A selection of intelligent cinema from around the world that entertains and provokes a mature viewer to reflect on what the viewer saw, long after the film ends--extending the entertainment value
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.
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.
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.
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.
Iranian cinema has made impressive strides in recent decades
and Nader and Simin: A Separation is
undoubtedly the crowning achievement of Iranian cinema in 2011. It is not often that any film wins three of the four top honors at a major festival such as the Berlin Film Festival 2011.
Apart from the Golden Bear for the best film, Nader and Simin: A Separation won the Silver Bears
for Best Actor and Best Actress—it only missed out on the Best Director, a redundant award after having won the Golden Bear. The many other awards the film has won include the Silver Peacock for the best director at the Indian International Film Festival held in Goa and the Golden Globe for the best foreign film. No Iranian film has received such an impressive and varied international recognition to date.
There are many reasons to admire this work of cinema. One,
it is one of the few Iranian films that has enjoyed equal recognition within Iran and
elsewhere. Though the film has slivers of implicit critical commentary on the
conditions in Iran today, the mainstay of the film is a social commentary that could
take place anywhere in the world. It is probably this fact that led the current
government of Iran to allow this film as an official entry of Iran at the
Oscars 2012.
The second reason that evokes admiration is that the film is
not about a separation leading to divorce, but instead a film on how a wife,
Simin, of 14 years desires to be with her husband, Nader, but emigrate from Iran and thus give a fillip to the future of their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh. Another aspect of this social value chain is the bull-headed stand of Nader, who refuses to emigrate
because of his ingrained Asian fundamental value of the son's moral responsibility to care for his
Alzheimer-stricken father in Iran. Nader’s viewpoint is the derived from the Asian value of parents giving all their efforts and savings for their
offspring, quite in contrast to modern western values. The film thus underscores the
importance of a family, the love of a mother for her daughter, a son for his
father, a daughter for her parents, and an economically weak husband, Hodjat, for
his wife Razieh and their daughter.
The third reason that makes the film outstanding is the rapid flow of the realistic
narrative, enabled by an ensemble cast that makes the viewer feel the events on screen could
easily happen to the viewer as well, in any geographical context. There is not one
moment in the film when the viewer would feel bored. The amazing script
enraptures the viewer as a thriller would while the film exudes realism that is easily identifiable and credible.
The fourth reason is that the film’s director Asghar Farhadi
seems to have made his best work to date, with each film he has made being
progressively an improvement on his previous work. This work finally catapults
him to a level where he can rub shoulders with finest of Iranian filmmakers: Mehrjui,
Kiarostami, Majidi, Panahi, Naderi, the Makhmalbaf family, and Jalili. The
success of this film will definitely help to bring into international limelight
the finest of Iranian cinema to audiences who are unaware of its stature.
There is no dull moment in this Asghar Farhadi film. The
film opens with a court scene, where a magistrate is only heard on screen, not
seen (a craft perfected in a superb Iranian 2004 film by director Mohsen
Amiryousefi called Bitter Dream).
What is not seen is a deliberate effort by the director to hide the less
relevant details and focus instead on the more important. The magistrate asks Simin (played by the
beautiful Leila Hatami, who has played roles for Mehrjui and Kiarostami in the
past, and is a daughter of another Iranian film director of repute—Ali Hatami)
why does she think her daughter has no future in Iran. The question is not
answered by Simin but her body language does. This is the first of the only two
overtly political comments that this critic spotted in the film. It is not easy to make an honest film in Iran. Asghar Farhadi seems to walk the tight rope with a panache while others get into trouble with the authorities.
Nader and Simin: A Separation is a tale of half truths and the impact of these
half truths on various individuals, on growing children who look upon their
parents as role models, and on relationships of teachers in schools with the
parents of their students. It is also a tale of conflicts of class and wealth
in society. But most of all, it is not cinema of escapism, but of reality. The
film presents a very real modern day Iran—and this critic has visited Iran on
five occasions over two decades on official work related to agriculture,
interacting with ordinary citizens, scientists, and a succession of powerful
Federal Ministers in that field. Iranians are a very intelligent and admirable
people, in spite of the current public intolerance of other faiths. The second evidence
of political criticism (if it was meant to be one) in this film that I spotted
was the Alzheimer-stricken father of Nader wearing a necktie and being driven
in a car in public places in Iran. Why Nader did that is not explained in the film.
In Iran, only foreigners wear neckties, as other citizens could face the wrath
of the moral police that often terrorize the public.
While much of the film delves into the conflict between two
couples--one rich, one poor—arising out of the outraged knee-jerk anger of a
loving son (on seeing his father left unattended and fallen on the ground with his hands tied to the bed-rail) expressed
towards his female house employee who had neglected her responsibility and stepped
out of the house, the film surprises the viewer at every stage like a thriller. A major surprise is when the
pivotal figure in the film turns out to be the young girl, Termeh, and not her parents, Nader and Simin,
as the title of the film would have led the viewer to believe. Farhadi’s film has made a great leap by
allowing a young girl to make the major decision in the film that will affect her parents and eventually her like an adult having watched adults and their behavior. It does not matter what the decision is—what matters is who makes the decision, in a world where
the males made all the decisions. (Interestingly, the young girl in the movie
is played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.) Ironically, the viewers will recall
the film had begun with a woman demanding a better deal for her daughter. Farhadi has made a film that re-defines the
role of women in modern Iran (and why not, when the first Nobel Prize winner in
Iran was a woman, Shrin Ebadi!) while men only seem to care and give priority to
other men over women (at least in in this cinematic tale). It is a great film that focuses on women and the girl child in Iran.
Farhadi’s film is one that will have universal acceptance because what is shown on screen will appeal to most viewers worldwide. The performances
are truly outstanding. The editing is equally commendable. And for Farhadi to
have developed the tale from real life observations the effort is commendable. True to the
director’s recent trends in exhibiting improved abilities with each film, I hope the next
Farhadi film outdoes this film in overall merit. Farhadi seems to have raised his
own bar for his next jump.
P.S.Nader and Simin: A
Separation ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Asghar
Farhadi’s About Elly was reviewed
earlier on this blog. Iranian films by Mehrjui, Kiarostami, Panahi, Naderi,
Amiryousefi, Makhmalbaf, and Majidi have been also been reviewed earlier.
P.P.S. When this author queried blogger MKP at The Film Sufi on the curious necktie scene mentioned above, MKP replied "You make an interesting point, Jugu. Since the Revolution, Iranian authorities and moralizers have endeavored to establish a social norm opposed to men wearing a necktie, which is deemed to be too “Western” and not in alignment with the principles of the Revolution. You do occasionally see some people, particularly in places like Tehran, wearing ties, but they are usually older people whose practices date back to the “old days”, when it was more common among the progressive middle classes. Nader’s allowing his father to wear a necktie would presumably reflect his filial loyalty. And it would also probably subtly underscore the class distinction between his family and that of Razieh in "A Separation" - Asghar Farhadi (2011)"
If there is one director who has made his presence
felt with a debut in 2011, it is Sébastien Pilote from Canada. Few have heard
of him, and even fewer have seen his first feature film The Salesman. The Salesman is probably one of the most powerful films from Canada in recent decades
that recall the quiet intensity of the works of Canadian directors Claude Jutra
and Norman McLaren, some forty or fifty years ago. The Salesman was honoured with the Jury’s Grand Prize and the Best Actor Silver
Gateway award at the recently concluded Mumbai International Film Festival
where the competition section is only open to debut films across the world.
Having caught up with the film at the International Film Festival of Kerala,
one realizes that the Mumbai jury had honoured the two aspects of the movie
that truly make it a rewarding experience—the direction and the acting.
The Salesman does not have the trappings of a ponderous movie. Yet, this critic
considers it as one of the finest films of 2011. It captures the global concerns of the
day—unusual weather changes and economic turmoil that affect almost all
citizens globally. Yet the film is not ostensibly about either of those two
subjects. The weather and the economic upheaval that leaves so many jobless
remain as a bleak backdrop for this lovely tale of an individual whose life is
interesting while on screen and will be interesting for the viewer long after
the movie gets over. That is precisely what makes the film stand out—a “lovely”
humanistic tale against the “dark” background. It gives you an indication of
the contrasts that the film provides the viewer at several stages of the film.
Everything in the film needs re-evaluation in each differing context—what is
lovely could take on a dark hue.
It is a tale of a car salesman in a small town in
Quebec, Canada, that is reeling under some 250 plus days of continuous snow and
a local economic catastrophe of the impending closure of a paper mill that directly
and indirectly supports the town’s population. Who is he? "I sell cars, that's all," says the salesman in the film. That's the devotion and the single purpose of his life as it appears for the viewer.
It is essentially about business ethics that ought
to make many students of business schools squirm-- if they have a conscience. A
successful salesman has to show results, not once but several times, and
especially in bad times of recession. Canadian actor Gilbert Sicotte (who has
been associated with so many good Canadian films) plays the affable Marcel
Levesque, the elderly car salesman. A successful salesman is not a new concept
in cinema—David Mamet’s play that was made into a film by James Foley and
called Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and Arthur Miller’s play made into a film by Volker Schlondorf f called
Death of a Salesman (1985) seemed to have flogged the angst of the textbook salesman to the
extreme. But Pilote’s debut film provides a new perspective—once a salesman,
always a salesman. The true salesman is indestructible. Irrespective of what
happens, they go on and on. In a way Pilote’s film The Salesman reminds the viewer indirectly that all true professionals are
similar—once they are good at a job they never give up, till they are made to
stop by external forces or physical handicaps. A doctor remains a doctor, a
journalist a journalist, a scientist a scientist, an actor an actor, if they
are good at their job, even after they are shaken mid-career by personal losses
that question whether all their devotion was worth it.
Examine the film’s tale from the viewpoint of
business managers. A good salesman is a goose that lays golden eggs. A healthy,
smart business organization rewards the top performer always, in the presence
of less competent salesmen. The top performer is given the more difficult of assignments—here
in this Pilote film of selling a fleet of new vehicles to the police
department. The salesman’s manager (read the ideal human resource manager) is
sensitive to the personal upheavals of his staff’s lives—and even suggests that
his top salesman take a break. But will a good professional take a break or
keep on working towards new goals set by the organization?
Then again the film is really a film on balancing
ethics with being good at your job, being the best in the rat race. It might be
philosophically an existential question. Do we live to be happy having lived
ethically in our professional careers or do we give more importance to win the
race and keep our pay packets secure? These are not questions asked in the
film—these are implicit questions for the viewer as the film ends. And that for
this critic is the reason why the film gains importance. And it is this
judgement of each viewer that will morally assess the salesman who cares little about what happens or what could happen to the buyer after the sale, in the medium term. And I am quite
sure there will many who will debate their individual viewpoints after the
movie gets over.
The film is a wonderful example of a film driven by
a great performance. Actor Gilbert Sicotte, always well dressed and quietly
persuasive, not just brings on screen the character of a perfect salesman, but
also makes the viewer like the character. The salesman treats his co-workers
well and they in turn even admire him. He is a good parent and a good
grandparent. One of the finest and delicate sequences in the film is of the grandfather
teaching his grandson the Lord’s prayer. There is another innocuous sequence
when the salesman quietly joins the jobless workers of the paper factory in a
group prayer. Religion is compacted into very few scenes in the film but how
powerful those scenes are can only be assessed at the end of the film. Perhaps
it is intense religion that keeps the salesman ticking. And may be not.
Then there is a relationship between a father and a daughter.
The affection of a daughter towards the widower father is not just the in food she
brings him but in the understanding that
the best gift she could provide her father would be to make him happy in his
job as a salesman by driving down to pick up a vehicle to humour her father’s
client’s wishes.
Pilote’s direction comes to the fore with the visuals of the employed salesman driving past the
jobless workers and the innocuous statement of the salesman that he believes in
keeping his clients happy. The salesman says "You have to like the people. And you need to look into their eyes. If you look into their eyes, you look into their souls." Pilote’s marked ability to develop a character
indirectly by beading simple incidents is fascinating. The salesman prides in knowing
his clients. Yet you know from an earlier Pilote sequence that he doesn’t know
them or rather he has forgotten them in spite of keeping a tape recorder to learn from his own mistakes and become even better at his work. Yet he goes on with his job aware that he
might be bringing misery to others than happiness. Pilote's film accentuates the contradictions.
Two incidents late into the film provide the pivotal
intensity by which the film needs to be evaluated. And interestingly the two
incidents help the viewer to evaluate and revaluate the salesman.
The film exudes a quiet power that is gripping and
thought provoking, as the final scene of the film of the salesman looking at
the arrival of the next lot of vehicles to sell. You might not get the feeling
that you are watching great cinema unfold on screen but if you care to reflect
on what you saw after the film concludes you will realize that Pilote’s film
packs a punch that becomes obvious over time as you reflect on the issues
presented in the film that have universal significance today. Like the salesman who claims to know his clients' souls by looking into their eyes, Pilote's film allows the viewer to "see" the soul of the salesman.
Terrence Malick has made only five feature films to date, all made in the US. The five films have won a solitary Oscar (for Nestor Almendros's cinematography in Days of Heaven), although many of his films have made the grade of garnering numerous unsuccessful Oscar nominations. On the other hand, Malick’s The Thin Red Line won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival, Days of Heaven won the Best Director award at Cannes, and now The Tree of Life has won the coveted Golden Palm at Cannes, awards that have eluded many Oscar winners. These facts themselves speak loudly about the quality of Malick’s cinema, appreciated more in Europe than in the US.
For this critic, too, only three of the five Malick feature films, the same three that won acclaim in Europe, bear the stamp of truly outstanding cinema. In contrast, many American viewers to this day find his debut film Badlands, which has certain elements that recall the typical Hollywood entertainment ingredients of the Sixties and Seventies, and The New World with its historical magnetism to be equally enchanting.
The Tree of Life is arguably Malick’s finest and the most profound work to date. It is not an easy film to appreciate and will leave an impatient viewer totally perplexed and frustrated. If a viewer had no idea of Malick’s cinema and had come to watch a typical action film with Brad Pitt and/or Sean Penn, that person would indeed feel cheated. If a viewer was not used to a narrative cinema continually switching between past and present with long sequences of film that appeared to be out of the Discovery TV channel and not pick up the relevance of the editing, the experience would be akin to a viewer wondering if the reels of the film were mixed up by the projectionist. (Interestingly, I recall similar reactions in the early Seventies when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001-A Space Odyssey was released. Young students went to see the film to get a “high” after smoking hashish, because of the long psychedelic and colourful sequences the film had of the journey to Jupiter, with no spoken words, accompanied by superb music in near empty theatres, totally oblivious of Kubrick’s intent.)
Malick’s cinema is different. Malick’s films are the works of an erudite filmmaker and, therefore seek to communicate with a viewership that has the patience and humility to listen to profound rhetorical questions asked for the benefit of the viewer. These films are the antithesis of popular cinema with slick talk and frenzied action. Malick’s works—at least the three that I admire most—tend to deceive the impatient viewer who refuses to probe a movie beyond the obvious. Malick’s The Thin Red Line was less about the heroics of war but more about the ethical and reflective mind of the soldier who is able to comprehend his actions and put them in the perspective with nature’s majesty. Malick’s Days of Heaven provided the viewer with awesome images of difficult calamities and the travails of the urban poor running away for refuge in rural America that sandwich a period of magical carefree rural lifestyle of love that embraces the wonders of nature around us that one often tends to ignore. The natural “heaven” in Days of Heaven is not so obvious but it is there in spite of the locusts and the fire that dominate the film. In The Tree of Life, each and every sequence of natural beauty, is a tool for the viewer to help understand the metaphysical and moral education of Jack (the director’s alter ego) that incorporates the lessons Jack has learnt from his father and mother, and, most all, his brother.
Malick is not a film director who makes films just for the love of the medium. He intelligently uses cinema, combining both music and images, as a tool to discuss his favourite metaphysical and theological concerns. Swedish director Ingmar Bergman did this often to question conventional Christian concepts his own father, a priest, had brought him up to respect and believe in. Bergman’s “Man-God trilogy” of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence almost rejects God as a metaphorical spider in the first, accepts God in the second despite doubts, wrestles ambiguously with God’s silence that even Mother Teresa had found so difficult to accept in the third. Andrei Tarkovsky did the same but very subtly—Tarkovsky’s strong Russian Orthodox Christian roots silently emerge in Solyaris (Solaris), The Stalker, and his final film Sacrifice, while the subjects of these films were not overtly spiritual. (Few are aware that Tarkovsky was an intensely religious Russian Orthodox Christian and knew St. Mathew’s Gospel in the Bible by rote, the very same book that Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini made into a fascinating work of cinema called Gospel According to St. Mathew). The Tree of Life needs to be evaluated the way one evaluates a Tarkovsky, a Bergman, or a Pasolini—all classics of international cinema.
There are different strokes to appreciate Malick’s The Tree of Life. The obvious one is that of a theist, a believer in God or Allah or any name you prefer to give the Creator. The first clue the viewer gets is the quotation "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (Chap 38,verses 4 and 7) from the Book of Job—a book from the Old Testament of the Bible. It is arguably the oldest book of the Bible, a tale that existed before Genesis was written and accepted by the Abrahamic religions. (For Muslims, Job is also part of the Holy Quran) The Book of Job is built around an individual, a God-fearing theist who questions God on why he of all people has been deprived of all things material and familial but yet stoically chooses to accept and revere God. In Malick’s film, a deeply God-fearing religious Texan family is deprived of one of their three sons, not unlike Job. The mother, Mrs O’Brien, the embodiment of grace in the film mimics Job’s reactions after the loss, with the words “I will be true to you. Whatever comes.” A major problem for viewers of The Tree of Life would be the constant references to the Book of Job, in case they are not familiar with the text. A quotation from the book kicks off the film. Fortunately, this critic had studied the book as a prescribed optional text for his postgraduate degree in English Literature from Bombay University, not merely as a religious text. Some of the text is explained by the priest’s sermon in the film. No one knows who wrote the Book of Job and literary scholars have concluded that the present form of the book is the product of oral literature and that the current version is the product of at least three different authors. Malick distills the essence of Job’s metaphysical travails into a simple event—the death of a 19-year old that occurs early in the film. For cineastes like me, the event and the progression of the film is reminiscent of the structure of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s French movie Three Colors: Blue, which interestingly Kieslowski and his screenplaywriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz similarly modelled on an important philosophical chapter of the Bible: I Corinthians 13. Mallick’s film, too, recalls the Kieslowski’s film, when Mrs O’Brien speaks the words “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.” Those words of Mrs O’Brien reflect the same ultimate realization of actor Julliete Binoche’s character in the French/Polish film following the death of an important member of the family, early in the Kieslowski film.
For Malick, the Job-like realization of Mrs O’Brien is only a tool for the full education and sensitization of her eldest son, Jack (who probably embodies the young Malick, growing up in Waco, Texas, the name emblazoned on the truck spewing DDT, in the film), played by Sean Penn, who has grown up to be a successful urban architect of repute. The success of Jack seems to recall the words of his father Mr O’Brien “Your mother's naive. It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world. If you're good, people take advantage of you.” We can assume Jack had followed his father thus far—following the way of nature. But when Jack’s brother dies, Jack realizes his folly—he needs to follow the way of grace embodied in his mother. What results in the film is an abstract journey (a path to nirvana of sorts) from the worlds of steel and glass, through a derelict wooden door frame (symbolic of the transformation of Jack) as he is led by a woman (either his mother or his spouse), through rocky crevices to a sea shore where all the persons he has met in life are alive and well. The sudden action of falling on his knees is the dawning of nirvana in Jack that links the viewer back to the opening words: “Brother. Mother. It was they who led me to your door.” To the attentive listener, the framework of the entire film had already been presented with the opening quotation from the Book of Job, followed by these words of Jack, before you even see a single person on screen. Apart from the Book of Job, there are several references to the 23rd chapter of the Book of Psalms. Now to an atheist viewer, or a cineaste who is merely interested in pure cinema, all this could appear to be hogwash. But is it?
If you prefer to put aside religion and theology in The Tree of Life, a moot question would be: Can an atheist enjoy and appreciate The Tree of Life? This critic would fault the marketing of The Tree of Life for audiences who are not familiar with the cinema of Malick, a method of presenting a tale increasingly being adopted by other filmmakers such as French director Claire Denis and Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu. There is a link between these directors' separate works that moviegoers could pick up. Alert viewers of Malick’s The Thin Red Line would recall a flame in the middle of a dark screen that began the film. The flame reappears prominently later in the film when the Sean Penn character in the film as an avuncular boss interacts with the AWOL character played by Jim Caviezel. There is the following spoken lines Pvt. Bell from The Thin Red Line : “Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free.” That sequence too underlined connection of the flame and “grace” glorified in The Tree of Life. This flame symbol takes a more evocative level of punctuation between segments of The Tree of Life, including the start of the film. The transformation of the troubled adult Jack in The Tree of Life begins with Jack lighting the flame of a blue candle. A flame that symbolizes light in darkness and knowledge of creation. The chain of thought is endless. In The Thin Red Line, an alligator slithering into the forest ponds opened the film only to be strung up as dead meat for soldiers later in the film. In The Tree of Life you have large dinosaurs for the creation sequences, followed by sequence of a lizard brought into the house by young Jack and his siblings.
In The Thin Red Line, there is a voice-over rhetorical question from Col. Toll about trees and nature: “Look at this jungle. Look at those vines, the way they twine around, swallowing everything. Nature's cruel.” In The Tree of Life, Mr O’Brien representing “nature” is the parent growing trees and getting his son to tend the lawn in front of their house. It is important for the viewer to recall the first spoken words in The Tree of Life: “Brother. Mother. It was they who led me to your door.” The father is NOT one who ultimately transforms the adult Jack.
For those who love good cinema, the following sequence epitomizes Malick’s cinema like no other. A character (the mother) receives bad news. No word is spoken. There is a sob of grief. Cut to the loud whirr of airplane engine. A telephone call is answered in the midst of the din. No word can be heard, only the loud engine. The engine sound suddenly fades and you hear bells of a church. This is typical of Malick’s cinema. Spoken words are minimal and when they are spoken they are often as a voice-over. Sometimes, the voice is not that of the person on screen.
Malick’s dialectics are essentially rhetorical questions and exclamations made by the characters in his films, with you the viewer emerging as the judge of the series of spoken viewpoints. It is Malick, the teacher of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) taking over, or perhaps Malick the Harvard and Oxford university alumnus taking over. For instance, in The Thin Red Line a soldier asks another who has a Greek name “Did you read Homer?” The question may seem out of place but if the viewer is familiar with Homer’s epics the situation on screen gets a new perspective. In Malick’s The New World samples of voice-overs are “Who are you, what do you dream of?” with the answer from lead female Pocahontas “We are like grass.” Very few directors have attempted this—and viewers who are new to the cinema of Malick, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Syberberg, Zvyagintsev, Ruiz, and Claire Denis will find such works “pretentious” just because the grammar of their cinema requires the viewer to be attentive and patient and constantly reflect on what they see and, most of all, what they hear. Mallick, and filmmakers like him, give more attention to nature, the flora and fauna, to tell a story of human beings.
In The Tree of Life, Mrs O’Brien, the mother, represents grace. She says: “Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.” quite in contrast to her husband who teaches his sons to be “fierce.. to get ahead in this world. If you're good, people take advantage of you.” Jack later realizes that his father, an evidently clever God-fearing man, who has 27 patents to his name, loses his job eventually. Jack even begins to hate his father and eventually the grown up Jack apologizes to his father for something he said following his brother’s demise. Jack’s father's self realization (another voice over) is another lesson in life: “I wanted to be loved because I was great, a Big Man. Now I'm nothing. Look. The glory around... trees, birds... I dishonoured it all and didn't notice the glory. A foolish man.”
The basic structure of The Tree of Life is birth, acceptation of siblings, ability to differentiate between good and bad, awareness of the less privileged, sexual awakening, loss of social security of a parent, death of a loved one, and the understanding of why death is a part of the larger scheme of the Creator of the universe. This basic structure is punctuated by visuals of the creation of the universe which puts in context the differences of the two parents of Jack. There is a dinosaur who almost kills a smaller one and yet does not but instead goes in search of another—is it the anguish of a mother who has lost her progeny? The volcanic lava meeting waves of the sea might appear to have little relevance in the Malick tale but it has considerable import if you consider the constant nature vs. grace turmoil in the O’Brien family. The final words of Mrs O’Brien the viewer hears are: "I give him to you. I give you my son." These are words of considerable theological relevance coming from a woman who was initially grieving the loss of a 19-year old son. This lady also says another important line: “Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.” Every leaf, every ray of light, is precisely what Malick underscores for the viewer in The Tree of Life. The visuals of creation, from the cell to the planets, nature’s beauty ranging from a butterfly to a tree, are interlinked with message of good living and understanding life for both a theist and an atheist. Malick's achievement in this film is his ability to telescope the development of Jack's body and mind with the cosmic development of earth, its fauna and flora. Kubrick's attempt in 2001--A Space Odyssey looked at the external cosmic beauty and man's preoccupation with machines, not with individual minds. Malick has broken that boundary.
One wishes Malick explained the absence of the third son towards the end. The third was not the kid who drowned—that was a kid from a neighbour’s family. Jack seems to be influenced by one sibling who dies, and not so by the other. The O’Brien family’s attitude to race relations is ambiguous while Mrs O’Brien goes out of the way to provide drinking water to arrested and disturbed individuals in police custody. There is compassion exhibited for all including frogs that some thoughtless kids tie up to a firecracker rocket for fun.
There is much more to this film than all this. There is the relevance for each piece of music used in The Tree of Life--pieces of music and chorale pieces carefully chosen by Malick. Malick's wide-ranging knowledge of music and the dogged effort he makes to identify the right piece for each film surpasses that of Kubrick, Peter Weir, Michael Mann, and Andrei Tarkovsky, all directors who have proven their skills in this field. The Tree of Life is a film that demands several viewings to digest the varied details and the full perspective of what these have to offer for an attentive viewer.
I recall, as a wet-behind-the-ears film critic, recommending in a New Delhi daily that I worked for in 1979 that one of the finest films on show during an International Film Festival of India was an Andrei Tarkovsky film showing at the now defunct Archana theatre. The disgruntled viewers who could not appreciate the film damaged the seats of the theatre. The next day I was pulled up by my News Editor. If the same film was to be screened today in New Delhi there could be a totally different reaction because more people are aware of what to expect from a Tarkovsky film. So, too, is the case of Terrence Malick’s movies—the more you see a Malick film with patience, the more you realize what it has to offer. Perhaps then a viewer will appreciate the philosophical words spoken in The Tree of Life: “I am nothing...Keep us. Guide us. Till the end of time.”
