GERMANY, PALE MOTHER
(Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1980).
The generation born in Germany during the war, or shortly afterwards,
was given the burden of dealing with a past that was shrouded in suffering
and denial. In this gripping, courageous film, Sanders-Brahms tells
the story of her mother's painful life, and in a wider sense envisions
how it would feel to live during a time when one's country succumbed
to tyranny and destruction, and to endure the devastation of war's aftermath.
Lene (Eva Mattes) finds the Nazis frightening, and she chooses to marry
a man (Ernst Jacobi) who is not a member of the Party. He is drafted
and sent to Poland when the war begins. After witnessing atrocities,
he comes home on furlough, and it is clear that he has lost some of
his gentleness. His lovemaking seems a lot like rape to Lene. Her daughter
is born during an air raid. Later, with her world collapsed and her
husband still at the front, Lene wanders across the countryside with
her daughter in search of a safe haven.
The director is good at creating the feeling of mute powerlessness
that many in Germany who had been indifferent to politics must have
felt during the catastrophe of the war years. She accomplishes a lot
without the luxuries of a big budget, such as crowd scenes or massive
period detail. Newsreel footage is occasionally used. In one striking
instance an actual shot of a homeless boy in rubble-strewn Berlin is
intercut with shots of Lene talking to him. With no attempt to integrate
the two film stocks, it powerfully unites the actual past with the picture's
narrative reenactment.
Sanders-Brahms falters a little during an extended sequence in the
middle of the film when Lene tells the story of "The Robber Bridegroom"
to her little daughter during their wanderings. This comes off as didactic,
albeit heartfelt. But the movie attains something akin to greatness
in its latter portion, portraying the numbness and spiritual despair
that Lene experiences after the war. After her heroic efforts, saving
her child, surviving against all odds - the bitterness and exhaustion
of postwar Germany proves too much for her. Mattes' performance is terribly
moving.
Germany, Pale Mother is narrated by Sanders-Brahms herself,
in the role of Lene's daughter Anna. The daughter's voice, looking back
at her parents' ordeal after years of grief, is brave and compassionate.
It blends into the voice of the mother as if they were one. The film
is dedicated to the director's mother and her own infant daughter. The
title is from a poem by Brecht. This is one of the most accomplished
elegies about that terrible time ever put on film.
MON ONCLE (Jacques Tati, 1958).
A young boy named Gerard has contrasting role models. His parents
are concerned with appearances and live in an ultramodern house filled
with ridiculous gadgets. His uncle is an eccentric bachelor, foolish
and distracted, who lives in a little apartment in the old quarter of
Paris. Guess which role model the boy gravitates towards?
This synopsis would make it appear that Mon Oncle is a satire.
But no synopsis could ever explain the bizarre sense of humor of Jacques
Tati. His focus is not on social conditions, at least not in the usual
sense, but on the inherent weirdness of human beings and the things
they do. In the Tati world view, people are awkward little stumbling
things whose preoccupations succeed in hiding their absurdity from themselves.
This kind of humor is really like nothing else you've ever seen, and
it takes some getting used to, as if one were to tune in to a Martian
comedy station that was making fun of earth.
Tati himself plays the uncle, M. Hulot, his recurring character, an
intrepid, perpetually confused figure in a white overcoat, smoking a
pipe and walking with an oddly abrupt gait. He is an accident always
waiting to happen. The ultramodern house includes a fountain in which
the water spouts from the mouth of an upright fish. The gadgets never
seem to work very well, other than making a lot of noise. When Hulot
takes his nephew on an outing, they join some boys whose idea of fun
is to suddenly distract passersby with a shout, hoping that they will
bump into a wall or a lamp post. There is little room for sentimentality
in a Tati film.
This was his first movie in color, and it won many awards, including
the foreign film Oscar. I have to admit that it didn't please me as
much as other works by him that I have seen. It's not nearly as funny
as M. Hulot's Holiday, which came before it, nor does it have
the brilliance or the radical conceptions of Playtime, which
came after. I expect to get a very dry experience with Tati, but the
gags are nevertheless rather weak here, as if he didn't have enough
material to fill his running time. Still, the picture has its rewards,
including an amusing bit where Hulot is let loose in his brother-in-law's
plastic hose factory. The opening and closing sequences, featuring a
gang of frisky little dogs running through the streets, sum up better
than anything else the Jacques Tati view of existence.
THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH
(Hal Hartley, 1990).
Audry (Adrienne Shelley) lives in a small town in Long Island with
her parents. She has taken a fatalistic attitude towards life, believing
that the world is ending soon, and promptly dumps her boyfriend and
stops going to school. But her interest is sparked by a young man (Robert
Burke) returning home after doing time in prison for manslaughter.
Writer/director Hartley's debut feature has an offbeat freshness and
unpredictability that helps compensate for its self-conscious quality
and amateurish feel. As the title warns us, the story is not believable,
and it isn't meant to be. Nobody would say these outrageous, deadpan
wisecracks in real life, but a lot of the dialogue works in the way
a good off-Broadway comedy might, where we are perfectly aware of the
artifice of the stage and just let ourselves be entertained by the tongue-in-cheek
sensibility of the author.
Hartley's humor is hard to describe. The two main characters are defiantly
unconventional, but looking for some kind of connection. They are surrounded
by small-minded types whose beliefs and prejudices are utterly transparent,
but Hartley treats them with a kind of amused deference rather than
viciousness. The fun lies in the odd, surprising things that these people
say to each other. Along the way the film has a few observations about
the way people make deals instead of being genuine, the way they think
they know what they want when they really don't, and other fleeting
insights into human behavior. Which isn't so say that The Unbelievable
Truth is profound. It's actually rather light, with characters that
are mostly surface, but in a way that's part of its charm. The picture
has the usual faults of a first effort (some bad acting from the guy
playing Audry's father, for instance), but it gets away with them because
Hartley has a voice that is distinctly his own. His quirky independent
approach was a breath of cinematic fresh air at the time.
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
(Fred Niblo, 1921).
Douglas Faribanks plays D'Artagnan in this version of the famous Dumas
novel which he produced at United Artists. And it's an incredible disappointment.
You'd think that this story would be a cinch to pull off for the king
of the swashbucklers, but Niblo's direction is so unimaginative that
it was all I could do to stay awake. Most of the time he just puts the
camera in a room and shoots everything head-on, while the actors gesticulate
wildly. This is Fairbanks at his worst, throwing his arms out and striking
poses at every opportunity. Even the sword fights and other stunts are
lackluster. The sets and costumes are pretty, but that's not enough
to save this turkey. I know Fairbanks could do better, because I've
seen The Black Pirate and The Thief of Bagdad, and they're
wonderful. So it just goes to show, poor direction can botch even the
most promising material.
THE SILENCES OF THE PALACE
(Moufida Tlatli, 1994).
Tlatli is one of the few women directors in the Muslim world. Her film
takes place in Tunisia in the 1950s, when the rule of the Beys, and
their French colonial masters, was coming to an end. Alia (Ghalia Lacroix)
returns to the palace of the prince Sidi Ali when she learns of his
death. As she walks through different rooms, the film flashes back to
her girlhood and adolescence. She grew up there, the daughter of one
of the many female servants. Her reveries reveal a place where the men
expected the servants to provide them with sex, where the women bonded
together in a closed society that never saw the outside world, and where
servitude and silence were the unchanging reality of women.
The film brings vividly to life an insulated world with lovely gardens
and colorful tiled walls. With a patient and vibrantly alert narrative
flow, Tlatli creates the feeling of having lived in this palace, especially
in the portrayal of the serving women - their tasks, their singing,
their little arguments, the underlying fear. The director is adept at
steady, fluid tracking shots, the use of closeup, and creating interesting
visual perspectives. There is more than an aesthetic purpose to her
methods. Her style matches the reality of the women she depicts - strong,
enduring, yet trapped, shut off, able to find solace in one another
but ultimately not belonging to themselves.
Young Alia is played by the beautifully expressive Hend Sabri. Alia's
tragedy is the gradual awareness of the true situation of her mother
(Amel Hedhili) whom she spies having sexual liaisons with the prince
Ali. Her question, "Who is my father?" is the one her mother refuses
to answer. Of course we suspect that it is Ali himself, but this truth
can never be acknowledged, not even in a whisper.
The central relationship between mother and daughter is heartbreaking.
There are moments of joy, such as when her mother gives her a lute for
a present. Alia loves to sing, and she is quite accomplished, but this
becomes a source of fear for her mother when it attracts the attention
of the men. Alia wants her mother to say no to the men. What she can't
understand is that there is nowhere to go - the palace is their world.
The Silences of the Palace is one of the most accomplished films
about the oppression of women I have seen. Without smoothing over the
complexities of the master-servant relationship, or being heavy-handed
in her depiction of the men, Tlatli presents a fully realized woman's
point of view, and shows how the greatest weapon against the freedom
of women is an imposed silence. Here she turns the weapon against itself
- the silences in her film speak the truth with moving eloquence.
Chris Dashiell
CineScene, 2001
