131. U.S. director Arthur Penn’s “The Missouri Breaks” (1976): Re-evaluation of a Western trashed by many film critics

The Missouri Breaks deserves more attention than it has received over the years. Apart from the fact that it contains one of the most darkly comic lines ever used in cinema "You know what woke you up? You just had your throat cut,” most reviewers have logically zoomed in on the obvious—the swaggering performance of Marlon Brando at the peak of his career and an overshadowed but endearing performance of Jack Nicholson. Yet the film belongs not to these two worthies but to Arthur Penn, the director. 

The late Arthur Penn was more “sinn’d against than sinning,” after he made his third western, The Missouri Breaks, when most critics and viewers felt the film was a disaster. A famous US publication Variety described the film’s achievement as “corned beef and ham hash.” According to reports on the making of this “revisionist” western, a term given to Westerns with anti-heroes, strong women, and a critical approach to re-evaluate established military heroes, government and business policies for the sake of authenticity, Penn was out-gunned in his directorial effort by his two megastars Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson who took a dislike to each other during the filming. But is that a correct evaluation? Perhaps, not so. Most of the scenes in the film in which a viewer could assume the two stars were filmed together were actually filmed separately. Unfortunately, the poor reception of this film with the viewing public sounded the death knell of the Hollywood Western, which until then was considered commercially a safe bet among the many genres. 

When a director such as Penn chooses to make a film on any subject he/she believes in, it is inevitable that there is some value addition that the director provides to the written work of the novelist/playwright/screenplay-writer—in this case, screenplay-writer Thomas McGuane and the un-credited interloper on the McGuane script Robert Towne (who had just a few years before in 1974 earned fame with Polanski’s Chinatown, another Nicholson film). And what was Penn’s value addition? It is useful to re-evaluate the film more as a Penn film rather than Brando film or a Nicholson film or even a McGuane film. It is important to note that The Missouri Breaks was made by Penn on the heels of two important Penn films The Little Big Man and Night Moves.  Both these films accentuate Penn’s growing interest in studying opposites in human beings, in oxymorons, in duality. The very title of  “little big” is an oxymoron that viewers might dismiss as a quaint Indian name or a contribution of the  author of the tale, Thomas Berger. And yet the film The Little Big Man is all about a man with unremarkable physique who could not only satisfy four wives sexually but had the wits to out-manoeuvre the strategies of General Custer to a considerable extent. Penn’s General Custer and Wild Bill Hickok are considerably different from other tales about them.  They are heroes with lots of chinks in their armour. And almost every other lesser character in the film proves to be different for the viewer as that film progressed. In Night Moves, Penn’s work that followed The Little Big Man, Penn presents another anti-hero tale about a detective named Harry Moseby, played by Gene Hackman. In Night Moves, we have an engaging and yet unusual tale of a man who can solve complex marital relationships of others but inexplicably fails to solve his own. Obviously, Penn was getting fond of making movies that explored the inherent contradictions in humans---physical, mental, and psychological. 

Penn’s next film The Missouri Breaks continues to serve the viewer with similar paradoxes of his two previous films. The film opens with a lovely natural scenery that includes three horse riders making pleasant conversation on a 4^th of July (the US Independence day) to reach a gathering of men women and children singing “O Susanna”. A few seconds later, the lovely bonhomie gets transformed into a hanging of one of the three horse riders, who we learn subsequently was a rustler being led to his own hanging. One wonders if this cinematic surprise for the viewer is courtesy Penn or if it is scriptwriter McGuane at work. Both Penn and McGuane repeatedly juxtaposes civilized behaviour with violent ones. Much later in the film, the rancher’s daughter, who is against violence. states “We had a famous painter out here last year... did last scenes. That man must have painted ten squares miles of canvas... and not one human face! And I wish he could have been here to paint that boy, Sandy, hanging up there so decoratively against the mountains. Because his pink tongue and his white face would have just set off the green of Montana splendidly. I mean, it would have made the damnedest bank calendar you ever saw!" An American film critic, Robert Philip Kolker, in his interesting book A Cinema of Loneliness, commendably observed that Penn was “always concerned with the contradictions inherent in the presentation of violence.”

Penn seems to be constantly attracted by characters that stand out of the ordinary—those who are constrained either physically or mentally (The Miracle Worker, The Chase, The Little, Big Man, Night Moves, etc.). He loved anti-heroes. In The Missouri Breaks there are three anti-heroes—a rustler, a cross-dressing bounty hunter, and a gay rancher who reads Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy but serves as judge and jury as he metes out death sentences to make his little world better to live in. The film was released with the tag line “One steals, one kills, one dies.” 

One would assume in a film studded with such unlikable characters that Penn would paint them black. Penn does the just the opposite—he manipulates the viewer to sympathize with the bad guys. Nicholson's horse rustler is smart—he knows the circumstances when a gun would have a bullet in it. He knows how to court a woman by brewing Chinese tea in the Wild West. Brando's bounty hunter is equally erudite—he carries a book on ornithology while horseback as he watches eagles seek its prey through binoculars, just as he follows desperadoes before he moves in on his own human kill. The ranch owner, with a gay lover on the ranch, is a good father to his daughter and is unusually well-read with 3500 works of English literature in his library. Yet, in spite of his wide knowledge, he hangs rustlers without much of a trial so that his profits grow. What a weird set of anti-heroes! One would have expected good women to balance the bad guys. But the women of Penn’s cinema have shades of gray—The Missouri Breaks is no exception. The leading lady seems to be fascinated by the bad guys and "demands" sex. Another rancher's wife has illicit sex with a guest. 

One would wonder why Penn/McGuane would make the rancher choose to read Laurence Sterne’s 9-volume novel Tristram Shandy from a wide choice 3500 works of English literature in his library. In this English novel written in the 18^th century introduces the reader to odd and black comedy, just as Penn/McGuane/Brando introduce the viewer to an odd and comic “regulator” Robert E. Lee Clayton who kills rustlers with sadistic pleasure and without remorse and has only one girl in his life--his own horse who he considers to have “the lips of Salome and the eyes of Cleopatra.” The “regulator” kills with incredible calculation and panache, yet he does not know when he ought to leave the stage, which is his undoing. One of the truly rewarding moments in the film is when Clayton makes a brief speech on justice, to drive home the cause and effect of the Wild West modicum of instant justice explained by the rancher in his own words, “he (the man who was hung earlier) was a thief... with probably a million good reasons for being on hard times. The main thing is that we put him out of his misery.” Clayton (Brando) after making the speech on justice takes ice cubes from under a corpse to reduce the pain from a toothache. Can any viewer deny that Penn was not at his best? Clayton cross-dresses and kills without mercy and yet knows well that his arch enemy will not shoot him in his bathtub when he exposes his naked back! Penn/McGuane/Brando makes the viewer briefly confused as to who is the better individual and who is to be less appreciated in this amazing confrontational sequence.

The final sequence of two important characters in the film leaving for different destinations after checking out where they would be 6 months hence leaves the viewer guessing of what would eventually happen in this tale after the movie ended (reminding the viewer of the final scene in Night Moves). Penn's films tend to end with a perspective of a detached outsider, making the characters quixotic and the leaves the films' end open to several viewpoints. Brando was a treat to watch in The Missouri Breaks—only his Quiemada (Burn!) appealed to this critic more than this one amongst all his films. Interestingly, in both these films Brando had problems with the director and allegedly took matters into his own hands at several stages. But if the viewer of  The Missouri Breaks agrees with the American critic Robert Philip Kolker, the bizarre killings of rustlers often attributed to Brando actually follows Penn’s signature style of his movies made in the Seventies.

The music and screenplay are in many ways a tribute to the rising fame of the spaghetti Western and, therefore, quite stunning—also because of the very interesting and intelligent use of sound editing. The opening fifteen minutes of the film underline this argument, although this is a Penn film and not a Sergio Leone film.

All in all, this film is a major Western as it has elements that never surfaced in most others—women who were not mere attractions, the effect of carbines on those shot by them, and of course the slow death by hanging, in contrast to the lovely countryside (stated by the leading lady). It is a Western that entertains the viewers by getting them to mull over the spoken words and the visuals that provoke and surprise unlike the conventional Western. It is no wonder that the conventional Western enthusiast found this one difficult to digest. And most important of all, the final scene suggests that it was time to adopt change. This Western entertains in a way most others do not. (The exceptions are three revisionist Westerns: William Fraker's Monte Walsh, Tom Gries’ Will Penny, and Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller). Thank you, Mr. Penn and all those who contributed to making this interesting film so enjoyable in retrospect.


P.S. Arthur Penn's The Little Big Man was reviewed earlier on this blog.

130. Korean filmmaker Chang-dong Lee’s “Shi” (Poetry) (2010): Learning to look at apples anew

Good Korean cinema often involves very little verbal talk. The visuals often do the talking, which is not common for movies made in most parts of the world.  Chang-dong Lee’s Poetry is one such example where body language is more eloquent than the spoken word—unusual indeed for a film ironically called Poetry, a literary form that survives on words.

Early in the film, the viewer gets the feel that the tale has much to do with dementia. As the film progresses, the film shifts to examining tenuous human relationships.  Later in the film, the subject shifts gears again to focus on lack of communication between sexes and generations.  Strangely the film suggests that clumsy attempts by dilettantes at poetry writing could serve as a fulcrum to launch proactive communication between two individuals who would otherwise have remained insulated in their own shells.

A  Korean teacher of poetry induces his motley group of adult students to write poetry by asking them to draw inspiration by looking at apples anew. One can look at any object, he says, like an apple endlessly until you awaken the poetic sensibilities in yourself. So what, an impatient viewer of cinema could comment.

The film Poetry begins and ends with shots of flowing waters of a river taken from a tall bridge. Just as different perspectives of an apple could lead to inspired poetry, so too do the flowing waters allow Chang-dong Lee to develop a sensitive tale on relationships over time, until you realize the director has nudged the viewer to appreciate social values, responsibilities and relationships that make life worth living, putting aside social evils and lack of communication between family members that pervades our modern lifestyles. Poetry deals with emotions; Chang-dong Lee’s Poetry deals with individuals who seem to be devoid of emotions and somewhere towards the end of the film, the viewer glimpses emotions, subtle and yet so evocative. Just as the visual of the flowing water from the bridge might appear the same, the message of the visual becomes all the more powerful, with the viewer having learnt of the events that the movie has unfolded.

Poetry, the film, is not just about poetry. It is a film about human relationships. Poetry is a quilt of relationships—grandmother and grandson, Korean men and Korean women, Korean schoolboy camaraderie, the strange absence of a mother and a father for a growing boy, the dying urge of a semi-paralyzed old man to pop Viagra pills to have sex, and the lack of remorse of young Korean schoolboys to accept the consequence of their evil actions.

Poetry, the film, is equally a delicate study of the differences in the attitude of the sexes in Korea, in Asia, and, in an extension, the world. It is an unusual and sensitive look at male dominated societies by a male director. A girl is gang raped (the event is thankfully never shown in the film) but the director Chang-dong Lee allows the viewer to perceive detailed emotions of many individuals in the aftermath. The perpetrators of the crime are not repentant.  The male parents of the perpetrators of the crime merely want wish away the incident with the help of their joint money power. It is only an elderly grandmother who attempts to reach out to comfort the oppressed family.  Here is an unusual tale of a woman mourning the death of one who is not of her own family but of another unknown family, while men equally affected by the same death only wish the event away and cry away from accepting responsibility. In many ways, this film is like a formidable chess game between men and women. The young boy who does not flinch when the mother places the photograph of a schoolmate he had raped and is now dead as a consequence of that action, is also a young boy being brought up by a single grandmother. He does not have a father or a grandfather. The absence of the mother and the unusual reactions of the grandmother could insinuate to the viewer that he himself was born following similar circumstances befalling his mother—this remains a mystery in the film.

 

There are many films that deal with suicide that are dark and sad. Here is a rare film where suicide ultimately leads to redemption of many and this is so effectively conveyed by the fallen apricot the grandmother picks up during her journey to meet up with the mother of a girl who had committed suicide only to realize the importance of the seed in the full cycle of life.

The performance of the grandmother played by Jong –hie Yun is remarkable. I learnt that this actress made this film after a long hiatus from her craft.  The awards the film has earned for her worldwide acknowledge the importance of subtlety in the business of thespians that cinema can capture more effectively than theatre, at least in most cases.

Finally, the film is a 2 hour 20 minute film but the real punch of the film comes in the last twenty minutes and the sock on your jaw is a delicate one that can fell you, thanks to its potent screenplay.  The film deals with a 60-year-old suffering from the onset of dementia but the film seems to suggest lead character is deliberately trying to forget a dark chapter of her life as well relating to her absent daughter, which the script so cleverly insinuates but never elaborates. The film presents an optimistic end for a film that began with a suicide—it allows for a woman suffering from dementia to take a proactive step to improve the life of others,while she still has her wits about her. What a wonderful and uplifting tale that does not easily appear as one!

The film is remarkable because the screenplay, written by the director himself, packs so much detail and ends with an astonishing open air badminton practice, which is so delicately crafted that no viewer is likely to forget it. Hardly a word is spoken in the long scene and, yet, it is so evocative. By a coincidence, this important sequence occurs at nightfall, while the opening and the end sequences of the movie suggests early morning.  That’s subtle poetry in itself. It is, therefore, not surprising that the award Poetry won at the Cannes Film Festival was for the Best Screenplay. Here is a movie where the spoken word is so sparingly used and yet the visuals and the few words used in the movie spin true poetry.


P.S. Other films relating to dementia discussed earlier on in this blog include Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest and Sarah Polley's Away from Her.

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.