10 reasons for avoiding the Iranian film 'Circumstance'

Warning – Spoilers contained

1. The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in bed.
2. The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in the fantasy Dubai hotel.
3. The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in bed (again)
4. The men in the audience who come to see dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scenes.
5. The gratuitous rape scene followed by the victim’s subsequent and immediate desire for the rapist.
6. The men in the audience who come to see gratuitous rape scenes followed by the victim’s subsequent and immediate desire for the rapist.
7. Insertion of one clever scene that plays with the film Milk and gives just one small and incorrect ray of hope that the film might improve towards the end.
8. The sheer difficulty of walking out of the film when you’re in the middle of the Forum cinema in the dark.
9. The frustration that attends a 9 pm screening of said film, knowing that escape will not be possible until after 11.
10. Ok- the last two are self-imposed conditions – I could only come up with 7 good reasons for avoiding this film.

If this doesn’t convince you, the following quote from the Slant website might, although I do not share the writer’s good will regarding the early stages of the film:

These latter acts topple the material full-bore into melodrama, sabotaging the early-going's convincing, compelling feel for youthful insurrection against stifling tradition in favor of more standard, less plausible tensions and conflicts. Casting Iran as a sinister social and political labyrinth designed to ensnare—and thus ensure docile acquiescence from—its female citizenry is no doubt justified, but the twists and turns of Circumstance prove increasingly formulaic and phony, especially once Mehran completes his transition from beaten-down recovering junkie to malevolent monster.

It won the audience prize at Sundance - something to do maybe with the "exotic" tags it has - ticks a lot of boxes...

The syntax of families

It’s easy to forget, from the vantage point of 53, how constant the issue of normality is when you’re 13 or 14. One psychologist I’ve heard reckons that the key universal refrain for teenagers is “Am I normal?” followed, (in my view) by “How do I fit in?”, “Do I want to fit in” and “What will it cost me?” I was thinking about these things yesterday watching the Israeli film Intimate Grammar, directed by Nir Bergman, which focuses on a teenage boy, Aharon and his struggle with these questions.

The film focuses on one family and their interactions, the bitter, abrasive mother, the hapless father and the two siblings, Aharon and his slightly older sister. The title, which I love, forces us to think about the grammar of relationships – of families. The three of us who saw the film together viewed the family differently – because of our own particular family grammar. For two of us, the mother was a pretty horrible experience, for the third, she was like her own mother and therefore interacting within the norms of behaviour. What are the rules in this Israeli family? How do people customarily display love, anger, the need for space?

The film begins in 1963 with black and white footage of Israel’s Independence Day. The larger political situation sits at the outer extremities of this film. It is referenced by characters and omnipresent only in the ways in which politics touches the lives of individuals; the Holocaust survivor’s appreciation of the importance of food, compulsory military service, active youth on kibbutzes. The immediacy of the film is based on its attention to the small neighbourhood where the family live. This small space is riddled with low-level conflict, and neighbourly abrasions. It’s shot in beautiful early 60’s colours like an old Polaroid. It’s claustrophobic in intention, we are squashed around the kitchen table enduring the squabbles, incipient tension and love that is part and parcel of this family. Like Koreada’s films (especially Still Walking), we are forced to be part of the painfulness and the lovely intimate moments that make up this family’s life.

The film is based on David Grossman’s novel. He was interviewed in the Paris Review about this and other novels and said, in relation to this:

I became a more friendly child in those years, more active socially, yet I remained introverted. In The Book of Intimate Grammar there is Aron, a secluded, lonely child, and his best friend Gideon, the all-Israeli boy, who goes out with girls, is in the Scouts, and wants to be a pilot. I modeled Gideon on a friend I had when I was sixteen—I even interviewed him. When the book came out, I sent a copy to him and anxiously awaited his reaction. He called me after some time and said, I liked it and, of course, I found myself. I am Aron. That was amazing to me. If I had heard him say that when I was sixteen, my entire life would have been different. My sense of solitude, of hopelessness, of being totally excommunicated—all this would have been different.

I love this quote. It really distils the experience of being an adolescent. That no one is as wretched as you, as uncool, as un-whatever it is that you have a yearning for. And, unbeknownst to you, everyone around you is feeling the same. Aharon (the Aron of Grossman’s quote) is small for his age. Bergman deals with this theme subtly in the film; it is a preoccupation but not one that we expect will dominate the boy’s life in quite the way it does. It made me remember a Maltese boy I taught in 1983. John was very short for his age. He was, in the parlance of my adolescence “a late developer”. John, a lively, intelligent boy who practised magic tricks on weekends, hung himself in a shed at the age of 17 and a half. I would’ve been about 24 or 25 then – a young teacher – I remember being really upset that he’d given no inkling that the height thing bothered him. It matters, that stuff about body image, about fitting in, about girls and being cool. So what Bergman gives us is a film about difference (newly emergent Israel, life in the cheek by jowl suburbs) and universality. It’s pretty classy.

Boy A

What do we do with children who commit horrible crimes? I started thinking about this earlier this week apropos of the court case where 4 young men from Melton belted up a Sudanese boy. They embodied everything that is unseen about the underbelly of this society; racist, largely unrepentant, low levels of schooling and likely to breed way more kids than anyone in my bubble of acquaintance. The barrister representing one of them reckoned that he should be excused a jail term because his poor access to schooling had left him bereft of a value structure! I really don’t know what should happen in cases like this. One writer to The Age suggested that these boys should be sent to the Sudan to experience a community where schooling is really hard to access!

I saw the English film Boy A last night. It’s won some awards and will probably get a commercial release. It follows the experiences of a young man, in his early 20s, who has just been released from jail after committing some sort of horrible crime. We don’t find out immediately, which creates a level of tension and interest that combines with the tension and interest as to whether ‘Jack’ is going to be able to survive with a new identity in a new town.

He is likeable. The actor Andrew Garfield, does a fantastic job of playing this young guy who has missed out on some of the key milestones in a teenager’s life and doesn’t know how to behave. He is shy and gawky and easy to like but all the time, you’re wondering what he did and what will befall him. The film is also about families; ‘Jack’ is supported by a parole officer with a son of about the same age. To some extent, the film is about the old Philip Larkin ‘They fuck you up…’ riff. Fathers and sons. Abuse. To what extent can you use your family (or poor schooling) as an excuse for your behaviour. It’s a well-told story but I am no closer to having any idea what should happen to those Melton boguns…

Slow burn of embarrassment

“As I get older, I want life to slow down a little. Films move too fast. I want to stay in the moment and, if you wait, things reveal themselves.” The film maker is Joanna Hogg and she is talking about her latest film Unrelated which I really loved despite it being a little too long.

Her film is a real achievement given that the main character Anna (Kathryn Worth) is annoying, embarrassing and dumb. Most of the time, I felt irritated with her. A middle aged English woman, she arrives at an Italian villa near Sienna late at night to be greeted by her friend’s daughter and her friends. They are drinking by the pool; the adults have gone to bed. The early part of the film sets up her unease and the fact that she and her absent husband are going through a rocky patch. Anna has been invited to be part of this holiday for this extended family and friends but she seems incapable of connecting with Verena, her friend and gravitates towards the younger generation who are in their late teens or early twenties. The whole extended generational mix reminded me of being at the beach house and of the sort of tensions which arise when you plonk a whole lot of people in the one place for too long an d fuel it with alcohol.

Hogg said in an interview that she deliberately organised the film shoot so that all the actors had to commit to being in the house for about 7 weeks. She shot it consecutively so that the story could emerge organically. Looking at this house and environment, it would be no real hardship to be forced to spend a couple of months there but tensions arise when you live in close proximity to other people for any length of time.

Anna is attracted to Oakley; there are many scenes where I felt the slow burn of embarrassment for her. It was painful to watch but very real. I am most interested in the questions of allegiances in this film. You can watch a trailer which shows the Gen Y kids buying (mostly) alcohol from the supermarket. Anna is trailing along behind with an uncertain look on her face like she’s not really sure if she fits in. (She’s not really sure if she fits in anywhere.) They hoon out to the car with the shopping trolleys and end up in a field smoking a joint. The kids (I know I should write young adults but this denotes my age) boast about getting pissed and rolling round Sienna in the middle of the night pissing on church doors, while Anna looks sort of embarrassed and sort of complicit. Then a silence falls over the group as they realise that she is “not one of them”. “Hey, don’t tell the olds.” And she agrees and that sets up the dramatic tension for a large amount of the film.

We would have liked to have seen more of the olds in the film. Slightly too much time is taken up trailing round after the kids and apart from Anna, the older generation remains largely one-dimensional. But Naomi and I both loved the tag line between Anna and Verena; an awkward and uncomfortable “Hey, let’s get a couple of tickets to an Iggy Pop concert some time.” Which sort of tells us that Anna is still in a pretty ungrounded space, despite what has happened to her in the close confines of this house.

Vulnerability

Wendy and Lucy is the second film I have seen this year that explores life on the road. In both Into the Wild and this film, the perspective is that of a young American going north. I hadn’t been much interested in Into the Wild until a friend told me how much he’d loved it. That film followed the real life of Christopher McCandless who left home after graduating, heading towards Alaska, without telling his family of his plans. His plans. He didn’t seem to have plans, more a sort of disgust about the material and pressured life that seemed to be laid out for him as a young lawyer. In contrast, Wendy (Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain) has plans. She is also headed for Alaska, seeking work. The film begins with a long shot- we see her playing with her dog Lucy and humming tunelessly. The long shot feels voyeuristic and sets up the ongoing feeling that people with nastier intentions than the film audience will also be watching Wendy who is young and vulnerable. She is on the margins; the next shot takes us to a campfire of people who are passing though a town on Oregon. It’s a little bit scary but she gets some good advice about possible work in Alaska and is able to move on.

McCandless took on the name of ‘Alexander Supertramp' and shrugged off any trappings of comfort pretty quickly. When his car was wrecked in a flood, he burnt the number plate and all his remaining money and started hitchhiking and jumping trains. What he does is sort of shocking. His journey is set against the background of the most fabulous North American scenery; big skies, rivers, bird and animal life. You get a real sense of the attraction for him of being on the road. In Wendy’s case, she gets stuck in a town in Oregon and we linger with her as things get more and more desperate. In contract to the Supertramp character, her shrinking money is a real issue for her. I could describe the plot in about two sentences so the real skill of the film-maker is in taking time to let us feel her vulnerability and strength of character. I’m really interested, in this MIFF, in films which try to stay with the painful moments for characters, in how film makers create the space for us to feel what they are feeling. I’m not so interested in crying when there is a painful moment as in really being forced to sit in the horribleness of whatever is on the screen and feel it.

The director, Kelly Reichardt, does this in a couple of ways. There is no music to distract or artificially build emotion. The film is slow; we experience Wendy’s panic when she discovers her dog is missing in excruciating slow tension. Wendy is never melodramatic; she is tightly contained, like Supertramp, but so so vulnerable. And the film feels like real life because it is just a fragment from Wendy’s life. I loved the director’s willingness to have us sit with the pain and fear and loneliness of Wendy. It was hard to sit through but very real.

Supertramp’s sister provides part of the narrative voice of Into the Wild; through her comments we hear what the family is going through as their boy has effectively disappeared. The film is quite interested in exploring the pain for the family of his decision to disappear and the extent to which he can no longer really connect with anyone that he meets. Some film footage makes us wonder about his relationship with his parents, particular his father, and to think about what you owe you family in terms of communicating with them. When is it OK to say “enough is enough” and to simply drop out of a family? Is it ever OK? Is it OK to punish the whole family for the sins of some? In Wendy’s case we are exposed to a little of her family but it’s clear that there is a disconnect. We’re left to wonder about what has happened in her life. She and the dog are alone on the road and this small lovely, painful film is also a film about the love which Wendy and her dog share. And about vulnerability and choices – or lack of them. And about making brave choices - It’s a difficult film for dog-owners.

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.