259. Lesotho’s film director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s second feature film “This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection”(2019), based on his original script: One of the most remarkable films from the African Continent

 

“Let the dead bury the dead, you shall leave no trace. Bury your existence, lest they say there lived a sufferer. The soul-less march of time has surrounded you, like an old cloth turned into a dry beetle. The (church) bells speak when people can’t. Little children cheer up. The dead buried their own dead. You will do so in future. You can hear the church bells under the water”

---words of a song sung in the opening sequence, where the time stamp is revealed by the electricity that lights up the room (the rest of the film is lit by candles). The song is sung, aided by a Lesiba, “an unbraced mouth resonated bow,” by the film’s actor Jerry Mofokeng

 

Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is one of the best directors from the African continent today, if not a wider geographical area, and his 2019 film This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection testifies that fact. How original is the tale of the film depends on whether he had seen a remarkable US film Northfork (2003) directed by Mark Polish with an original script written by the brothers Mark and Michael Polish. The essential similarity between the two are limited to the impending acquisition of land to make way for a man-made lake, the shadow of forcible relocation of the inhabitants of a town/village, a Christian priest (Nick Nolte, in the Polish film; Makhaola Ndebele in Mosese’s film) who provides spiritual succor, and relocation of buried remains of the dead before the waters are released. Both are remarkable films. In both films, we have inhabitants resisting change. In both films, the villagers/townsfolk battle powerful wealthy capitalist groups who promise a better life if the inhabitants agree to move out.  Unlike Polish’s film that focused on diverse characters in a town, in Mosese’s film, the focus is on a single inhabitant--an 80-year-old  widow named Mantoa (Mary Twala Mlongo, who is stunning in this film) mourning currently her son’s death and his burial. Similar to the work of the Polish brothers, there is a priest in Mosese’s film to comfort her spiritually but Mosese goes a step beyond the American film, he brings in sheep as non-human mourners in a twist of magic realism to comfort a widow whose house was once burnt in a fire that consumed all her possessions and, possibly, her bedridden husband. To capture the movement of the animals from an overhead shot was a masterstroke, reminding one of Terrence Malick’s shot of grazing wild bison surrounding the lead actors in To The Wonder (2012).

Mantoa played by Mary Twala Mlongo, who won
5 Best Actress Awards at various international
film festivals for this role

The opening song sung with a Lesiba
(the room has electrical lights)

Death and burial are important elements of spiritual and social discussion in This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection. The film begins with Mantoa mourning the death of her son who had been working in a mine in neighboring South Africa, that landlocks Lesotho. The script of Mosese reveals in fits and starts that Mantoa has lost her bedridden husband, her daughter and her granddaughter. Her cumulative grief is relieved for a while by the consoling words of the Christian priest quoting the Bible passages. Yet this only leads to a crisis of faith in the strong Mantoa, who merely impassively listens to the hymn “Abide with me” sung in the local language by members of another burial procession passing by her hut. Mantoa is preparing for her own death and burial in the background of the imminent “death and burial” of her “weeping” village called Nasarethe (a variant of Nazareth, the town Jesus grew up in the Bible) under the waters of the proposed lake.  Mantoa calls all the womenfolk of the village and gives guidelines on her own burial reminding one of Abbas Kiarostami’s quest for a suitable person to bury his fictional character Badil in the 1997 Golden Palm winner at Cannes, The Taste of Cherry. For Mantoa, her death is certain and around the corner and her burial wishes will be complied with; for Badil, his plan is dependent on future intangibles. Mosese presents Mantoa, a woman of strong will and character, a ‘Mother Courage,’ who pays a villager in advance to dig her grave next to her husband’s and son’s graves.

Mantoa grieves her losses to a fire sitting on
a charred bed while sheep magically
surround her as co-mourners

After the fire, the rebuilt elegant hut of Mantoa
(note the art direction/production design)

Mosese’s film presents an unforgettable mix of script, visuals and sounds that are rarely captured so effectively and evocatively in a film. Almost every shot in the film, often wordless, express the affinity of Mantoa to her immediate surroundings that goes beyond the cemetery, the church with its well-described historic bell, and the dead bodies buried in the graves. The colorful attires of Mantoa indoors are regal and yet simple. The exterior shots silently describes the single individual swallowed up by the vast well-endowed land that produce useful flora for the humans and feed for the sheep, not to mention the rainwater that blesses the country.

Mantoa in mourning attire
(note the candles.)

Mantoa, in better times, (note the rich colors.)

 (In reality, not stated in the film, the multi-million dollar Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which commenced in 1986 with the help of the World Bank, the African Development Bank, and the European Investment Bank, captures stores and transfers water and generated electricity to South Africa, earning Lesotho hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually.)   

The typical cinematography of the film, accentuating
Mantoa's stature against larger forces,
of rainwater from the clouds that can bring
prosperity and the cemeteries that will go under water 

 

Director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, as the director, screenplay writer and editor has made Lesotho and Africa proud with his second feature film winning plaudits all over the globe.  African cinema is on the march while showing indirectly the effect of development in the region.

P.S.  This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection has won 20 awards worldwide at film festivals including Athens, Durban, Hong Kong, Kerala, Montreal, Reykjavik, Sundance, and Taipei international festivals. At the Kerala festival (IFFK) it was chosen the Best Film in competition. Five of these awards were for Mary Twala Mlongo as the Best Actress at the respective events. At IFFK, too, the late Mary Twala Mlongo earned a Special Mention. The film participated at the Denver film festival,  This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection is one of the author's best films of 2020. Mark Polish’s film Northfork (2003) and Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder (2012), mentioned above, have been reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the names of the films in the post-script to access the reviews.)

156. Italian filmmaker Uberto Pasolini’s English film “Still Life” (2013) (UK/Italy): Quietly amazing and powerful cinema

It is not often that you come across a film that looks innocuous at its beginning and then develops gradually into a truly uplifting and amazing work of cinema.

Still Life is a tale of a lower-rung British civil servant John May (his name could well have been John Doe in the US or Joe Bloggs in the UK ), unmarried and yet married to his job with a diligence that makes our own attitudes to work in offices (and homes) look a tad unprofessional in comparison.  The name John May sounds as colorless as is the individual that the director and original screenplay writer Uberto Pasolini gets actor Eddie Marsan to play. The incredible character is a lonely chap working in a small office in UK all alone with files all neatly stacked just as neat and orderly is his small desk with a phone.  And Marsan and Pasolini get around to develop such a colorless individual that some unsuspecting viewers of the movie assumed that the film would be as drab as the character and were seen walking out of the film halfway misled by its quiet beginning. And what a lovely film they missed out on!

Marsan is able to slip into the role of the loner, who ensures that all lonely individuals who die in his official jurisdiction get a proper burial after taking great pains to locate any possible kith and kin to attend the funeral, by either calling up people on the phone or ever visiting addresses he finds in the deceased’s residence. (Marsan had earlier played minor but important roles in Scorsese’s The Gangs of New York,   Iñárritu's 21 Grams and Malick’s The New World.). Marsan, who never smiles in the film, does smile once in the film and what an occasion that is!

Eddie Marsan as John May: Discovering color in "colorless" lives

When May returns to his apartment from work, the viewer is presented a neat and orderly place with the bare essentials, and one even gets to see him eating a meager meal of toast and canned fish. And we also learn that he has been repeating this for the past 20 odd years, and believe it or not, enjoying both his work and his spartan meals.

However, the director Pasolini leaves a crumb trail for the perceptive viewers.That trail, which looks innocuous, is only building up to something unusual, as intelligent viewers would expect. And that Pasolini does deliver at the end of the film, and it's a finale that would make you revisit the earlier scenes with your mind’s eye afresh and enjoy it all over again.

The existential query of a diligent bureaucrat

Who is Pasolini? He is no relation of the famous filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.  Interestingly, he is a descendant of famous Italian  director Luchino Visconti and is a real life Count, if Wikipedia, is to be believed, and he has worked his way up the movie ladder after being the third Assistant Director for Rolland Joffe’s  The Mission (1986), the producer of The Full Monty (1997) and director of Machan (2008), his debut film that picked up a few minor awards worldwide.

Pasolini in Still Life makes visual statements that border on the comical but is never funny in the conventional sense of fun. These statements are thought provoking and real.  Early in the film, the viewer sees empty churches of various Christian denominations where the priest solemnly conducts a brief funeral service and even reads out a few words of praise about the deceased. We subsequently learn that those words spoken by the priest are actually provided by May after painstakingly going through the deceased’s living quarters like a detective and speaking to people who knew the person when he or she was alive.  Mr May is often the only individual present at each of these funerals.  But May ensures that the dead do get a fitting funeral at the cost of the town's exchequer.

The person sitting behind me in the movie hall was heard commenting: “Look at the empty churches,” mistakenly assuming the visual commentary of the director was on religion. But Still Life is not a film about religion but about old age and the lack of friends and family in the evening of our lives. Even when John May contacts the deceased's  relatives and friends they rarely bother to attend the funeral. It is a film that looks at relationships both in life and upon death. It is a film about the uncertainty of our jobs, of being served the pink slip even when you are the ideal worker. It is a film that reminds you that you cannot take tomorrow for granted.

A glimmer of color in the life of John May

Still Life is also a film about essentially good people who remain unmarried and without friends and yet ought to be be be considered as persons who add value to society . Director Pasolini has proven one fact: you can make great cinema if you have a great script with a positive tale and a wonderful performance by an actor such as Eddie Marsan. And Pasolini has a talented composer of music to make the movie even more delectable, his wife Rachel Portman, who had earlier regaled our ears while watching Swedish film director Lasse Halstrom’s two notable works Chocolat (2000) and The Cider House Rules (1999). The power of Ms Portman’s music in Still Life keeps pace with the development of the film’s story and, if the viewer pays attention to the subtle progression in the music, one can anticipate an extraordinary end. The film’s end and the final chords of Ms Portman’s music are truly memorable.

Now Still Life could appear to be a very simple film to many viewers but is it? Still Life captures visual details that can be considered humorous, sofa chairs propped up by books (shown twice in the film), what the elderly consider a great meal on two occasions in the film is toast and canned fish, and when a young man in the mortuary is searching for a four letter world combining death and animal, John May is quick with the correct answer “dodo.”  Visuals in the film are brilliant and evocative: closed curtains of apartment buildings so that no one knows what is happening in another neighbor’s home,  old people looking out of balconies day after day in a vacant manner, streets that seem to empty without children or young couples. It is indeed a Still Life that Pasolini picks to project as a slice of modern England. It is a life where people don’t care about the others. It is a life where officials are quick to spot jobs that can be logically considered redundant in modern society to save money, oblivious of how well someone is executing that particular job, and of the larger value of the job that makes an otherwise drab life colorful, even if the job deals with death of many unsung individuals who fade out without a song. It is a tale that reinforces the fact that the most unimpressive persons can change lives of others if they care to do so–a subject that British director Stephen Frears tried to grapple with limited success in Hero (1992) with Dustin Hoffman playing the lead. It is a British film to the core as it looks at its staid bureaucracy, but with a difference, and it is an European film because Pasolini injects a typical European way to dissect the British subjects, with love and a twinkle in the eye. It has propped up the dwindling British cinema recalling the finer examples of the late Joseph Losey's cinema.

A touch of  "Pier Paolo" in Uberto Pasolini's cinema 

Pasolini’s Still Life is a remarkable film bolstered by an amazing screenplay, astute direction, credible acting and appropriate music. It is the finest film of 2013 that entertains and uplifts the mind of the viewer and it is great to know that there is yet another Pasolini in the world of cinema that matters! It is also a film that shows a director can grow in expertise from film to film as in the case of the Polish maestro Kieslowski who bloomed towards the end of his career. However, it is essential that the viewer watches the film right up to the end to grasp and relish the film’s quiet strength. It was one of the few films that received a standing ovation after the film ended from the knowledgeable audience at the recently concluded International Film Festival of Kerala. Uberto Pasolini had indeed made an impact with those who stayed to watch the film right up to the end.

P.S. Still Life is the best film of 2013 for this critic. It won several minor awards at the 2013 Venice film festival and the award for the best film at the Reykjavik film festival. Still Life won the Black Pearl award (the highest award) at the Abu Dhabi film festival's New Horizons section for "its humanity, empathy, and grace in treating grief, solitude, and death." The citation went on to add  "The film lured us with its artistic sensibility, subtleness, intelligence, humor, and its unique cinematic language." Mr Marsan won the Best British Actor award at the 2014 Edinburgh International film festival. Still Life won the Grand Prix and the Best Actor award at the rapidly emerging 2014 VOICES film festival at Vologda, Russia.  The film, The Mission, in which Mr Pasolini  served as the Third Assistant Director was reviewed earlier on this blog.

P.P.S. The author was delighted to receive a personal "thank you" email from the director of the film Still Life, just weeks after the above review was posted on the internet. The author had neither met nor contacted Mr Pasolini prior to receiving his email.