The Debris of the Soul

The complete cinematic experience consists of the interaction between the external screen and our internal emotions. With this spirit, I watched Beasts of the Southern Wild, a visually enchanting and difficult movie. In it, the apocalyptic photography, the music, and the sound produce a dreamy dimension. This movie is about being brave, about desperate love that transcends the boundaries of bodies and spaces. It is ultimately about the transmission of knowledge from parents to daughter.

The setting is a surreal industrial pre and post Katrina “bathtub.” The leading actor is a child with the acting skills of Marlon Brando, who carries the audience along the debris of souls, the shanty and disordered places, and the magic of realism. Hushpuppy is her name. The movie has few direct dialogues. What we see, hear, and perceive is through Hushpuppy’s eyes. Some actors are silent throughout the length of the movie. Some others are the background of a marginal world where children wonder around and they are always cared as one’s own.

A scene, a joyful break in the story, reveals a floating world of sex trade, joyful encounters, and recuperated love. Food, dance, affection surround Hushpuppy and her silent friends who finally find some peace in the loving harms of “girls girls girls.” This movie moves at every scene; it embraces the audience. Suddenly the emotions of impossibility and apparent motionlessness leave the path to distraction from one's self because stories develop despite and beyond boundaries and expectations. 

The Borders of Comprehension

In an overly crowded small cinema d’essai, I recently watched The Tree of Life. The only available sit was in the dreadful first row so the film really entered my brain and my neck. My sit neighbor gave up after few minutes, turning his attention to his smart-phone and an infinite reserve of twizzlers.

In The Tree of Life there are no borderlands or borders, everything is extremely open and experimental. One moment, we see proto fascist father Bred Pitt (who for the occasion lost all his “hotness), another moment we see Sean Penn trapped in designers’ dream house, and another moment we see supportive dinosaurs that in the name of animal solidarity don’t eat each other. (Imagine all this from the front row).

But Melick had a plan. Although, at first the lack of coherent narrative and hidden elements are very disturbing, later in the calmness of my overstuffed apartment, I could see better his intensions and a certain level of mercy for the audience.

This film is about men and how they manifest their sorrow and desires. The man in question is a boy, who has to deal with the quasi-Victorian family dynamics in 1950s Texas. The neighborhood is the entire world. The overly beautiful, caring, and playful mother strikingly contrasts with the father who wants to be called “father not dad.” The themes of coming of age, of dealing with death and with sexual desires are there but developed along a realistic continuum of acceptance.

The audience will recognize the same voice-effect of The Thin Red Line. Malick seems to like certain colors and he sticks to them. For The Thin Red Line, it was grey, red, and shades of brown. For The Tree of Life, it is green and blue. There is one film in the film that I can’t still explain but just take for his visual power as I would take a painting. It’s a sort of Kubrick’s dream perhaps about the eternity of life. Furthermore, the end of the film reminds of the end of theatrical play: all the characters meet in a sort of apocalyptical moment, perhaps to thank the audience to have resisted until the end.

Magic Realism Right Here Right Now

When M. and I went to see Biufitul by Iñárritu, we left the movie theatre without looking at each other saying a quick goodbye that meant “I need time to think about what we watched.” M. and I had agreed that no one should ask us “did you like it?” right after watching a movie. That would push us to make a quick judgment; instead we need at least 24 hours to let the images, dialogues, and music marinate in our soul. This movie hypnotizes the audience with strong color, music, and heart-tormenting stories.

In Biutiful there are multiple borderlands besides the obvious ones of race, class, and gender in a merciless contemporary Barcelona. We don’t see landmarks of the city; the geographical setting is irrelevant as any exploitative métropole is the same. Uxbal is the magic realist hero. His supernatural power makes him more aware of his surrounding, sometimes is a source of income, and helps the audience to cope with the despair of people’s lives as described in the film. The supernatural happens in the midst of new techniques to commodify the human body within a neo-colonial framework. This is not about the colonized turned into migrant but about the so-called "new world order" that makes us all victims (and perpetrators) of wild capitalism. Barcelona is the archetypical land of centers and peripheries, of corrupted police, of no-passport escapades, of sweatshops’ dreadfulness, and of strange solidarity.

A message that I want to get from this movie is that human relationships rescue us from the dehumanizing forces of global exploitation. This is not a story of good women and bad men. It’s much more subtle than that. It’s about our own possibilities of choosing, the good old free will. I am allowed though to have my favorites in this range of Biutiful characters. Bea is like Barcelona, motionless spectator of Uxbal's struggle, she is his magical refuge. Ige is the quintessential answer to human degrade; she is the woman of the right here and right now.

Entre Vida y Peliculas

Sometimes we turn our own everyday life into films. We struggle to force people and situations within filmic categories. We are enchanted by the Victorian player (playa) of Jane Eyre who had a mad wife hidden in the attic. We are tormented by the postcolonial hero who charms us with poems and stories of struggle. Ultimately, we are smitten with the obscure boy who convinces us that free love is the answer... for men of course, not for women. All in all our living cinematic loves tell us a story; most times we don’t believe it, but if we do, we launch a campaign against our brain, against our common sense, and against our friends. At that point we are ready to fight for the cause/story. Then we get tired because we had too much rum in the company of the wanna-be revolutionary.

The morning after is the time of confusion, the time of possibilities. It can be the end or the beginning. In the film “French film” Hugh Bonneville wonders why people are obsessed with the beginnings of their love stories. I can’t leave him because our beginning was magical. I heard that many times. I also heard: we must be together because our beginning was magical. Bonneville finds out that beginnings don’t make stories. What really makes a story is the consolidation of it. It is about choosing, taking a stand, and risking. It is about being brave. After numerous beginnings, Jane falls for Richard, but when she finds out about the other woman, she leaves and among the inhospitable nature she finds peace. If our lives were screenplays, the writer would always make us leave. Instead we stay, chasing the filmic.

On Male Putos: Crossing Emotional and Commercial Boundaries

This week’s borderland is Josianne Belasko’s provocative story on male whoring. In an anonymous Paris, sisters Judith and Irene run a commercial TV – the one that in the US would sell the snuggle. The male whore, or gigolo if we want, is Marco aka Patrick. Judith is the “cliente” which is the title of the film in France. The twist is social and sexual: Judith is a commitment phobic hence she thinks that by buying sex she doesn’t get attached. She is a middle-aged divorcee whose ex husband married someone twenty years younger with whom he had a child. The usual story. Marco lives at the outskirt of Paris, in a racially mixed harmonious community. He is married to Fanny and they are too poor to have their own house so they like with Fanny’s mother and sister.

Belasko represents women who like sex without the complexity of emotional involvement. The sexual trade happens in a dignifying way where both Judith and Marco are a happy customer and supplier. Belasko breaks with some misconceptions on female sexuality and the desire of domesticating the male. Another broken taboo in the film is the presence of the female pimp. Initially Fanny is hurt and disgusted by Marco’s whoring career. Later though when poverty torments them with mortgages, bills, and no future perspective, Fanny changes her mind. She pushes Marco to go back to his “escort” career so that they can have a decent life. This is indeed the social twist of the film.

Eventually Fanny and Marco realize that they can’t handle the fracture of another woman/cliente between them. They intended to transcend attachments but struggled to separate sex from emotions. Eventually Fanny surrenders and jealousy overcomes financial needs. In this Belasko presents us a more realistic, perhaps stereotypical, woman who is unwilling to share her husband.

Josiane Belasko pushes us with excellent humor to transcend our gendered conceptions of sexual trade. She then brings us back to psychodrama of heterosexual love.

Filmic Orientalism Made in Italy

Silvio Soldini, acclaimed director of Bread and Tulips, is enamored with postcolonial encounters along the Italian peninsula. In his last effort, “Cosa voglio di piu’” translated as “Come undone” (I’ll never understand the rationale behind films’ titles translation) he depicts the illicit relationship between the autochthon Anna, blonde professionally-driven woman and Domenico, dark hair Greek-god-like-body with unskilled job. The setting is a provincial town nearby an obscure 21^st century Milan. The story is irrelevant if it wasn’t for Soldini’s new narrative technique that hides passages to the audience. If Anna uses her cell phone we’ll know that she is calling Domenico. However, the scenes are temporally and spatially disconnected. Perhaps a finesse of Allenian tradition.

The tropes of the story are relevant to people who explore the multiple constructions of differences. Domenico is a migrant from the South of Italy; he jokingly says “I’m from Saudi Calabria” using a discursive proximity that in the Italian collective imaginary means uncivilized. Leave alone the fact that extremely wealthy Saudi Arabia has nothing do to with economically depressed Calabria.

Anna instead is from the imaginary dorm city where her working class family represents an achor to the territory contrary to the instability of Domenico’s life. They both live in cemented blocks with little green space but while Anna’s partner is a fixer, Domenico’s partner lives in domestic disorder. The migrant family is represented as incapable of keeping European civilazation within the household, of educating children, and of conducting a financially dignifying life.

Anna and Domenico are cheaters but while Domenico’s wife makes a southern scene when she finds out, civilized Anna’s partner says “let’s go to sleep as it has been a dense day.” Towards the end of film when the story seemed to be ended, the narrative takes a turn and the cheating couple is spending a weekend in Tunisia. Again, Soldini doesn’t reveal the intricacy of the plot that took them to the “real” North Africa. But Anna’s civilization strickes again: her partner calmly let her chose to go for a weekend with her lover so that she could decide what to do. Domenico, instead, machistically left without saying anything to his wife.

The end is maybe expected because Anna and Domenico’s affair even if physically involving never transmitted deep feelings. Like the dorm town where they live, everything has a passionless rhythm perhaps to define civilization as uneventuful.