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Reviews
Le Miracle du Saint Inconnu (2019)
Our Yearning for the Unknown/Meta-physical
Our yearning and reverence for the unknown is irreducible to its existence. Meaning, it is irrelevant whether anything beyond our physical world exists or not, we create that "meta" physical because we need it. Lest you think this is solely a religious thing think about how we need films and literature and generally fiction to deal with the uncertainty of our lives. We yearn for these conceptions of god or superheroes or saints and sages because of anxieties of uncertainties in our lives. Of course we can find the strength within ourselves, no need to go out out in the mystical realms to search for it. But the point remains, that the unknown/mystical/gods/superheroes work their "magic" even if/when they do not exist.
This is the point of this film.
This explains why our yearning for something "beyond our physical world," which is the meaning of meta-physics, often translates into psychic investments (for example in form of in form of awe or fear) in places, events or objects. We have apartment buildings with no 13th floor, as if the evil forces of bad luck taking the elevator will not notice that 14th is actually the 13th floor. The landscapes of Iran, Pakistan and India is dotted with shrines of barely known saints and sages that have become centers of local pilgrimage. In The Unknown Saint (2019), a film by the Moroccan director Alaa Eddine Aljem, a thief on the run buries the loot on top of a hill near a remote village. Returning from prison years later he finds that people have built a shrine over the spot and an entire village around it, believing it to be the grave of an unknown saint. And if you think it is only the backward countries that are superstitious visit Brother Andre's chapel in Montreal's Oratory to see all the crutches and canes of people who were healed.
The Oath (2018)
Funny and Scary, captivating Political Horror
This film starts funny, becomes scary, characters change by the events coming at them to the brink of murder and mayhem. I enjoyed the roller coaster of emotions this film elicits and the restoration of sanity it offers at the end. You feel the raw fear (and I suppose empowerment, depending on your political stance) when George Zimmerman vigilante types knock on your door demanding to speak with you for not being patriotic enough. The film has a feeling of being written for theatre. I would've liked to see the character of Mason, the military-vigilante agent examined more. What is his background? What brought him to where he is, a violent militia with a gun, a badge and a vendetta? He is the protege-offspring of Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men (incidentally also originally written as a theatre piece), the violent character whose grotesque existence ironically guarantees our freedom. He does have the best line in the movie: "If it wasn't for people like me, people like you would've been enslaved by people like me!"
Leave No Trace (2018)
No Country for Old Vets!
What a great film and great acting. After years of constant war it is time to deal with all its aftermaths. There are many layers to this film, and no one is against the ex soldier with PTSD, in fact everyone is accommodating. The film does not pass moral judgement on the condition or offer easy solutions. It does however ask the affected ex-vet to not take down the rest of us with him. No one is sure how to deal with him and his condition. But, Like it or not the film suggests such a sever case is best to disappear, into the woods for example, leave no trace, emerge once in a while to collect some food we leave him, like a tribute to a ghost, and disappear again. The alternative is chemical intervention (medicine that might work) therapy dog, or endless government forms to fill up.
A Patch of Fog (2015)
Sins of fathers paid for by the sons
Let me start with the negative before praising how good of a movie this is.
Downside of this film is in it's retake on an tired cliche: the patriarchal struggles of all men to come to grips with their fathers. Honestly, have you ever known a man who had a healthy relationship with his father? The story is as old as the Bible, Adam and God, them Able and Cain, then Jacob and Essau then Jesus and his Heavenly Father all the way to pretty much every single film of our times.
However, this film is an excellent artistic retake on this old cliche. The son cannot relate to the world unless he puts his relationship with his father in order. Freud called it Oedipal Complex, film theory calls it Oedipal Trajectory.
Sandy Duffy thought his father abandoned him when he got lost as a child in the fog. But little he knew that his father spent years penning a book about his fear of never leaving the house and dedicated it to Sandy, who plagiarized it in his own name and became famous and rich as a result. But as we see in a pivotal moment of the film he wanted his father to rescue or at least search for him when he got lost not to dedicated his novel to him. That my friend is the story all men who miss their absent fathers. They don't want the riches their father left them. They want their fathers' approval, intimacy.
Of course the film only hints at this longing for father. Instead it focuses on its consequences, which are the loneliness that men are condemned to endure under patriarchy.
The security guard (about whom we know so little) is the mirror image of Sandy Duffy the successful writer. Sandy Duffy is able to conceal his loneliness under his wealth and fame, Robert the security guard who caught him shoplifting has nothing at all, no talent, no education, can't even read properly so he asks Sandy to record audio tapes of his book for him. Bring them together and you have a potent story of unrequited friendship. This is the story of our contemporary men who have so much in common in their loneliness yet are so ill equipped to come together except if they are forced to by threats of extortion or being exposed as frauds that they are. I don't mean to generalize here but if you are a middle aged man ask yourself whether you are not a fraud, an emotionally crippled man due to your father's failures? The coming together of these two men cannot but be destructive as turns and twists of the film all the was to the very end demonstrates.