Reviews

The opening scene of "Munyurangabo" passes very quickly, yet sets up the emotional conflict among its characters and within its central protagonist, Ngabo (not until the end is the relationship between the title of the film and this name revealed). I had to return a couple of times to understand the connection. It opens with Ngabo seeing a machete in the marketplace and observing two men fighting. Next we see Ngabo, machete in his lap, seated on a cement wall. He looks at the machete its tip covered in blood, and then again, and it is clean. Did he imagine the blood? Did the men in the market use it on each other?

Ngabo and his friend, Sangwa, set off on a trip. They begin with a physical and emotional closeness that very gradually disintegrates. Sangwa has spent their money on a new shirt, so they must hitchhike. Their goal is to kill a man, but will visit Sangwa's family (whom he has not seen in three years) along the way. As this visit is prolonged, the friends drift apart. The dialog is very spare, but each word and gesture is significant in driving the friends apart. Must Hutus and Tutsis inevitably remain enemies? When Ngabo continues his journey alone, his meeting with the Rwandan poet-laureate at a roadside shop provides the film's turning point.

The Rwandan genocide has long passed from the news media, but this film does much to reveal something about its effect on the generation that have grown up in it aftermath.

I was ten years old in 1962 and, scion of an academic family, recall overhearing snatches of adult conversation in muffled tones about homosexuality ("acey-ducey"), Christopher Isherwood, Castro, Soviet spies, building bomb shelters, Aldous Huxley. The dreamlike sequences into which such references intrude in Tom Ford's film- the decors, fashions, hairdos, evoke a host of hazy memories Without explanations, I feel a connection with the adult world I observed then, the repressive roles that enveloped this generation. Colin Firth carries in his entire being the weight of his age, having lost the one person who allowed him to break into an authentic self. Julianna Moore captures the pre-liberated frustrations of a women playing unsuccessfully at the "feminine mystique.".

Besides the acting, the fact that this film is the first effort of a fashion designer is the major source of the film's appeal. It is visually "dressed" in terms of settings, costumes, conversations, visual effects. There may be no lingering "meaning" to attach to its memory, but it provides a fully satisfying visual experience.

The film, "Dunia," brought back memories for me of the American 1970's, when feminism was on the rise, the first edition of "Our Bodies, Ourselves," came out, belly dancing became popular, and one of the records that circulated among the incipient belly-dancing community was entitled "How to Make Your Husband a Sultan." Amidst our own "consciousness-raising" at that time, there was very little awareness of real women's lives in Middle-Eastern communities. Today, there is far more reporting on the strictures imposed on women under "Sharia law," but still little comprehension of the lives of young women who dress like westerners, live in big cities, and are exposed to, and caught between, the contemporary secular and the traditional Islamic value systems.

This film, made in 2005 by a Lebanese-French director who owes her renown to the world of documentary filmmaking, apparently underwent a tortuous path to its public showing. The fictional heroine, Dunia, embodies the contradictions of her society. We meet her at an audition for dancers who wish to represent Egypt in an International Belly Dancing Contest. We do not see much of her dancing before the judges at her audition, but hear their interview of her. When asked to SHOW more of emotions about the Arabic poetry she wishes to study in her voice and body, Dunia slips to the floor, wrapping her arms and clothing closely around her. The young woman articulates the contradictions with which she lives: the daughter of a famous dancer, she has never seen her own naked body -- the only naked female bodies she has seen have been in foreign movies, which she watches through her window on her neighbor's television in an apartment next door. (I had heard long ago, that Egyptian belly dancers must cover their mid-section. Therefore the very image we have of belly-dancing is challenged).

Dunia, as well as the young man who is enamored of her, are voyeurs rather than participants in the realm of the erotic. SHE observes other, less inhibited older and younger women; HE stalks her at her dance classes, ascending to the roof to look down at her undulating body. When he braves general opprobrium to come visit her alone in her apartment, attempts to kiss her, and strips off his own shirt in an attempt to arouse her, she rebuffs his advances. She asks if he would marry a non-virgin, even if it was he who had been her only lover. She prefers not to put his protestations of liberalism to the test. Of course, her own concession to tradition (she marries him), do not protect her from ingrained expectations of male dominance and female submission.

Dunia is fascinated by her academic adviser, a specialist on the stories Scheherezade spins in the classic "1001 Arabian nights," whose public protestations against censorship of literature incur the wrath of the public and cause a protester to blind him (significantly, the "seer" of the erotic in poetry is blinded). On the other hand, she watches in horror as the grandmother of a friend's pubescent daughter relentlessly pursues the opportunity to make "a lady" out of the girl by performing female circumcision on her.

Thus the complex layers of this film make it worthy of close attention -- viewing and re- viewing. It is a "bildungsroman" of a young Egyptian woman. Dunia claims to have grown up in Luxor, which was the ancient capital of Thebes. Her young adult trials take place in contemporary Cairo. Thus she embodies the entire history of Egypt, and her final epiphany is accompanied by her professor's admonition, "Never wear another person's clothes. Dunia, you are the world."

While far from perfect, this documentary is of considerable value on its own merits. The historical-political context of Eisenstein's work is readily available, but his internal take on his evolution as an artist is not. It is worth noticing the provenance of the documentary: Italian director, Swiss producer -- i.e. a European take, outside the bipolar US_USSR relations of the time (the Soviet war in Afghanistan). It purports to be a visual "Cliff Notes" to his memoirs - so the source material predates the Cold War. Written shortly before the director's death, it could scarcely include commentary on the Stalin era, and by now the mere mention of homosexuality attached to one of Russia's cultural icons is "politically incorrect," to say the least.

I teach a course on "Foreign Film" and am most concerned with getting my students to look at visual matter through the eyes of others. I can provide a historical perspective, but this is one of the best supplements I have found so far.

Karen Shakhnazarov's films are all, in a sense, "period pieces." They find a solid place in international film festival culture without ever quite winning the prize. "Vanished Empire" had a particularly personal ring for me, since I began my long-time study in and out of Soviet/Post-Soviet Russia in the period this film depicts (circa 1974), and had an uncomfortably eerie sense of deja-vu throughout the film. Searching for an American parallel, I came up with "American Graffiti," where Richard Dreyfus's character is caught between remaining in his Middle-American hometown or heading off to an Eastern college (as he does) and returning many years later to write about it.

Shakhnazarov's film has a similarly autobiographical feel to it, although his young hero ends embracing, rather than rejecting, the culture from which he emerged: the Russian intelligentsia. The meticulous reproduction of the Soviet 1970's offers a vaguely satiric self- portrait, hinting at the educated class's role in preserving world culture and history while rejecting indoctrination into Soviet politics and values. Therefore, the young hero, Sergey's true love is not, as he believes, the "good girl," Lyuda, who prefers the ACTUAL recording of "Swan Lake" (a covert reference to the ballet's role in service to the state) contained in the black market record jacket of the Rolling Stone latest release to the Western contraband recording that Sergey has paid dearly for, expecting to win her affections. Sergey's instinctual pull towards rebellion keep him from romanic fulfillment, but bring him closer to his true self.

Instead, Sergey comes to love and honor his dying mother, and follows his grandfather's advice by making a pilgrimage to the archaeological site that represented his family's life's work.In the ancient desert sands, Sergey finds the source of his earlier hallucinatory, drug-induced vision.

Emblematic details (cars, records, ancient trinkets) speak to viewers with Shaknazarov's background. Reading them properly, however, requires something of the education Shaknazarov's hero gained in the intervening years between the "coming of age" story and the film's contemporary epilogue.

This story takes place 15 years after the war. Although I was acquainted with the horrors of the war, I was NOT acquainted with the horrors of survival. The refugees 15 years after live in brick houses that from the outside look like low-cost townhouses, against a magnificent mountainous landscape. The only thing sustaining the life of these refugees is the care of those who survived, particularly the very you, and the interminable wait for the bones of their loved ones who fell victim and were interred in mass graves. As the bones are plowed up, they are bagged and trucked to the camp, where the wives and mothers await them daily.

The scenes of this life are appropriately filmed in black and white. They are interrupted by color sequences of the Serbian-run TV reality show "Big Brother," which one of the surviving young men has been accepted into, much to the disgust of his Bosnian family. This contrast is the film's major irony -- the only relief from the waiting for news of he dead is this vision of a motley crew of random strangers living on a TV set.

The impact of this film is, of course, emotionally powerful -- but the REAL reality of the situation only slowly took shape in my mind. Because of this lag, I gave it a 7 rather than an 8.

A film well worth seeing, experiencing, piecing together. I offer some of the pieces, without yet being able to offer the "together." I just returned from a showing at the Cleveland International Film Festival, and was disturbed enough by the low aggregate scores on IMDb.com to attempt a review.

Venice is the Lost Paradise of Atlantis, the city of which young Marek dreams in 1939 as he trains to be a Defender of the Polish homeland. He writes his hopes for the future on a piece of paper that he inserts in the wishing wall of the Catholic church next to the boys' dormitory that houses him as the film begins. Meanwhile, father and mother abandon him to the decaying family estate that serves as a refuge for aunts, cousins, where he continues his refrain of "I don't want to be here." A flooded cellar provides a temporary fantasy escape to a paper Venice; steps beyond its confines introduce him to the world of brutality and horror from Nazi invaders and the intimations that Soviet liberators offer a threat of their own.

There is much beauty yet in the women and girls surrounding him, in the remnants of a cultured world in architecture and music. Many scenes are in sunlit nature or golden haze. Marek seems too young to make sense of the world of adults or of the budding sexuality of his more precocious female playmates, yet adult life choices confront him in the most importunate ways.

This film clearly aims to present the immediate post-WWII Russian/Soviet landscape in a way that is not breathtakingly new, but satisfyingly authentic for middlebrow audiences, East and West. In this way, it reminds most of the Finno-Russian production, "The Cuckoo." The heroes are not larger than life, no better than they need to be (when the Russian heroine is asked why she prefers the newly arrived hero to her former lover, she answers, "because he has more of the devil in him"); the national prejudices create tension, project an atmosphere of cruelty, even brutality among characters who clearly have a stake in reaching mutual understanding. The cold is palpable, as is the primitive living conditions. No wonder the power and beauty of the locomotives provide romanticism and sense of adventure for all.

A large part of the suspense comes from just trying to figure out the back story and the relationships among the characters. The political atmosphere is understated enough, I think, so thoughtful audiences have something to "read between the lines," and those who want an adrenaline rush will not be disappointed.

...including stupidity. For two-thirds of this movie I was thinking "this is a stupid movie;" about one-third was genuinely mesmerizing. The main theme is best reflected in the choreographer's remark to the heroine early in the film "You must kill the sweet girl Nina in order to play the Black Swan." There was a brilliant film in here somewhere, in the intersection between the plot of the ballet "Swan Lake" and the contemporary story of rivalry among would-be prima ballerinas, but this wasn't it, unfortunately--although all the components were there. The evil sorcerer's magic spell is cast through alcohol spiked with "Ecstasy;" Prince Charming and Svengali intersect.

The film's aesthetic sense is one more likely to appeal to aficionados of horror films than those expecting a logic more typical of psychological thrillers: taut it ain't. We know that not everything is beautiful at the ballet from the dancers' point of view, but neither do the conflicts behind the scenes amount to mythological tales of good and evil. It doth make me mad.

This film is a screen adaptation of the memoir of a German Holocaust survivor and, except for the opening and closing scenes is a straightforward narrative, chronicling the family's experiences during the period following their narrow escape from deportation eastward to a concentration camp from which they know there is no return.

The first scene sets up the back story of the end of WWI, when the Jewish horse trader and German farmer serve their country and are awarded the Iron Cross for valor. A narrative voice explains the central irony of military service being rewarded by country that would later persecute or exterminate its heroes.

The farmer's family faces conflicting loyalties -- a son who goes off to war on the Eastern Front at the same time as the parents take in the horse traders wife and daughter, along with various other displaced persons; a daughter in the first blush of romance with a Nazi activist and his cause. The Jewish husband and wife, meanwhile, suffer the separation and perils of an assumed identity (in the case of the wife and daughter) and isolation, hiding, constant vigilance (in the case of the husband).

This film invites the viewer to live through these events with the family, and never over-dramatizes - which may account for the lack of enthusiasm of younger viewers. But the performances have much psychological depth as well as a ring of truth in all its scenes.

English readers of Joseph Brodsky's Book of essays that won him the Nobel Prize(Less than One) will recognize the film's title as coming from an essay in the book: "A Room and a Half." It is both a real and a symbolic space to which the poet never returned. The Filmmaker's fantasy-plot, however, takes off by withholding one of the most famous of Brodsky's poetic line "To St. Basil's (Vasilievsky) Island I will come to die." For those familiar with these lines, their absence becomes a form of suspense - until the are spoken in the last scenes. The historical canvas of Brodsky's like unfolds against a stylistic montage from Shadow-silhouette cut-out of the prerevolutionary poetic-aristocratic world of Anna Akhmatova, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, etc. to the use of this avant-garde art form in service of the October Revolution. The Stalin-era film is the orange-tinged film stock of that era; the animation of the crows in the snow seems lifted from master animators of the 1970s. As a biography the film make me think most of Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror," which brings together the scraps of images, paintings, poetry in an attempt to find a new wholeness with stream-of-consciousness connections, seamlessly connecting documentary images of the real Brodsky and his friends (as in th scene shot in the Restaurant Russian Samovar" on 53rd St.), with imaginary meeting of parents and child in the afterlife.