A
Dream and a Lie
by
Howard Schumann
Iranian director Majid Majidi is known for sweet and often
sentimental films that contrast with the more acerbic films of his countrymen
Jafar Panahi and Abbas Kiarostami. Though no Iranian film has made much
headway at the box office in the U.S., films such as Majidi’s
The Color of Paradise have found their audience on DVD and
he has received numerous awards, including an Oscar nomination for Best
Foreign Film for Children of Heaven. His latest film, The
Song of Sparrows, which appeared at several film festivals
last year, has now opened in limited release in New York and Los Angeles
and it carries on in the same tradition of simplicity, warmth, and a
substantial dollop of sentimentality.
Reza Najie,
who portrayed the blind boy’s father in The Color of Paradise,
is Karim, a poor man who works on an ostrich farm in rural Iran. A devoted
husband and father of three, he loses his job when one of his birds,
a symbol of nature, wanders into the hills. Though he chases after the
bird, putting on an ostrich costume in a comic attempt to capture the
bird, it is to no avail. Compounding his misfortune, his oldest daughter
Haniyeh (Shabnam Aklaghi) drops her hearing aid into the water-storage
tank so that it now requires expensive repairs, money that the family
does not have. Traveling to Tehran to try to fix the hearing aid, Karim
inadvertently finds that people, some with considerable means, mistake
his motorbike for a taxi, giving him a new and lucrative line of work
as a cabbie.
Clearly visible,
however, is the contrast between Karim’s wealthy customers and
the poor beggars who wait at the side of the road, and the job exposes
him to the seamier side of big city life and the ugly grey face of crowded
Tehran. As a taxi driver, Karim is bilked out of his fare, threatened
with reprisals if he does not find another spot to wait for customers,
listens to men shouting at each other on their cell phones, and gradually
succumbs to the allure of accumulation. Every night he brings home another
piece of useless junk that he finds on his route and they begin to pile
up in his backyard.
Slowly he begins
to lose his generous and honest nature and even his children become
corrupted. His youngest son Hussein (Hamed Aghazi) makes plans to become
a millionaire by cleaning out a sludge-filled pit and using it to breed
and sell goldfish, unaware of what is involved. When the fish are accidentally
lost, the boys are overcome with grief but Karim, who has been forced
into self reflection by an accident, reminds them that "the world
is a dream and a lie," forecasting the family’s return to
sanity and joy, exemplified by an exquisite ostrich dance that brings
a note of light-hearted grace.
***
If
you. like me, envision a saner and more humane society, watching Matteo
Garrone’s Gomorra may be hazardous to
your mental health. While the film strips away idealism as effectively
as Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, it includes
no trace of glamour or sympathetic “family” dons supervising
the cooking of lasagna. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last
year and nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film,
Gomorra is realistic and well made, but as close to despairing
a film as I’ve seen, capturing a feeling of being trapped with
no way out.
From
the opening scene in which men, lying under the blue lights of a tanning
studio, are mercilessly gunned down by fellow mobsters, to the victory
salute a man gives after two young men, thinking they are on a mission
for their don, are sent packing, Garrone’s vision is, if not nihilistic,
then seriously lacking in hope. Divided into five overlapping stories,
Gomorra puts us in the middle of a harsh looking Italian housing
project called Le Vele in Scampia, outside of Naples, a concrete example
of a corrupt way of life led by the Camorra crime syndicate which has
been responsible for an estimated 4,000 deaths in Italy in the last
thirty years.
Based on a novel by Robert Saviano (who is now in 24-hour protective
custody), an exposé of gang warfare in the Naples and Caserta
area of Italy, the film makes clear the extent of the penetration of
organized crime into every aspect of Italian life, including tourism,
textiles, transport, and banking in addition to illegal drugs, protection
rackets, and arms dealing. The Camorra employs workers in every age
and ethnic group and the disparity in age is starkly dramatized in the
film. Toto (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a thirteen-year-old boy who lives
with his single mom while his father is serving prison time. He begins
delivering groceries until he learns how much more he can earn carrying
drugs.
Two
teenagers, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) who seem to have
gotten their reality from action movies like Scarface, want
to do things their way, committing robberies and stealing automatic
weapons until their syndicate bosses decide they dislike the direction
in which they are headed. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a highly
regarded tailor, but when he chooses to train Chinese competitors, he
is considered a threat to the mob. In another story, an older thug,
Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) makes the rounds of the project to pay
the families of those in the clan languishing in prison, but even he
has to wear a bullet-proof vest and live in fear.
In
one of the last sequences, Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) works for Franco
(Toni Servillo) in the field of toxic waste management, but has second
thoughts about dumping waste and polluting the farmlands of southern
Italy. There are no heroes or villains or even any colorful characters
in Gomorra. One is reminded of Bob Dylan’s song “Only
a Pawn in Their Game.” It is a game in which everyone is caught
in a tunnel through which no light is allowed to shine. If it serves
as a wake-up call to the good people of Italy, however, it may be worth
the darkness.
©2009 Howard Schumann
CineScene
