A great movie about three French women threatened with redundancy when the factory they work in is faced with closure and relocation to the Asian subcontinent. In a battered old car they set off to India to accept the 'offer', by the creeps in the HR department, of a job in the new factory - on local wages, with no flight to take them there, and no pension or benefits... Crossing Poland, Ukraine, Russia and Kazakstan, their number is gradually whittled to one, the determined and aneponymous heroine, Aglaé. This is a satire on the disgusting and heartbreaking aspects of globalisation, outsourcing and pitting one worker against another. But for all the trials and tribulations of the heroine, it is also an affirmation of ordinary people, even the Russian border guard who insists on singer a song for the singer folk who are smuggling Aglaé across his border... Fab work for this debut Canadian French director. Fabulous to have shot over so many countries. And the final message? The true face of globalisation? People.
Reviews
5 Reviews
Shirin
(2008)
Kiarostami's Hymn to Women
30 June 2009
This is an amazing film.
I knew very little about it when I went except that 'all it showed' was a lot of women's faces watching a film ... What I experienced, however, was a brilliant - and daring - piece of multi-layered cinema. Yes, 'all we watch' are the faces of a group of 140 (apparently) Iranian women - plus Juliet Binoche - watching the traditional story of Shirin, an Armenian Queen.
We hear the soundtrack (and, in my case, read the subtitles) and see the women's reactions. But we never see what they see. They are looking past and beyond us.
The first thing that strikes one is the beauty of - and in - the faces of these women - and how beautifully Kiarostami lights and shoots them. Not to mention the complex and subtle rhythms of the edit. Women from their late teens into their sixties achingly expressive like renaissance portraiture ...Holbein or Velasquez or some of the Dutch masters come to mind ... And even after is had dawned that some, or perhaps all, of these faces might belong to actresses, each cunningly made up, the layers of the film, for me, only deepened: here, after all, is the dialectic of actors being watched - 'as themselves'.
Because, we wonder, are they aware that they are being filmed, watched? Of course. Kiarostami would have explained the set-up to them. That must be why he has managed to persuade so many famous and attractive Iranian women actors to take part; what a show reel for them! But through this choice, the director allows us to watch them while wondering how much they might, at any one point, be 'acting'? How much they are aware from moment to moment, these 'fakers', these 'deceivers', that they are being observed? And when, as they become engrossed in elements of the story, they forgot? And become 'themselves'.
And they do become engrossed. The tears flow. As did mine - watching their tears. They flinch when swords scythe, when heads and hands are chopped off. They lower their eyes with a memory of their own. Or in horror. They smile with recognition. Their faces light up. Darken.
So much is shown. But so much is not revealed. So much work is left to our imaginations.
And of course, there is the whole layer of these women being Iranian. A culture we don't know. Or think we know and dismiss out of hand, or patronise out of our ignorance. Every one of the women - even Juiette Binoche - is wearing a headscarf, headscarves that themselves become expressive of the wearer's individuality. How they drape them. Each one, like each face, unique. How each scarf lies. How each scarf frames the face. How the women themselves move the folds and adjust them, or play with, or arrange the material, unconsciously, as they watch...
And on another level, a deeper level, it's a great choice of Kiarostami's, that the film they are watching is about Shirin, a strong women, a lover, a hero Queen - an epic story crammed with sex, passion, betrayal, longing, lust and all expressed in the most heightened language and emotion. Because, as we watch these women watching, we know that they have, collectively, experienced all of this. Their eyes tell us that. Their tears. Their little smiles of recognition. Their open and child-like faces.
This is the ultimate success of the film. We meet 140 Iranian women. And one French one - also a clever choice ... We have a chance to watch them intimately. We, in the dark, watch them in the dark, watching. We fall in love with them; no less so the older ones, whose faces are etched with life. We know, young and old, they have all lived and had lives and loves and children, some of them, and grief and failures and loss and triumph over odds. And yet we know nothing of their stories. The details. Yet yearn to know them. The unknowable.
This is a film which gives the lie to a million clichés and 'certainties' about Iran, and 'freedom' and Islam and 'The Other'. I do recommend people to find a place to see it. But in a cinema. On a big screen. After all, it's an epic - but on a vibrantly human scale.
I knew very little about it when I went except that 'all it showed' was a lot of women's faces watching a film ... What I experienced, however, was a brilliant - and daring - piece of multi-layered cinema. Yes, 'all we watch' are the faces of a group of 140 (apparently) Iranian women - plus Juliet Binoche - watching the traditional story of Shirin, an Armenian Queen.
We hear the soundtrack (and, in my case, read the subtitles) and see the women's reactions. But we never see what they see. They are looking past and beyond us.
The first thing that strikes one is the beauty of - and in - the faces of these women - and how beautifully Kiarostami lights and shoots them. Not to mention the complex and subtle rhythms of the edit. Women from their late teens into their sixties achingly expressive like renaissance portraiture ...Holbein or Velasquez or some of the Dutch masters come to mind ... And even after is had dawned that some, or perhaps all, of these faces might belong to actresses, each cunningly made up, the layers of the film, for me, only deepened: here, after all, is the dialectic of actors being watched - 'as themselves'.
Because, we wonder, are they aware that they are being filmed, watched? Of course. Kiarostami would have explained the set-up to them. That must be why he has managed to persuade so many famous and attractive Iranian women actors to take part; what a show reel for them! But through this choice, the director allows us to watch them while wondering how much they might, at any one point, be 'acting'? How much they are aware from moment to moment, these 'fakers', these 'deceivers', that they are being observed? And when, as they become engrossed in elements of the story, they forgot? And become 'themselves'.
And they do become engrossed. The tears flow. As did mine - watching their tears. They flinch when swords scythe, when heads and hands are chopped off. They lower their eyes with a memory of their own. Or in horror. They smile with recognition. Their faces light up. Darken.
So much is shown. But so much is not revealed. So much work is left to our imaginations.
And of course, there is the whole layer of these women being Iranian. A culture we don't know. Or think we know and dismiss out of hand, or patronise out of our ignorance. Every one of the women - even Juiette Binoche - is wearing a headscarf, headscarves that themselves become expressive of the wearer's individuality. How they drape them. Each one, like each face, unique. How each scarf lies. How each scarf frames the face. How the women themselves move the folds and adjust them, or play with, or arrange the material, unconsciously, as they watch...
And on another level, a deeper level, it's a great choice of Kiarostami's, that the film they are watching is about Shirin, a strong women, a lover, a hero Queen - an epic story crammed with sex, passion, betrayal, longing, lust and all expressed in the most heightened language and emotion. Because, as we watch these women watching, we know that they have, collectively, experienced all of this. Their eyes tell us that. Their tears. Their little smiles of recognition. Their open and child-like faces.
This is the ultimate success of the film. We meet 140 Iranian women. And one French one - also a clever choice ... We have a chance to watch them intimately. We, in the dark, watch them in the dark, watching. We fall in love with them; no less so the older ones, whose faces are etched with life. We know, young and old, they have all lived and had lives and loves and children, some of them, and grief and failures and loss and triumph over odds. And yet we know nothing of their stories. The details. Yet yearn to know them. The unknowable.
This is a film which gives the lie to a million clichés and 'certainties' about Iran, and 'freedom' and Islam and 'The Other'. I do recommend people to find a place to see it. But in a cinema. On a big screen. After all, it's an epic - but on a vibrantly human scale.
Laila's Birthday
(2008)
Laila's Birthday
26 April 2009
Warning: Spoilers
I saw this as part of the Palestinian Film Festival 2009 at the Barbican in London. Definitely a must-see, strangely feel-good movie made in a place that disgraces both the west and the UN, sanctimoniously pledged as they are to 'right wrongs wherever they occur'.
The film shows the everyday difficulties, obstacles and tragedies of life in the occupied West Bank (NB occupied by the Israelis, against all international laws and norms, since 1967) and the resilience of its protagonist, Abu Laila, on the day of his daughter's birthday.
This rather formal and uptight man, trained and originally working as a judge, is now reduced to temping as a taxi-driver with his brother-in-law's car. His day takes him on a journey through Ramallah where he bumps against both the commonplace and the extraordinary:
A couple of young lovers want him to drive them - anywhere - round the town so they can progress their love-affair. The injustices at the justice ministry he visits to get his old job back, redecorated and having new curtains for the umpteenth time as a new government comes in. An old woman who must go to the hospital and the cemetery - but she can't decide in which order. A man wounded in an Israeli missile attack - who subsequently dies - is taken to a hospital by the mechanic repairing Abu Laila's taxi when it conks out. The increasingly hapless driver - drinking a coffee round the corner when the missile strikes, finds car and mechanic gone - then has to go to the hospital and even take home the man's grieving but silent female relative.
All the while a guy who had earlier left his mobile in the car, continues to ring in, more and more aggressively, demanding Abu Laila bring it back.
In a post screening talk, the famous Palestinian actor playing Abu Laila, Mohammed Bakri, made the point that the film is not only about the responsibility of the Israelis for the life that Palestinians lead in the West Bank and Gaza, but that Palestinians have to take some of their own responsibility. They can't blame everything on the occupation.
However, there's blame and blame, and once Bakri got going in the discussion, it was clear that whatever he claimed the film to be saying, he (and probably the director) still see the occupation as the central factor. After all, why should the oppressed behave any more morally than the free? In the penultimate and powerful scene, a helicopter circles overhead and Abu Laila finally blows his top at the whole crazy world there. But it is still his daughter's birthday. And he has yet to go home...
The film shows the everyday difficulties, obstacles and tragedies of life in the occupied West Bank (NB occupied by the Israelis, against all international laws and norms, since 1967) and the resilience of its protagonist, Abu Laila, on the day of his daughter's birthday.
This rather formal and uptight man, trained and originally working as a judge, is now reduced to temping as a taxi-driver with his brother-in-law's car. His day takes him on a journey through Ramallah where he bumps against both the commonplace and the extraordinary:
A couple of young lovers want him to drive them - anywhere - round the town so they can progress their love-affair. The injustices at the justice ministry he visits to get his old job back, redecorated and having new curtains for the umpteenth time as a new government comes in. An old woman who must go to the hospital and the cemetery - but she can't decide in which order. A man wounded in an Israeli missile attack - who subsequently dies - is taken to a hospital by the mechanic repairing Abu Laila's taxi when it conks out. The increasingly hapless driver - drinking a coffee round the corner when the missile strikes, finds car and mechanic gone - then has to go to the hospital and even take home the man's grieving but silent female relative.
All the while a guy who had earlier left his mobile in the car, continues to ring in, more and more aggressively, demanding Abu Laila bring it back.
In a post screening talk, the famous Palestinian actor playing Abu Laila, Mohammed Bakri, made the point that the film is not only about the responsibility of the Israelis for the life that Palestinians lead in the West Bank and Gaza, but that Palestinians have to take some of their own responsibility. They can't blame everything on the occupation.
However, there's blame and blame, and once Bakri got going in the discussion, it was clear that whatever he claimed the film to be saying, he (and probably the director) still see the occupation as the central factor. After all, why should the oppressed behave any more morally than the free? In the penultimate and powerful scene, a helicopter circles overhead and Abu Laila finally blows his top at the whole crazy world there. But it is still his daughter's birthday. And he has yet to go home...
Departures
(2008)
Death's Comforters
18 December 2008
Warning: Spoilers
I watched this movie on a Japanese Airlines flight from Tokyo to London having previously sat through James McAvoy and Angelina Jollie in the appalling and callous Wanted.
Nothing in Departures could be more different.
Here you see where the real pain of death lies: in those who are left behind. That every life come to an end is someone's brother, sister, mother, son, father, wife, lover or friend. And this is what is explored in the film through the story of Dagio, a cellist who, with his wife, returns to the family house he'd been left by his mother nine years before.
Needing a job, he becomes the assistant to a man who washes, dresses and applies make-up to corpses in a ceremony that each family witnesses. And on one level it's about the deepening relationship between Dagio and this man - a growing father to Dagio - whose real father left when Dagio was six and whose face he can no longer see in his dreams. But this mentor/father-figure, a man of maybe seventy, is also moving towards his own death, and in one beautiful moment, we see him asleep on a sofa and Dagio tenderly tucking him in with a blanket; in the same way they both tuck the ceremonial sheet under the corpses they wash and dress.
It is also a movie about forgiveness and understanding: a father finally breaks down, weeps and accepts in death his cross-dressing son; and Dagio's own wife begins, when she actually sees what he does, to appreciate the value of the 'unclean' and strange job he has got himself.
Even Dagio's relationship with his mother is examined. He was not there for her funeral, because 'he was abroad' at the time; we assume, touring with the orchestra which has recently been disbanded. And he begins to play music again, with a new understanding, and to remember himself as a boy playing the the little cello that his mother and father bought for him.
Because finally the film is about art. About the cello. About transcending life's pain and turmoil. I was often reminded, while watching the movie, of the Korean film 'Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring'. About cycles of struggle, failures, disappointments, beginnings and deaths. Hugely recommended.
Nothing in Departures could be more different.
Here you see where the real pain of death lies: in those who are left behind. That every life come to an end is someone's brother, sister, mother, son, father, wife, lover or friend. And this is what is explored in the film through the story of Dagio, a cellist who, with his wife, returns to the family house he'd been left by his mother nine years before.
Needing a job, he becomes the assistant to a man who washes, dresses and applies make-up to corpses in a ceremony that each family witnesses. And on one level it's about the deepening relationship between Dagio and this man - a growing father to Dagio - whose real father left when Dagio was six and whose face he can no longer see in his dreams. But this mentor/father-figure, a man of maybe seventy, is also moving towards his own death, and in one beautiful moment, we see him asleep on a sofa and Dagio tenderly tucking him in with a blanket; in the same way they both tuck the ceremonial sheet under the corpses they wash and dress.
It is also a movie about forgiveness and understanding: a father finally breaks down, weeps and accepts in death his cross-dressing son; and Dagio's own wife begins, when she actually sees what he does, to appreciate the value of the 'unclean' and strange job he has got himself.
Even Dagio's relationship with his mother is examined. He was not there for her funeral, because 'he was abroad' at the time; we assume, touring with the orchestra which has recently been disbanded. And he begins to play music again, with a new understanding, and to remember himself as a boy playing the the little cello that his mother and father bought for him.
Because finally the film is about art. About the cello. About transcending life's pain and turmoil. I was often reminded, while watching the movie, of the Korean film 'Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring'. About cycles of struggle, failures, disappointments, beginnings and deaths. Hugely recommended.
Import Export
(2007)
Death and Money
11 October 2008
Warning: Spoilers
I saw this movie in London on a Friday night in October at a point when the world's finances were in meltdown and the FTSE had lost 9% of its value in one day. So what? So everything... This film couldn't have been more apposite; Import Export is all about capitalism - and cash. Having it. Not having it. And the humiliations most people must undergo just to stay afloat.
And, as it turns out in this movie, the real heroes of the piece are the 'losers' West and East, but particularly the latter; losers who may have few chips to bet in capitalism's little crap game, but ones who haven't yet forgotten their humanity.
In particular Olga, the Ukrainian nurse who travels to the West only to absorb one humiliation after another. In a series of beautiful scenes in the Geriatric hospital in Vienna where she now works as a cleaner - we see her variously comb the hair of a demented inmate before a nurse tell her it's against the rules, plug in a phone and sing a lullaby to her baby a thousand miles to the East, dance tenderly with a dying patient in a basement storeroom and later go to the 'Exitus' to make a last vigil over his body, a moment of almost religious intensity...
Interwoven with her story, is that of Pauli who makes the journey in the opposite direction, ending up in the Ukraine with his debased and alcoholic step-father, a pathetic and impotent racist whose behaviour reminded me strongly of the SS invaders in the climactic scene of Elim Klimov's Come and See. A man whose debasement is a cypher for the moral emptiness of the West. For money, he gets a prostitute, naked from the waist down, to crawl round on her hands and knees while telling her to repeat, in German, a language she doesn't understand, that she's a 'stupid f**king c**t'.
The power of money. The only thing he understands...
Pauli finally tries to 'defect' to the East. But even there the system is now dog eat dog so he leaves his step-father and begins to hitch-hike back. Meanwhile, at the hospital, the cleaners, ladies from the East all, sit in their overalls around a dinner table and share a joke. And laugh and laugh and laugh.
Their spirit is not dead. It's the real power of the downtrodden. Everywhere.
And, as it turns out in this movie, the real heroes of the piece are the 'losers' West and East, but particularly the latter; losers who may have few chips to bet in capitalism's little crap game, but ones who haven't yet forgotten their humanity.
In particular Olga, the Ukrainian nurse who travels to the West only to absorb one humiliation after another. In a series of beautiful scenes in the Geriatric hospital in Vienna where she now works as a cleaner - we see her variously comb the hair of a demented inmate before a nurse tell her it's against the rules, plug in a phone and sing a lullaby to her baby a thousand miles to the East, dance tenderly with a dying patient in a basement storeroom and later go to the 'Exitus' to make a last vigil over his body, a moment of almost religious intensity...
Interwoven with her story, is that of Pauli who makes the journey in the opposite direction, ending up in the Ukraine with his debased and alcoholic step-father, a pathetic and impotent racist whose behaviour reminded me strongly of the SS invaders in the climactic scene of Elim Klimov's Come and See. A man whose debasement is a cypher for the moral emptiness of the West. For money, he gets a prostitute, naked from the waist down, to crawl round on her hands and knees while telling her to repeat, in German, a language she doesn't understand, that she's a 'stupid f**king c**t'.
The power of money. The only thing he understands...
Pauli finally tries to 'defect' to the East. But even there the system is now dog eat dog so he leaves his step-father and begins to hitch-hike back. Meanwhile, at the hospital, the cleaners, ladies from the East all, sit in their overalls around a dinner table and share a joke. And laugh and laugh and laugh.
Their spirit is not dead. It's the real power of the downtrodden. Everywhere.
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