountant, his heart probably has more reason that his head can never understand. Every time that he meets a girl he fancies, no matter where and when, his heart would pound so hard that he may suffer a heart attack or near heart attack. He met one, after he missed the last train to Paris after investigating a client's case there. It's a girl that his eyes just caught as he was walking off the train station in great frustration after he rushed to the train just in time for its doors to close on him. He went into a cafe bar to get a bottle of mineral water after asking the bar tender that it was still open, took it and then the girl he saw before crossing the street came in and bought a packet of cigarette. After she left, he felt a compulsion to follow her. He did. He asked her if she knew a hotel. She showed him first one, then another. He went into the second. But before he checked in, he left the reception counter and went back to the girl waiting outside, Sylvie Berger (Charlotte Gainsbourg). They smoke. They got talking. They talked all night. When it was time to leave. They decide they would meet in Paris at the Jardin des Tuileries, near the fountain but did not exchange telephone at 6 p.m. the following Friday. Sylvie went, waited until 7 p.m. and returned home to her beloved sister Sophie Berger (Chiara Mastroianni) and mother Madame Berger (Catherine Deneuve ) and her husband (Patrick Mille), with whom relations were not ideal. Owing to two Chinese clients who never said anything in reply to his questions, he was later than usual when he left the office that Friday and suffered a heart attack at the garage in which he nearly fainted. He recovered, drove at breakneck speed to the rendezvous only to miss it again. he went to see a doctor who declared that his heart was normal and that the attack was probably due to too much excitement.
Im Keller (In the Basement) (地窖天堂)
Blaise Pascal once said that the heart has its reasons which the head will seldom know. Indeed we know hardly anything about what passes at the inner most layers of our heart. If one may borrow an analogy from Carl Jung, the co-founder of analytic psychology, all sorts of surprising things lie deep within the cellar of the edifice called the human psyche, formerly called the "heart". I do not know whether or not Veronika Franz and Ulrich Seidl who co-scripted Im Keller ( In the Basement) (2014), directed by the latter, knew about what either Pascal or Jung had to say about the kind of dark matter lurking in the depths of the human heart, but if one may judge by what they did in the quasi-documentary about what some Austrians are doing in their basements, then I'm quite sure it's turning their camera lenses upon that mysterious region of the human psyche through showing us what some marginal Austrians most desire, away from the gaze of the more conventional section of their society.
When the film opens, we see a man staring intently at a huge white serpent in a glass case in front of which is a sniffing guinea pig which gradually approaches the snout of the apparent immobile white reptilian until it gets too close, when it swung at lightning speed at the guinea pig and had it in the grips of a fatal squeeze.
When the film opens, we see a man staring intently at a huge white serpent in a glass case in front of which is a sniffing guinea pig which gradually approaches the snout of the apparent immobile white reptilian until it gets too close, when it swung at lightning speed at the guinea pig and had it in the grips of a fatal squeeze.
2015年4月3日 星期五
Mita Tova (Farewell Party) (安樂死派對)
The second film of the evening is also about death, a most weighty subject. But from the way Tal Granit and Sharon-Maymon treated the subject, Mita Tova (Farewell Party) (安樂死派對), co-written and co-directed by them, it does seem that it's at quite some distance from heaviness. This is evident from the very first scene. An old man in front of a table full of paraphernalia for welding is speaking on a phone to someone else. He says, in an obviously machine-produced low frequency voice that he is Elohim (Jewish for God) and that there is no vacancy in heaven for the party at the other end of the line and that despite her difficulties and suffering, she must try her best to hold on and receive the treatment and adds that her husband says hello to her from heaven, when she's single! On the other side of the line, we see an old lady who says that she has been diagnosed with cancer and doesn't want to live. But there's a hiccup. In the middle of the conversation, the old lady hears what appears to be a woman's voice asking Elohim where she placed her things.Then it hung up. The old woman dialed up Elohim's number asking to speak to God. A female voice told her to wait because Elohim was at the toilet! After the hiccups, Elohim resumed the telephone conversation and continued to pep talk the old lady.
Timbuktu (在地圖結束的地方/在世界盡頭喚自由)
Good Friday evening turned out to be good to me, not religiously as Jesus was said to have died on the cross on Good Friday night for the redemption of the sins of man and in that sense "good" for mankind but because I saw two good films in a row. Both of them concern death but in quite different contexts. The first is Timbuktu, a film screenplayed, directed and co-written by Abderrahmane Sissako with Kessen Tall.
What or where is Timbuktu? It's the name of a place which my Form 1 teacher threatened he would send me to whenever I became unruly in class. But according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's a city in the western African country of Mali at the southern edge of the Sahara, 8 miles north of River Niger which was historically important as a trading post on the trans-Sahara caravan route and a centre of Islamic culture (c. 1400-1600), which became a French colony in late 19th century (forming part of the French Sudan) but which became independent in 1960 when the Republic of Mali was established. The city was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988 but because of armed conflicts in the region, in 2012, it was declared a World Heritage in Danger.
As the film opens, we see a blind-folded man (Abel Jafri) being taken in a military jeep, with a fluttering flag with some Arabic words written on it, being taken to a tiny courtyard in a small town. There he was greeted and became one of the soldiers of the local jihadists controlling the town and the surrounding area. Then we see another jeep with a number of soldiers inside, one of whom in military uniform and a turban on his head, Abdelkerim, was aiming his rifle at a running gazelle. He kept firing shots at it but the gazelle kept running and we hear someone advise the hunter, "Don't waste your bullet, tire it". Then the screen switches to a target practice. The targets were some traditional African sculpture of local deities made of either either wood or clay. They were all shot down, one by one. In the last one, we see gun smoke rising from the mouth of the broken head of a local deity. Next we see a herd of cattle being tended to by a small boy Issan ( Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) watched by a couple Kidane ( Ibrahem Ahmed) and Satima ( Toulou Kiki ) and their daughter Toya ( Layla Walet Mohamed ) lying on their rug under a tent, far from the town, but close to each other, discussing how when Kidane dies, he would like to give the herd to Issan, his adopted son. When the film ends, we see two children, both running on the desert dunes, one a boy, Issan the other a girl Toyla. A lot has happened in the meantime.
What or where is Timbuktu? It's the name of a place which my Form 1 teacher threatened he would send me to whenever I became unruly in class. But according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it's a city in the western African country of Mali at the southern edge of the Sahara, 8 miles north of River Niger which was historically important as a trading post on the trans-Sahara caravan route and a centre of Islamic culture (c. 1400-1600), which became a French colony in late 19th century (forming part of the French Sudan) but which became independent in 1960 when the Republic of Mali was established. The city was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1988 but because of armed conflicts in the region, in 2012, it was declared a World Heritage in Danger.
As the film opens, we see a blind-folded man (Abel Jafri) being taken in a military jeep, with a fluttering flag with some Arabic words written on it, being taken to a tiny courtyard in a small town. There he was greeted and became one of the soldiers of the local jihadists controlling the town and the surrounding area. Then we see another jeep with a number of soldiers inside, one of whom in military uniform and a turban on his head, Abdelkerim, was aiming his rifle at a running gazelle. He kept firing shots at it but the gazelle kept running and we hear someone advise the hunter, "Don't waste your bullet, tire it". Then the screen switches to a target practice. The targets were some traditional African sculpture of local deities made of either either wood or clay. They were all shot down, one by one. In the last one, we see gun smoke rising from the mouth of the broken head of a local deity. Next we see a herd of cattle being tended to by a small boy Issan ( Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) watched by a couple Kidane ( Ibrahem Ahmed) and Satima ( Toulou Kiki ) and their daughter Toya ( Layla Walet Mohamed ) lying on their rug under a tent, far from the town, but close to each other, discussing how when Kidane dies, he would like to give the herd to Issan, his adopted son. When the film ends, we see two children, both running on the desert dunes, one a boy, Issan the other a girl Toyla. A lot has happened in the meantime.
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