FIGURE 6.5 Leila Hatami and Peyman Moaadi from the opening and closing scenes of A Separation
The visual separations in the last shot are part of the film’s pattern of internal frames. In the second sequence, we share Simin’s view through a window of her husband with his father, and that of Somayeh, Razieh’s daughter, peering past the tinted glass of the bathroom door where her mother helps the old man. Characters often stand in doorways, which allow for only a partial perception of events. Godfrey Cheshire elaborated in Film Comment, “The couple’s well-appointed Tehran apartment features numerous internal windows and glass partitions, enabling cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari’s fluidly mobile camera to follow and constantly reframe the characters while remaining obviously cut off from them. This technique … sets up a visual dynamic to match the drama’s emotional and moral dynamics: our perspective constantly shifts as we peer at one character and then another, trying to grasp their thoughts and motives, and work out our feelings about them.”11
The formal strategy of visual separation expresses the film’s theme of tragic misunderstanding. For example, Termeh notices from a doorway her mother counting a wad of cash for piano movers. However, she neglects to mention this to her father after he asks Termeh if she took the money. Because he never speaks of the missing cash to Simin—who clearly used this money to pay the piano movers—Nader accuses the innocent Razieh. Throughout the film, each character’s situation is gradually revealed, which prevents easy judgment on the part of the viewer. Because no single person is aware of all the facts, Farhadi refuses to take sides. Simin might seem tough at the beginning when she moves out, but a close-up of her father-in-law’s tight, trembling grasp of her wrist represents the hold of her domestic life. She later displays loyalty to Nader—offering to sell the house and car to post bail for him—who is a decent man, especially as a father and a son. Even the film’s least sympathetic character, Hojjat, is comprehensible in his lower-class rage against the bourgeois Nader. And by the end of the film, Razieh is a victim in a different sense than we assumed: it was because a car hit her when she ran to rescue Nader’s father in the street that she sought medical attention and left him tied to the bed. In the climactic penultimate scene, she refuses to swear on the Koran that Nader is responsible for her miscarriage, even if it means not getting the much-needed settlement money.
An article by Masoud Golsorkhi in the Guardian provides a political perspective as well:
On the other side of the class divide are Razieh … and her husband.… They provided the targets for the Shah’s army and the cannon fodder that put a halt to Saddam’s invasion. It’s them that support Khamenei, and they are part of the bloc who voted for Ahmadinejad. Their life choices are limited to say the least. Their opportunity for flight is nil. In their world, democracy is a suspect, unaffordable luxury item. For them the investment in the revolution is an investment against the worst excesses of unbridled capitalism.12
The specificity of this Iranian theocracy coexists with universal domestic situations, such as when Nader tearfully washes his ailing father in a wheelchair rather than the shower, hugging his hunched body in frustration, love, and helplessness. Like Kieślowski’s Decalogue—which was set in late-1980s Poland—A Separation constitutes a nonjudgmental observation of contemporary individuals trying to live decently while confronting confusion, compromise, and moral ambiguity. The writer-director summarized his humanist vision elegantly: “Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we’ll still be heartbroken.”13
Farhadi made his next film—The Past (2013)—in France, exploring similar themes of intimacy, separation, and miscommunication. It begins with a windshield wiper over the titles—an appropriate opening for a film about shifting perception and how hard it is to see what lies ahead. The movie’s major question is, can one build happiness on the misery of another? Its answer seems to be one that is shared by A Separation; namely, Jean Renoir’s line as Octave in Rules of the Game: “There’s only one terrible thing in this world, that everyone has his reasons.”
Nadine Labaki’s Arabic-language ensemble piece Where Do We Go Now? (2011) offers a fresh female perspective on sectarian violence in the Middle East. From a script that she cowrote with Thomas Bidegain, Rodney Al Haddad, and Jihad Hojeily, this fable is not only feminist and political but also humanist. It proved quite popular: after its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Where Do We Go Now? won the People’s Choice Audience Award at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival and was Lebanon’s entry for the Academy Awards’ Foreign-Language category. From the opening shots of an isolated mountain village, women are the focus: Christian and Muslim females dressed in black approach the camera in unified movements choreographed to mournfully vibrant music. (The score is by Khaled Mouzanar, Labaki’s husband.) To the chant’s percussive rhythm, the group briefly kneels or bows while walking, each woman swinging a right arm over her heart (see clip). A female voice-over accompanies the stylized and ritualistic image: “The story I tell is for all who want to hear. A tale of those who fast, a tale of those who pray, a tale of a lonely town, mines scattered all around. Caught up in a war, split to its very core. To clans with broken hearts under a burning sun, their hands stained with blood, in the name of a cross or a crescent. From this lonely place, which has chosen peace, whose history is spun of barbed wire and guns.” When they reach the cemetery, the women tend to the graves of their husbands and children. This opening establishes the coexistence not only of numerous characters but also of narrative tones: just as a dance formation enlivens a funeral procession, musical numbers throughout the film distance us, suggesting a means of escape from the violent backdrop.14
Surrounded by landmines, Christians and Muslims live in a wary harmony. When a television is set up for everyone to watch at night, the mayor (a Christian) celebrates the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century as the local priest sits beside the imam. But after a broadcast presents renewed local violence, the women sabotage the TV set, afraid the news will exacerbate tensions between their combustible men. In this world of strutting macho types on both sides—where violence erupts simply because shoes go missing from the mosque—those who suffer most are the women. Their solution is to unify by gender rather than religious faith. Labaki plays Amale, a young Christian widow whose café is the hub of the town’s activity. She is attracted to Rabih (Julian Farhat), the Muslim worker painting her café: in a musical number that projects her daydream, they sing their emotions. A subsequent song accompanies the titillating Russian dancers who have been brought to the village by its women: their moves are distracting enough to allow them to infiltrate a tape recorder into the Muslim men’s gathering.
FIGURE 6.6 From Where Do We Go Now?
An older widow, Takla (Claude Baz Moussawbaa), learns that her younger son, Nassim, was accidentally killed outside the village. Despite her grief, she tries to prevent more bloodshed by hiding it from the community, claiming he has the mumps. The film’s most striking scene takes place in the church where she vents her rage at the statue of the Virgin Mary, whose face has drops of blood (from a hoax when chicken’s blood was snuck into the holy water fonts). But a miraculous moment occurs after the distraught Takla leaves: the camera holds on a bloody tear that truly seems to drip down the statue’s cheek. When her older son forces his way into Nassim’s empty room, she does something extraordinary but plausible: Takla shoots him in the foot rather than let him inflame the men to take revenge on Muslims.
In a rather abrupt shift of tone, Labaki subsumes Takla’s pathos into a colorful scene of the women baking hash cookies together in a musical number. Their agenda is to get the men sufficiently and happily incapacitated that they won’t notice the women finding their buried guns to rehide them. This culminates in quite a transformation in the name of peace: the Christian women don Mus
lim attire and vice versa, confusing the men with prayers that indicate they adopted the opposing religion. The end of the film evokes the film’s beginning, but this time men and women are unified in the walk to the cemetery, carrying the coffin of Nissim. The female voice-over (which we now recognize as that of Amale) returns: “My story is now ending for all those who were listening, of a town where peace was found while fighting continued all around. Of men who slept so deep and woke to find new peace. Of women still in black, who fought with flowers and prayers instead of guns and flares, and protected their children. Destiny then drove them to find a new way.” The film’s title, which appeared after the opening credits, returns verbally when the pallbearer asks, “Where do we go now?” They don’t know whether to bury the young man in the Christian or Muslim section of the cemetery. Labaki leaves the question in the air, closing with the simple dedication “To our mothers,” which ties back to the opening of women approaching the cemetery. Despite radical tonal shifts between scenes of bloodshed and upbeat musical performances, these very juxtapositions form part of the film’s vision. Where Do We Go Now? invites us to take a step back and appreciate the shared, flawed humanity that can take comic as well as tragic shape.
Where Do We Go Now? is remarkably similar thematically and stylistically to another official selection of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, The Source, which calls itself a fairy tale, even beginning with the words “Once Upon a Time.” Starring the French-Algerian actress Leïla Bekhti as Leila, this Arabic-language film is by Radu Mihăileanu, a Romanian-born, French-based Jewish director whose previous films include the superb Live and Become. Like Labaki’s film, The Source portrays the solidarity of wise, brave women in villages where male violence has ruled. It also uses musical numbers to express the characters’ emotions and focuses on a beautiful young woman who has had enough of the status quo.
In the film Leila galvanizes other women to go on a “love strike” because too many have miscarried while hauling water from the distant source. In this tale that echoes Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, she finds support in the elderly, loquacious widow “Madame Rifle” (Biyouna)—thus nicknamed because her words are like bullets—who declares there will be no sex until the men get the water piped into town. The film’s opening in an unnamed contemporary Maghreb setting is gripping: close-up shots of women’s feet on a rough road are crosscut with a woman giving birth in a village, while another falls as she hauls full buckets and miscarries near the source. While the town celebrates the birth, Leila sings out in despair that no baby should die. (We learn in the bathhouse, where the women are playfully sensual, that Leila lost a baby, too.)
Her husband, Sami (Saleh Bakri), is a fine and supportive mate, a teacher who praises Islamic enlightenment. At night he reads the Koran with Leila, flashlights clipped to their foreheads. Although he asks the imam to send girls to school, the spiritual leader says they are needed to do chores. At the harvest festival the women perform their strike song, mocking their lazy men and alerting females in other villages. In addition, a visiting journalist writes about their plight, which leads the government to finally take action on the request for water piping.
Even if these Arabic-language “fairy tales” seem naïve in the light of continuing violence in North Africa and the Middle East, their healing vision—rooted in female empowerment—is an audaciously refreshing antidote. They utilize the form of the ensemble piece to embody and represent communal coexistence. Their openings therefore employ different strategies from those of Le Bal and Day for Night, where the yearning for intimate connection or artistic creation dominates. A Separation and Where Do We Go Now? both begin with repetition within the frame—whether mechanical or ritualistic—and end in a kind of limbo: now that the sociopolitical fabric has been torn, can it still be repaired? They make one think of how Albert Camus revised Descartes’s famous motto into “We act, therefore I am.” As the African proverb cited at the end of The Good Lie (2013)—a splendid collective protagonist drama directed by Philippe Falardeau from a script by Margaret Nagle—puts it, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
7
Misdirection/Visual Narration
The Hourglass Sanatorium, Before the Rain, Ajami, Under Fire, The Conversation, Rising Sun, Psycho, The Truman Show
What is “misdirection”? When we sit down to watch a movie, a few questions are implicit. Who is the main character? What is the story? When and where does it take place? And why should we be watching it? Traditional motion pictures begin with an establishing shot that indicates the place, time, and identity of the protagonist. This kind of narrative clarity is appropriate in delineating focus, from The Best Years of Our Lives to On the Waterfront. But I am even more likely to practice sympathetic scholarship on the films that tweak our assumptions, replacing an establishing shot with a mobile gaze that keeps redefining focus. Motion pictures like Under Fire, The Conversation, Rising Sun, and Psycho undermine our complacency as moviegoers. They keep us actively engaged in the unfolding of the tale. Their openings make us aware not only of what is being revealed but also what remains concealed. Exploiting the resources of camera narration, they include zoom shots that draw us ineluctably into a mystery.
One of the most deftly unsettling openings can be found in The Hourglass Sanatorium (Poland, 1973).1 Wojciech Has begins his adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s stories with a raven’s silhouette flying left in slow motion, while the camera tracks right. The camera slowly pulls back to reveal that our perspective has been through a train window framing the sky. It moves further back into an extreme low-angle perspective of the compartment’s decaying decor: religious Jews are seated in a kind of mobile limbo—perhaps sleeping, perhaps dead—in the landscape of Poland between the world wars. A blind conductor awakens Josef (Jan Nowicki) to announce that the next station is his destination, the sanatorium where his father is in treatment. This opening introduces visual refrains that will be developed throughout the film. The wide-angle lens prepares for Josef’s regression to a child’s perspective. It is also a self-conscious reminder that we are looking up at the screen and subject to the feeling of entrapment that comes from watching the ceilings bear down on characters. The distorting lens invokes a subterranean, hellish perspective appropriate to the story (and the film ends symmetrically with a low-angle shot of a vast graveyard). The logic of dreams pervades The Hourglass Sanatorium, which is less a linear narrative than a composition of internal rhymes. Enhanced by dissonant sound design, meaning emerges through surreal visual and aural juxtapositions. As in his other masterpieces—including The Noose and The Saragossa Manuscript—Wojciech Has allows content to determine form: a circular structure expresses how characters are stuck in time or doomed to repetition. Later in The Hourglass Sanatorium, the blind conductor tells Josef, “Plain facts are chronological, lined up on a thread.… There are sidetracks of time,” invoking the possibility of temporal loops or parallel universes. At the end of the film Josef undercuts the notion of linear progress when he says about the sanatorium, “It’s regurgitated time, second-hand time”—a line taken directly from Schulz’s story.
FIGURE 7.1 From The Hourglass Sanatorium (see clip)
Before the Rain and Ajami are among the most powerful films from war-ravaged countries, offering a poignant vision of characters trapped in cycles of repetition, whether determined by history or personal circumstance. Like The Hourglass Sanatorium, they manifest a fruitful tension between a story moving forward on a horizontal axis and a vision that spirals backward in time. (As Jean-Luc Godard famously said, a film should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order.)2 The repetition of images provides not only aesthetic coherence but also a philosophical awareness: perhaps history is not simply progress but recurrence, as still-raging wars rhyme with previous violent escalations while human needs and fears change little over centuries or national borders.
Before the Rain was the first entry from Macedonia to t
he Academy Awards and won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1994 Venice Film Festival. Although comparisons were made to Pulp Fiction (which Quentin Tarantino directed at approximately the same time), this Balkan triptych uses a fractured narrative structure in a more philosophically organic way. Writer-director Milcho Manchevski divided his first feature into three parts, “Words,” “Faces,” “Pictures”—also the elements of film language—manifesting a sensibility that is simultaneously literary, spiritual, and photographic. The film takes place against the backdrop of ethnic tensions between Orthodox Christian Macedonians and Muslim Albanians. In the first part, Kiril (Grégoire Colin)—a young priest who has taken a vow of silence—finds a young Albanian girl, Zamira (Labina Mitevska), hiding in his room. Zamira is being pursued by vengeful Macedonians who believe she killed one of their shepherds. Part 2 jumps to contemporary London, where photo editor Anna (Katrin Cartlidge) works with the images of war victims (which include Zamira’s corpse). She is having an affair with Aleksander (Rade Šerbedžija), a Macedonian photographer who urges her to leave London with him. While she is trying to speak honestly with her husband at a restaurant, a menacing man from the Balkans opens fire, killing many patrons. Part 3 returns with Aleksander to Macedonia, where after an absence of sixteen years he learns that the Albanians are now considered enemies. He still loves Hana, the Albanian mother of Zamira. When he visits Hana at the home of her father, the stories come together. Understanding that she needs his help in protecting Zamira, he takes the girl from her captors, who are part of his own family. Just as Zamira was shot at the end of the first section by her own brother when she tried to leave with Kiril, Aleksander is shot by his cousin Zdrave when he walks away with her. She flees to the monastery, where we see Kiril in the same shot as the film’s beginning: Before the Rain thus seems to close in a loop. Only on a second viewing do we realize that Aleksander’s funeral took place in part 1, where the woman crying from a distance was Anna.
Cinematic Overtures Page 11