Monday, July 28, 2008
Flipping Out
The documentary opens with breakfast scenes around a bong in the northern foothills of India; it explores what happens to those who “flip out” either as a result of prolonged and sustained drug use or because of their experiences of military service or some combination of both. Or maybe neither; one man interviewed spoke of his mother with a mental illness and his fear of inheriting it.
We meet many young Israeli men, some people dedicated to saving lost causes, an Indian woman and an Israeli deputy prime minister. The documentary provoked a long conversation between me and my Israeli-Australian friend. What should be the nature of national service? Can Australians really understand Israel’s plight? Can we understand what it is to need an army? What is the responsibility of government when their citizens are in need abroad? What comparisons could be made with the way that Australians behave in Bali? How should India respond?
We talked at length about the nature of that military service experience. The documentary maker began with a promising through line - footage of young Israeli soldiers on active service. He asked some questions about the nature of their army service but this part of the film petered out after a while. We really don’t know the extent to which young people do “flip out” en masse or whether it’s more isolated. The film made me angry and curious which is a good outcome. What sort of populace do you create when you force your entire cohort of young people through a three year army period. The film alluded to brutalisation and the annihilation of identity without exploring it in any detail. Do you really want to live in a society created in this way? I want to know more about this.
As Naomi reminded me, I have the luxury of thinking this way. She was proud of the Israeli government stepping in to look after these young people through a system of “warm houses”. I can’t imagine feeling anything about an Australian government doing good in this way. I am not very patriotic; maybe because I don‘t have to be but also because I want to live in a society where patriotism and nationalism are not key features.
After the film we walked up the hill towards the Cellar Bar. A couple crossed our path on the way, he in Western clothes and she in a full burka, even with the finest black chiffon across her eyes. I struggle with the fact that gender impacts so much on what some people wear; I’d be fine if he was also swathed in black fabric. The most poignant scene from the film flashed into my head. An Indian woman is being interviewed; really the only time an Indian person is part of the story in any meaningful way. She was the landlady several years prior when a young man called Ran “flipped out”. She describes the impact of the young Israelis in Goa. We see scenes of many, many stoned dancers on the beach against a faint sunrise and pulsing techno music. She recounts a phone call with his parents where he was too stoned to talk to them. Then he shows up. She is clearly nervous but happy to see him but he has changed significantly. He has now found a form of orthodox Judaism that prevents him from touching women so he cannot even shake her hand, even though it's clear that she cared for him when he'd been ill. The scene is stark in the disconnect, he might as well be stoned for all the warmth she receives from him. It’s terribly sad. It adds to my great suspicion of fundamentalist religion.
And so it is a film about nationalism, about caring, about trauma and about young people adrift in another culture with the licence this brings to cut loose. A great film to start the film festival.
Waves
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Falling in love again. Properly…
We meet Inge (Ursula Werner) in her bedroom / sewing room in the heat of an East Berlin summer. She is sweaty and dishevelled, her eyes small in her middle-aged puffy face. Within minutes, she is in Karl’s flat, their faces in that classic cinema close-up that presages sex. It’s tender and lustful all at once. We’ve all felt that urgency to have sex; so much wanting it that only half the clothes come off and the feeling afterward too of “What have I done? What am I going to do now?”
Inge has a husband of 30 years, Werner (Horst Hehberg) whose hobby is listening to recordings of vintage steam trains. Their relationship seems firm and strong and for a while, Inge resists taking things further with handsome Karl (Horst Westphal). Then she tells her daughter “I always thought I would fall in love again, properly. I just gave up expecting it.” The word “properly” really got to me. There are degrees of love and I feel lucky that I have been in love “properly” a few times in my life. It was timely to watch this film; it’s easy to give up on the possibility of this happening again. Inge was brave and honest as a character; she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as she had been living. Karl re-awakened something for her. In love, her face softened and became young again; in one scene, she looked like a nervous, trangressive teenager.
The positioning of this film, within the ‘Forbidden Pleasures' section of MIFF, seemed exploitative to me. A lot of the publicity for the film globally has been of the “check out these old people having sex” variety. The film is a drama, with the appropriate amount of sex present in any love triangle film, however unusual it is to show explicit sex between people of this age. The film deals with all the anxieties and realities of the body as it ages. The young people next to me were clearly uncomfortable with the sex scenes; they laughed or whispered whenever anything approaching a conventional love or sex scene was shown. I wanted to turn and say “this will be you. If you’re lucky” but I didn’t. Perhaps it was a good thing to watch, two weeks after my 50th birthday. Despite part of the storyline, it is a film about seizing the day in the bravest, most honest way you can. And it bravely depicted ordinary people who looked like me and they filled up the screen.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
In search of a better life…
I’ve only been there in winter when it’s a city of dire cold and fog. Or bad smog. I think there is a bad inversion layer over the place even though it sprawls out over steep hills. It’s the first ritzy city that I encountered in China, after the rural intimacy of Yunnan province. Chongqing is full of skyscrapers and department stores, and of huge billboards flogging French cosmetics. I got a shock when I first went there. In Moijiang where I’d come from, I’d been able to buy a Chinese flag and some left over Red Army gear in modest little shops and not much other merchandise. This was in 1999 though and China has rushed ahead since then in its lurch towards modernisation.
Chinese Canadian film-maker Yung Chang has made a film about this area of the world. And this theme. Called Up The Yangste, he began with the idea of “exploring the culture of tourism and the tourism of culture” on the Yangste river tourist boats before figuring out that the story he was telling was really about contemporary China. I’ve been on one of those tourist boats in non-tourist season. One year I was there, we had an evening tour of the cold old river, mists swirling around and the lights of the city off in the distance. The city actually reminds me of a fabled Tolkein-style fantasy but maybe that’s another story. The evening river tour was pretty dismal. It was about everything that is wrong with organised tourism; artificial jokes, bad music, reality out of sync with promise. But I had no expectations that it would be good and wasn’t paying the 200 or 300 yuan fee. Cynical in the extreme.
Yung Chang’s film is not cynical. It’s a documentary made great by the real life characters in the film. While it starts with the very impersonal fortress like lochs which the Yangste boats must pass through, the bulk of the story is intimate. It tracks the experiences of two teenagers who leave school to begin work on the tourist boat. This is absolutely compelling. Yu Shui is the daughter of a very poor family who squat on the edges of the soon-to-be-flooded Yangste growing corn illegally. They are minority people; the lowest of the low in this society. Yu Shui would like to stay at school but they are too poor; she must make a sacrifice for the possibility of one of hers siblings attending high school in the future. Her grief at leaving and the unexpressed pain of her parents fills the screen; Yung Chang is discreet enough to avoid commentary at these specials moments in the film.
The other character we meet is ‘Jerry’, Chen Bo Yu, whose own words set him up for his fate in the film. “ I am successful because I am good looking and good at English,” he says gleefully at the beginning of the film. An only child, he knows he occupies centre-stage in his parent’s lives. I have not met many Jerrys in my times in China but I’ve met a lot of Yu Shui’s. Maybe it reflects where I’ve been – not in wealthy Beijing or Shanghai schools but in rural western China where circumstances are hard.
I loved the scenes of Yu Shui and her family. Her father carrying their huge wardrobe on his back up the newly made shoulder of the road. The road built with shovels, chisels and wheelbarrows, just as I have seen them building the great highway into Burma. The chiselled cheekbones of Yu Shui’s father and his gaunt worker’s body. The family visiting their daughter on the boat, her Dad still in the soiled clothes of a road worker shuffling into the tacky lounge where tourists are subjected to songs like “How Easy it is to Learn Chinese-sy.” This made me cringe, as did the scene where the mostly Western tourists are taken to inspect the new home of Chinese families whose previous homes have been submerged by the new dam. The Westerners make arch comments about the politics and the Chinese bat these away like slow-pitched balls. It’s painful for me to watch these scenes; it reminds me of many similar experiences in China and of just how hard it is to plough below the surface in another country and to really connect with the people and the issues. Even with the best will in the world.
Up the Yangste does just as the film-maker wanted – it is a real insight into many of the issues in modern China, seen through the very private lens of Yu Shui and other family and other ordinary people, some who cry with anger about what has happened to them. It’s real and raw; as opposed to the cheesy experiences that the Western tourists have as they are transported up one of the longest and most important rivers in the world. (Note that if this whets your appetite for reading about change in China, you can do no better than Peter Hessler’s River Town, an outstanding Westerner’s account of life in a town on the Yangste, or Mr China by Tim Clissold (about doing business in China or Simon Winchester’s great book about the Yangste itself, The River at the Centre of the World.
Monday, July 21, 2008
There is no culture here…
The film maker, Eran Korilin, said in an interview on At the Movies, "I wanted also the film to have these aesthetics where you would have a very strict and disciplined shooting and cutting but maybe you would feel underneath that there is something pounding, you know, beneath." Something pounding beneath - what an ambition and a phrase.
The band is stranded in the wrong small town in Israel. Their intended destination is Petah Tikwa. My friend Jindra says that this translates as ‘Opening of Hope’. Instead, they are in a fictional town called Beit Hativka; which might well be called “Departure of Hope’ or “Hopelessness”. It is a town perched in the middle of a white sandy desert, its new sparseness accentuated by the empty roads and colonnade of light poles stretching out to nowhere. The director, Korilin, emphasises the surreal nature of the landscape by positioning the band in tight geometric formation, their uniforms very blue against the overexposed grey of the sky. Life there is dismal; as Dina, the café owner points out ”Culture, there is no culture here, no Arab, no Israeli, no culture at all…” It is a town entirely at odds with my experience of the Middle East though the spare desert scenes were like many I saw in Jordan and some in Syria. The setting conveys the same sort of desolation that I feel in new outer-suburban parts of Melbourne. Part of it is the lack of life on the streets and the sense of disconnection that people have from each other.
There is much more to say about this film. It is a fragment of a story but I was engrossed in it. The director avoided both predictability and sentimentality, with the exception of the concerto sub-theme. In its exploration of the loneliness of many of the individuals, it is touching without being sentimental. I could write much more about the two main characters, Dina and Tawfiq, created by actors who both know how to fill a screen.
Wikipedia says that The Band's Visit was Israel's original Foreign Language Film submission for the 80th Academy Awards but was rejected by the Academy because it contained over 50% English dialogue. Thus, Israel sent Beaufort instead; Beaufort was finally included in the five final nominees. I saw Beaufort last year at MIFF; it is a very good film which is also about loneliness and despair against a fairly bleak backdrop. It was rumored, according to Wikipedia, that it was the filmmakers of Beaufort who brought to the Academy's attention the ineligibility, on language grounds, of The Band's Visit. Beaufort's makers denied this rumor. Is it better than The Band’s Visit? Different beasts!
Light but not fluffy
The film is a two hander; ageing actress and straight-laced accountant. The most predictable of line-ups. Two characters come to appreciate each others strengths and become different, fuller, happier people as a result. These films are a dime a dozen. What made a difference was Anneke Blok, who played the actress. She gave the role dignity, nuance and a mix of vulnerability and resilience that took the film beyond the expected. The film played lightly with the theme of damage. Blok’s character, her skin damaged through age and sun, her life damaged through bad decisions. Her daughter physically damaged. Jacob Derwig, who plays the accountant Jacob, whose marriage has been blighted by caution; the film delicately explores the ideas of risk and passion.
Van der Oest’s willingness to upset the traditional narrative also added the requisite amount of texture. An added bonus was the setting; a canal boat in Amsterdam; lovely to see aspects of a country seldom seen in films viewed here. Its not a great film but not fluffy either.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
June reading
I've decided to try to distil what I am reading into haiku. Yes, it could be seen as a sign of being a wanker but I think its a good way of trying to work out what the writer was really on about.
I re-read Marry Me by John Updike after reading Couples again. I last read these books in the 70's/80's when I was at uni and before I'd had affairs with men. I think I just thought about it then. I needed Esther Parel (Mating in Captivity) in my life but she only wrote it last year. I liked Couples - it was sexy, redolent of the 60's but still real. Marry Me was disappointing.
Loves Ruth. Or Sally. Or Ruth.
Or? How will it end?
Doomed father and young son lurch
onwards. World without hope.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Life's Looking Good
I am a little inspired at the moment by the writer Amy Hempel who I heard on Radio National yesterday (9/7). I haven't read any of her writing. She was talking about brevity and cited Gertrude Stein who once wrote a 4 word short story titled Longer: