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roy-blake
Reviews
Va, vis et deviens (2005)
Must be seen
This is an Israel-France co-production, with a Romanian director. It concerns a young Ethiopian boy who goes to Israel in 1984 with Operation Moses, This was a project to rescue the Falasha, a group of black Jews who had lived in Ethiopia for centuries, from famine. Moshe, as he becomes, is not actually Jewish, however. His Christian mother sends him off and tells him not to come back to Africa until he has "become". Before getting on the truck to the airlift he is taken in hand by a Falasha woman whose son has just died. He pretends to be that son and is assisted in this by a friendly doctor who knows about the situation.
In Israel his surrogate mother, already sick, soon dies and he is adopted by an Israeli couple, secular left-wing Jews from France. He very quickly learns enough about Judaism to pass as Jewish, and, after an initial difficult period of adjustment wherein he is ostracized, largely because of his race, he finds his way in Israeli society.
Gradually Shlomo becomes more accomplished and more integrated in Israeli life. He has an off-and-on relationship with Sarah, an Israeli Jewish girl. Unfortunately, her father, who seems to be quite bigoted against blacks, opposes the relationship, ostensibly on the grounds that Shlomo isn't Jewish enough. To prove that he is, he enters and wins a religious debate on the topic "what color was Adam." He sidesteps the obvious black/white question by declaring that Adam was red, like the earth he was made from. He wins the girl's heart, but not the father's.
Eventually Shlomo goes to Paris, becomes a doctor, and returns to marry Sarah. He still has the guilty secret that he is not really Jewish, and finally reveals it when his wife tells him that she is pregnant. She is very upset, not because he isn't Jewish, but because he kept something from her. Shlomo tells his adoptive mother the truth, and she intercedes with Sarah. She forgives him, but, she says, on one condition. We never hear exactly what that is, but in the next and final scene we find Shlomo working with Medecins sans Frontieres in Africa, where, against all odds, he finds his birth mother, still in a refugee camp.It's a bit too pat, but after what Shlomo has been through, we forgive the filmmakers for this rather Hollywood-style ending.
This film won best film award at the Copenhagen festival, and it is easy to see why. While it deals with the very particular situation of the Falasha in Israel, it addresses much larger questions of identity and belonging, of prejudice and acceptance, and of the need for recognition of our common humanity. It's not a diatribe against religion: two rabbis show great compassion towards Shlomo while others show their prejudices. Nor is it really about politics: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the background, and so are the civil wars in Africa, but the film is much more about smaller, everyday interactions where people show their true selves. I don't think a brief description can do justice to this film: it should be seen.
Mon colonel (2006)
Plus ca change---
The French film, Mon Colonel, is ostensibly about the Algerian war for independence from France in the 1950s, but it has obvious, and apparently intentional, relevance to present-day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The film is presented as a murder mystery: a color, present-day story concerning the murder of a retired colonel, wrapped around a black-and-white version of the events, years ago in Algeria, that motivated his killer. The story is gradually revealed in excerpts from a diary that are delivered to the police and the military. The diary is that of a young law student who volunteers for the army in Algeria and is assigned to assist the colonel in charge of a large town there.
The framing device is a bit clumsy, but it does serve to bring the story into the present, the better for us to consider its implications. This is not done in too obvious a way: Iraq and Afghanistan are never mentioned. But we certainly get the point. We'd probably suspect something like this anyway, from the fact that the script is by Costa-Gavras, long a politically-engaged director with a leftist viewpoint, who is probably most famous for his film Z (1969), about the military junta in Greece.
In particular, the Colonel has definite ideas on the uses of torture. It is to be used to extract information that could save the lives of French citizens or defeat the insurgents. It is not to be covered up, or called something else: the Colonel scandalizes visiting French dignitaries by telling them exactly how the "pacification" of his town has been achieved. And very importantly, one must dislike torture, and must not enjoy inflicting it on people. It is to be used only for serious purpose, and not to humiliate people unnecessarily. It is to be used in the service of "justice", if not necessarily "legality."
The Colonel's young protégé is a law student. First he is assigned to finding a legal justification for the Colonel's methods. Because of emergency laws that have been enacted, he succeeds in preparing a plausible case. Pleased with his work, the Colonel then puts him in charge of the torture. The young man has great difficulty with this assignment. Eventually he refuses to carry out his orders, and disappears under mysterious circumstances.
The background for the situation is carefully shown. The French have been in Algeria for 125 years and consider it part of France. Many Algerian Arabs consider themselves to be French and some have fought for France. On the other hand France resists giving them the vote, fearing, as one senator remarks, that the parliament in Paris would be "turned into a bazaar." The towns all have signs on their outskirts proclaiming that they are French, but most of the countryside belongs to the insurgents. There is a great scene where almost the entire French (i.e. non-Arab) population of a town is driven out to the countryside, with visiting dignitaries from France, for a picnic. When the young student asks his Colonel whether this is safe, he is told that the area has been scoured for rebels for weeks, and the whole area is full of soldiers. There is even a tame Arab chieftain making a show of welcome. Obviously this is not the sort of outing the townspeople would undertake on their own.
There is no doubt that the filmmakers are opposed to the Colonel and all he stands for. Even so, they give him plenty of opportunity to explain himself and try to justify his actions. The rebels are committing terror attacks against civilians, the supposedly loyal Arabs are paying off the rebels, there are spies in their midst (a friend of the young officer turns out to be one of them.) And the techniques of the Colonel, including torture and summary executions, seem to be working --- the town is "pacified." As the Colonel points out, in an insurgency, whichever side is supported by the people will win. (The Colonel is not naive in the matter of guerrilla war, he even has quotes from Mao posted on his walls to remind him how the insurgents think.) The Colonel's job is to make sure the people support him, through fear if necessary, and, temporarily at least, he succeeds.
Of course we are intended to relate this film to current events in the Mideast, Abu Graib and so on. But I found it more interesting on two other levels, one, the historical, and two, as a more abstract meditation on human conduct. It made me realize that in spite of seeing the film Battle of Algiers many years ago, and reading Camus in college (his name turns up in the film, the Colonel thinks he's a traitor), I know very little of the history of the French in Algeria. I should learn more. As for the more abstract arguments, they hang in the air. What do you do about terrorism, if not to fight it by any means necessary? We know what the French did: eventually, they left. They could do that because Algeria, whatever they claimed, was never really part of France. Questions hang in the air, like an argument that has only begun.
It's a good movie, believable, thought-provoking. It probably opens some old wounds in France, which would mostly, it seems, like to forget about Algeria. There is nothing minimalist about this film. It is full of the sense that thoughts, motives, actions matter, that we are responsible for our actions and had better consider them carefully. Definitely worth seeing.
Flandres (2006)
War is hell, men are pigs
Flandres won the grand prize at Cannes, so somebody must have liked it. I didn't, much. The film takes a depressed, and depressing, look at the life of a French peasant, who becomes a soldier in a nameless war somewhere in the Mideast. At the beginning of the movie, we see him doing farm chores, wandering around the muddy barnyard with a pig (a heavy-handed metaphor Eisenstein would have loved), and having Hobbesian sex with his girlfriend (nasty, brutish and short, possibly the least erotic scene of consensual sex ever filmed.) Later he denies that they are a couple, so she takes revenge by immediately going off with another man. Good for her, and too bad she can't stay away from this brute.
Both of the heroine's lovers are drafted and sent to some faraway desert land where they join a small platoon. The men know nothing about the war, and seem to care less. They fight when they have to, and some of them, including our hero, rape a lone woman when they get the chance. The woman turns out to be a rebel officer, and when the men are captured she has one of them castrated and shot. He turns out not to be one of the men who raped her. No justice here, just chance and random cruelty --- we get the point.
Our hero eventually escapes, after leaving the girl's other lover, who is wounded, to be killed by the rebels. (Not that any heroism on his part would have helped, they would merely both have been killed.) He has been moved enough by his experience to mutter "I love you" as they have sex again. This time the sex is just as boorish, but the sun is shining and the girl has an air of resignation rather than frustration.
The film is well made in a minimalist sort of way, for which its director has been much praised. However, I felt that the points have been made before, and more effectively. I also thought I detected a whiff of condescension, the Paris intellectual looking down his fine long nose at the dirty peasants and their humdrum lives devoid of any real consciousness. I don't, personally, think that's fair.
Gomgashtei dar Aragh (2002)
Kurds as people
Others have already outlined the plot, criticized the shouted dialog, etc. All valid points. But for me the importance of the movie was that it was the very first film I'd seen written, directed and acted by Kurds, in Kurdistan. We hear a great deal about these people in the abstract. Here they are living their lives and culture. In fact, the DVD I saw included an interview with the director in which he said that he intentionally showed as many aspects of Kurdish life as possible, to spread knowledge of things Kurdish.
The culture is fascinating, old-fashioned and tribal and yet with an amazing capacity to endure and survive adversity. There are also hints that the culture may be more adaptable to change than you might think. One scene stands out --- one of the brothers is in search of yet another wife (his eighth) in order to add a son to his personal tribe of 11 daughters. A young woman he is trying to interest points out that he could adopt one or two of the orphans in her charge. He is initially nonplussed, then delighted. He gains two sons, without the need of another wife. Progress, of a sort at least! I also gained some insight into the situation of the Kurds in the border regions of four countries. At the end of the movie, the old man crosses the border from Iraq back into Iran. It consists of some well-trampled barbed wire half-buried in the snow. It means nothing to him.
See this movie, to begin to understand, a little, what it must be like to be one of these forgotten people.
Basic Instinct 2 (2006)
yawn
I think the people who deride Sharon Stone for trying to look sexy at her "advanced" age are wrong. Maybe it's because I myself am ten years older than she is, but she looks pretty good to me. No, the problems with this film are the plot (absurd and, worse, unbelievable) and the acting (especially the "analyst", though it's not entirely his fault, given the silly things he has to do and say.) The first film had an almost equally improbable plot, but somehow you could suspend your disbelief for the time it took to watch the movie. I think it had to do largely with the chemistry between the two leads, which seems to be utterly lacking here. I just can't believe the psychiatrist is THAT obsessed with Catherine, whereas in the first movie the cop's obsession felt very real. The present film is probably worth a look, for historical reasons, but it completely lacks the power of the original.