A souffle of strangeness?

Note – Spoiler alert


I’ve seen three films in the last little while with children in lead roles. I Wish, Moonrise Kingdom and Monsieur Lazhar have seemingly little in common apart from this fact – but in each case, the presence of the children invests the film with charm and a fable-like quality that made me put away adult ways (scepticism, hard-heartedness, cynicism).

The Girl’s Own Annual overlay of Moonrise Kingdom was especially appealing. It was beautiful to look at, like a faded Polaroid, or the pages of a picture story book from the 1960s (it was set in 1965). Situated on an island off the coast of New England, two 12 year olds run away from home. This is not a gritty urban runaway story, despite the fact that the boy, Sam, is an orphan living in a foster home, and the girl, Suzy, is unhappy at school and feels misunderstood at home. Each starts out on the adventure with a lot of equipment (she takes a cat in a basket, a portable record player and several hardback books, he carries a pipe and enough camping equipment for a scout troop. The film is highly stylized – reminiscent in look and feel to the new app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Less more.
Critic Roger Ebert describes it thus: “Anderson always fills his films with colors, never garish but usually definite and active. In "Moonrise Kingdom," the palette tends toward the green of new grass, and the Scout's khaki brown. Also the right amount of red. It is a comfortable canvas to look at, so pretty that it helps establish the feeling of magical realism”  and Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian says: “Where David Lynch finds a dark horror beneath the wholesome exterior, Anderson sees something else — something exotic but practical and self-possessed, a world that ticks along like an antique toy, much treasured by a precocious child. The homes and buildings often look like giant dolls' houses.”

The adult world depicted in all three films is fraught – by relationship issues, war, suicide, loneliness, displacement. And so each film-maker is able to generate a contrast between the adult world and the children’s world – of perspective, of capacity to respond to the world, of tone. Monsieur Lazhar is the bleakest, dealing as it does with suicide, war and refugees. In this film, the children cannot escape these issues and the film is potentially quite dark. We watch it knowing that it can’t (and shouldn’t) end well. What makes it bearable is the relationships created in the classroom between the children and their teacher and his determination to acknowledge and work with the pain they’ve experienced as a group. In this he shows great respect for what children are capable of both feeling and working through.

Koreada, who directed I Wish, showed this kind of respect in Nobody Knows, his 2004 film that focussed on a family of children abandoned by their parents trying to survive in the Tokyo suburbs without adult support. He is a director who is very skilled at working with children. In I Wish, the lead characters are played by two real-life brothers who play brothers separated when their parent’s marriage breaks up. Living in different cities, they miss each other and what the family was and the plot to get the parents back together (the “I wish” of the title). The film is about the wishes and fantasies of children, as all three films are to some extent. There is a sweetness in the story, a humanism and charm in the kids that made me put aside things that I would normally criticise. I liked being in the optimism of the kids’ zone – they thought they could do things, change things. All three films give children a degree of agency, inventiveness and care for each other that is often missing in films about children.

It’s maybe no accident that I’ve connected I Wish and Moonrise Kingdom. Roger Ebert says, of Wes Anderson “In Anderson's films, there is a sort of resignation to the underlying melancholy of the world; he is the only American director I can think of whose work reflects the Japanese concept mono no aware, which describes a wistfulness about the transience of things. Even Sam and Suzy, sharing the experience of a lifetime, seem aware that this will be their last summer for such an adventure. Next year they will be too old for such irresponsibility.”
I could write more, as others have, about the symbolism inherent in Moonrise Kingdom (the coming of the flood, America in a time of innocence (early 60s – innocent – really?) etc etc) but these things weren’t strong factors in the charm of this film for me. Bradshaw says it better than I can: “Anderson's movies are vulnerable to the charge of being supercilious oddities, but there is elegance and formal brilliance in Moonrise Kingdom as well as a lot of gentle, winning comedy. His homemade aesthetic is placed at the service of a counter-digital, almost hand-drawn cinema, and he has an extraordinary ability to conjure a complete, distinctive universe, entire of itself. To some, Moonrise Kingdom may be nothing more than a soufflé of strangeness, but it rises superbly.”

Dark and crazy

What little I know of life in Romania has been conveyed mainly by films until now. I have seen some splendid films including Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I thought about a lot when I was reading The Appointment. In the latter film, an old man is carted from hospital to hospital in the course of one night, getting sicker and sicker as doctors keep refusing to treat him and send him away. The plot line of The Appointment is not dissimilar. The main character (unnamed) is on a tram journey across town which lasts the course of the book. She has been “summoned” by the authorities for interrogation; this trip is just one of many already taken. The journey in the story allows for the character to reflect on her life while adding a kind of forward impetus to the narrative. We are keen to find out what will happen to her as we linger in the surreal and muddy waters of life under the Ceaucescu regime.

It’s a hard book to read. There is nothing desirable about her life and awful things happen to most characters. As occurs in toxic regimes (and this applies to workplaces as much as cultures and countries), people behave very badly toward one another when there is fear and scape-goating around. Or they drink to escape or have nihilistic or abusive sex. All of these elements pertain in this novel. I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it but it provides both a sense of truth, and some very fine writing. Take the following for example:

“The water squirted and gathered around the tree trunks in shallow pools, full of drowned ants. The earth drank slowly. Then Grandfather said You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you've even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. From here to there it's just the farty splutter of a lantern. And they call that having lived. It's not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.” (p80)

This novel was written by Herta Muller who emigrated to Germany in 1987, two years before the Ceaucescu regime was overthrown. She accurately captures the way in which the individual is made powerless by the state in writing: "there's nothing to think about, because I myself am nothing, apart from being summoned." One reviewer, Costica Bradatan, wrote: “Müller's work is political not in any superficial way, but in the more profound sense of literature as bearing witness. ‘Bearing witness’ is just the right phrase – it doesn’t make it an easy read but it does make the narrative compelling. It reminds me of the novel I read earlier in the year set in Libya (In the Country of Men). In that case, the author made the politics more palatable by telling the story through the perspective of a small boy. I liked that novel a lot but I’m glad that Muller didn’t try to make it easy to read. Like the ride with Mr Lazarescu, you kind of need to endure the awfulness and the craziness. I guess the other obvious comparison is anything by Kafka, but I haven’t been in that territory for a long time.

Bradatan also writes:

"There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail…That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for."

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Rabbit

Returning to the haiku tradition for Rabbit Redux:

"Suck it and see" is what
Rabbit might have thought
If he thought at all.

Just finished Rabbit is Rich which I loved. Will post some more about this novel which is now almost 30 years old.

Wrangling India

It’s worth seeing Slumdog Millionaire just for the Bombay character which is ever-present. The film begins with a long chase scene through the slums; two small boys followed by a policeman. They have been playing cricket on the tarmac of an airport runway. As you do. It’s a great opening sequence that sets up the whole film; these kids are resilient, cheeky survivors in a city that requires these qualities.

Mumbai/ Bombay was the first Indian city I ever went to. Here is what I wrote back in 2000 about arriving:

“I had been wondering how long it would take for the work 'teeming' to enter the thought process- I had to wait no longer than the Qantas In-flight video where Mumbai was described as "magnificent and teeming" , a "city of contrasts" - great cliché writing. A night journey into Mumbai- hot, heaps of men in the streets, zooming little 3 wheeler auto cabs, no women to be seen anywhere, my driver attempting to keep me awake (4.30 am Melb time) by making a left turn in front of a bus going straight ahead. Buses are invincible in India - just scary in their intent.

A day in Mumbai - caught the train into the 'city' squashed into a carriage full of saris and Jill in her stolid navy! Lovely being with the women and when I finally worked out that I was blocking the way out of the train (10 stops later) they welcomed me and gave me a seat.”

Unlike a lot of my life, I remember this arrival very vividly. I flew in late at night into a world where people careered round in the little mechanised autocabs. I caught one to my hotel in Juhu, a beachside suburb close to the airport which features a bit in Slumdog Millionaire. Juhu was a strange mix of seeming hipness (lots of bars and clubs) and deadset sleaze. Once inside my hotel room I bounced off the walls. I felt frightened and vulnerable. It was my first time overseas by myself.

The next day I planned to go into the “city” to go to the museum. I caught the suburban train. It cost 2 cents. The description above doesn’t do it justice. I missed several trains because they were too full and people sort of waved me off. It took me a while to realise that I was trying to get into the wrong carriage; I should be in the women’s carriages which were at one end of the train. My journey took a long time. It’s no wonder I found India hard going on that trip; there was no cushion of protection from ‘real’ India as I experienced in later trips. It was like being hit over the head with a shovel. I looked at a lot of the scenes in Slumdog Millionaire with a kind of wonderment that I managed it at all. And have been back. And love it.

An English guy, Danny Boyle, made Slumdog Millionaire. I haven’t seen any of his other films. He said that working in India was not like “wrangling India’ as one interviewer suggested; it was like “accumulating India”. It’s a version of “Don’t fight the Ganges”, the very sage advice I learnt on my first trip. The notion of wrangling anything in India is kind of hopeful. Boyle said "I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy." Ironically it's a film about survival when the very process of making the film must have felt about as scary and out of control.

If you accept the film as homage to Bombay, it works about as well as it could. Like being in India you need to go with the heavy melodrama and the obvious villains and innocents. It’s not subtle. The theme of exploitation of slum kids was done a whole lot better by Rohinton Mistry in the novel A Fine Balance and more recently in Animal's People by Indra Sinha. Jamal, the main character in the film, is only interesting for what happens to him and for his doggedness and honesty; he is otherwise without screen exuberance. I probably agree with The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis who says "In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit." All true but Boyle gets away with it because of Bombay.

As a postscript, I read Paul Theroux's book The Elephanta Suite recently. I have not loved his writing in the past but I really liked this book which is a collection of three novellas. It's very very self conscious fiction; it's not his comfort zone. It doesn't flow sweetly. But he is wrestling with the encountering of American and Indian cultures and I loved what he was trying to say about the process. Here is a snippet from a review in The Guardian: "Alice, the heroine of the last of these three novellas, 'The Elephant God', a young American woman on a train, feels that Indian novels haven't adequately prepared her for the experience of India. 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?' "That's India for you - big enough for all these stories AND Slumdog and more...