Three Families
and a Horror Film
More from the Vancouver
Film Festival
by Howard Schumann
"For me, a son will always be his father's child, even
when he's grown up. We should maintain the tenderness that exists in
human relations. If we fail to do so, we will lose our humanity.”
-- Alexander Sokurov
Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son had a sense
of joy and love, tempered by an ominous setting in a dark forest. The
second part of the trilogy, Father and Son, has no such
ambivalence. It is drenched in sunlight and bathed in a glow of greens
and browns. 
The
film opens with the image of two male bodies in bed, their naked bodies
intertwined in a rapturous embrace. One is breathing rapidly; the other
is trying to comfort him. We think these must be gay lovers, but soon
discover that it is a father comforting his son after a nightmare. (Though
the film feels homoerotic, Sokurov has said that it is not, attributing
that idea to "sick European minds.") Shot in Lisbon, Father
and Son is not attached to time or place. A soldier's uniform is
depicted in the latest style, while women's dresses and hairstyles are
of the 40s, 50s and 60s.
Father
(Andrei Shchetinin) and son (Aleksei Nejmyshev) live together on the
top floor of an apartment house and have done so for many years since
the death of their mother. Their world looks like a sanctuary, but may
be a prison. It was while attending a school for air cadets that the
father met his wife and had his son, now 20. His son's physical appearance
reminds the father of his late wife, and their bond is intense and emotional.
Alexei attends military school like his father who left military service
against his will and wants his son to pick up where he left off. He
has a girl friend but there is a distance between them. She is jealous
of his relationship with his father that to her appears overprotective
and he does not want to give up his father's closeness.
Alexei's
father is conflicted about looking for a job in a different city and
seeking a new wife. They must decide whether to continue their lives
together or independently. The struggle for freedom and independence
is mutual but they are held together by a transcendent love. Father
and Son is an enigmatic but deeply poetic film about this complex
bond. While the film is open to interpretation from different cultural,
psychological, or religious points of view (the film says, “A father
who loves his son crucifies him. A son who loves his father sacrifices
himself for him”), for me, the best approach is to avoid the temptation
to analyze and just bathe in the warmth of its loving glow.
In
Argentine director Adolfo Aristarain's Common Ground,
Fernando (Federico Luppi), a professor of literature in his sixties
in Buenos Aires, and his wife Lili (Mercedes Sampietro), a social worker,
are loving partners, and respected in the community. Their world is
turned upside down when Fernando receives notice that he is being asked
to retire early. The enforced retirement, a result of the economic crisis
in Argentina, comes as a complete shock, and he and his wife are forced
to make drastic decisions that threaten the foundations of their comfortable
life.
Based on the novel The Renaissance by Lorenzo F.
Aristariain, Common Ground is a story about love, getting older,
and discovering what is important in life. It is also an acid social
comment on the current state of life in Argentina, where thousands of
people have had to face a similar end to their secure middle class existence.
Fernando
and Lili have a son Pedro (Carlos Santamaría) who lives comfortably
in Spain with his wife and two children. A leftist man of strong convictions,
Fernando tells his son about the meager pension left to him by the university,
but refuses his assistance. Instead he berates him for abandoning his
country and selling out to make money. The parents are forced to sell
their apartment in the city, purchase a farm, and bravely set out on
a new style of living. Their adjustment to rural life has its moments
of sadness, but their striving to live out their lives with dignity
and purpose is profoundly human. Though Common Ground does not
reach the heights of Aristarain's previous A Place in the World,
it is an honest film that celebrates the strength of a loving family.
Based on the experience of a friend who had difficulty
readjusting to China after his marriage failed in the U.S., Wang Xiaoshuai's
new film Drifters shows the conflict between Chinese traditions
and the desire of its youth for a better way of life. Er Di,
the film's Mandarin title, means "younger brother," and Hong Yunsheng
(Duan Long) is a younger brother by birth and by social class. Like
many of his generation, he risked his life to stowaway on an overcrowded
boat headed to the U.S. in search of that indefinable something called
the American Dream.
As
the film opens, Er Di returns home to the coastal city of Fujian after
being deported from America at the instigation of his in-laws when they
learned that he had fathered a son with the boss's daughter. He spends
his time hanging around aimlessly, much to the dismay of his parents.
His only companion is Xiao Nu (Shu Yan), an actress from a travelling
Shanghai opera troupe, but their relationship lacks spark. Gradually
his past begins to catch up with him.
The
first half-hour moves at a snail's pace, but the film finds its rhythm
when Er Di learns that his son Fusheng, now five, has been brought back
to Fujian by his grandfather. Prodded by his elder brother and sister-in-law
he is determined to see the boy in spite of the grandfather's objections,
but has to overcome not only the restrictions of American law, but differences
in social status. When Er Di discovers that he has strong parental feelings,
the film shifts from being a social commentary to a family drama and
sets in motion a chain of events that leads to a moving conclusion.
Known
as one of the most talented directors of China’s “Sixth Generation"
of filmmakers, Wang Xiaoshuai's film is a poetic character study reminiscent
of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien. With little dialogue and the
camera held at a distance, the story unfolds slowly, told mainly through
facial expressions, nuances, gestures, and body language. Though I would
have preferred more depth to the characters, Drifters
is an involving film about a generation of uprooted Chinese whose government
is unable to see the extent of their despair, holding out vague promises,
heard on television during the film, that China's entry into the WTO
will bring a better life.
A dead body lying naked in the
middle of the desert, a cop on his
walkie-talkie
calling for backup at a road block in the same desert, a three-legged
dog. These and other bizarre things show up in Twentynine Palms,
the latest film by Bruno Dumont (La Vie de Jésus, L'Humanité).
It is essentially a horror film that might easily be called Scream
4.
The opening scenes are beautiful and serene. David (David
Wissak), an independent photographer from Los Angeles, and Katia (Yekaterina
Golubeva), a young woman without work, travel in a red 4X4 Hummer toward
the vast California desert, preparing to 
do
a photo shoot for a magazine near the Joshua Tree National Park. The
road leads to a motel in the city of 29 Palms, a desert oasis that in
the film consists of one gas station, one hotel, and a swimming pool.
Dumont says that he filmed in the U.S. rather than his native France
because he "… felt the need to change space, ingredients, colors...
and it is while filming in California that I had a true shock." The
shock extends to the viewer as well.
There
is little dialogue or action in the conventional sense. The communication
between the couple is complicated by the absence of a common language:
he speaks English, she only speaks French. What conversation exists
is trapped in a level of superficial banality. The lovers explore the
desert in their 4X4, and are focused entirely upon their own pleasure,
seemingly defined by their sexuality. They swim in the motel pool, watch
game shows on television, eat, make love in the middle of the desert,
eat some more, argue and make up, then make love some more, all shown
in explicit detail. Everything is familiar, a slice of typical Americana,
yet nothing is as it seems.
Little
by little the milieu becomes oppressive; a quiet and incoherent fear
begins to settle in, an abstract fear because as Dumont says, "there
is no reason to be afraid." At the end, nothing can fill the emptiness
but destruction. The contrast between the poetry of nature and the constricted
range of the human experience is clear. In this world without a spiritual
core, the screams of pain and screams of delight are indistinguishable,and
anguish has the same meaning as pleasure.
One cannot be neutral about a Bruno Dumont film (many
people walked out during the Vancouver showing). His audiences are polarized
between those who love his films and those that detest them, and the
director seems disinterested in reconciling the two. I found Twentynine
Palms extremely difficult to watch, and even harder to be emotionally
engaged with the characters. Dumont tests our 
endurance
with scenes of brutal violence, making no concession to our sensibilities.
In bringing us face to face with our worst nightmare, however, he forces
us out of our state of emotional detachment and compels us to react,
not with our minds or even our hearts, but viscerally with the totality
of our being. Far removed from the pre-digested package cinema of Hollywood,
Dumont has made an important statement about American values. The question
must be asked however -- with films like Twentynine Palms that
are so off-putting, will there be anyone who notices?
©2003 Howard Schumann
CineScene
