126. Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s “Hanezu no tsuki” (Hanezu) (2011): The Terrence Malick of Japan makes a film on comprehending life from a Japanese perspective

Naomi Kawase is arguably the most interesting active Japanese director today. Her cinematic themes are intrinsically correlated with Asian traditions and these aspects that weave into her films’ plots could easily be lost on occidental sensibilities. Like the cinema of Terrence Malick, Kawase’s cinematic works are deeply entwined with what humans perceive in nature. Like Malick, Kawase’s plots frequently refer to souls of the dead. And finally like Malick, Kawase inevitably touches on the importance of passing on traditional wisdom and cultural sensibilities from generation to generation, which the present generation tends to overlook while running the modern rat race of survival. Years before Mallick made his The Tree of Life (2011), Kawase had dealt with a Japanese cinematic tale that dealt with sense of loss and emptiness one feels in the aftermath of the death of two beloved family members in her feature film The Mourning Forest (2007) and the subsequent ability of the lead character to comprehend the deeper meanings of life and death by an unusual, unplanned trip into a forest with an elderly gentleman. There appears to be one major difference between the two directors:  Malick takes the viewer beyond the earth and our immediate physical environs to comprehend the larger cosmic and spiritual scheme of life and death, while Kawase gets entrenched with a similar quest in the immediate environs of Japan and its history, allowing for death of a near one to be the key to understand the larger meanings of life and death. And interestingly both Malick’s The Tree of Life and Kawase’s The Mourning Forest are movies built on scripts developed by the directors themselves.

What then is the connection of Kawase’s The Mourning Forest and her latest work Hanezu? Kawase’s Hanezu marks a small departure for the lady director—the script she has written for Hanezu is not her own but based on a Japanese novel written by Masako Bando. For the first time, Kawaze, who has also served as the cinematographer for her many earlier documentary films, chose to be the cinematographer for this feature film, probably realizing that colour and visuals were crucial for the viewer to appreciate Hanezu more than in the case of The Mourning Forest. In Hanezu, Kawase has picked up a novel that resonates well with her earlier work The Mourning Forest, where an old widower totally consumed in love for his dead wife makes a quixotic pilgrimage to his wife’s grave in the forest from his old age home. He has a reason—he had been writing his letters to his dead wife expressing his untiring love and devotion and these letters had to be ‘delivered to her’ within 33 years of her death. His young nurse follows him into the forest and the actions of the senile man who loves his wife so intensely serves as a solace to the nurse who has herself much to grieve with a recent death of her own child. Much of the impact of Kawaze’s Hanezu on a viewer will be lost if the viewer has not seen The Mourning Forest.

Hanezu is a tale of a woman Kayoko living with a man, Tetsuya. It is not clear whether they are married or not. The lady is in love with another man named Takumi who is a sculptor.  The sculptor and his lady love cook and eat together and even go to a Buddhist temple together. The story takes place in the Asaka region of Japan. The sculptor and his lady love have grandparents who were also in love a long while ago but never married. In the Asaka region, many denizens wait for closure of their hopes and loves. Kayoko belongs to the new generation, impatient and impetuous. She suddenly states that she is bearing a child and this information leads to interesting outcomes. There is no clear indication as to who is the father of the child. The outcome of the revelation is unpredictable.

Hanezu has many facets that are similar to The Mourning Forest. Like The Mourning Forest, Hanezu is also a tale of two sets of lovers, separated in time. One individual from each set do converge briefly in both films. These meetings would not have any importance if the viewer of the film and the characters in the film do not absorb or understand the lesson being conveyed from one generation to another, with nature’s flora and fauna adding visual clues to understand those lessons. The images of forest and humans in The Mourning Forest and the many shots of arachnids in Hanezu facilitate the transfer of knowledge for the lead characters.

Nature is an important key to appreciating any film by Kawase (and Malick!). I quote the following statement of Ms Kawase from the Cannes film festival press kit: “I live with the idea that I am a part of nature. In modern times, under the illusion that we are greater than all things, humans have destroyed nature, isolated themselves from nature, and failed to live in coexistence. I think the suffering that people experience in modern society stems from a failure to recognize ourselves as part of nature. You could say that humans actually play supporting roles in my films. I portray nature in a central role because I want to reawaken in the characters the sense of the blessings of nature and awe toward nature that people felt in the past; I want them to coexist with nature, in the truest sense. This is because I consider it something important that should be passed on to my child and to the children of the future.”

Hanezu begins with a shot of soil being excavated. The end of the film has a statement that the cinematic work is dedicated to ancient history buried within the soil being excavated in the Asuka region of Japan. What is the connection? In the press kit provided during the Cannes film festival, the following statement from the filmmaker throws light on the film “The Asuka region is the birthplace of Japan. Here, in ancient times, there were those who fulfilled their lives in the midst of waiting. Modern people, apparently having lost this sense of waiting, seem unable to feel grateful for the present, and cling to the illusion that all things will move constantly forward, according to one’s own plan.” And it is not surprising for this critic to note that the director herself was born and lives in Nara, situated in the very same place where Japan’s oldest capital once stood, and is supposed to be the centre of Japanese culture. Kawase’s films constantly refer to ancient tales and tradition constantly weaving modern tales with those of the past. It is left for the viewer to comprehend the connections between the present and the past and absorb the larger picture.

Hanezu begins with a strange statement of two mountains vying with each other to earn the affection of a third. The strange fact is that three mountains exist to this day. As the film Hanezu unfolds there is a woman and two men who love her, not unlike the mountains. And a careful viewing of the film presents a mirror image of a love tale of unfulfilled triangle involving grandparents of the contemporary lovers of Hanezu. Kawase seems to suggest that there is a karma of the previous generations that the present cannot shrug off. It is then the conception of a child, suicide of a lover, the ability to devour with relish the food prepared by a lover link up with nature’s mirror of the lives of spiders and other arachnids that come into focus and make sense to the viewer. When a Kawase character bicycles off after nonchalantly stating to her lover that she is pregnant, it would seem odd to a viewer who has grown up on Hollywood celluloid tales. Not so, if one cares to accept the patterns of the spider’s web in one’s Asian histories and traditions. Kawase’s cinema is poetic and different from the usual commercial cinema.

The film’s title Hanezu was chosen with considerable deliberation. Hanezu is a shade of red. According to the filmmaker, it is an ancient word that appears in the 8th century poetry collection, the Manyoshu. According to that literary work, it is possible that red was the first colour that humans recognized, and that its meaning comes from its association with blood, the sun, and flame. Those three elements are, in turn, symbolic of life itself. At the same time, red is a fragile colour that fades easily. Both of these aspects are incorporated in the title. Kawase explains her choice of the film’s title in an interview “By resurrecting an ancient word in the present, I wanted Japanese - who aren’t familiar with this word—to savour its meaning. No one can know the reality that lies in the ground, but my role as one who lives in the present is perhaps to turn an ear to the voices of the dead and to weave a tale. What does it mean to live as a person within the unavoidable transience of life - the flux of the waxing and waning moon, people’s hearts, the era, time? I believe there is a deeper truth in the tales of nameless people who are hidden in the shadows of major events and neglected by the trivial riches of the daily media.”

In the film Hanezu, there is blood, there is the sun, and there is the flame. At several points in the film, the viewer is nudged to notice repetitive actions in nature as well as actions of ancestors to better understand and appreciate the ongoing tale of love between a woman and two men—one an artist who believes in freedom and one a scientist who believes in rearing caged birds. One lover shops for his groceries at the nearby store, while the other grows his own food.

In an interview included in the press kit of her film, Kawase stated, “In the poems of the Manyoshu, the ancients who lived without cars or airplanes had to wait for their loved ones to visit, no matter how much they longed to see them. And they wrote these feelings of futility into their poems. They expressed their feelings by transferring them to the flowers and fruits of the season. Ours is an era when things circulate even when they are out of season. Under the illusion that this (anything, anytime) is richness and living their lives surrounded by all this, contemporary people seem to have banished “waiting” and live their lives centred on activity. If someone doesn’t respond, prod them. In all aspects of work, speed is given priority. But didn’t those ancients, in the sensibility of “waiting,” actually have a larger sense of scale than we have today? It was from this perspective that I put a sense of “waiting” into the film. Compiled between the late 7th and late 8th centuries, the Manyoshu is Japan’s oldest existing collection of poetry. It has some 4,500 poems. They were written by people from a wide range of social strata, from Japan’s emperors to nameless farmers, living throughout Japan from the Northeast down to Kyushu. Many of the poems concern love between men and women. Also, in ancient times, people were in awe of nature and revered it, believing that gods inhabited the mountains and rivers. It was an era when people lived in tandem with nature, and nature’s presence is rich in the poems of the Manyoshu. “Manyoshu” literally means “collection of 10,000 leaves,” but it is thought that the title was chosen to suggest “10,000 ages,” or a collection that would be passed down for eternity.”

There is more of Terrence Malick in Naomi Kawase though there is no evidence that she might be his admirer. It comes through in their similarity of dealing with their actors. Says Kawase in an interview “When I make a film set in Nara, I have actors who live in Tokyo come to live in Nara for a month before shooting starts. I ask them to become a person from that area, to eat the local food and become friends with the local people. I ask them to learn how to live as if they were born there and had lived there all their lives. As actors begin to settle into lives in that environment, their expressions become more natural. They no longer just read the words of the script, memorize them, and use their bodies to express them; they forget the words, experience and internalize them, and their bodies begin to move naturally. The environment shapes and creates the actor. We do not rehearse. Rather, I try to film with just one take. The actors have created their characters in that environment, so it’s not possible for me, as director, to tell them to be something different. That would be like changing the life of a person who has lived in reality. Rather, while creating the environment, I have long and frequent discussions with the actors, and establish the environment that way.”

While Kawase’s The Mourning Forest was relatively easier to comprehend and appreciate, Hanezu packs in so much more traditional information and clues of visual association, making the film relatively more difficult exercise to appreciate, especially if you were not Asian or Japanese. For instance, the visual connection of a Japanese soldier in the Second World War trudging with a love letter that he never sent to his beloved could befuddle many a viewer. Yet it fits in with the intertwining concept of love, death and waiting which are the essential bits of the film. Hanezu is not an easy film to appreciate. Neither is any film of Malick, Raoul Ruiz, Claire Denis, or Semih Kaplanoglu, easy to appreciate.

P.S. Hanezu ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. The Mourning Forest and The Tree of Life were reviewed earlier on this blog.

125. Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da” (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) (2011): Truth buried alive--a tale seldom told, in a manner rarely employed

Turkish cinema made an impact on the world map in the early Eighties essentially because the honest nationalist realism of the Kurd actor/screenplay-writer/director Yilmaz Güney was blooming and gaining world attention. Güney, like many outstanding Iranian filmmakers today, was imprisoned in Turkey again and again, as he was perceived to be an inconvenient threat to the government until he died in 1984 in exile. With his passing, there seemed to be no one who could fill Güney’s boots for two decades. Eventually, two Turkish directors Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Semih Kaplanoglu have emerged and raised Turkey’s profile once again in contemporary world cinema as no other, with achievements that shadow each other. Both have already made film trilogies: Ceylan, a trilogy referred to as ‘the provincial trilogy’, and Kaplanoglu the ‘Yusuf’ trilogy. Ceylan (born in 1959) is some 4 years older to Kaplanoglu (born in 1963).  Both have made about five to six feature films. Both began as photographers/cameramen, graduating to becoming the toast of major film festivals such as Cannes and Berlin as film directors. Both cast their own family members as actors and crew in their films. Both have not just proved their abilities as filmmakers but have in their films indirectly promoted the natural splendours of the Turkish landscape to the world audiences to devour.

This is a perspective that a viewer of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest work Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ought not to ignore. Ostensibly a long feature film on the investigation of a murder, the cinematic work offers much more to an attentive and patient viewer. Ceylan’s interest in photography is probably most evident when he collaborates with his cinematographer, Gökhan Tiryaki, in his past three feature films. The visually rich Turkish film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia demands a lot from its viewer as the visuals compete for attention of the viewer as much as the narrative. Viewers, unfamiliar with Turkey, would wonder where Anatolia is on the modern global map. When the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone made films with similar titles, his “West” and his “America” were not difficult to pinpoint. When the Mexican filmmaker Robert Rodriguez reprised the phrase in his 2003 film with “Mexico,” once again the geography was easy to pinpoint and unambiguous. Not so with Anatolia.

Anatolia is an ancient name for much of modern Turkey. It is the name associated with much of Turkey from the days of Alexander the Great. What is important for the viewer to note and reflect on is that Ceylan chose the term Anatolia rather than Turkey, when the tale he presents is of modern day Turkey, of individuals and mindsets that are not historical but contemporary. Perhaps for Ceylan and co-sciptwriters (comprising his wife Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kasal, the very same team that wrote the brilliant Three Monkeys) the mindset and values have not changed with time and  perhaps for them modern Turkey is no different from Anatolia of the ages past.

The viewer is presented a murder story that begins in the night. By the end of the film, the truth behind the murder is unravelled, with visuals bathed in sunlight. The journey from darkness to light reveals a lot more than the solving of a murder. The tale is one that goes beyond the story of any one individual but of many individuals, powerful individuals, less powerful mortals on the fringes of society, individuals living in towns and individuals living in the villages, individuals educated and not so educated. Some individuals murder human beings, others murder truth. The title of the film suggests that the viewer is being told an old fable, but the viewer will soon realize the film is a contemporary tale, a melancholy one that suggests more than what is obvious on a casual viewing.

A prosecutor dictates a report that will have legal muscle, which is essentially his own parochial view, without any real questioning or discussions. A doctor conducts an autopsy without touching the corpse. A village elder passionately demands a morgue in a village which has poor electrical connections rather than ask for any other modern amenity one associates with progress. Ceylan’s film is crowded with male characters, with only two female characters appearing briefly on screen, and one (the prosecutor’s dead wife) who never appears physically but is discussed at length. In the middle of the cinematic investigation of the murder of a man someone suggests “Look for the woman.” The film develops into an autopsy of male minds rather than of a male corpse. The irony that the script gradually develops gets further underscored by the scientifically rigid doctor, who is a votary of autopsies to investigate abnormal deaths, deciding to doctor the autopsy at hand, after looking out of the window at a woman.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the viewer will realize, is less about the investigation of a murder than an investigation of a social psyche of a people who have not changed over the ages. Ceylan makes you wonder if truth was ever documented in the region but buried alive because it was convenient.

Though the bulk of the film is talk-heavy, the film’s strength lies in the visuals. The prologue of the film, before title credits, reveal three men talking in a large room in the night,  followed by a shot of that building from the outside, patrolled by a stray dog, and finally that vision is finally cut off by a passing truck. Dogs reappear at critical moments again in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia—once again when the body is found and later at the gates of the village elder. Having visited Turkey on two occasions, this critic finds the role of the dogs in the film surprising, as stray dogs are rare to spot in that country compared to well-fed stray cats. Evidently, Ceylan employs dogs to tell the viewer something; perhaps it is a mere a cinematic punctuation in the tale, perhaps more. This critic does not recall dogs appearing in either Climates (2006) or Three Monkeys (2008), the two preceding Ceylan films.

Visuals continue to be important in this film. At the end of the superb Three Monkeys, dark clouds, a lovely metaphor, loomed over the Marmara Sea. In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, thunder and lightning are heard and seen but no rain falls on the beautiful weather beaten landscape. In fact, the lightning lights up a carving on the rocky hillside scaring the wits out of a man with much to hide in his life. When the electricity in the village fails, Ceylan and Tiryaki, introduce the village elder’s beautiful daughter’s face illuminated in the dark by lamps and candles for a short sequence as she silently serves tea to the guests. The effect of her appearance and presence is felt by the men on the screen, harking back to the women in their lives. It is a great moment of epiphany. Soon after that the prisoner in the group exclaims aloud as he sees a man who he thought was dead.

And again, much later, it is the final image of the dead man’s wife walking on a lonely path, as seen from the autopsy room, which brings the cinematic tale to a closure.

Ceylan’s film is about women seen through the eyes of men. Somewhere in the film the prosecutor tells the doctor: “Women can sometimes be very ruthless.” Much later in the film, after long exchanges of views with the doctor, the prosecutor concludes himself, that the death of his “gorgeous” wife was not as he had made it out to be all these years. Men cheat on their wives, they kill for the sake of women they love, and yet consider these women to be ruthless even in their stoic silence captured by the film. These are vignettes of Anatolia over the ages, repeated to this day. Ceylan seems to ask the viewer to reassess history in this context.

Ceylan’s use of the camera to track the fall of an apple from a tree, rolling down the slopes and a stream to settle where other such fallen apples are gathered speaks a lot for his metaphoric ability to connect nature and man. Even when a child throws a tomato at his father (not knowing the kinship) the camera focuses on the emotions of the mother and father, and those images unveil a story never directly discussed in the movie.

The remarkable aspect of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema is that he presents the obvious contradictions in society; he refrains from taking a high moral ground. He leaves it to the viewer to decide every issue each viewer has perceived in his films.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011, the second highest award at the event after the Golden Palm. (Ceylan might have won the Golden Palm if Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life was not competing with his film.) It has also won the best film award at the Haifa Film Festival, the grand prize of the critics at Sao Paolo Film festival, the Grand Jury Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen awards, and the special jury award at the Dubai film festival. Ceylan’s film can appear to be lengthy and tedious, but the film offers delightful stories within the main story, some said, some unspoken. It is for the alert viewer to pick up the strands such as this comment from the prosecutor: “You don’t know how boys suffer here, without a father. It’s the kids who suffer most in the end, doctor, it’s the kids who pay for the sins of adults.”  The film is in a way the collective, melancholic story of Anatolia over the ages repeating over the many generations. To call the film “Once Upon a Time in Turkey” would have missed director’s implicit intent.

P.S. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Ceylan’s Three Monkeys (2008) ranks as one of the 100 best films of the author. Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1968) and Semih Kaplanoglu’s Honey (2010) were reviewed earlier on this blog.

124. Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s “Elena” (2011): The third riveting film from a talented filmmaker who makes any perceptive viewer sit up and enjoy layers of meaning

Andrei Zvyagintsev is one of the most interesting among active filmmakers today. He has only made three feature films. Each of those three films is built, to put it in literary terms, on the scale of a novella rather than an epic novel. Each film delves with aspects of family bonding—or at least that provides the least common factor for the tales, only to multiply and amplify on aspects of an individual’s life beyond the family, subjects often relating to psychology, politics, sociology and religion. And that is what makes any Zvyagintsev film interesting—its universality and its inward looking questions, all open ended for the viewer to ponder over after the movie gets over. And Elena is true to that spirit.

Famous Russian novels (later made into films) often had for their titles mere names—Anna Karenina or Dr Zhivago. But those novels went beyond those ordinary names. (A few US films, such as Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, also used ordinary individual’s names at titles of movies.)  This is the case of Elena, the movie. Elena is the lead character, an ordinary individual. Yet, she represents much more than a simple individual. She represents a social class, a generation, and the mother hen of a family. She combines diametrically opposing elements of the angelic Florence Nightingale and a cool, calculated villain. Like a Michael Clayton, you can spot Elenas in our society.

The basic story of Elena is of a humble matronly nurse who marries a rich man, taking care of his needs from hospital, where they first met during a hospitalization, to his elegant home in the evening of his life. The obvious strand of the story is the social disconnect between husband and wife, even though both are content and obviously need each other. The woman needs the money and social standing of her husband, and the man needs a woman for companionship and personal care and to manage his upscale apartment. The rich man has a “hedonistic” daughter from a previous marriage, who still loves her father in an aloof manner and lives her own life far from the “family”. The father, in contrast, cares for the prodigal daughter and is concerned about her future, while he is least concerned about his wife’s progeny.

Elena has her own brood, from a previous marriage. A son, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson with limited means and ability, who seem to survive on Elena’s financial contributions, constitute the other branch of the family tree. After the initial introductions of the state of Elena's extended family, the story of Elena the movie takes off to a higher altitude as the drama progresses from the preliminaries into intrigue culminating in an ending that will make an intelligent viewer ponder over the various events in the film.

To assess the film as a mere tale of two social classes in modern-day Russia would be missing the wood for the trees. It is indeed a tale of the “invasion of the barbarians”—an original title Zvyagintsev had toyed with using. The sharp contrast of the overhead shot of the rich old man in his bed early in the film, with the overhead shot of Elena’s grandchild lying in the center of an oversized bed is only one layer of the rich screenplay of Elena.

If a viewer thought the film was a tale on class inequalities in Russia, it would be relevant to hear what the director has to say on the film.  To quote Zvyagintsev from Elena’s press kit: “This is a drama for today, told in a modern cinematographic language subjecting the viewer to eternal questions about life and death. A monster disguised as a saint, a repenting sinner facing her idols in a temple — how is that for an image of the Apocalypse? The Devil is powerless when he stands before the face of God. Man is powerless in the face of Death. And God is powerless in the face of Man’s freedom of choice. Humanity holds the key to the future of this trinity.” Now, this critic has always held the view that Russian directors like Tarkovsky, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, and Zvyagintsev are deeply religious individuals (having grown up in the traditions of Russian Orthodox Church) and their cinema betrays their theological bent even though traditional images of worship rarely appear on the screen in their cinematic works. In Elena, there is a brief sequence of Elena praying but it is fleeting. At a critical point of the film, the train on which Elena is travelling kills a horse on the railway tracks.  A horse killed in an accident might appear insignificant to many. Not so to a Russian filmmaker like Zvyaginstsev who loves to use Tarkovsky-like images of horses one recalls in Solyaris and Andrei Rublyev. For Zvyagintsev and for Tarkovsky, the white horse is a symbol of purity and grace. And the killing of a horse in Elena suggests the fall from grace. The context has to be understood by the viewer.  So is the electrical power failure or outage in Elena’s son’s apartment on Elena's second visit. In Zvyagintsev’s The Return, other Tarkovskian metaphors like the sudden rains were brought into focus.

In Elena, the opening shot is of an apartment viewed from outside, from the perspective of a tree branch. There is a long silence until it is broken by a cry of a bird, a hooded crow (Corvus cornix), if my knowledge of ornithology holds good. The shot of the bird and its cry, are harbingers of the varied metaphors strewn around the film. A crow is never considered a good omen. When the rich man takes out his costly sedan to drive to go to his regular swimming pool, he has to stop his car for a stream of workers who cross the road. Any Zvyagintsev film ought to be enjoyed like solving a crossword puzzle. Every shot is loaded with a silent commentary. The obvious story line of the rich versus the poor is obvious for the less interested viewer.  However, Zvyagintsev has presented through Elena his concern for the diminishing ethical, moral and spiritual values in of the post-glasnost Russia of today.

Zvyagintsev’s choice of subjects and the writer(s) to build his three films gives an insight into the man. His first film The Return was based on a little known Russian duo, who wrote TV scripts. Collaborating with Zvyagintsev, opened up their careers to work later with the talented Nikita Mikhalkov on the Oscar nominated film, 12, loosely based on The Twelve Angry Men. Zvyagintsev moved on to American writer William Saroyan for his next film The Banishment. He used the skills of two other lesser known Russian screenplay writers, Artom Melkumian and Oleg Negin. Between the two writers and Zvyagintsev, Saroyan’s work was transformed into a slightly different tale with so much added punch. He cleverly dropped the Saroyan title of The Laughing Matter and called it by the loaded title The Banishment. Zvyagintsev persisted with Negin on his third film Elena. What Melkumian and Negan did to reshape the Saroyan tale, is accentuated by Negan in Elena, with a host of symbols and metaphors that transport a simple tale of a family into the world of contemporary politics, ethics, social changes and religion. The women characters in all the three Zvyagintsev films are interesting studies: they live to serve men. In Elena, the main female character drives the story-line, even though she lives to serve, first her husband and subsequently her son.

Zvyagintsev’s debut film The Return has all the trappings of the elements that made Andrei Tarkovsky tick and the structured layers of meanings that the film offered were mindboggling. That debut won him the Golden Lion at Venice film festival and 27 other awards worldwide. His second film The Banishment won the Best Actor prize at Cannes film festival. His third work Elena won him the Jury prize at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section, the Grand Prize of the Ghent international film festival and the Silver Peacock for the Best Actress at the Indian International Film Festival, Goa.

These honors themselves indicate that Zvayagintsev is a director who can pick good actors and derive great performances from them. In the first two films, he stuck with actor Konstantin Lavronenko for the main role. He was able to transform an actor with three low profile Russian films into an internationally recognizable actor. For his second film, he chose the talented Norwegian/Swedish actress Maria Bonnevie over Russian actresses and the lady delivered a smashing low-key performance. In Elena, a TV actress Nadezhda Markina was catapulted into role that won her a Silver Peacock and the best actress award at the Asian Pacific Screen awards.

Zvangintsev’s cinema cannot be appreciated sufficiently if one does not notice his constant cinematographer Mikhail Krichman who went on to win a Golden Ossella at the Venice Film Festival for his cinematography in another remarkable recent Russian work Silent Souls (2010). Krichman’s amazing ability to make nature and the natural surroundings come alive in each frame is remarkable. The combination of Zvyagintsev and Krichman is a gift for viewers, just as director Grigory Kozintsev paired with Jonas Gritsius to give us those magnificent Shakespeare films from Russia, Korol Lir (King Lear) and Gamlet (Hamlet).

Apart from actors and the cameraman of Zvyagintsev’s cinema, viewers have been introduced to three remarkable musicians Andrei Dergatchev in The Return, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in The Banishment, and now in Elena the minimalist US composer Philip Glass. In Elena, Philip Glass’ music comes in stark contrast to a diagetic soundtrack, when Elena heads to the nest of her brood. Philip Glass has never been as breathtaking in cinema as he has been in Elena and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi.

And that is what makes Zvyaginstev’s cinema a rich total experience—great thought-provoking screenplays, superb visuals, arresting performances, delightful music and a direction that leaves you clamoring for more of such films. 

P.S. Elena ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Zvyagintsev's The Return and The Banishment  have been reviewed earlier on this blog. The Russian films Silent Souls and Korol Lir (King Lear) and  the US film Michael Clayton have also been reviewed on this blog.

123. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “Jodái-e Náder az Simin” (Nader and Simin: A Separation) (2011): A delightful study of gender differences and the importance of keeping the family together

Iranian cinema has made impressive strides in recent decades and Nader and Simin: A Separation is undoubtedly the crowning achievement of Iranian cinema in 2011. It is not often that any film wins three of the four top honors at a major festival such as the Berlin Film Festival 2011.  Apart from the Golden Bear for the best film,  Nader and Simin: A Separation won the Silver Bears for Best Actor and Best Actress—it only missed out on the Best Director, a redundant award after having won the Golden Bear. The many other awards the film has won include the Silver Peacock for the best director at the Indian International Film Festival held in Goa and the Golden Globe for the best foreign film. No Iranian film has received such an impressive and varied international recognition to date.

There are many reasons to admire this work of cinema. One, it is one of the few Iranian films that has enjoyed equal recognition within Iran and elsewhere. Though the film has slivers of implicit critical commentary on the conditions in Iran today, the mainstay of the film is a social commentary that could take place anywhere in the world. It is probably this fact that led the current government of Iran to allow this film as an official entry of Iran at the Oscars 2012.

The second reason that evokes admiration is that the film is not about a separation leading to divorce, but instead a film on how a wife, Simin, of 14 years desires to be with her husband, Nader, but emigrate from Iran and thus give a fillip to the future of their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh. Another aspect of this social value chain is the bull-headed stand of Nader, who refuses to emigrate because of his ingrained Asian fundamental value of the son's moral responsibility to care for his Alzheimer-stricken father in Iran. Nader’s viewpoint is the derived from the Asian value of parents giving all their efforts and savings for their offspring, quite in contrast to modern western values. The film thus underscores the importance of a family, the love of a mother for her daughter, a son for his father, a daughter for her parents, and an economically weak husband, Hodjat, for his wife Razieh and their daughter.

The third reason that makes the film outstanding is the rapid flow of the realistic narrative, enabled by an ensemble cast that makes the viewer feel the events on screen could easily happen to the viewer as well, in any geographical context. There is not one moment in the film when the viewer would feel bored. The amazing script enraptures the viewer as a thriller would while the film exudes realism that is easily identifiable and credible.

The fourth reason is that the film’s director Asghar Farhadi seems to have made his best work to date, with each film he has made being progressively an improvement on his previous work. This work finally catapults him to a level where he can rub shoulders with finest of Iranian filmmakers: Mehrjui, Kiarostami, Majidi, Panahi, Naderi, the Makhmalbaf family, and Jalili. The success of this film will definitely help to bring into international limelight the finest of Iranian cinema to audiences who are unaware of its stature.

There is no dull moment in this Asghar Farhadi film. The film opens with a court scene, where a magistrate is only heard on screen, not seen (a craft perfected in a superb Iranian 2004 film by director Mohsen Amiryousefi called Bitter Dream). What is not seen is a deliberate effort by the director to hide the less relevant details and focus instead on the more important.  The magistrate asks Simin (played by the beautiful Leila Hatami, who has played roles for Mehrjui and Kiarostami in the past, and is a daughter of another Iranian film director of repute—Ali Hatami) why does she think her daughter has no future in Iran. The question is not answered by Simin but her body language does. This is the first of the only two overtly political comments that this critic spotted in the film. It is not easy to make an honest film in Iran. Asghar Farhadi seems to walk the tight rope with a panache while others get into trouble with the authorities. 

Nader and Simin: A Separation is a tale of half truths and the impact of these half truths on various individuals, on growing children who look upon their parents as role models, and on relationships of teachers in schools with the parents of their students. It is also a tale of conflicts of class and wealth in society. But most of all,  it is not cinema of escapism, but of reality. The film presents a very real modern day Iran—and this critic has visited Iran on five occasions over two decades on official work related to agriculture, interacting with ordinary citizens, scientists, and a succession of powerful Federal Ministers in that field. Iranians are a very intelligent and admirable people, in spite of the current public intolerance of other faiths. The second evidence of political criticism (if it was meant to be one) in this film that I spotted was the Alzheimer-stricken father of Nader wearing a necktie and being driven in a car in public places in Iran. Why Nader did that is not explained in the film. In Iran, only foreigners wear neckties, as other citizens could face the wrath of the moral police that often terrorize the public.

While much of the film delves into the conflict between two couples--one rich, one poor—arising out of the outraged knee-jerk anger of a loving son (on seeing his father left unattended and fallen on the ground with his hands tied to the bed-rail) expressed towards his female house employee who had neglected her responsibility and stepped out of the house, the film surprises the viewer at every stage like a thriller. A major surprise is when the pivotal figure in the film turns out to be the young girl, Termeh, and not her parents, Nader and Simin, as the title of the film would have led the viewer to believe. Farhadi’s film has made a great leap by allowing a young girl to make the major decision in the film that will affect her parents and eventually her like an adult having watched adults and their behavior. It does not matter what the decision is—what matters is who makes the decision, in a world where the males made all the decisions. (Interestingly, the young girl in the movie is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.) Ironically, the viewers will recall the film had begun with a woman demanding a better deal for her daughter.  Farhadi has made a film that re-defines the role of women in modern Iran (and why not, when the first Nobel Prize winner in Iran was a woman, Shrin Ebadi!) while men only seem to care and give priority to other men over women (at least in in this cinematic tale).  It is a great film that focuses on women and the girl child in Iran.

Farhadi’s film is one that will have universal acceptance because what is shown on screen will appeal to most viewers worldwide. The performances are truly outstanding. The editing is equally commendable. And for Farhadi to have developed the tale from real life observations the effort is commendable. True to the director’s recent trends in exhibiting improved abilities with each film, I hope the next Farhadi film outdoes this film in overall merit. Farhadi seems to have raised his own bar for his next jump.

P.S. Nader and Simin: A Separation ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly was reviewed earlier on this blog. Iranian films by Mehrjui, Kiarostami, Panahi, Naderi, Amiryousefi, Makhmalbaf, and Majidi have been also been reviewed earlier.

122. Canadian director Sébastien Pilote’s debut film feature film “Le vendeur” (The Salesman) (2011): White lies to make people happy and sell products that are not essential for the buyer

If there is one director who has made his presence felt with a debut in 2011, it is Sébastien Pilote from Canada. Few have heard of him, and even fewer have seen his first feature film The Salesman. The Salesman is probably one of the most powerful films from Canada in recent decades that recall the quiet intensity of the works of Canadian directors Claude Jutra and Norman McLaren, some forty or fifty years ago. The Salesman was honoured with the Jury’s Grand Prize and the Best Actor Silver Gateway award at the recently concluded Mumbai International Film Festival where the competition section is only open to debut films across the world. Having caught up with the film at the International Film Festival of Kerala, one realizes that the Mumbai jury had honoured the two aspects of the movie that truly make it a rewarding experience—the direction and the acting.

 

The Salesman does not have the trappings of a ponderous movie. Yet, this critic considers it as one of the finest films of 2011.  It captures the global concerns of the day—unusual weather changes and economic turmoil that affect almost all citizens globally. Yet the film is not ostensibly about either of those two subjects. The weather and the economic upheaval that leaves so many jobless remain as a bleak backdrop for this lovely tale of an individual whose life is interesting while on screen and will be interesting for the viewer long after the movie gets over. That is precisely what makes the film stand out—a “lovely” humanistic tale against the “dark” background. It gives you an indication of the contrasts that the film provides the viewer at several stages of the film. Everything in the film needs re-evaluation in each differing context—what is lovely could take on a dark hue.

 

It is a tale of a car salesman in a small town in Quebec, Canada, that is reeling under some 250 plus days of continuous snow and a local economic catastrophe of the impending closure of a paper mill that directly and indirectly supports the town’s population. Who is he? "I sell cars, that's all," says the salesman in the film. That's the devotion and the single purpose of his life as it appears for the viewer.

 

It is essentially about business ethics that ought to make many students of business schools squirm-- if they have a conscience. A successful salesman has to show results, not once but several times, and especially in bad times of recession. Canadian actor Gilbert Sicotte (who has been associated with so many good Canadian films) plays the affable Marcel Levesque, the elderly car salesman. A successful salesman is not a new concept in cinema—David Mamet’s play that was made into a film by James Foley and called Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and Arthur Miller’s play made into a film by Volker Schlondorf f called Death of a Salesman (1985) seemed to have flogged the angst of the textbook salesman to the extreme. But Pilote’s debut film provides a new perspective—once a salesman, always a salesman. The true salesman is indestructible. Irrespective of what happens, they go on and on. In a way Pilote’s film The Salesman reminds the viewer indirectly that all true professionals are similar—once they are good at a job they never give up, till they are made to stop by external forces or physical handicaps. A doctor remains a doctor, a journalist a journalist, a scientist a scientist, an actor an actor, if they are good at their job, even after they are shaken mid-career by personal losses that question whether all their devotion was worth it. 

 

Examine the film’s tale from the viewpoint of business managers. A good salesman is a goose that lays golden eggs. A healthy, smart business organization rewards the top performer always, in the presence of less competent salesmen. The top performer is given the more difficult of assignments—here in this Pilote film of selling a fleet of new vehicles to the police department. The salesman’s manager (read the ideal human resource manager) is sensitive to the personal upheavals of his staff’s lives—and even suggests that his top salesman take a break. But will a good professional take a break or keep on working towards new goals set by the organization?

 

Then again the film is really a film on balancing ethics with being good at your job, being the best in the rat race. It might be philosophically an existential question. Do we live to be happy having lived ethically in our professional careers or do we give more importance to win the race and keep our pay packets secure? These are not questions asked in the film—these are implicit questions for the viewer as the film ends. And that for this critic is the reason why the film gains importance. And it is this judgement of each viewer that will morally assess the salesman who cares little about what happens or what could happen to the buyer after the sale, in the medium term. And I am quite sure there will many who will debate their individual viewpoints after the movie gets over.

 

The film is a wonderful example of a film driven by a great performance. Actor Gilbert Sicotte, always well dressed and quietly persuasive, not just brings on screen the character of a perfect salesman, but also makes the viewer like the character. The salesman treats his co-workers well and they in turn even admire him. He is a good parent and a good grandparent. One of the finest and delicate sequences in the film is of the grandfather teaching his grandson the Lord’s prayer. There is another innocuous sequence when the salesman quietly joins the jobless workers of the paper factory in a group prayer. Religion is compacted into very few scenes in the film but how powerful those scenes are can only be assessed at the end of the film. Perhaps it is intense religion that keeps the salesman ticking. And may be not.

 

 

Then there is a relationship between a father and a daughter. The affection of a daughter towards the widower father is not just the in food she brings him but  in the understanding that the best gift she could provide her father would be to make him happy in his job as a salesman by driving down to pick up a vehicle to humour her father’s client’s wishes. Pilote’s direction comes to the fore with the visuals of the employed salesman driving past the jobless workers and the innocuous statement of the salesman that he believes in keeping his clients happy. The salesman says "You have to like the people. And you need to look into their eyes. If you look into their eyes, you look into their souls." Pilote’s marked ability to develop a character indirectly by beading simple incidents is fascinating. The salesman prides in knowing his clients. Yet you know from an earlier Pilote sequence that he doesn’t know them or rather he has forgotten them in spite of keeping a tape recorder to learn from his own mistakes and become even better at his work. Yet he goes on with his job aware that he might be bringing misery to others than happiness. Pilote's film accentuates the contradictions.

Two incidents late into the film provide the pivotal intensity by which the film needs to be evaluated. And interestingly the two incidents help the viewer to evaluate and revaluate the salesman.

 

The film exudes a quiet power that is gripping and thought provoking, as the final scene of the film of the salesman looking at the arrival of the next lot of vehicles to sell. You might not get the feeling that you are watching great cinema unfold on screen but if you care to reflect on what you saw after the film concludes you will realize that Pilote’s film packs a punch that becomes obvious over time as you reflect on the issues presented in the film that have universal significance today. Like the salesman who claims to know his clients' souls by looking into their eyes, Pilote's film allows the viewer to "see" the soul of the salesman. 

P.S. The Salesman ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author.

121. US director Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” (2011): An exquisite cinematic product grappling with metaphysics and theology

Terrence Malick has made only five feature films to date, all made in the US. The five films have won a solitary Oscar (for Nestor Almendros's cinematography in Days of Heaven), although many of his films have made the grade of garnering numerous unsuccessful Oscar nominations. On the other hand, Malick’s The Thin Red Line won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival, Days of Heaven won the Best Director award at Cannes, and now The Tree of Life has won the coveted Golden Palm at Cannes, awards that have eluded many Oscar winners. These facts themselves speak loudly about the quality of Malick’s cinema, appreciated more in Europe than in the US.

For this critic, too, only three of the five Malick feature films, the same three that won acclaim in Europe, bear the stamp of truly outstanding cinema. In contrast, many American viewers to this day find his debut film Badlands, which has certain elements that recall the typical Hollywood entertainment ingredients of the Sixties and Seventies, and The New World with its historical magnetism to be equally enchanting.

The Tree of Life is arguably Malick’s finest and the most profound work to date. It is not an easy film to appreciate and will leave an impatient viewer totally perplexed and frustrated. If a viewer had no idea of Malick’s cinema and had come to watch a typical action film with Brad Pitt and/or Sean Penn, that person would indeed feel cheated. If a viewer was not used to a narrative cinema continually switching between past and present with long sequences of film that appeared to be out of the Discovery TV channel and not pick up the relevance of the editing, the experience would be akin to a viewer wondering if the reels of the film were mixed up by the projectionist. (Interestingly, I recall similar reactions in the early Seventies when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001-A Space Odyssey was released. Young students went to see the film to get a “high” after smoking hashish, because of the long psychedelic and colourful sequences the film had of the journey to Jupiter, with no spoken words, accompanied by superb music in near empty theatres, totally oblivious of Kubrick’s intent.)

Malick’s cinema is different. Malick’s films are the works of an erudite filmmaker and, therefore seek to communicate with a viewership that has the patience and humility to listen to profound rhetorical questions asked for the benefit of the viewer. These films are the antithesis of popular cinema with slick talk and frenzied action. Malick’s works—at least the three that I admire most—tend to deceive the impatient viewer who refuses to probe a movie beyond the obvious. Malick’s The Thin Red Line was less about the heroics of war but more about the ethical and reflective mind of the soldier who is able to comprehend his actions and put them in the perspective with nature’s majesty. Malick’s Days of Heaven provided the viewer with awesome images of difficult calamities and the travails of the urban poor running away for refuge in rural America that sandwich a period of magical carefree rural lifestyle of love that embraces the wonders of nature around us that one often tends to ignore. The natural “heaven” in Days of Heaven is not so obvious but it is there in spite of the locusts and the fire that dominate the film.  In The Tree of Life, each and every sequence of natural beauty, is a tool for the viewer to help understand the metaphysical and moral education of Jack (the director’s alter ego) that incorporates the lessons Jack has learnt from his father and mother, and most all his brother.

Malick is not a film director who makes films just for the love of the medium. He intelligently uses cinema, combining both music and images, as a tool to discuss his favourite metaphysical and theological concerns. Swedish director Ingmar Bergman did this often to question conventional Christian concepts his own father, a priest, had brought him up to respect and believe in. Bergman’s “Man-God trilogy” of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence almost rejects God as a metaphorical spider in the first, accepts God in the second despite doubts, wrestles ambiguously with God’s silence that even Mother Teresa had found so difficult to accept. Andrei Tarkovsky did the same but very subtly—Tarkovsky’s strong Russian Orthodox Christian roots silently emerge in Solyaris (Solaris), The Stalker, and his final film Sacrifice, while the subjects of these films were not overtly spiritual. (Few are aware that Tarkovsky was an intensely religious Russian Orthodox Christian and knew St. Mathew’s Gospel in the Bible by rote, the very same book that Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini made into a fascinating work of cinema called Gospel According to St. Mathew). The Tree of Life needs to be evaluated the way one evaluates a Tarkovsky, a Bergman, or a Pasolini—all classics of international cinema.

There are different strokes to appreciate Malick’s The Tree of Life. The obvious one is that of a theist, a believer in God or Allah or any name you prefer to give the Creator. The first clue the viewer gets is the quotation "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (Chap 38,verses 4 and 7) from the Book of Job—a book from the Old Testament of the Bible. It is arguably the oldest book of the Bible, a tale that existed before Genesis was written and accepted by the Abrahamic religions. (For Muslims, Job is also part of the Holy Quran) The Book of Job is built around an individual, a God-fearing theist who questions God on why he of all people has been deprived of all things material and familial but yet stoically chooses to accept and revere God. In Malick’s film, a deeply God-fearing religious Texan family is deprived of one of their three sons, not unlike Job.  The mother, Mrs O’Brien, the embodiment of grace in the film mimics Job’s reactions after the loss, with the words “I will be true to you. Whatever comes.” A major problem for viewers of The Tree of Life would be the constant references to the Book of Job, in case they are not familiar with the text. A quotation from the book kicks off the film. Fortunately, this critic had studied the book as a prescribed optional text for his postgraduate degree in English Literature from Bombay University, not merely as a religious text. Some of the text is explained by the priest’s sermon in the film. No one knows who wrote the Book of Job and literary scholars have concluded that the present form of the book is the product of oral literature and that the current version is the product of at least three different authors. Malick distills the essence of Job’s metaphysical travails into a simple event—the death of a 19-year old that occurs early in the film. For cineastes like me, the event and the progression of the film is reminiscent of the structure of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s French movie Three Colors: Blue, which interestingly Kieslowski and his screenplaywriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz similarly modelled on an important philosophical chapter of the Bible: I Corinthians 13.  Mallick’s film, too, recalls the Kieslowski’s film, when Mrs O’Brien speaks the words “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.” Those words of Mrs O’Brien reflect the same ultimate realization of actor Julliete Binoche’s character in the French/Polish film following the death of an important member of the family, early in the Kieslowski film.

For Malick, the Job-like realization of Mrs O’Brien is only a tool for the full education and sensitization of her eldest son, Jack (who probably embodies the young Malick, growing up in Waco, Texas, the name emblazoned on the truck spewing DDT, in the film), played by Sean Penn, who has grown up to be a successful urban architect of repute. The success of Jack seems to recall the words of his father Mr O’Brien “Your mother's naive. It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world. If you're good, people take advantage of you.” We can assume Jack had followed his father thus far—following the way of nature. But when Jack’s brother dies, Jack realizes his folly—he needs to follow the way of grace embodied in his mother. What results in the film is an abstract journey (a path to nirvana of sorts) from the worlds of steel and glass, through a derelict wooden door frame (symbolic of the transformation of Jack) as he is led by a woman (either his mother or his spouse), through rocky crevices to a sea shore where all the persons he has met in life are alive and well. The sudden action of falling on his knees is the dawning of nirvana in Jack that links the viewer back to the opening words: “Brother. Mother. It was they who led me to your door.” To the attentive listener, the framework of the entire film had already been presented with the opening quotation from the Book of Job, followed by these words of Jack, before you even see a single person on screen. Apart from the Book of Job, there are several references to the 23^rd chapter of the Book of Psalms. Now to an atheist viewer, or a cineaste who is merely interested in pure cinema, all this could appear to be hogwash. But is it?

If you prefer to put aside religion and theology in The Tree of Life, a moot question would be: Can an atheist enjoy and appreciate The Tree of Life? This critic would fault the marketing of The Tree of Life for audiences who are not familiar with the cinema of Malick, a method of presenting a tale increasingly being adopted by other filmmakers such as French director Claire Denis and Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu. There is a link between these directors' separate works that moviegoers could pick up. Alert viewers of Malick’s The Thin Red Line would recall a flame in the middle of a dark screen that began the film. The flame reappears prominently later in the film when the Sean Penn character in the film as an avuncular boss interacts with the AWOL character played by Jim Caviezel. There is the following spoken lines Pvt. Bell from The Thin Red Line : “Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free.” That sequence too underlined connection of the flame and “grace” glorified in The Tree of Life. This flame symbol takes a more evocative level of punctuation between segments of The Tree of Life, including the start of the film. The transformation of the troubled adult Jack in The Tree of Life begins with Jack lighting the flame of a blue candle. A flame that symbolizes light in darkness and knowledge of creation. The chain of thought is endless. In The Thin Red Line, an alligator slithering into the forest ponds opened the film only to be strung up as dead meat for soldiers later in the film. In The Tree of Life you have large dinosaurs for the creation sequences, followed by sequence of a lizard brought into the house by young Jack and his siblings.

In The Thin Red Line, there is a voice-over rhetorical question from Col. Toll about trees and nature:  “Look at this jungle. Look at those vines, the way they twine around, swallowing everything. Nature's cruel.” In The Tree of Life, Mr O’Brien representing “nature” is the parent growing trees and getting his son to tend the lawn in front of their house. It is important for the viewer to recall the first spoken words in The Tree of Life: “Brother. Mother. It was they who led me to your door.” The father is NOT one who ultimately transforms the adult Jack.

For those who love good cinema, the following sequence epitomizes Malick’s cinema like no other. A character (the mother) receives bad news. No word is spoken. There is a sob of grief. Cut to the loud whirr of airplane engine. A telephone call is answered in the midst of the din. No word can be heard, only the loud engine. The engine sound suddenly fades and you hear bells of a church. This is typical of Malick’s cinema. Spoken words are minimal and when they are spoken they are often as a voice-over. Sometimes, the voice is not that of the person on screen.

Malick’s dialectics are essentially rhetorical questions and exclamations made by the characters in his films, with you the viewer emerging as the judge of the series of spoken viewpoints. It is Malick, the teacher of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) taking over, or perhaps Malick the Harvard and Oxford university alumnus taking over.  For instance, in The Thin Red Line a soldier asks another who has a Greek name “Did you read Homer?” The question may seem out of place but if the viewer is familiar with Homer’s epics the situation on screen gets a new perspective. In Malick’s The New World samples of voice-overs are “Who are you, what do you dream of?” with the answer from lead female Pocahontas “We are like grass.” Very few directors have attempted this—and viewers who are new to the cinema of Malick, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Syberberg, Zvyagintsev, Ruiz, and Claire Denis will find such works “pretentious” just because the grammar of their cinema requires the viewer to be attentive and patient and constantly reflect on what they see and, most of all, what they hear. Mallick, and filmmakers like him, give more attention to nature, the flora and fauna, to tell a story of human beings.

In The Tree of Life, Mrs O’Brien, the mother, represents grace. She says: “Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.” quite in contrast to her husband who teaches his sons to be “fierce.. to get ahead in this world. If you're good, people take advantage of you.” Jack later realizes that his father, an evidently clever God-fearing man, who has 27 patents to his name, loses his job eventually. Jack even begins to hate his father and eventually the grown up Jack apologizes to his father for something he said following his brother’s demise. Jack’s father's self realization (another voice over) is another lesson in life: “I wanted to be loved because I was great, a Big Man. Now I'm nothing. Look. The glory around... trees, birds... I dishonoured it all and didn't notice the glory. A foolish man.”

The basic structure of The Tree of Life is birth, acceptation of siblings, ability to differentiate between good and bad, awareness of the less privileged, sexual awakening, loss of social security of a parent, death of a loved one, and the understanding of why death is a part of the larger scheme of the Creator of the universe. This basic structure is punctuated by visuals of the creation of the universe which puts in context the differences of the two parents of Jack. There is a dinosaur who almost kills a smaller one and yet does not but instead goes in search of another—is it the anguish of a mother who has lost her progeny? The volcanic lava meeting waves of the sea might appear to have little relevance in the Malick tale but it has considerable import if you consider the constant nature vs. grace turmoil in the O’Brien family. The final words of Mrs O’Brien the viewer hears are: "I give him to you. I give you my son." These are words of considerable theological relevance coming from a woman who was initially grieving the loss of a 19-year old son. This lady also says another important line: “Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.” Every leaf, every ray of light, is precisely what Malick underscores for the viewer in The Tree of Life. The visuals of creation, from the cell to the planets, nature’s beauty ranging from a butterfly to a tree, are interlinked with message of good living and understanding life for both a theist and an atheist. Malick's achievement in this film is his ability to telescope the development of Jack's body and mind with the cosmic development of earth, its fauna and flora. Kubrick's attempt in 2001--A Space Odyssey looked at the external cosmic beauty and man's preoccupation with machines, not with individual minds. Malick has broken that boundary.

 

One wishes Malick explained the absence of the third son towards the end. The third was not the kid who drowned—that was a kid from a neighbour’s family. Jack seems to be influenced by one sibling who dies, and not so by the other. The O’Brien family’s attitude to race relations is ambiguous while Mrs O’Brien goes out of the way to provide drinking water to arrested and disturbed individuals in police custody. There is compassion exhibited for all including frogs that some thoughtless kids tie up to a firecracker rocket for fun.

There is much more to this film than all this. There is the relevance for each piece of music used in The Tree of Life--pieces of music and chorale pieces carefully chosen by Malick. Malick's wide-ranging knowledge of music and the dogged effort he makes to identify the right piece for each film surpasses that of Kubrick, Peter Weir, Michael Mann, and Andrei Tarkovsky, all directors who have proven their skills in this field. The Tree of Life is a film that demands several viewings to digest the varied details and the full perspective of what these have to offer for an attentive viewer.

I recall, as a wet-behind-the-ears film critic, recommending in a New Delhi daily that I worked for in 1979 that one of the finest films on show during an International Film Festival of India was an Andrei Tarkovsky film showing at the now defunct Archana theatre. The disgruntled viewers who could not appreciate the film damaged the seats of the theatre. The next day I was pulled up by my News Editor. If the same film was to be screened today in New Delhi there could be a totally different reaction because more people are aware of what to expect from a Tarkovsky film. So, too, is the case of Terrence Malick’s movies—the more you see a Malick film with patience, the more you realize what it has to offer.  Perhaps then a viewer will appreciate the philosophical words spoken in The Tree of Life: “I am nothing...Keep us. Guide us. Till the end of time.”

P.S. The films The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven, Three Colors: Blue, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence have been reviewed earlier on this blog. The Tree of Life ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author.