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Cinema by
Leonard Heldreth Foreign movie buffet offers
supreme acting
The films this month are a cross-section of current world cinema—a
new film from an acknowledged Russian master, a first film from a Chinese-American
director shooting in Mexico, a South American film with two well-known actors
and a prize-winning semi-documentary from France.
Alexandra
Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra follows the adventures
of an elderly Russian woman who goes to visit her grandson, Denis, where he is
serving near Grozny in Chechnya. She hitches a ride on a military train and then
on an armored personnel carrier until she reaches the military camp, a raw conglomeration
of tents and shacks at the edge of a city, most of which has been destroyed by
the war with the Russians.
She visits her grandson, a twenty-seven-year-old
career officer, and lectures him on getting married; she makes friends with some
Chechen women in a marketplace; she renders her comment on the war (“It’s
all stupid and useless”) and climbs back into a boxcar on a train to return
to Russia.
What makes this film so effective are Sokurov’s direction,
his cameraman’s beautifully framed photography, the role of Alexandra played
by the famous opera soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, and Sokurov’s theme that
even enemies must learn to live together when they share a common border.
Alexander Sokurov is best known in the United States for his one-take tour-de-force,
Russian Ark, a nonstop tour through time and the Hermitage Museum. More typical
of his work are Mother and Son and Father and Son, two lyrical meditations on
relationships between parents and children, the first set in Russia, the second
in Paris. Sokurov is considered a world-class director, on a level with Bergman,
Renoir, Kurosawa or his fellow Russian, Tarkovsky. As this film makes clear, he
takes his time building a sense of place and character, sometimes at the expense
of plot (which I don’t think interests him much), but the result often is
extremely powerful.
Sukurov’s direction is highlighted by the work of
his cameraman, Alexander Burov, who fills the screen with shots of Alexandra and
a Chechen boy walking through empty fields; wooden walkways straddling puddles
and skirting tents in the military camp; the destroyed city, some of whose buildings
look ready to collapse with the next gust of wind; the antiquated military equipment
and the very young Russian soldiers; the suspicious Chechens; and Alexandra’s
grandson braiding his grandmother’s hair. Slowly, the cameraman creates tableaux
that frame the dark figure of Alexandra as she maneuvers from place to place,
often dragging a wheeled cart behind her.
Galina Vishnevskaya, the eighty-one-year-old
woman who plays Alexandra, is a premier Russian soprano who was married to cellist
and conductor, Mstislav Rostropovich. Stripped of citizenship in 1978 for their
political activities, the couple returned home after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Anyone watching the film in Russia would be aware of the significance of
casting such a well-known historical figure in the role. Ms. Vishnevskaya is an
excellent actress, permitting herself to look and move like a dumpy Russian grandmother,
rather than the diva she is (and as she appears in a press conference in the DVD
supplements).
Sokurov has said that Alexandra is about the eternal life of
Russia, and it’s hard to argue with such a broad generalization. But it’s
also about freedom and the ability to reject oppressive rulers. It’s about
wars that come and go throughout human history, and the need to understand how
to live side by side after the war is over. And it’s about the humanity that
must be maintained in all of these conflicts, as Alexandra maintains hers, even
in the demolished apartment of the Chechen woman who treats her like an old friend.
Alexandra is a film that can’t be rushed. Let it develop at its own pace,
which is very unlike the typical American movie, and its visuals and messages
will stay in your memory long after the film has ended. The movie is in Russian
with English subtitles.
Sin
Nombre
Sin Nombre (without a name) is set in Honduras and Mexico with Spanish-speaking
actors. It is written and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, a U.S. native citizen
with a Swedish mother and a Japanese father who has attended universities in California,
New York and France. The project was developed at Sundance after Fukunaga won
a prize there with a short film about immigrants, and Focus Films financed the
project.
Sin Nombre is his film-school thesis, and it won the thirty-one-year-old
director prizes for direction and cinematography at the Sundance Festival. Just
to top things off, it was coproduced by actors Diego Luna and Gael García
Bernal (see the following review of Rudo y Cursi).
The first part of the film
follows two converging stories. In Tapachula (Mexico), Willy, a.k.a. El Casper
(Edgar Flores), is balancing an affair with a local girl, Martha Marlene (Diana
García), with his efforts to initiate a new twelve-year-old recruit, El
Smiley (Kristian Ferrer), by helping him find and kill a member of an opposing
gang.
The girlfriend lives in another gang’s territory, and when this
fact is discovered by Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta), the head of the local branch
of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha gang, he has to punish both Casper and the girl.
In addition to being beaten, Smiley and Casper have to help Lil’ Mago
rob the people riding the freight trains north in an attempt to reach the United
States.
Farther south in Honduras, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) is joining her father
and uncle to ride trains through Guatemala and Mexico to the U.S.; they hope eventually
to reach New Jersey, where the father had established another family before he
was deported.
The two plots come together when the gangsters jump on board
the train Sayra and her family are riding. As the violence escalates, Casper revolts
against Lil’ Mago, an action that puts him on the run from the gang and Smiley
and, for the moment, allies him with Sayra and her family.
Much of the rest
of the plot is predictable—Fukunaga acknowledges he developed this aspect
of the plot in order to make the points he wanted to show. So, while the plot
is not very important, what he wanted to show is important—what the immigrants
had to go through just to reach the U.S. border, and the destructive effect of
the gangs upon young people.
Fukunaga spent two years researching the film
by riding freight trains north like the Honduran and Salvadorean immigrants he
depicts; these immigrant trains seem to be a hot subject, for just in the last
few weeks, I’ve seen a major magazine article about them as well as the announcement
of an HBO documentary special.
The director also contacted jailed members
of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, which is an actual organization with headquarters
in Mexico, as well as large cells in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities. He ran
the dialogue and actions of the fictional gang members by them in order to make
these as authentic as possible.
The film has some rough spots in plot and
characterization, but for a first-time director, it’s a remarkably polished
achievement.
See it to understand better the struggles of people trying to
escape the poverty south of our borders; it’s not a didactic film, and he
doesn’t argue that the United States should open its borders. He merely lets
us share the experience of people riding the trains north, and how at one station,
people throw them oranges, and at another, they throw rocks.
The film is
full of striking images, competent acting by mostly nonprofessional actors, and
a look into a world about which most of us know almost nothing. The film is in
Spanish with English subtitles.
Rudo
y Cursi
The quality of the production crew should make this film a masterpiece,
or at least a huge hit. Carlos Cuarón, the writer and director, wrote the
script for the highly regarded and commercially successful Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001),
which his brother Alfonso directed.
That film starred Gael García
Bernal and Diego Luna in career-making roles and was hugely successful as well
as critically acclaimed throughout the Americas.
This film brings the Cuaróns
together again with Bernal and Luna in the first venture of the new Cha Cha Cha
Productions, a group which also includes other top Mexican directors Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel) and Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy
and Hellboy II).
The general outline of the plot is dreadfully familiar, but
the details and acting freshen it up a bit, and the Mexican soccer background
adds some flavor.
Tato (Bernal) and Beto (Luna) are half-brothers who share
a common mother, their fathers having sired them and moved on. They work as banana
pickers on a large plantation in a dirt-poor area of Mexico where Tato dreams
of being a singer, although he has almost no talent, and Beto dreams of being
a soccer goalie, although so far he has advanced only to foreman of the banana
crew, a position which helps him support his wife and children.
It seems
nothing but luck or coincidence will ever help these two escape. Then, coincidence
enters in the form of a soccer scout named Batuta (Guillermo Francella), whose
red sports car has broken down near the village, stranding him and his trophy
squeeze for a few hours.
To pass the time while it is repaired, he watches
the boys play soccer and is impressed with the two brothers but can offer a contract
to only one.
Neither of these young men is the brightest berry on the bush,
and they get confused during the contest. One, however, goes off to Mexico City
and is successful, and that leads to the scout offering the other brother a contract.
The scout provides some cynical and often humorous voice-over comments about what
is seen on the screen, as he links the incidents together.
The adventures
of the two brothers, as they rise to the top of the soccer world and eventually
face each other in the inevitable championship game, are amusingly chronicled.
Each brother has a weakness that undercuts his ability to succeed, and their rise
and fall is inevitable.
Fortunately, this film is not just another “poor-boy-makes-good”
sports movie; in fact, except for the final game, there’s very little soccer
action in it. Instead, the director focuses on the changing relationship between
the two young men, and the two actors, friends since childhood, make the fraternal
love-hate relationship believable.
The details of their story, and the way
this comedy, with moments of intense drama, wraps up lift it above the typical
sports-success genre. Rudo y Cursi doesn’t have the emotional impact and
the memorable qualities of Y Tu Mama Tambien, but it has enough comedy and drama,
as well as two solid performances by Bernal and Luna, to make it quite engaging.
By the way, the title comes from the nicknames the boys receive as soccer players.
The film is in Spanish with English subtitles.
The Class
François Bégaudeau, a teacher
in a Paris suburb, wrote an autobiographical account of one year in his teaching
experience; it was called Entre les Murs (Between the Walls). Film director Laurent
Cantet used the novel as a springboard to develop a film script even more loosely
based on the original than the typical Hollywood movie. He met with Bégaudeau
and a select group of students each week and guided them through talking about,
acting out and improvising around the events in the novel.
From these encounters,
he created a script which was further modified as he filmed the class acting out
the script. The result is a film that seems to give an honest picture of what
happens inside a French classroom for a year, one in which students talk as they
actually speak and in which both students and teachers make mistakes, locked into
a system that often prevents them from making the best choices.
The film
follows an average (or less) French high school class as the teachers try to mold
their polyglot of students—Arabs, Africans, Orientals and Europeans—into
the French citizens of the future.
The students, as might be expected of
thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds, aren’t interested at being molded, and several
are intensely proud of their ethnic backgrounds, although the threat of being
sent to their parents’ country of origin inevitably frightens them.
At parent-student conferences, the teacher often has to rely on the students to
translate what their parents say. It’s not a recipe for a docile situation,
and the French teacher, try as he might, lets himself be baited into confrontations
he should have avoided.
But he’s only one against a class of many, and
his patience is worn down inevitably by the constant resistance. He can’t
do his best because the students and the system won’t let him; on the other
hand, has he tried hard enough? It’s a tough question.
This film, unlike
most classroom films, is not uplifting. The best student’s mother is being
deported. The worst student’s father wants to send him back to Mali. Another
student is terrified of being sent to a trade school. Marin wins some, but he
also loses some, and the outcome often is not pretty.
Although he uses all
amateurs in the roles, Cantet, the director of Human Resources and Time Out, elicits
thoroughly believable performances from all these nonactors, including Bégaudeau,
who plays Marin, his alter ego. Especially outstanding are Esméralda Ouertani
as an Arab student who exploits her position as class representative; Franck Keïta
as Souleymane, the Mali student who knows how to antagonize both students and
teachers, but is good to his mother; and Wei Huang, the brightest student in a
class that offers him little chance to be exceptional.
The first part of the
film tends to be slow, as classroom situations are, but the later part picks up
as tension builds about some decisions. The problem with any classroom film is
that when things are going well and students are working and learning, there is
little action; drama usually occurs when things go wrong. So, inevitably, this
film focuses more on the problems than on the achievements.
But it’s
a welcome antidote to the overly inspirational ideas so often seen in American
films. No one’s life is turned around in this film, but no one is knifed
or shot either. The Class offers one of the more realistic views of a junior-high
classroom, for better or worse. The film won top prize at Cannes and is in French
with English subtitles.
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note:
All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores. Reviews of most
earlier films cited can be found at www.mmnow.com
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