Incendies (Sunday, May 15, 2011) (31)

The French-Canadian film Incendies, adapted for the screen and directed by Denis Villeneuve from a play by by Wajdi Mouawad, is a very interesting exploration of a family's complicated history. The film opens with twins Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) sitting with the lawyer and friend of their mother Nawal (Lubna Azabel) in his Montreal office, after she has recently died. He tells them that her estate will be split between them equally, but that they have to search for their father (who they presumed was dead) and brother (who they didn't know existed) in her native Middle-Eastern country. It seems their mother had an eventful life before she immigrated to Canada, a life that included a lost son.

At first they are dumbstruck that their mother kept these people from them, then they are angry that she was "making things difficult from beyond the grave". She was probably not a wonderfully loving mother to them, and hunting for their family members is the last things they want to do.

Jeanne sets out first to find the brother, going to the mother's remote village (in a country that is given no name on purpose, but is something very much like Lebanon) to get information from anyone who might remember her. She finds that her mother was an outcast who has no friends left where she came from. As the story unfolds to the twins and to us, we realize that their mother was a political activist who left a trail of pain behind her.

The structure of the film is very complex and not-totally linear, making it sometimes difficult to establish place and time as we move from one chapter to another. We see Jeanne flash back to a moment just before her mother's death where she was suddenly and literally dumbstruck at a public pool, we then jump to the mother's life back when she was in her twenties and fighting for a rightist Christian agenda in the largely Muslim country (see: Lebanon). This disorientation is important for us to understand how head-spinning these revelations are for the twins. Sometimes the story they are discovering is so strange and unexpected that even they can't believe it.

Still, there is a tension and a sense that we never quite know exactly what we should be knowing but that we are very close, the comprehension equivalent of having a word on the "tip of your tongue". Many of the stories we see or hear are so elliptical and subjective that we never get enough space to figure out a full meaning. I think this is an effective device, but it is a bit showy and overdone at times I really would rather there was a more standard sequence of scenes.

Technically Villeneuve does a beautiful job with the look of the film and the framing of the shots. He uses a lot of hand-held cameras and near-point-of-view shots putting us relatively in the subjective position of the characters (mostly Nawal and Jeanne). He brilliantly uses the frame to conceal parts of bigger images and give us a very interesting selective view of things. This approach is used brilliantly in the climactic moment when the identities of the father and son are revealed. In many ways this style is all used to foreshadow that one shot - a very literary technique used beautifully in the visual here (how nice!).

The penultimate scene of the film ties the story up elegantly, but Villeneuve, unfortunately uses an epilogue that is totally unnecessary and very annoying. After we've just come to the end of a very complicated story, the epilogue has one character reading a letter explaining exactly what we have just seen. It's as if Villeneuve goes from thinking we are the smartest audience in the world to the dumbest in a matter of minutes. Aside from being intellectually frustrating, the epilogue is banal, leaving a very common, simplistic idea in our heads.

I feel like this is a very good movie, but has a bunch of problems that should have been washed out over drafts and re-writes of the script, not to mention stage-productions. This is a beautiful, emotional roller coaster of a story that gets us deeply into this family, but some of its formal qualities are too distancing. I think Villeneuve sometimes tries too hard to impress us rather than just telling a good story.

Stars: 3 of 4

Miral (Friday, April 1, 2011) (18)

Ugh. This fucking movie... So Julian Schnabel has made three fabulous movies up to this point: Baquiat, Before Night Falls and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I think he films are much more interesting, much more visually appealing and much more approachable than his other artworks (I really don't like his broken plates on canvas "paintings). Miral, however, breaks that streak as it has a really terrible story, is full of terrible film cliches, has no clear narrative structure with lots of waste and was apparently cast by a blind person (and a deaf person).

The story follows the Palestinian freedom movement from the creation of Israel in 1948 to sometime randomly around the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993 (apparently the Second Intefada wasn't important or something). Miral (Freida Pinto) is a girl born to two Palestinian people in the 1970s. After her mother dies, her father puts her into an orphanage for Palestinian girls in East Jerusalem (I think) set up by Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass) who is a sorta political person. There she is raised on the edge of political radicalism, but never really becomes a radical herself.

At some point when she's a teenager she gets a boyfriend who is more of a radical and she begins peacefully protesting Israeli treatment of Palestinians with fliers and picket signs. Then she's arrested and then there's a peace agreement (I don't mean to give too much away. Sorry). That's about it. More than anything, this is a really, really dull story where basically nothing happens. It doesn't really give a good view of the Palestinian struggle (Arafat and the PLO are never mentioned, as far as I could tell) and doesn't really explain any amount of world history that was happening at that time.

There's nothing wonderful about the look of the film, nothing you haven't see a million times in other movies. Schnabel plays with colors throughout the film, so sometimes you get washed out, super bright desert scenes, sometimes he puts a blue or red filter on the lens and you get blue or red scenes. The camera seems to move a lot, in one sequence he tilts it up to look at the tops of trees in a woods and spins... I think I've seen that before in one of his movies (maybe Diving Bell). It's all a bit paint-by-numbers filmmaking and not really interesting.

OK - so let's talk about how Freida Pinto is an Indian woman born in Mumbai and is not Palestinian. This was really totally distracting for me throughout the film. I heard an interview recently with Schnabel who said that Rula Jebreal, who wrote the memoir the film is based on (and who is now Schnabel's girlfriend), looks Indian so he cast an Indian in the role that is based on her. Well, that would be great, if the movie was called "Rula" and it was hyper-realistic - but it's not. It's a
movie called Miral and there is no sense in not casting a Palestinian, or Arab, woman in the role. It's weird and culturally dishonest.

Then there's the fact that the film is in English and not Arabic. Two of his first three films are not in English. Before Night Falls is a film about Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas and it is in Spanish and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is about French fashion editor Jean-Dominique Bauby and is in French. So why the hell is this movie in English? It's totally distracting, especially when there are English-speaking characters in the story - like a US military guy who mysteriously comes in and out of the first act of the film and is played by Willem Dafoe.

The film has been getting a lot of press about how it's anti-Israeli or something. I really don't see that totally. It's anti-Israeli the way that Star Wars is anti-Empire or the way Pan's Labyrinth is anti-Spanish fascists. That is to say that the Israelis are painted so broadly and are so bizarrely one-dimensional that they almost cease to exist as real characters or a real negative force.

There are several (turgid, terribly written) lines of dialogue where you hear Palestianians commiserate about " why won't they let us build new houses?" or "why are the settlers in our land?" Well, yes - those are good questions - but empty questions really won't scratch the surface of the issues. We see IDF soldiers acting like dicks at checkpoints. OK - buy why are they acting like dicks? And is it only the soldiers who are acting this way or do Israelis on the street agree with them. The fact is we see basically one civilian Israeli in the whole film, played by Schabel's daughter Stella... and she's a pretty cool girl, who is then dropped from the plot.

My favorite bad part of this bad film (aside from the all-brown-people-are-the-same mixup) is that end credits song is some obscure Tom Waits tune, sung in English, sorta a bluesy, mournful rock piece. Uh, Julian, are you telling me there wasn't something more relevant to the story or the region that you could have put in this spot? Maybe a song from the rough geographic area (by a Palestinian musician? Even a Palestinian rock song? Something in Arabic?)? What's the point in all this cultural gobbledygook? I don't really know and I bet Schnabel doesn't either. This is very much the throw-pasta-at-the-wall approach to making movies. It doesn't stand on its own at all, is incredibly boring and is pretty dishonest as a historical narrative.

Stars: .5 of 4

American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein (Sunday, June 20, 2010) (55)

This is a small documentary about American academic Norman Finkelstein who has made a career out of being a Jew who does not supported much of the recent Israeli policy toward Palestinians. He has been an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East and has worked tirelessly to get the world community to see the conflict from the Palestinian point of view. As the son of Holocaust survivors, he has been an interesting voice in the debate, comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians to his parents' treatment in the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazis.

The film briefly shows Finkelstein's roots in Brooklyn and how he made a name for himself in the early 1980s writing a piece that criticized a popular book that only took the Israeli side of the conflict. Most of the film takes place in the past few years as he went on a college campus debate tour over his latest book. In the middle of the tour, he got into a fight on the radio with Alan Dershowitz and then made it his mission to condemn Dersh and prove him to be a plagiarist. This got him into hot water with his employers, Hunter College and then DePaul University.

Finkelstein is certainly a weird guy and basically doesn't know when to shut the hell up. He is not wrong about Dersh copying footnotes from an earlier book into his recent one (I have read about this and it seems pretty clear that he plagiarized), but so what?! This is not a battle worth fighting.

At a point, Finkelstein goes even further off the rails by claiming that Hezbollah is a force for good. Certainly they are doing some money-giving work on the ground in Beirut, but it's hard to argue that they are an absolute force for good (their policy of wiping Israel off the map isn't "good", no matter how you slice it).

He seems to enjoy being a firebrand, more than being a serious public intellectual. It is interesting to see before our eyes him move from the latter to the former.

This is an interesting film, though rather wonky. You have to be interested in the Middle East and the "peace process" to even remotely enjoy or understand this. Still, it's an interesting work.

Stars: 2 of 4

Waiting for Armageddon (Sunday, June 20, 2010) (54)

Waiting for Armageddon is an interesting documentary about how right-wing American Christians support very rigid Israeli right wing efforts to get Palestinians out of Jerusalem, figuring that Jesus will only return when the city is controlled by Jews and the Temple is rebuilt. It is a bit of a cautionary tale for American Jews (or really any Jews) who support a one-dimensional approach to Israeli policy. It is about how these people are not looking to be friends with Jews, but are looking to use Jews for their own devices. Jews to them are place-holders with a false religion who represent a possible deliverance from their terrestrial lives. This cynical view is particularly sickening to me (not only the people who think it, but also the Jews who allow themselves and their people to be used in such a way).

The film is done very nicely with interesting interviews from both sides (from the Christians and from skeptical Israelis) and interesting perspective from academics and historians. It has a nice, tight look and seems well put-together overall.

The best and freshest thing (and really an amazingly lucky documentary moment) is a sequence at a gathering of Christians where a speaker talks about how "post-modernism" is the worst thing in the world, because it allows you to split the meanings of words and actions. Calling post-modernism horrible because of its fluid definitions! How amazing! How post-modern!

Still, there's nothing much very original about this film. It's not bad at all, but it's not really anything that I haven't seen or read before in the (left-wing) press. Yes, the Christian-Right generally hates Jews and only cares about Jesus' second coming... it's not all that interesting.

Stars: 2 of 4