129. Chadean filmmaker Mahamet-Saleh Haroun's “Un Homme Qui Crie” (A Screaming Man) (2010): A subtle perspective from African cinema on an unusual father and son relationship

“Be careful not to cross your arms over your chest, 
 assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, 
 because life is not a spectacle, 
 a sea of pain is not a proscenium, 
 and a screaming man is not a dancing bear."

           (Extract from Aimé Césaire's poem
            Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939,
            quoted at the end of the film)

Mahamet-Saleh Haroun’s A Screaming Man marks a definite improvement in style and content to his earlier work, the 2006 film Daratt (Dry Season). A Screaming Man is not just well crafted cinema, it offers an unusual tale that can make you reflect on the behaviours of people. It is not surprising that A Screaming Man won the Jury’s Prize for the Best Film at Cannes Film Festival, the Silver Hugo for the Best Film and Best Screenplay at the Chicago Film Festival and the Muhr for Best Film, Best Actor, and the Best Editor at the Dubai film Festival, all in 2010.

While Daratt won accolades at the Venice Film Festival for its ability to capture the political and economic conditions in Chad, often called the 'Dead Heart of Africa,' crippled by a 40-year civil war and more recently the economic onslaught of the Darfur refugees from Sudan, A Screaming Man takes the viewer closer to the heart of an ordinary African and his family values—with the ubiquitous political turmoil of Chad taking a back seat. A Screaming Man is an inward looking essay on film, while Daratt relied considerably on the external actions for the viewer to get inside the minds of its characters such as a young man, who is proud enough to refuse charity, even when hungry and penniless. The outstanding quality of the latest two Haroun films is that both are rewarding experiences for a reflective viewer with A Screaming Man likely to have more universal appeal than Daratt, which spun around the arms–related violence associated with civil strife.

Haroun’s A Screaming Man is an interesting and subtle study of the male mind in its winter years confronted with the world of his own seed blooming in the spring of youth. A loving father, who is aging, can grow jealous of his own progeny’s success at times though this is not a common occurrence. However, this unusual situation is not particular to Chad or to Africa—the tale could be universal. Adam, the father, is a former national swimming champ, a former hero in this 'Dead Heart of Africa.' He is now reduced to eke out a living as swimming pool supervisor in the swanky hotel catering to expatriates. Haroun captures the economic turmoil in the country by the subtle takeover of the hotel by a Chinese corporate house. Haroun opens his film with the 55-year old ‘Champ’ beaten in the ability to stay underwater longer by his own 20-something-year old son, Abdel, in the hotel pool. Both are employees of the hotel employed to take care of the pool and the guests who choose to swim there. Adam loves his job and is understandably jolted when the management, in an effort to trim costs, reassigns him to a lesser job of manning the gates of the hotel, while his son continues his work at the poolside.

A Screaming Man is a film that puts the allure of the pool and swimming in the forefront for none other than a former Central African swimming champ over the bleak prospect of seeing his own son enjoying the pool each day, while he has to scamper to his feet every time a vehicle comes to the gate far away from his first love, swimming, which had once made him a regional hero. Adam truly loves his only son Abdel. The film is about the aging Adam having to consider his own son as an adversary pushing him away from what he loves most, to swim and be the pool supervisor, a job that gives him a meagre salary, pride and sweet memories of what he had achieved in life. The film also focuses on how for a poor man in a developing nation a comfortable job in a posh surroundings can gradually make him oblivious of the real life dangers for his family living outside the hotel’s insular security and cleanliness. Even the economic and political turmoil in the country seem to be distant when you have such an employment.

That is merely the preface of the movie. Can a 55-year old, who made his name as a swimming champion be forced to stay away from the attractive waters of the pool? Would a father do a sinister act to get back to the pool at the cost of his son’s life? The rebel forces are closing in on the town and the father has to either contribute financially to a warring faction or permit his son, presently enjoying good life at the poolside, to be drafted against the son’s will into the armed forces of one of the warring factions. Haroun’s film provides us with visual clues that Adam, who spends each day at the hotel, returns each evening, to a modest living quarters, indicating that he is not rich enough to contribute to the war as he is socially expected to do.

Haroun’s latest film provides glimpses of the private life of the poorer sections of the Chadean Muslim household where the wife cooks for the father and son, where the father regularly compliments his wife for her cooking and when he does not do so the wife knows that something is amiss (and that it need not be related to her cooking!). The communion at meals is a time for family bonding and we see husband and wife about to enjoy a watermelon slice, when the intimate partaking of food is interrupted by a neighbour seeking to borrow some provision. Haroun does not show us the neighbour on two such interruptions in the film, but the camera concentrates on Adam’s family and their reactions to the interruptions. Haroun’s priorities are clear—develop the characters of Adam, Adam’s wife, and Abdel—not that of the peripheral neighbour. The Chicago Film Festival got it right—it is indeed a mature and well conceptualized screenplay.

Adam’s wife Mariam is developed by Haroun as the steadfast and unbending force in the family. She cooks well and expects to be complimented and thanked at the end of each meal she provides her family. She is able to criticize her husband on the right occasions. She believes in helping her neighbours who she knows will not return her favours. Like a true mother, she is unhappy at her son being drafted against his will. Like a good “mother-in-law” she welcomes her son’s lover, who not from Chad but from neighbouring Mali, into her house in his absence without a question. (This appears to be a subtle subtext in the film that Haroun introduces on the social churning in Chad with Malian and Sudanese populations living in Chad adding to the economic burden). It is Mariam who wants the family to leave town for their safety while Adam initially seems magnetically pulled towards his job at the swimming pool brushing aside the looming dangers of the civil war closing in on his doorstep.

Now Chad has both a Muslim and a Christian population of consequence. Haroun, who has written the screenplay himself, introduces David, the cook at the hotel, into the tale. David is the Christian element in the tale though no obvious religious symbol or action invades the film. David and Adam are friends and colleagues. Both feed a stray dog when they get a quiet moment to themselves. But the new Chinese owners of the hotel decide not just to move Adam from the swimming pool to the front gate but to replace David with someone else as the hotel’s cook. An unforgettable line spoken by David to the taciturn Adam at the turn of events is “David is not going to beat Goliath this time.” Goliath could be death knocking at the door of the laid-off and now sick cook. The smart screenplay of Haroun describes the replacement of David with two the simple but brief scenes that are evocative on the screen—David’s replacement refuses to feed the stray dog and the bench that used to carry the weight of David easily breaks under the weight of the new man! Haroun, however, does develop the character of David—the downsized cook. David states to Adam rather philosophically “Life continues.. but the problem is that we put our destinies in God’s hands.” David believes in God but that statement, when spoken by David as he seems to lose faith as an unemployed and sick man, is evocative, especially in the ears of Adam and ours as discerning viewers, who can view the predicament of Chad, not merely that of Adam and David.

The interesting aspect of Haroun’s development of Adam’s character is initially as a sounding board of his wife Mariam and his Christian colleague, David. Adam listens to both and ingests their views almost silently. Initially in the film, Adam does come through as the ‘’dancing bear” of the Aimé Césaire poem.

The transformation of the “dancing bear” into “a screaming man” of the poem, follows two interesting sequences in the film. One is the arrival of the pregnant Malian singer, Djeneba, who claims to be carrying the child of Abdel and is received into the household of Adam and Mariam without questions. The second is sequence when Adam returns home and sees all the town fleeing in the opposite direction. It is then that Adam speaks one of his rare lines “It is not me, it is the world that has changed.”

The last part of the film (presenting some fine outdoor camerawork of cinematographer Laurent Brunet, comparing well with his commendable indoor photography earlier in the film) delves on the actions resulting from changes in Adam's mindset and what he could do to redeem his past mistakes. And as the film began, it ends with Adam and Abdel immersed in water, albeit under different circumstances. It allows the viewer an unusual perspective of external forces that decide how you balance varied duties to your family, your profession, your religion, and your country. Ultimately the movie suggests that it is not the external forces that ought to prevail, but one's own convictions that decide one's priorities. And that development of the plot is what makes this a very decent and sophisticated African film worth viewing.


P.S.  Mahamet-Saleh Haroun's Daratt (Dry Season) was earlier reviewed on this blog. A rarely viewed film from India on a similar relationship, which is historically true, is Feroz Abbas Khan's Gandhi, My Father, also earlier reviewed on this blog.

128. Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s German film “Faust” (2011): Reflecting on the Faust syndrome in our lives

Alexander Sokurov’s Faust is a complex film. It is also an amazing film dealing with the good and the evil in each of us. There are sections of the film that can be revolting to a viewer and there are others that offer spectacular beauty. This inherent Janus face of this movie is probably one reason that it will not fulfil every cineaste’s concept of ideal cinema. The film, when viewed in its totality and analyzed for both its content and its style, is both powerful and rewarding. While handing over the Golden Lion, it is no surprise that the US film director Darren Aronofsky and Chairman of the Venice Film Festival 2011 Jury said of the film Faust “There are films that change you forever and this is one of them.”

Sokurov’s Faust can be a rich experience for a patient viewer who would try to see the film more than once to glimpse the lodes of gold in the cinematic mine that the film offers. Aronofsky and the jury that he headed at the Venice Festival could obviously evaluate the dense value of the film in its script, in its actors’ performances, in its cinematography, and in its music.

Sokurov’s Faust is an example of cinema using literature as a base to develop a movie that presents a new twist to the accepted tale(s). Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev did it with King Lear, Andrei Tarkovsky did it with Stanslaw Lem’s Solaris, and now Sokurov (who was Tarkovsky’s protégé and Sokurov who decided to document Soviet director Kozintsev’s flat on film) has followed in their footsteps with his Faust, amalgamating two literary works, one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and another of Thomas Mann and contributing his own and co-scriptwriterYuri Arabov’s value additions to the product.

For this critic, Sokurov’s Faust and Malick’s The Tree of Life were the finest works of cinema made in 2011, the former winning the top honour at the Venice Film Festival and the latter the top honour at Cannes Film Festival. Both films deal with theology. Both films showcase the respective director’s ability to create breathtaking visuals and soundtracks. Both films have and will continue to have their equal share of fans and detractors. While The Tree of Life was a cinematic work of stunning beauty dealing with elements physical and metaphysical that are good and thus encouraging the viewers to open their mind’s eye to beautiful aspects of life, Faust presents, in contrast, an unusual tale relating to both the good and the evil in life. Initially Sokurov’s Faust wallows in sequences of dark thoughts, the ugly and the grotesque to grapple with equally fascinating ruminations on philosophy, sociology and politics, while in the later parts the film takes you into a strange landscape, beautiful and unreal, devoid of habitation.

To appreciate Sokurov’s Faust, it vastly helps if the viewer is familiar, or at least acquainted with the subject dealt in the film. It is notable to recall Sokurov’s statement given to critic Steve Rose of The Guardian newspaper:  "I'm a very literary person, not so much a cinematographic person. I don't really like cinema very much." It is an unusual statement for a filmmaker to make. Yet, it makes sense if you are familiar with the later cinematic works of Kozintsev and, in particular, Sokurov’s film Faust. Three independent and great literary works deal with the backbone of Sokurov’s movie Faust. Both Kozintsev and Sokurov devoured the literary masterpieces and presented those works as cinema adding to the existing value with additional sequences, visuals, and music that make these movies much more valuable for the enquiring mind than the original literary idea. Sokurov creates this magic with the aid of his trusted screenplay writer Yuri Arabov, with whom he has collaborated on most of his major cinematic works.

The first of the three connected literary works is a play The Tragical History of Dr Faustus written by Christopher Marlowe in the 16^th century. This play was performed on stage last century by actor Richard Burton and luckily for those of us who care, the performance was transformed into a movie Doctor Faustus (1967), directed by Richard Burton and Nevil Coghill. That theatrical performance will remain a treat for anyone who loves good theatre. (This critic, while a college student, saw that film in 1972 in a near empty commercial movie hall in Thyagaraja Nagar, Chennai, India.) It was the only work that Burton ever directed but he was able to capture and distil the finest elements of good theatre with visual finesse and magical eloquence on film for posterity. Marlowe’s Faustus was a German scholar in Wittenburg, who having learnt everything in conventional academia yearns for more, especially the dark arts, and signs a pact with the devil (Mephistopheles) to sell his soul if he gets knowledge beyond conventional academics, power over knights and courtiers of Charles V, and the carnal pleasures resulting from the company of Helen of Troy (Elizabeth Taylor plays the cameo part in the film) for a period of 24 years. Marlowe’s Faustus later repents that he will be deprived of the pleasures of heaven but the devil wins the philosophical joust at the end.

The second literary version comes from the land of Dr Faustus: Germany. This is Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust written in the early 19^th century for the stage in two parts. The play is widely accepted as one of the finest works in German literature. In Goethe’s version, the play begins as a wager between God and the Devil in heaven that God’s favourite human Faust, who is learning everything that is known to humans, can be drawn away from his god-fearing lifestyle. In the first part of the play, the scene shifts to terra firma and Faust signs with a drop of his own blood a contract with Mephistopheles, that Mephistopheles will serve Faust on earth while Faust will serve Mephistopheles in Hell after death. Faust gets the help of Mephistopheles to woo and impregnate his love Gretchen, who in turn kills her mother to be with Faust and later her illegitimate child from her intimacy with Faust. Later imprisoned for the killings but refusing to escape at the behest of Faust, Goethe produced two endings of the first part of the play. Literature students will recall the “Urfaust,” the first version, where in the final scene in Heaven, Gretchen is condemned. In the later version of the play, Goethe revised the ending of the first part of his play to cries from Heaven that Gretchen would be saved. The second part of Goethe’s play is set, not on earth, but in the “macrocosmos” where Faust wins over evil even though he had lost the race initially in Part One and goes to heaven. When German director F.W. Marnau made his visually riveting silent movie Faust (1926), he amalgamated Goethe’s work with Marlowe’s idea of a 24-year bargain with the Devil into a movie built around a 24-hour bargain instead.

Then there is the third literary version of the tale, also from Germany—this time, not as a play but as a novel, by the Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann. Mann’s Doktor Faustus was written a century later than Goethe’s work, in 1943-47 to be more precise. In this work, the title refers to Faustus/Faust, the main Faustian character is called Adrian Leverkuehn, a musical composer. A complex character Leverkuehn intentionally contracts syphilis by having sex with Esmeralda (rough equivalent of Marlowe’s Helen of Troy and Goethe’s Gretchen/Margarethe/Marguerite) so that he would go mad and through madness create better music. When he goes mad, Leverkuehn is able to interact with Mephistopheles who acknowledges Leverkuehn’s madness but cautions Leverkuehn that he Mephistopheles exists despite his madness. This version of the Faust lore deals with parallels in politics (it was written by Mann in exile, much after he won the Nobel prize, while Germany was under Hitler) and the creative process of artistes involving spiritual fall and physical degradation to attain fame.

Now Alexander Sokurov’s Faust is an amalgamation of Goethe’s and Mann’s writings. This is obvious because it is stated in the credits of the film. What is not stated and has to be distinguished by the knowledgeable viewers is how Sokurov and his trusted screenplay writer Yuri Arabov have transformed Goethe’s and Mann’s writing further just as Kozintsev and Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak reworked Shakespeare’s King Lear. For Goethe, Faust was essentially a scientist who craves for knowledge and power signs a pact with the Devil to gain these “unattainable limits.” For Mann, Leverkuehn/Faust was a man who wilfully contracts syphilis to be become mad and thus more creative, more respected and adored, and thus more powerful. Satan appears to the syphilitic/mad composer and both sign a pact similar to the works of Marlowe and Goethe. Sokurov and Arabov create a character Mauricius Mueller that represents Mephistopheles, an amalgam of the three literary versions (though there is no official credit to Marlowe in the film).

A viewer, who knows a wee bit about Sokurov and Arabov will realize that they use literature and history to make the viewer think afresh. Unlike the Faust/Dr Faustus of Marlowe/Goethe/Mann, here in Sokurov’s film is a starving Faust who is so poor that he does not have money to eat. Unlike the literary versions of Satan in the different tales, here is a Mauricius Mueller, a disfigured moneylender who farts on screen and crawls around like a reptile, insisting that there is no meaning in life. Sokurov, Arabov and their collaborator Marina Korenova urge the movie’s viewers to look at the famous tale afresh.

Faust is the final part of Alexander Sokurov’s tetralogy dedicated to the subject of power. (The previous parts are Moloch about Hitler and Eva Braun, Taurus about Lenin and The Sun about Japanese Emperor Hirohito.) Faust does win over his adversary in Sokurov’s film unlike in Marlowe’s play and Mann novel where his adversary cautions him that the Devil exists in spite of Faust attaining creative glory in his madness. The crucial importance of the end of Sokurov’s Faust is the suggestion that Faust has got his power/knowledge/carnal desires but that as Sokurov himself asserted in a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, “he walks off in order to become a tyrant, a political leader, an oligarch”. "The tyrants in the previous films of the tetralogy saw themselves as God's representatives on Earth, but they made an unpleasant discovery: they are only human," reads a commentary in production notes for the movie. “In Faust, the reverse is the case: a man is turned into an idol before our very eyes. Faust's triumphal march around the world is only beginning as the film closes.” It is true that every ethical viewer/reader of the Faust tale would like the doctor to win over his adversary. Sokurov presents a starving Faust who seeks out the Mephistophelean moneylender, quite in contrast to Goethe’s tale where the Devil seeks out Faust to tempt and trap. But Sokurov presents a larger question for us to consider, what if our hero of the moment is developing into a tyrant of the future?

Of particular importance is the following fascinating quotation from the film’s scriptwriter, Yuri Arabov, quoted by writer Yelena Andrusenko in her essay Faust or How Man Tempts the Devil: “Sokurov showed a tiny devil being pelted with giant stones. Compared to the evil incarnated in Faust, the devil looks like a fleck of dust on the cultural and mythological stage. And suddenly I realized that we made a film about a breakup between modern man and metaphysics as such. Compared to medieval people or people of the Renaissance, we are just a flat sheet of paper, because when we completely break away from metaphysics, we lose our spiritual essence. We may position ourselves as humanists or as Orthodox Christians. But our hearts are empty and devoid of love. I made a script about how a man tempts the devil, or pawnbroker, how the pawnbroker cooperates with the man, how the notions of duty and kindness change, and how, by striking a deal, the man betrays those notions. As long as the world is divided into the good and the evil, mankind is doomed to live with the Faust syndrome.”

Any viewer of Sokurov’s Faust would wonder why the director chooses to use distorting anomorphic lenses from time to time to purposely skew our vision. This a film that recalls John Berger’s iconic book Ways of Seeing and the importance of effects, through lenses, utilized by the filmmakers—in this case director Sokurov and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel. The viewer is constantly reminded of the mind of the person on screen by the visual of the body. Beautiful grown women appear childlike, imposing men become ogres because an element of their body is magnified. Light and darkness (not new to cinema of good filmmakers) play their part as usual, with pure at heart in dazzling white, while the evil ones are in shadows. The consummation of sex is implied by Faust and his love Margarete jumping into deep blue waters! There is the opening shot of the film which recalls Goethe’s version of the tale where a contract seems to fly down from the heavens to the town where the tale takes place. The entire tale revolves around a pact signed by Faust in blood. But the real treat for the eyes are real scenes from Iceland’s landscape of volcanoes and hot springs barren of plant life that form the basis for purgatory/heaven equivalent that forms the backdrop for the Faust/Satan standoff. Finally, there are several scenes that remind you of the paintings of Breughel and the Flemish school as you watch the film just you recall the painter’s works as you view director Grigory Kozintsev and cinematographer Jonas Gritsius collaboration in Korol Lir (King Lear). I tend to conclude more and more that Sokurov’s decision to make a documentary of the late Kozintsev’s flat was no coincidence and that the collaborative cinema of Sokurov and Arbov is close to Kozintsev’s collaboration with Boris Pasternak.

It is often the choice of actors that makes a great film. The choice of Johannes Zeiler, a low-profile German TV actor in the title role of Faust had probably much to do with the German connection to the making of the film in the German language rather than in Russian. And Zeiler proves his mettle. However, the real actor of the film who steals the show is Anton Adasinsky, the Russian actor, who plays the moneylender Mauricius. Adasinsky is a rock musician and a pantomime actor of considerable repute. Adasinsky is able to present a Satanic figure that both repels and appeals to the viewer. It is amazing to study Adasinsky slip into a grotesque reptile-like asexual appearance from a Shylock-like respectable usurer. What is even more curious is the use of the German actress Hana Schygulla who appears briefly as Mauricius’ wife, to symbolize death. Her appearances on screen merely denotes the arrival of death in the story, much like importance of the clock for the Burton/Marlowe version.

Finally, the music of Faust.  Just as Sokurov relied on Arbov for most of his cinematic works for developing his screenplays, Sokurov leans on Andrey Sigle for weaving the music in most of his films.  While one could argue that Sokurov’s choice of music of Mahler, Tchaikovsky and Wagner was impeccable, it young Sigle who presents his creativity in weaving those musical works and that of the opera Faust by Charles Gounod while adding his own. It is rather difficult to appreciate Sigle’s contribution to the film for the uninitiated as the bars of the famous composers tend to dominate. Sokurov has achieved in Faust what Terrence Malick achieved with Alexandre Desplat in The Tree of Life. In both films, the respective directors pick up strands of existing music by great composers and then use the likes of Sigle and Desplat to provide new music that blends with the music already chosen by the director. While viewing the film Faust, anyone who can appreciate music would be tempted to close their eyes time and time again and let their ears feast on what Sokurov provides.

Many critics have rued the fact that Sukurov’s Faust is too complex for the average viewer. It explores why evil takes place today. At the same time it is, as Darren Aronofsky stated, a film that can “change the way you look at films,” for the simple reason that it a lovely example of how a literary work can be used to mirror the European politics of the day (Russian President Putin is said to have bankrolled the film, while some see modern day parallels in European politics from the perspective of Russia.) For Sokurov, the film explores the rhetorical question: who gains from the pact, Faust or the Devil, even after the film shows an obvious view that Faust wins. But is that the true outcome? Sukurov's Faust can be viewed as a flip-side of the Marlowe ending--where the devil wins but Dr Faustus repents. For the reflective viewer, the film definitely provides more than one possibility. Sokurov's Faust is essential viewing for those who value intelligent scriptwriting along with  creative use of music, art direction, and photography—all critical inputs for good cinema.

P.S. Faust was the second best film of 2011 for the author. Kozintsev’s Korol Lir (King Lear) and Malick’s The Tree of Life discussed above, have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

127. Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s “Bé omid é didar/See you later” (Good bye) (2011): A courageous film capturing terror on screen without a scream being heard

The overall impact of viewing the Iranian film Goodbye reminds you of another unrelated film from USA. Way back in 1964, Hollywood produced a film called The Pawnbroker. It was directed by the late Sidney Lumet. Anyone who has seen that film will not forget actor Rod Steiger’s scream at the end of the film—a scream so anguished that no sound emanated from his vocal chords. A silent scream is an oxymoron but that single enigmatic scene propelled the career of Steiger and the performance won him a Silver Bear for Acting at the Berlin Film Festival. And Steiger later claimed that he borrowed the idea after seeing the anguish of the male subject’s skyward cry at the right extreme of the famous and massive Pablo Picasso painting Guernica.

Good bye is also about anguish—the silent suffering of the ordinary Iranian, intolerance of individual and artistic freedom of expression and the insidious backlash against any who dare to protest against current levels of social, political, and religious freedom in that country. There is not a word of direct criticism of the State in the film Good bye—yet the film is a bold silent scream of protest against everything that is intolerable in the country. It is an anguish one can relate with any society surviving under a dictatorship or extreme religious fundamentalism. The ability of director Mohammad Rasoulof to depict the Kafkaesque life of the sensitive, educated Iranian with remarkable restraint without resorting to depicting a major show of on-screen violence makes this work standout among other movies made over the years etching out similar feelings.

The year 2011 produced two amazing and yet realistic Iranian films: A Separation and Good bye. The former film was officially allowed by Iran to compete at the Oscars and won the Best Foreign Film Oscar and even got nominated for its screenplay as well. Earlier at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, it had swept three of the four major awards: best film, best actor and best actress. The latter film, Good bye, could never get Iran’s official blessing—in fact in December 2010, an Iranian court sentenced its director Mohammad Rasoulof along with fellow prominent director Jafar Panahi, to an year (or was it six?) in jail and barred him from making films for 20 years. (The two were released on bail pending an appeal but are banned from travelling abroad.) In spite of this official prosecution of the director, the film Goodbye was smuggled out of Iran and entered in the 2011 Cannes film festival in the Un certain regard section. It eventually went on to win the award for best direction in that section.

Can we compare and contrast the two Iranian films? In A Separation, the mother of a girl child wants to leave Iran and live abroad for the sake of the future of her daughter. The reason for this decision is asked by the magistrate to the mother and there is no direct answer to the question—only body language gives the viewer some clues of the unspoken answer. In Goodbye, the film is about a lady lawyer, Noura (played by Leyla Zareh), married to a photo-journalist. She has been disbarred from legal practice for having taken part in a civil rights protest. Her husband has been sent off to a desert for showing his dissent. The well-educated lady is desperate to leave the country. Both films exhibit the frustration of the Iranian in Iran, especially of women. Yet the director of the former film is allowed to travel to Hollywood to receive the Oscar, while the other lives in Iran with the Damocles sword of a jail term dangling above him.

As the film progresses, we learn from pieces of furtive conversation that a former client of the lady lawyer Noura (apparently who Noura could not defend because she had been disbarred) has been hanged. Goodbye (the more accurate translation of the title would be ‘See you later’) doesn’t criticize the state directly. The events speak for themselves. The disbarred lawyer wants to immigrate to an unnamed country; her justification is “if you feel like a foreigner in your own land, it’s better to be a foreigner abroad.” Any intelligent viewer can see certain parallels between Noura of  this film and the Nobel Peace Prize winning Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi who also worked for human rights of Iranians in Iran only to find her Nobel Prize medal and diploma has been confiscated from her locker (according to Ebadi’s page on Wikipedia). In Iran, there are unofficial agents who facilitate this underhand immigration as the one Noura plans in this film. The outcome at the end of the film Goodbye makes the film worth your while as the viewer not just savours a good realistic story but also appreciates the string of silent screams visually captured by the director and a top-notch team comprising a talented and yet unknown crew of cinematographer Arastoo Givi and sound editor Hussein Mahdavi.

The “silent scream” pervades the film as you watch Noura, wearing a ‘chador’, a mandatory cloak for women in public places, busy removing her nail polish in an all-women public transport at night. The moral police never confronts Noura in the film, but director Mohammad Rasoulof’s screenplay captures the fear of Noura and her cleverness to avoid such a confrontation. Equally important for the viewers to note is the ability of the director and cinematographer to capture the mood of Noura’s co-passengers as she is busy removing her nail polish in public. They all know why she is doing it and seem to silently approve the non-confrontational plan. The viewer is transported into a world of documentary cinema while you are actually watching fiction.  The fact that Noura represents the upper middle class section of Iranian society is subtly stated but not made obvious throughout the film.

The “silent scream” pervades the film as Noura’s apartment is visited by officials checking if she owns a satellite connection to her TV. The lawyer Noura knows she could get into trouble if she denies the fact. She answers that she has one such connection but that it does not work. The officials confiscate it. What the director’s clever screenplay insinuates is that the eyes and ears of the state is possibly snooping into your homes, to figure out that you have a facility to access satellite TV, working or not working.

Another “silent scream” of the film is the sudden unexplained disappearance of a pet turtle that seemed to have suddenly climbed out of its glass enclosure and disappeared within the closed apartment. Again the screenplay silently insinuates the long arm of the Big Brother.

The lone direct confrontation that Noura faces is the sequence of plainclothesmen who question her on her husband in a lift following which they search her apartment. It is interesting to see the elderly family member serve the unwelcome guests tea and snacks as they rummage the apartment for evidence against Noura and her husband. The film has not a single sequence of physical violence; yet the tension and terror fill each frame. Noura's wistful gaze towards the Teheran international airport from her apartment’s terrace conveys her feelings to ultimately flee the country. These are the powerful understatements that make Good bye worth watching.

After the movie ends the viewer could say that similar tales were made by directors like Costa-Gavras and several East European directors. What sets Good bye apart is the subtle weaving of small encounters that add up to more than their sum—especially when you notice the entire film revolves around the expertise of Rasoulof and a very unheralded crew of local talent. And Leyla Zareh as Noura is convincing to the core, bringing out the emotions of a mother-to-be wondering if she ought to abort under the unusual circumstances.

It is one thing to make a film like this in a free world and another to make this film with such admirable camerawork, art direction, sound mixing, and screenplay writing in Iran itself when Rasoulof is being asked not to make films.  The brave film presents Iran today that a casual visitor to that country cannot glimpse but merely suspect of the existence of the daily terror that the braver sections of society face. Possibly great cinema is always spurred on by state persecution.

P.S. Good bye ranks as one of 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Asghar Farhadi's A Separation was reviewed earlier on this blog.

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. Ms Kawase is also one the author's 15 favourite active filmmakers.

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 the 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

Designer Sam Smith's favorite poster of the film/(courtesy MUBI)

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 Karen Crowder (played by Tilda Swinton) in 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 Negin did to reshape the Saroyan tale, is accentuated by Negin 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 Zvyagintsev 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 diegetic 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.