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Victoria & Abdul (2017)
The Lightweight Appeal of Victoria & Abdul
Judi Dench is again marvelous as Queen Victoria, despite the film's upbeat and historical politics.
And so it comes full circle. In 1997, Judi Dench—to that point best known for her work on British stage and television, and for her first turn as Bond's "M" in GoldenEye—vaulted into cinema royalty (so to speak) for her performance as Queen Victoria in the director John Madden's Mrs. Brown. The film concerned the queen's close relationship with a common-born Scotsman named John Brown, a relationship that was regarded with concern and envy by her court and family.
Twenty years and seven Oscar nominations later—her first was for Mrs. Brown, her sole win for Madden's later Shakespeare in Love— Dench again plays Victoria (though somewhat older) in Stephen Frears's Victoria & Abdul. The film concerns the queen's close relationship with a common-born Indian Muslim man named Abdul Karim, a relationship that was regarded with concern and envy by her court and family.
It is worth noting that, despite some liberties taken, both films are based on real-life events. Victoria, who lost her beloved husband, Prince Albert, 24 years into her 64-year reign, never remarried, and both Brown and, subsequently, Karim served as important servant-companions in her later years.
That is, however, more or less where the resemblances between the two films end. Despite strong performances by Dench and Billy Connolly (as Brown), Mrs. Brown was a slow and somewhat awkward period drama. Victoria & Abdul, by contrast, is an elegant yet sprightly romp— albeit one that has been justifiably criticized for historical revisionism regarding the relationship between Britain and the Raj, as well as for the relatively two-dimensional portrait of Karim.
The story begins in 1887, with the Queen's Golden Jubilee, the 50th anniversary of her ascension to the throne. In her honor, a ceremonial coin is minted in India, which has been under formal British rule for nearly three decades. Two Indian clerks are chosen to present the coin by virtue of their height: Karim (played by Ali Fazal), who is in fact tall, and Mohammed (Adeel Akhtar), who is not, and was instead a last-minute fill-in.
Arriving in England, the two are instructed in the niceties of the Court ("The key to good service is standing still and moving backwards"), and solid comic mileage is gotten out of the elaborate etiquette and pantomime of a state dinner. Karim is entranced; Mohammed, not so much. ("The place is completely barbaric," he complains, citing—in a clever inversion—the English consumption of food featuring pig's blood and sheep's brains.)
Despite instructions that he make no eye contact with the queen, Karim does exactly that at the first opportunity. She returns his gaze and, later, noting his height and looks, decides to bring him gradually into her service. She asks him to teach her Urdu and to describe the taste of a mango. Soon she has declared him her "Munshi," or teacher, awarded him Mohammed as a servant, and had his burqa-wearing wife and mother-in-law brought to England.
Her family and ministers take this all about as poorly as one would expect: One derides her "Munshi mania"; another declares Karim "the brown John Brown." (As a group, her court is played by an all-star lineup of Eddie Izzard, Tim Pigott-Smith, Simon Callow, Olivia Williams, Michael Gambon, and Paul Higgins—whose brogue is unmistakable to any fan of his role as Jamie in The Thick of It and In the Loop.)
The contemporary political resonances of an Anglophone head of state striking up a deep friendship with a Muslim—even one who is essentially a servant—are obvious and unlikely to be accidental. And indeed, Karim recedes a bit in the latter half of the film, becoming less a flesh-and-blood character than a metaphor for tolerance. Moreover, however appealing this abstract ideal may be, the portrayal of Victoria as a progressive anti-racist is an absurd whitewashing of the colonial era and the British Raj.
Fazal makes the most of his opportunities as Karim, and the rest of the cast fulfill their straightforward plot functions ably. But like planets orbiting a celestial body, all revolve around a customarily gravitational performance by the great Dame Dench. It is instructive to watch Mrs. Brown and Victoria & Abdul side by side. As magnetic as Dench is in the former, by the latter she has come fully into her powers. The moment when Victoria first notices Karim's gaze is typical: With scarcely a gesture or change of expression, she instantly commands the scene. Victoria & Abdul is worth seeing for Dench's magisterial performance and for Frears's light but sure directorial touch. Just don't mistake it for actual history.
Taeksi woonjunsa (2017)
The Taxi Driver: Democracy Dies in Darkness
When governments are tyrannical, the first thing they do is limit or eradicate the free press so no one can hold them accountable and replace it with their own "real" news. The Taxi Driver is a drama based on such a clandestine event that marked South Korea in 1980– the Gwangju Uprising, also known as the May 18 Democratic Uprising, and/or, the Gwangju Democratization Movement. The regime not only banned reporting and barred reporters, it actively shut down media and hunted them so that no news of the event would reach outside the seized city limits. But, any way you slice it, it did happened, and only one reporter was able to document it and show it to the world. Director Jang Hoon tells a story based on German reporter Jürgen Hinzpeter, known as Peter, as he infiltrated the massacre that took place in the days of May 18-20 in Gwangju, South Korea, with the help of Kim Man-seob, a taxi driver from Seoul.
Peter is played by Thomas Kretschmann who, interestingly, cites his experience escaping East Germany in his early 20s as a giving him a crucial understanding to be able to deliver on his interpretation of Peter. The title character of Mr. Kim is played by Kang-ho Song who has a robust career in both theater and film. The role of the taxi driver is not only moving but also demanding since his character is the focus of the film and serves as the vehicle for the dramatization of the historical event. The character of Kim is symbolic of the everyday person living at the time who has a choice to look away or risk his or safety and bear witness to the massacre.
Jang Hoon's vision is focused and his delivery is compelling. While the story praises the courage of Peter to tell the story of a massacre that would have otherwise been swept under the rug, the heart of the story is in Mr. Kim's personal transformation. In Spanish the phrase, "hacer conciencia" is often translated into English as "to raise awareness" but conceptually it is very different than to simply make someone aware, or give them information they lacked. The phrase in Spanish is far more active and intentional. It may rest on the Shakespearean idea that humans are the paragon of animals, but animals nevertheless; to "hacer conciencia" is to make or create a conscience, thus implying an intellectual and emotional growth that comes with experience and compassion and from which there is no turning back. Mr. Kim's transformation is the active transformation of a people as each of them "make conscience" and sacrifice their lives for the hope of democracy.
Through the character of Mr. Kim, Hoon balances a lighter side of existence with the stress and suffering that lives just under the surface. The balance is nicely bookended by small details that surface throughout like the memory of a food or the bow tied y Mr. Kim, first in his daughter's hair, and later on a box of cookies. The balance between Peter and the event is also well proportioned, with Peter often being the character in the background, thus keeping the focus on the people of South Korea. Mr. Hoon's inclusion of footage of the real Jürgen Hinzpeter in the end is both a loving gesture, and a note of gratitude because in the end, The Washington Post is right, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" when atrocities happen because no one is watching.