Avuncular American

Travels Through the Green Heart of Florida

Back roads in central Florida are a nice alternative to risking life and limb on the Interstate.  You can drive almost as fast, but the two opposing lanes impose a certain discipline, and there's no comparison in traffic congestion.  After a family reunion on the margins of Disney World, I headed back to the Gulf coast through the orange groves of "Frostfree" and other colorfully-named places.  Passing over Troublesome Creek, I wasn't far from Soggy Bottom.  Had the Coen brothers (of O Brother, Where Art Thou? fame) been inspired or was this an echo of the 2000 hit comedy?  In any case, a road works sign informed me that "State Prisoners at Work" were up ahead, but I detected no chain gangs.

My genial host in Sarasota marveled at my wanting to drive through what he called "cracker country," but it's all part of my "cultural learnings," as Borat would say.  At least this rather pretty swath of the state has a real economy - though apparently based on a citrus monoculture - compared to the Florida coastline, where the part of the population not earning its living from tourism sells life's necessities (and a lot of dross too) to the other part that is dependent on the "snowbirds," that quaint expression describing the Northerners (American and Canadian) who migrate south for the winter.  There were even rolling hills and lakes that didn't appear to be glorified swamps.

As with other parts of rural - especially Southern - states, there are lots of churches, some part of larger denominations like the First Baptists, others of various pentecostal evangelical fundamental persuasions.  The percentage of "manufactured homes" (mobile homes to you and me) is very high, and the contrast with the faux-Spanish stuccoed condominiums and villas of urban Florida couldn't be more striking.

Borrowed CDs and NPR (for non-US readers, National Public Radio, the news, music, and culture network) provided aural diversion from the monotony of the orange groves, and no Deliverance moments were had, though I did see a few ramshackle dwellings with anti-social warnings about dogs.  Urban or rural, Florida abounds in gun shops, and American flags.  To the foreign visitor: the largest American flags fluttering in the breeze are not indicative of a government installation, but show you the way to a car dealership.  You can still buy a little plastic gizmo to attach a flag to your rear passenger window, though there are far fewer of these than after the post-9/11 patriotic fervor.

My rambles have gone on long enough.  Next: political learnings on things like the health care situation.

Israel's Long Straw, Palestine's Trickle

The Biblical "land of milk and honey" and the "wilderness" of the holy book are one and the same.  There's the freshwater Sea of Galilee, the saltwater Dead Sea (getting deader by the minute), and the Jordan River in between.  There is rocky desert, chaparral, and the occasional verdant spring.

Until the rampant development of urban Israel, suburban Israeli settlements on occupied Arab land, and the increasing gerrymandering, walling off, and bypass-roading of what is left of "Palestine" thanks to the Oslo Accords, there was basically enough water.  Enough even to build a swimming pool in the then sleepy West Bank town of Ramallah, where I went in 1972 to dig its foundations out of solid rock.  Even during those early years of The Occupation, Israelis and Palestinians managed to share the region's precious water resources.

"Share" is a word that would be difficult to justify in the current circumstances.  Today's release by Amnesty International of its damning "Troubled Waters" report elicited a predictable official Israeli response, essentially saying "Water? ...what water problem?"  After denying there is a problem, the Israeli MFA, in a reaction that is remarkable for its brevity and chutzpah, goes on to say that if there is a problem, it's the Palestinians own fault.  For a more realistic account, see the BBC's report from Gaza.

Better yet, watch "Drying Up Palestine," the short documentary film on how Israel has been sucking on a long straw, digging deep under future Palestinian independent territory and depriving currently-occupied Palestinians and future "independent" Palestinians of one of the very requisites of statehood: water resources.  Maybe Peter Snowdon and Rima Essa's film (you can see a clip here) should be up on the Amnesty site.

Image: AppleWorks clip art.

The White Ribbon... of Innocence, Lost

Das Weiße Band (image from official website)

"Strange events happen in a small village in northern Germany..." as one capsule review has it, would make you think that Michael Haneke's Das Weiße Band (The White Ribbon in international release) is another M. Night Shyamalan clone.  No disrespect to Mr. S., but this is anything but a German-language "The Village."  Haneke, you see, has won the Cannes Golden Palm for his efforts.

And those efforts are considerable.  Haneke, talking to Le Soir's Fabienne Bradfer, said that he's wanted to make this film for the last ten years, but he's never had enough money until his 2005 French suspense hit Caché.  Think of Caché and its atmosphere of intermittent tension, unexplained incidents, and moments of high emotion and you will get a sense of The White Ribbon's Weltanschauung.

The pre-World War I setting, rendered in a black-and-white that is stunning for its clarity even when illuminated by a candle, is lovingly rendered, though this is not, repeat not, a period costume drama.  The choice of B&W seems natural, for it helps, along with all those females with their hair pulled back in tight buns, seemingly from the age of five, to recreate the atmosphere of a society living the last months of an era that we know now only from rare documentary footage.  Just as the (controversial) use of color in the recent WW II French documentary series Apocalypse made 70 year old footage of people come alive, the use of B&W in Das Weiße Band "helps the viewer enter the film" as Haneke says.

I won't go into those "strange events" since I hate it when reviewers tell you the plot line.  But I will say this: whoever still harbors illusions of rural society as an idyllic haven from the violence of the city may find The White Ribbon a disturbing revelation.  But if Haneke's film is a metaphor for the latent violence in humanity - even amongst its youngest members - then there are plenty of harbingers of the horrors to come when the little terrors grow up to be the adults of the Third Reich.

An American GI performing occupation/de-Nazification duties in postwar Germany once said that he used to be incapable of looking at people without his first thought being "I wonder what s/he did during the war."  As you watch Haneke's film, you know that the 20th century's World Wars (separated by barely a generation) are looming ahead, and you find yourself wondering "what will little Martin be up to 20 years hence?"

This is what Haneke wants us to do: "I ask questions... [and I ask myself] what can I do to give the greatest freedom to the audience?"  Part of that freedom is not being given tidy endings, or explanations for what we have just watched for the last 144 minutes, riveted to our seats.  But that's the way the villagers would want it too.  The omerta that reigns over the pristine square and well-tended fields hides many secrets, and the onset of the war that ended the barony, toppled the Kaiser, and set the seeds for the even greater slaughter of World War II comes - I almost hate to say it - as a relief.

The villagers might just say that it allowed them to change the subject, away from their obsessions over those "strange events."  Those of us who see The White Ribbon might not shake its effect so easily.

"The Army of Crime" - Criminal, Terrorist, or Patriot?

L'Armée du Crime

The lump that was in my throat during the 139 minutes of L'Armée du Crime, Robert Guédiguian's dramatization of the "Manouchian Group" story has subsided, but the emotion remains.  This is a good, old fashioned, based-on-fact war story that needed to be told, and in the veteran French-Armenian director's hands, it has been done justice.

"Justice," such as it was during the dark years of the Nazi Occupation of France and the active collaboration of the Vichy government of Maréchal Pétain, was of course in the hands of the victors.  The Manouchian Group - we know their fate in the film's first moments - is given a show trial and accused of carrying out "terrorist acts" against the occupier.

The film does not actually glorify terrorism - few of the group are natural killers, least of all poet Missak Manouchian, who becomes its leader - but its portrayal of the various assassinations, ambushes, and bombings carried out in Paris is factual.  The Musée de la Résistance Nationale has lent its stamp of approval, even providing an excellent "teachers' guide" available on the film's official site.

The film's poster tells you the essentials: Manouchian's collection of resistance fighters - "Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Spanish, and Armenians" - came from the ranks of the MOI, la Main-d'oeuvre immigrée, foreign communists who had found refuge in France, and many of whom were veteran anti-fascists from the Spanish Civil War.  The film deftly shows their trajectory from simple immigrant workers lying low during the early days of the Occupation, through uncoordinated individual acts against the Germans, to full-blown integration into what became the Resistance.

Guédiguian has a stable of actors who regularly surface in his films, and one of his regulars, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, playing the composite character of "Commissaire David," manages to incarnate the contradictions and betrayals that were the hallmark of French officialdom's reaction to defeat at the hands of the Germans.  While Darroussin's understated performance captures all the ambiguity, the script sometimes hammers French culpability down our throats, especially when depicting torture by French police - not Nazis.

All of which, Guédiguian tells us, is based on historic documentation.  Even the soundtrack is historically significant: listen to Maurice Chevalier's "Ça sent si bon la France" and savor not only the irony in the 1941 song's selection for the soundtrack, but reflect that the crooner was long shunned after the war for his dalliance with collaboration.

Terrorism, torture... you might get the impression that the director is trying to send a contemporary message while educating his audience on a part of French history often overlooked.  That would be correct: Guédiguian is a committed leftist, who mourns the passing of the kind of militant trade unionism that was the petri dish for the Manouchian Group.

French men and women who remember that their soldiers tortured Algerians in their war of independence but forget that Frenchmen tortured Frenchmen in the Nazi cause will find L'Armée du Crime unnerving.  Americans who acknowledge that "enhanced interrogation" has been carried out in their name will be reminded that water torture is not always as clean and clinical as shown in stock Pentagon or CIA footage.  And we used to think it was only the Gestapo that did such despicable things.

At least the 23 members of the Manouchian Group, tortured and executed in the dank dungeons along the Seine for their adopted country, now have a fitting cinematic tribute to their bravery.

14 Kilometers, But Oceans Apart: Trans-Mediterranean Migration

Spanish writer/director Gerardo Olivares' film 14 Kilómetros tells us how far the Moroccan coastline is separated from Spain.  Tantalizingly close, visible from your window whether you're in Tangier on the African side or Tarifa on the European coast.  But if you are one of the thousands of desperate African migrants who has spent your last cent crossing the Sahara getting to the jump off point, you are not going to let 14 Km get in your way.  Or you are going to die trying, as thousands do.

Dr. Bichara Khader of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CERMAC) at Belgium's Université Catholique de Louvain knows this world of mass migration, and has made the study of it his life's work.  Today's presentation at MEDEA's "Mediterranean Midday" was largely devoted to Maghrebi migration to Europe, but the Africans of 14 Kilómetros were never far from our minds.

The fictionalized trio of francophone Africans in Olivares' film (amateurs recruited on the streets of Mali and Niger) start a little hesitantly, and at first appear to be reciting their lines a bit mechanically.  But that impression passes, and the viewer is left with just the three protagonists and the utter vastness of the Sahara.  One of the film's most lingering images is of the impossibly overloaded truck (Olivares was reminded of "boat people" on wheels) lumbering through the desert, dropping people off at some unmarked crossroad in the sand: Libya to the right, Algeria and Morocco to the left.

Our trio takes the latter route, and add to the 100,000 or so sub-Saharan Africans living in the limbo of the Maghreb.  Their Algerian and Moroccan "hosts" may still attempt to make the crossing themselves, but the heyday of North African migration to Europe in the boom time of the Sixties and Seventies is long over.  With Maghrebi birthrates dropping to European levels, how long will it be, asks Dr. Khader, until the Africans simply start to replace the missing Maghrebi workers and give up on their dreams of Europe?

For the crossing is increasingly difficult.  Whether it is 14 Kilometers in the Strait of Gibraltar or hundreds of kilometers to the Italian coast from Libya, European nations are increasing their pressure on the countries of the Maghreb to prevent the African migrants from crossing.  With their detention centers and increasingly sophisticated patrol boats, are the North African countries becoming, in Dr. Khader's words, "the gendarmes of Europe?"

In Olivares' film, the characters are shunted between border posts, safe houses, and brothels.  We come to care for the characters, and to root for them as they confront traffickers whose only interest is in their well-hidden wads of Euros.  We hold our breath as they risk being discovered by Algerian, Moroccan, or Spanish border guards.

For what?  To spend their lives on the edge of society, performing "Difficult, Dirty, Dangerous" jobs shunned by Westerners?

Gerardo Olivares' amateur actors have no such illusions.  As the director told Nicolas Crousse of Le Soir, at the Madrid opening of his film, they saw how African migrants lived in the Spanish capital.  "If it's like that," they told him, "we prefer staying in our own countries."

(Image: Strait of Gibraltar, NASA Earth Observatory)

Un Prophète

"Prison dramas", unless they are quality films like Leonera or Vier Minuten, are often simply that - prison dramas.  Genre films that are quickly produced, formulaic, and easily forgotten.  Not so with Jacques Audiard's Un Prophète, winner of the Cannes Grand Jury prize.  For Un Prophète is, as they tend to say in France, "un grand film."  Check out the official site for a trailer.

No big name actors or flashy pyrotechnics, though the special effects for the apparition of a departed cell mate - ostensibly from Hell - with little tufts of flames singing his track suit, are rather nifty.  No, the special effects are all in the acting - Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup (yes, French actors are no longer just "Alain" or "Jean-Paul") in the principal roles of Malik and César - and in Audiard's directing.

Prisons in France are all the news these days.  If it's not condemnation for overcrowding or suicide rates 10 times the non-prison population, it's spectacular breakouts with the help of hired or hijacked helicopters.

Malik and César have no need for such high-profile techniques.  César, as the grey-bearded godfather of the prison's Corsicans, can order an execution as easily as he can ensure privileged treatment for his troops.  Malik, a quick-learning "petty" criminal whose primary talent is survival, comes to serve the Corsicans, even learning their language (the film is primarily in French, but with frequent, and credible, use of Arabic and Corsu).  It's hard to say exactly at what point the Corsicans come to serve Malik, but that is clearly the trajectory.

In prison films in the United States (I can see Brad Pitt trying to snap up the remake rights after his capture of the excellent French-Georgian thriller 13 Tzameti), the Corsicans would become the Cripps, facing off the Bloods.  In Audiard's film, the other major power brokers are "les frères" - the brothers, referring to the bearded Muslim prisoners.  They are not necessarily Islamists, but they are disciplined.  Malik, himself of maghrebi origin but of no apparent religious conviction, somehow bonds with the brothers, but is also chummy with a gypsy (gitan) drug dealer who controls a deadly ring on the outside.  Why have enemies when allies can come in handy, inside or out?

The Outside.  If there's anything in Un Prophète that shows how prison is just "Criminality, Uninterrupted," it is the almost sheer impunity with which prisoners continue to ply their trade.  There are cell phones, of course, and special prison delivery services with packages swung between barred windows.  But Malik's specialty is making the utmost out of his occasional 24-hour paroles.  César thinks that he "owns" Malik's hours on the outside.  Malik has other ideas.

I've already said more than I usually do about the content of a highly recommended film.  Jacques Audiard, the latest in his family to gain cinematic glory, has made a keeper.

(Poster: Cinema de France.com)

Le Doaré Archives: Preserving Brittany's Past

One of the discoveries during our August holidays in Finistère was the Le Doaré Archives, literally the patrimony of three generations of Chateaulin's Le Doaré family photographers.  The current scion, Dominique (here at right, in front of some of his father's and grandfather's photos), presented over three hundred slides one evening to a hushed outdoor audience of Chateaulinois, all eager for a look at their town's past.

Three hundred slides, selected from a treasure trove of 80,000 to 100,000 photos, which represents a visual history of this unique part of France going back over one hundred years.  Dominique Le Doaré invited the audience to identify some of the subjects of his forebears' photos, and admonished everyone to label photos in their own family collections, saying that their archival value is greatly diminished without dates or context.

No such worries for this iconic photo below of Jos Le Doaré, Dominique's father and founder of Editions Jos, a local institution that has now been sold to a publisher, but which continues to provide thousands of quality postcards to tourists wanting to mail home a souvenir to family and friends.

Here little Jos clicks the shutter on an early 20th-century camera, while posing for his father Jean-Marie, who established the dynasty in 1898.  Jos, dressed in traditional Breton costume and sporting the then de rigueur below shoulder length tresses, was to grow up to continue in his father's footsteps, and to catch some historic moments, like the liberation of Chateaulin by Free French forces in August 1944 (which I wrote about last month).

Le Doaré Archives works with the University of Brest's Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC) in safeguarding this photographic heritage, recently in a collection of old sepia postcards.

Working out of a corner of the Editions Jos facility, Jacques Le Doaré scans his way through the thousands of negatives, slides, photographic plates, and postcards to build a digital record of a way of life that has long disappeared.  For photography and history buffs alike, the Le Doaré brothers' work is vital in preserving what the rest of us often relegate to the shoe box.  More power to them.

The Time That Remains: Palestinians, Israelis & Israeli Arabs

Had Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh ("Palestinian Walks") written the screenplay of The Time That Remains (poster at left, from the official site for the French release), the dwindling time might refer to the chance to hike the hills of Palestine before the Israelis completely cover them in concrete.  Or maybe the time remaining before Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman succeeds in expelling Arab Israelis from the land of their birth.

But the title of Israeli-Arab director/screenwriter Elia Suleiman's highly personal view of being an Arab in Israel may apply to family relations as much as Palestinian-Israeli relations, as in "appreciate your parents while they are still around," the theme so touchingly sketched in the recent Japanese film Still Walking.  In Suleiman's Nazareth of 1948 to the present, we see the Arab-Israeli conflict as experienced by and recounted to a boy growing up in a Palestinian family that has stayed on - in what has become part of Israel.

When I first saw the film's poster, I imagined that the little boy was getting a scolding from his father (it's actually the school headmaster; little Elia, it seems, is developing a reputation as a political dissident).  No, Suleiman's father Fuad (actor Saleh Bakri dominates the first third of the film as the young resistance fighter) is portrayed as a strong, silent type, who is left for dead after his capture in the 1948 fighting, and who spends the rest of his life under a cloud of Israeli suspicion that he hasn't abandoned his Palestinian nationalism.

We never see Suleiman-père old and frail.  He's the reliable go-to man for family and neighbors in a Nazareth left adrift, cut off from their cousins across the Green Line.  At the local school, children sing patriotic songs (but for which country?) in Hebrew and Arabic.

Though political themes are ever present (what honest film on the subject could avoid politics?), The Time That Remains is at times black comedic, and more than one reviewer (including Suleiman himself) has seen shades of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati in the absurdity of Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab relations.

The cinema in France where we saw "le Temps qu'il reste" distributed a very helpful flyer with a reprint from the Nouvel Observateur interview with Elia Suleiman, where he explains to Pascal Mérigeau that his novel view of the last sixty-plus years is his alone - and is not a documentary.  We read that "at 17 years old, I was accused of being a Communist sympathizer, and had 24 hours to make up my mind," which is how the young Suleiman ended up in London, which led to New York, which led to Paris...  This episode is alluded to in the film, when we see a teenaged Elia getting caught up in the first "Land Day" demonstrations to protest Israeli expropriation of its Arab citizens' land.

For objective students of the Arab-Israel conflict, The Time That Remains should stand up well to scrutiny.  For connoisseurs of the absurd, the film will show a collection of war and post-war situations that could be fodder for Ari Folman should Waltz With Bashir ever get a prequel.

In keeping with Suleiman's ambivalence over matters of nationality, statelessness, and patriotism, The Time That Remains was presented at Cannes 2009 as neither an Israeli nor a Palestinian film, but a product of France, Belgium, Italy, and the United Kingdom.  Suleiman, the "present absentee" Israeli/Palestinian/Expatriate and on-camera narrator of his own film, looks on silently at his life and gives us a rare look at the conflicted world of Arab-Israelis.

Pranzo di ferragosto - Roman Mid-August Lunch With Mamma

A sort of "Big Night" for homebodies longing for a memorable midday meal, "Pranzo di ferragosto" ("Mid-August Lunch," official site) won best film at the 2008 Venice Film Festival and other festival awards.  If I told you the film features four lovely Italian ladies, you are going to start thinking (1) Monica Bellucci; (2)...  If I told you that the actresses - who all appear to be first-timers in film - are at least over 80 years old, your interest might waver.  But don't succumb to ageism, for this film is, among many other things, an ode to youth, or at least remaining young at heart.  Poster at left: Cineocchio.org.

Gianni Di Gregorio's film has another inspired casting choice: the director as the lead actor, playing "Gianni," a fifty-something soft-alcoholic bachelor who takes good care of his mother, played by Valeria De Francisis, who either has a steel-reinforced blond permanent, or goes to bed in her platinum wig.  Guffaws would be out of place in this comedy, but there is plenty of material for wry chuckles.

Take the story line of this 76 minute film: Gianni and Mamma live in a pleasant old apartment block in downtown Rome, but have fallen behind - way behind - in their condo fees; they have had their keys to the elevator taken from them.  "Who needs an elevator anyway?" rationalizes Gianni to the understanding building manager, who has a plan to help the dutiful son and his mother.  It involves "Mamma sitting" for his octogenarian mother for the weekend of Assumption.  And that's just the beginning of Gianni's special weekend.

Note for readers unfamiliar with European observance (especially in the nominally Catholic countries) of Assumption Day, which always falls on 15 August: in a month already known for its city-emptying tradition of mass exodus to the beach, those left behind on 15 August have to fend for themselves.  Especially true when you have to prepare an impromptu feast for four (yes, the octogenarian count has risen) hungry ladies.

Di Gregario has, in a light-hearted but not silly or condescending way, combined in this short gem two bases of Italian society: the filial devotion of sons for their mothers (we are not told what the daughters-in-law think), and the unending quest to eat well - even when sharpers make the most of their mid-August monopoly on the wine supply.

See "Pranzo di ferragosto" for a midsummer Italian treat whenever it comes to your cinema or DVD distributor.  We saw it, appropriately, in provincial France on Assumption Day weekend.

Note:  This review also appears in European Film Awards Reviews and Picturenose.

Ben Hopkins' The Market: Bazaar Trade 101

Pazar - Bir ticaret masali, the latest film (shot in Turkish) by English director Ben Hopkins, has been given the title of The Market: A Tale of Trade (official site) for its international release.  This is trade at its most basic, a bazaar of barter, seen through the adventures of hero Mihram ("Saint Mihram," as he's called by cynics who doubt his ability to stay relatively honest, is admirably incarnated by Tayanç Ayaydin, a 30 year old Turkish actor who, by the way, can do a great bearded Jack Nicholson impersonation).

There is muted humor in The Market, as befits a director whose work includes a title like 37 Uses For a Dead Sheep - Ben Hopkins' 2006 documentary on nomads who populate another corner of eastern Turkey.   The locations are suitably bleak, appropriate for a setting along the border of what used to be the fault line between the Soviet Union and NATO's easternmost member.

Though the story of a smalltime trader on the make is timeless, Hopkins adds an extra layer of authenticity by situating it in the early 90s.  The USSR has recently broken up, neighboring Azerbaijan is dismantling (read pillaging) its Soviet infrastructure and dabbling in "the market" (read mafia) and Turkey is beginning to install a mobile phone network.  The US dollar (cash) is the preferred financial instrument.  Opportunity beckons for Mihram.

The Market: A Tale of Trade offers choice illustrations of many "capitalist" sub themes:

• Everything Has Its Price
• Business Is Business
• Information Is Power

Mihram is both an advocate for and a victim of all of the above.  If your pickup truck is your office, and if items on either side of the border have different "supply and demand" curves, you probably need a good business plan.

If your business plan's major elements are prayer (including a shaky vow to lay off the liquor) and gambling, or is too complicated to explain to your wife, then its chances of succeeding are, shall we say, aleatory.  Luck is a helpful element in any business, but when your multiple commitments, based on the same wad of cash, start to unravel, you have to be luckier than Mihram's track record would indicate.

You can enjoy The Market on many levels: excellent acting by unknown (in the West, anyway) new faces; a feel for life in those indeterminate border zones where rules are something for the books; an allegory for how all of our lives are influenced by "market forces."  Ben Hopkins' "Director's Statement" is definitely worth reading, as it traces how he came to write the screenplay "that dealt with my conflicting feelings about capitalism - my admiration for its creativity and innovation, and my cynicism that it can ever deliver its benefits without inequality and exploitation."

After months of Madoff and banks, bailouts, and bonuses, it's refreshing that Ben Hopkins provides a look at trade, one of the very basics of society's economic relations.  But who other than Hopkins would have thought to stage a timely and timeless capitalist drama on the dusty steppes of Central Asia?