THE ENDS OF
THE EARTH
by Chris Dashiell

The career of Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf inspires hope, in a time when it's especially needed, that there is a spiritual perspective that can stand up and speak truth to fundamentalism, a perspective that can still be vital in the arts, and in public life. Makhmalbaf is himself an example of change within a conservative tradition. Imprisoned by the Shah's regime at the age of 17 for trying to steal a gun from a policeman, he embraced the Islamic revolution when he was released in 1979. His films have documented his gradual evolution from rigid traditionalist to humanist - eventually he went so far as to turn his arrest into an opportunity for reconciliation, in the remarkable metafiction A Moment of Innocence (1996). The Islamic state hasn't been too happy with Makhmalbaf's liberal tendencies - at one time or another he has had to contend with censorship, in the midst of growing tensions between moderates and hard-liners in Iran.

The flashpoint of debate and controversy is the status of women, and Makhmalbaf's films, along with those of his wife and daughter, continue to hammer away at this theme. One must admire the persistence and courage of those who are speaking out, and to appreciate how daunting the prospect of change must be in such a repressive climate. Even in Western secular society, patriarchal beliefs still have the upper hand, and cling tenaciously to power. How much more difficult, then, and how inspiring, is the struggle for women's self-determination in a theocracy.

Kandahar, Makhmalbaf's latest film, has benefited from its timing - shot before the war, it arrived on screen in the middle of a crisis that has prompted a great deal of interest in anything having to do with Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the film is not really a polemic against the Taliban, or at least its political intent is not so superficial as to focus on just a regime or a particular set of conditions. With the director's characteristic simplicity of approach, and austerity of method, Kandahar seeks to portray how it feels to live in a repressive society, and how human beings react to social collapse. In so doing it also holds the mirror up to the viewer's society, not just in Iran but everywhere.

The semi-fictional frame story concerns Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), an Afghan woman who works as a journalist in Canada. Her sister, who lost her legs to a landmine as a child, sends letters from Kandahar that become increasingly desperate as the restrictions of the Taliban take hold, finally announcing that she plans to commit suicide during an upcoming eclipse. Nafas decides to go into Afghanistan to save her sister. She is dropped near the border by a chopper, entering the country disguised as the fourth wife in a poor returning family. When the family is robbed by bandits, she must go it alone, eventually hooking up with an American doctor, who attempts to get her smuggled into Kandahar with the help of a one-handed beggar.

Pazira is essentially playing herself - the story of the sister is true, except it was actually a friend of hers, and it was Pazira who brought the idea for the story to Makhmalbaf. He traveled to Afghanistan to observe the people and way of life there. The picture was then filmed near the Iran-Afghanistan border. Beset with dying refugees, repeatedly threatened by vigilantes, the shoot had to be moved to a different spot every day, and Makhmalbaf wore a disguise.

The pressure of filming under such conditions is evident in the movie. Sometimes the dubbing is off. The director uses a lot of intrusive intercutting, evidently to fill in narrative gaps. The nonprofessional actors don't always seem natural. Pazira and Hassan Tantai (who plays the doctor) speak in a flat, declamatory fashion that shows lack of experience, or the time to develop a certain level of performing skill. It may have been a mistake for Makhmalbaf to have the narration (and a good deal of the talk between Nafas and the doctor) in English, even though this was probably meant as a way to reach more people. The English sounds awkward much of the time.

I think, though, that to overemphasize such flaws, as some reviewers have, is to miss the point. The film is not meant to be entertainment. The fictional frame is a way for the camera to reveal various aspects of the Afghan situation. In fact, Kandahar is more like a documentary than a story, and as such it has much to offer.

The opening image - indeed the dominant image of the film - is of a woman in a burqa, nameless and faceless, hidden behind the barrier required of her in this culture. Then the burqa is raised and we see the woman. She is now an individual, with a mind and a voice. This simple analogy, of seeing through a covering, is repeated in different contexts throughout the film, to great effect. The forbidding reality of the burqa is offset by the presence of the narrator, Nafas, who straddles two worlds. Through her the viewer must balance these worlds as well, and allow the humanity of women to be known despite the barriers. In a moving sequence near the beginning of the film, the camera pans across the faces of girls in a refugee camp. They have not disappeared under the burqa yet, and the narrator's musings about their future merges with the striking features of the girls, expressing fear, hunger, confusion, openness, or anger. This sad prelude prepares us for the discomfiting truths of Nafas' journey into Afghanistan.

The film depicts various examples of personal and social collapse. Rather than taking a passive approach, looking on the people as objects of pity, Makhmalbaf rigorously portrays the frustrating, intractable, and untrustworthy behavior of people in a survival situation. The young guide that Nafas takes on keeps trying to get her to give him more money. A man argues with relief workers because he thinks the artificial legs that he's been given to take to his wife look too big for her (it's evident that to him, bigger legs are less feminine). In the midst of disaster, people hang on to the last vestiges of individual choice, as well as the dubious comfort of habit, in the face of even the worst setbacks. The surreal image of a host of men on crutches, hobbling as fast as they can, towards a field where artificial legs have fallen by parachute, is an eloquent summing up of the film's point of view - tragic, gruesomely comic, yet compassionate, it's a scene one can't easily shake.

The temptation for western audiences is to feel distance and condescending concern. In other words, this isn't us, it's those poor primitive people "over there." Makhmalbaf tries to remedy this, I think, with the character of the American doctor, a black Muslim who came to Afghanistan for spiritual renewal and lost his faith instead. His conversation is meant to provide perspective for Americans, to humanize Afghanistan and help make it comprehensible. This device succeeds only partially. Makhmalbaf has never been one to try to help the audience along too much. His whole approach has usually required that the viewer do a little work. The images in Kandahar convey the feelings, the identification, far more than any of the talk.

Landmines are an ever-present fact in the film. Their human cost is a comment on the waste and destruction that has been a constant in the region, from foreign rapacity as well as homegrown insanity. (One can only imagine how much worse it must be now.) The consequences - people with missing arms and legs - are presented with sober matter-of-factness. Between the eternity in the human face, the soul's world reflected and expressed, and the conditions of life in such a hell - the contrast is stark and stirring. Underneath it all, the theme of patriarchy remains, a direct correlation between the status of women and the state of society.

Makhmalbaf approaches filmmaking as a continuing humanitarian project. This is a potent way of viewing the artist's vocation - not as a series of discrete efforts at attaining a masterpiece, but as an ongoing journey, with each film as an element in a larger meaning. Kandahar, with its flaws, its stress, its unwillingly abbreviated quality, is part of this project. Its importance is immediate, and wholly of our time.

*******

The personal is the political, as the saying goes. Unless it isn't. In the case of Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy, it unfortunately isn't.

Mark Rylance plays Jay, a bar owner in London whose marriage fell apart six years ago, and who lives his life in a kind of bitter ennui, enlivened only by the sex he has every Wednesday with an anonymous partner (Kerry Fox). Eventually he feels the need to follow the mysterious woman and find out who she really is.

The movie has gotten some attention because of the long sex scenes. Yes, the sex is very explicit, and Chéreau manages to attain some good effects with a handheld camera, showing bodies at different angles, in motion and rest, a sort of carnal poetry, evoking the strangeness of coupling when seen from a purely physical point of view. But the film is in trouble when it tries to show us the characters in any other light.

Jay is mean and depressed because the script tells him to be. He is given a junkie hanger-on to torment and a bartender with a French accent to upbraid him, and none of it makes any sense. Mark Rylance, who has a reputation as a great stage actor, is an exceedingly dry and unengaging performer on film. To be fair to him, though, the screenplay, based on stories by Hanif Kureshi, gives him nothing to work with but anger and unease. By the time we are allowed an occasional glimpse of the woman's point of view, it's too late to wonder, or to care, what these people are up to. (And the handheld camera becomes nauseating. Once in a while one needs to be still - even Lars von Trier knows that.)

That sex is a means for these two lonely people to experience something outside of the narrow confines of their lives is obvious before the end of the first reel. That it's still not enough is also quite clear. And? There's no sense of real people here, or of a real world that they inhabit. The film ends up resorting to cheap psychodrama, and it's frustrating because Chéreau is a serious director who has shown in the past that he has talent. I kept hoping for a genuine feeling to emerge from Intimacy. But as it turns out, its opening theme is the only theme - joylessness is sad and empty and, um, joyless.

I have a few questions. They are meant only for those of you who have seen Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind.

What's more important? A) To portray the character of a brilliant mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia, or B) To stun the audience by making them think one thing, and then pulling the rug out from under them by changing the point of view halfway through the film?

If you're Ron Howard, the answer is B.

Why does a scene in which Alicia Nash (Jennifer Connelly) is alarmed by her husband's behavior, end with her looking at a telephone, as if she's going to call for help - when the next scene has Nash giving a lecture at Harvard, a lecture at which for some unaccountable reason, the shrink (Christopher Plummer) arrives to take our hero away?

The scene at Harvard was needed so that Ron Howard can continue to build false suspense (Nash seeing the secret agents coming after him, etc.) The scene at the phone is a teaser, and it may not make much sense, but the audience will forget that after the next scene. The point is that it's always more important to play a plot gimmick to the hilt than it is to be consistent.

Why does Alicia discover Nash's relapse at the very time in which he has been entrusted with the task of giving the baby a bath?

That's an easy one, if you've been paying attention to the first two questions. It is necessary that these events happen at the same time, so that we can have a scene of Alicia rushing to save the baby from drowning. It's important for Ron Howard to keep the audience involved as much as possible. Since he can't rely on an innate feeling for character, or on any meaning in the material beyond the trite ones that the film carefully explains for us several times before it ends, it is vital that Ron Howard keep our attention on his plot mechanics at all times.

What's good about it?

Russell Crowe is pretty good. He tends to rely on ticks and mannerisms, and he is forced to say some godawful things, but there's no question he's a good actor, even in middling material like this.

You mean you didn't like it? What the hell's wrong with you?

Don't get me started.....

©2002 Chris Dashiell
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