FAULTLINES
by
Don Larsson

Questions of guilt and innocence, of people's actions under pressure, mark the three films here. In the first two cases, political pressures intensify the usual struggles of life; in the last, it is precisely the lack of political pressure that creates struggle.

In Divided We Fall, a Czech town has been occupied by the Nazis after Munich, and the previous social order has been overthrown. The town's wealthiest family, Jewish but not intensely religious, is gradually ousted from their business and home and eventually shipped off to Terezin, the "showcase" concentration camp that was really just a way station for Auschwitz.

In the meantime, Horst, the socially despised former family chauffeur, has become the local Nazi Party authority and an important figure in the town. He uses his access to to privileges like food, liquor and cigarettes to insinuate himself into the lives of Josef and Marie Cizek, a childless couple. Josef, an intellectual living on disability, sneers at the Nazis and berates Horst but accepts his favors just the same, more from fear than greed.

The couple's limits are tested, though, when David, the only surviving member of the Jewish family, returns to town looking for a place to hide. The Cizeks have a hiding hole, a small hidden pantry that is just right for a fugitive. But now they both need and fear Horst more than ever. He is their safeguard from suspicion, yet his mere presence is a continuous danger as well, all the more so when his desire for Marie finally takes control of him.

In partial retaliation for Marie's rejection, Horst also wants the couple to cache a Czech: another local Nazi who had suffered a stroke after he lost his son. With the threat of discovery and death hanging over them, Josef resorts to a desperate lie: His wife, he announces, is pregnant, even though he has just returned from a visit to the German doctor that confirmed his own sterility. Marie needs to become pregnant - and fast. The only solution is to turn to David.

Often comical, the film thankfully avoids Roberto Benigni's slapstick approach to the Holocaust in Life is Beautiful, evoking fear and pity as often as laughter. Gorgeously shot in digital format, the film emphasizes key emotional moments by slowing down the action - not quite the same as cinematic slow motion, and all the more startling for that.

The main actors are all very good. Anna Sisková's Marie displays genuine humor and pleasure at Horst's flattery while still loathing his advances toward her. Bolek Polívka, as Josef, is a delicate balance of nervous energy and slothful resignation, reminiscent in his looks and voice of Alan Rickman. The most taxing demands are met by Jaroslav Dusek's Horst, who must inspire dislike but not hatred.

There are certainly allegorical overtones to a story whose main characters are named "Josef" and "Marie," who pray to the Virgin Mary, and who have what appears to be a miraculous pregnancy, but those elements are not overplayed. Revelations are eventually made, identities shift, and new alliances form in surprising ways. The enemy, it ultimately seems, is neither fascism or communism but the fears and desires that separate one human being from another. "United we stand" is Horst's exhortation for Nazi unity; the response, "Divided we fall," is a plea for common humanity. Born in 1967, the "Prague Spring" that would be crushed by the Soviet Union, director Jan Hrebejk recalls the work of such humanists as Jean Renoir, Satyajit Ray, and Idressa Ouedraogo. Not bad company to keep!

There is more than one kind of death; there is more than one way to be buried. In the Iranian film Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine, film director Bahman Farjami (played by the film's actual director, Bahman Farmanara) has been buried alive, not allowed to work, for nearly a quarter of a century. Now he has an assignment, to make a documentary for Japanese TV on Iranian funeral practices. His real goal, though, is to make a film about his own death.

Things start badly, though. In Iran's sexually repressive religious culture, Bahman takes a risk by giving a ride to a woman hitchhiker, who turns out to be carrying her own child, born dead as the result of her husband's beatings. A family friend has disappeared and no one knows if he is in a jail, a hospital, or a morgue. To top it all off, Bahman's own grave, next to his dead wife's, has been taken by somebody else.

The film is often grimly funny about rules and bureaucracies. (Trying to find his friend, Bahman even speaks to a "Mr. Kafka"!) But cultural paralysis, political and physical abuse, the ravages of time and Alzheimer's, and Bahman's own precarious health - a chainsmoker, he seems deliberately determined to ignore doctor's orders - all make death a constant hovering presence. There are intercuts of a Muslim cleric reciting Islamic law regarding burial, and Bahman sometimes has visions of his dead wife walking nearby. Although amateurish and lumbering as an actor, Bahman makes himself his own symbol of mortality with his smoking, his weak heart, and his cynical resignation.

For all his justified bitterness, the director knows that hope survives. A stone thrown into a pond, he notes, creates ripples that spread. This film, it seems, is meant to be a stone in the pond and a life's final testament. If you look beyond the cultural differences and the lack of technique, you will find another testament about what it ought to mean to be human in this life, hard enough without the burdens that governments and systems add.

In light of the real suffering that characters like those in the previous two films endure, it is easy to despise almost everyone in The Anniversary Party, another digital low-budget film, and the creation of co-stars Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh. In those other films, human faultlines are exposed and ruptured by political and social tensions. Here, the faultines are the characters' own creations, the result of their intense narcissism.

British novelist Joe (Cumming) and American actress Sally (Leigh) are a couple who seem determined to exemplify and even reinvent the lifestyle that used to be called "Yuppie." They wake on designer sheets with perfect smiles, eating a healthful breakfast prepared by their valuable Hispanic housekeeper (named "America"!), whom they treat with facile love and perfect condescension. They begin their morning with a yoga session led by a personal coach, next to the pool, which is next to their designer home (tastefully arranged by Sally herself). It is to be a landmark day: their sixth anniversary and a celebration of their having ended a mutual separation of several months. Joe is going to direct his first film, an adaptation of his most recent novel; Sally is making a new movie herself; and the couple is planning to move back to London and start a family.

But, poor things, they are constantly plagued by interruptions. The caterers are bringing in the food; guests are calling for directions; the dog wants attention; and the first guests, the couple's accountant and his wife, arrive with tax forms to be signed. Banter as crisp as the wine and empty as air kisses fills the house as more guests arrive, but the placid surface reveals more cracks: the couple bicker when Sally discovers that one of the invited guests is to be an actress (Gwyneth Paltrow) who will star in Joe's movie, playing a character based on herself, and is none too pleased to have the young upstart "bitch" in her home. (Later, one guest even sets off an embarrassing silence when she congratulates Sally for having that role.)

More guests arrive, including Sally's director and co-stars in her current movie (apparently a remake of My Man Godfrey!), and it seems that things are not going all that well on the set. Joe keeps referring to his months without Sally; Sally doesn't seem all that set on motherhood.

Almost all of the guests are terminally self-obsessed. There is the young mother, nervous to have left her child with a sitter; there is the glum film director; there is the actress wife who gave up her stardom for motherhood and there is that flighty young star. Worst of all, the object of glances and snickers by everyone else, there are the uptight neighbors, invited in a goodwill gesture to soothe a running quarrel about Joe and Sally's dog. It's always barking! they complain. No, it's not - and besides, that's what dogs do, Joe and Sally respond. The problems never really rise above that level.

This melange of egos and superficiality grates at the nerves as the party continues and the characters become thoroughly unlikable. The calm accountant explodes in a fit of misogynistic fury when his wife flubs playing charades. Joe hits on the neighbor's wife. And then the young star offers a gift of tabs of Ecstasy. You know you need a better set of friends when the most stable person in the bunch is Kevin Kline.

But then, just as you are thinking of striking out of the theater for some fresh air, the faultlines open wide enough to expose some depths. The glittery surfaces slip away and reveal some real pains and feelings. Even the obnoxious neighbors turn out to have their own reasons for acting the way that they do. Life intrudes once more with a final phone call that ends the party. Thankfully, there is no neat resolution to all the tangles, and not all of them are thoroughly explained. Finally, it seems, you don't have to live in a repressive regime to suffer the same pains of living that afflict everyone else. It is not at all clear if there will be a seventh anniversary party, but it will certainly not be the same.

©2001 Don Larsson
CineScene