Flipping Out

The director called it “flipping out” but I think of it as post-traumatic stress syndrome. I wonder if there’s a proper and specific term for it in Israel? Yoav Shamir’s documentary is about the experiences of young Israelis post their military service in India. Many go to India to recover from their 3 years of service. When I was in India, they had just decamped in a mass exodus to go south from Dharamsala and other mountain towns and there were huge collective sighs all round from the locals who found them too loud, too miserly and too stoned.

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

Is it possible for a dramatic moment to go unnoticed amidst the flesh and press of a crowded Mediterranean beach? Director Adrian Sitaris takes us up close and personal in this short Romanian film. A couple fondle each other as their neighbours watch on in cross envy. A young man in baggy underpants is visibly attracted to a young mother. It’s all lust, bustle and sand up your bathers in 16 minutes. But what can you really get away with on a beach? This is an intriguing little film.

Falling in love again. Properly…

“Cloud 9: a state of bliss; in a euphoric state…” At various times in my life I have been on Cloud 9 and at various times I have yearned to be in that strange out-of-body but totally in touch with body state of disconnect with the world. Falling in love – it’s a time when the world goes a bit fuzzy, when you can’t concentrate, when its hard to know what you want except to see that special person. It’s dizzying and unsustainable but totally addictive. German film Cloud 9 focuses on the reactions of Inge, a seamstress in her mid 60’s who falls suddenly in lust and love with Karl who is 76. It’s a love triangle film, one which might be fairly prosaic if it were about younger people. But time is running out for all three and it is this, the performances and the utter ordinariness of the woman and her lover that makes this film really special.

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.

In search of a better life…

I’ve been to Chongqing about seven times. It’s the port city in China where all the tourist boats congregate before and after they ‘do’ the Three Gorges. Chongqing is the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet. Its population is already bigger than that of Peru or Iraq, with half a million more arriving every year 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.

There is no culture here…

There’s a moment in The Band’s Visit which is painful to sit through; it’s what gives this film traction and lifts it above the general run of the mill cross cultural films. Three Egyptian men in blue uniform are jammed around a dining table with four Israelis. They have gate-crashed a birthday and they are definitely not welcome. In a less interesting film the discussion of music would establish a connection between these disparate individuals. Instead, the conversation goes nowhere. We become aware that the connection even between band members is at best tenuous, let alone the possibilities of connecting across cultures with long-standing issues. The connection between the Israeli couple is fraught and angry; it hints at the despair of long-term unemployment. Their happy wedding photo belies the present loneliness of both individuals. And yet the film is only momentarily about their story. Much of the dialogue takes place in English; a second language for both cultures which creates a further level of stilted alienation.

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

It’s risky calling a film Tiramisu. It’s a bit like calling something ‘trifle’ or ‘sweet mush’. A free kick to reviewers. The texture is important in a really good tiramisu. It’s all in the savoiardi biscuits and really good quality mascarpone cheese. Tiramisu could have gone either way – sweet mush or something a bit more satisfying. While it teetered for a while, director Paula van der Oest avoided the most predictable narratives to produce a satisfying light drama. It’s billed as a comedy by MIFF; perhaps the Dutch language made it funnier than I could see.

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.

June reading

11 July

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.

Flip-Flopping Jerry
Loves Ruth. Or Sally. Or Ruth.
Or? How will it end?

If I had more room, I'd write "And who cares?" I didn't like Jerry or Sally much. I liked Ruth and Richard. I wondered whether I liked any of them when I read it in 1980. I wish I'd written in the margins. This blog is a way of writing in the margins...

I also read The Road by Mr Cormac McCarthy who writes about men. This book is less obviously a book about men and more a book about the relationship between the anonymous father and the anonymous son in the face of a post-apocalypse world. It was absolutely gripping; both the unfolding of the story and the depiction of the tragic doomed relationship they shared. I loved the way that he avoided telling us what had caused the apocalyspe and that, contrary to the way the genre usually unfolds, the story is set several years after disaster has struck.

A world full of ashes.
Doomed father and young son lurch
onwards. World without hope.

The love story (if you can describe it thus) is what enables you to read this grim story. It's beautiful sparse prose. A wonderful book.

Life's Looking Good

"Life's looking good, like a chopping block should." This blog name is drawn from some graffitti I encountered on the toilet wall of the women's toilets in the Union building at Melbourne Uni. Amidst the calls to the sisterhood, political statements and sexual confessions was this small piece of black philosophy. I liked it and it's one of the few things that has stuck from my time at Uni. I want to write a blog which is about what I am reading, looking at and doing. This is my first entry on the day after I have turned 50.

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:

She stayed away longer.

Given what I have read of Gertude Stein, I can hardly believe this economy. And then Amy read one of her own short short stories (a one sentence story) Just Once In My Life:

Oh, when have I ever wanted something just once in my life?

They are like little haiku. My friend Julie shared this great haiku with me:

Writing a haiku

With seventeen syllables

Is very diffic

Amy can be found here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2294505.htm.

So just to finish, the mention of Gertrude Stein reminded me of this all time funny threat. In an episode of The X-Files called "Bad Blood", the character Fox Mulder warns his partner, Dana Scully, that if she goes to prison, "your cellmate's nickname is gonna be Large Marge, she's gonna read a lot of Gertrude Stein."