Change Your Image
sadeq_rahimi
Reviews
Babel (2006)
A Disturbing Experience !
I can't bring myself to decide a vote for this film, because my reaction to it seems to not have much to do with quality. In fact my reaction was so visceral, early, and strong that I can hardly say I paid attention to technicalities of 'quality'. But the experience was a disturbing one for me, so much so that I had to stop watching this film half way through. I can't really understand why someone would want to make a film like this, much less why or how someone could enjoy being exposed to it. It has in it a venom-like bleakness that leaks into the space and suffocates any sense of hope. OK, I'm being dramatic here, but really, I just don't enjoy having somebody's simple, crude and strong conviction that, "life is s#it," be dumped on me -and watching this film is like standing under a garbage truck unloading rotten life on you. My idea of watching a film is far from being water-boarded with some miserable mind's bleak helplessness and dead-end point of view, especially if that comes with pain. Maybe I would enjoy a film like this if I were really far from the reality of all the S#it that is going on in the world on a daily basis -so much that my senses were just dead numb and something like this would maybe force some life into that numb skull of mine; or perhaps I would get a high watching this film if I were deeply masochistic. So here goes what sounds more like my rant, than my review. Maybe I'll come back to this and change it later, but for now, I've just seen this film, and this is how I feel about it.
Rat (1960)
Comic, yes. Bleak, yes.
I watched this film without knowing what it was going to be about. It's thrown together with an American B movie 'This Is Not A Test' in a collection that I picked up at the local library for killing some time. The two films both deal with the horrors of the atomic weapon era. The story has been pointed out by others here so I won't summarize that, but it was quite an interesting contrast to see the two back to back. Atomic War Bride is made with many implicit and explicit allusions to the European intellectual and literary traditions, while addressing the new issue of atomic weapons of mass destruction, that was going to soon become one of the earliest strong signs of globalization. I don't mean to get into 'This Is Not A Test' here, but the point is that those traces of intellectual thought make a serious difference between these two films. While the American one is not much more than a basic and crude take on the questions of authority and irony, this one covers a wide range of issues about the relationship between the individual and the society, the relationship between the individual and the state, questions of violence and love, absurdity, freedom and group psychology, and more. All in all, I guess, this is a nice little film that makes you think again and again, without necessarily claiming to be an intellectual film. It is, after all, an absurd comedy about war and the question of optimism against the harsh realities of the human nature. I found it well worth the watch.
Um Filme Falado (2003)
Blissfully Uncritical Eurocentrism
There are many opinions listed here about the film itself from technical or artistic points of view or about whether it is interesting or boring etc.. My reaction is not about any of that. I have serious problems with this film's naive Eurocentric point of view, which, seems to me, adds up to a very troublesome and dangerous crusader mentality that breaks the world into a 'civilized' 'West' and the 'uncivilized' Rest. Don't misunderstand me, the idea is certainly not put in these many words, the film does have a nice politically correct surface --but simply look a bit deeper below the surface to see the way Africa is referred to, the direct and indirect ways 'Arabs' are pictured (not to mention the deeply ignorant way in which a whole world of Islamic cultures and civilizations are grouped under this term 'Arab' at one point), or the way the notion of civilization, its origins and its trajectory is depicted, the way terrorism is understood or pictured, and one can keep listing. Had this film been made in 1920s, I would have had less of a surprise reaction to it, but I mean, come on, we are talking 2003!
Consider the following excerpt for example. This is out of a scene where three main characters (three women, a Greek, an Italian, and a French -Papas, Sandrelli, & Deneuve, respectively) are having dinner with the ship's captain, an American man (Malkovich). You judge for yourself.
(French): Greece is still the cradle of civilization, and will be as long as the world goes around.
(Greek): It's a civilization that's been forgotten
(French): And with it fraternity and human rights, and the Utopian ideals of the French Revolution
(Italian): Which the United States later adopted
(American): And has reinforced
(Italian): Yes, but they're also being forgotten, as is happening on other continents, like Europe, not to speak of Africa!
(Greek): No civilization lasts forever
That's how Alexander the Great saw it when, under the influence of Aristotle, he decided to found a universal library
But what I find most curious is the case of the Arabs, who, having spread Greek culture in Europe and beyond, were the ones to destroy it, burning all the books in the blindness of their religious fervor.
(Italian): The beginnings of fundamentalism, which is everywhere today
(Greek): What haunts the Arab world nowadays is the development of the West, with its many technical advances and scientific progress. This creates religious prejudice, which is what divides us
PS, I know I said I won't explain, but for anyone who still takes seriously the story that the library was made by Alexander and then burnt by the Arabs, why not take a look at this Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Library_of_Alexandria or better yet, at this article: http://www.bede.org.uk/Library2.htm
Anlat Istanbul (2005)
A powerful reflection on a soured dream
For anybody interested in thinking about Turkey as a dynamic society going through a(nother) serious 'turning point' in its history, this can be an important film to watch. I noticed someone commented on this film as one of the most 'realistic' films ever made in the history. There must be some truth to this: perhaps not in any concrete sense, but in the subjective state of the person who wrote that note, and the 'realism' that spoke to him or her through this film. As exaggerated and meaningless as that claim may appear, it is important and meaningful nonetheless, because he or she lives this truth, at one level or another. For him or her this is real, and that IS real. It is wonderful the way these fairy tales find themselves translated in the underworlds of Istanbul: neither fantastic tales of Eastern Thousand and One Nights, nor happy ending fairy tales of Western symbols, these are the uncanny tales of the truly marginalized characters, 'realities', ghosts that have been pushed back into the invisible undergrounds of Turkish 'civilization quest' materialized in the name of Istanbul, this age old dream trophy of Turkish warriors. A broken bridge, a host of nightly creatures cast out of nice dreams gone bad, and the human cost that has been paid in pursuit of a mirage: it is time to wake up and follow the Ottoman tune, not across any bridges to anywhere on 'the other side', but rather, right into the running fluidity of the generous Bosporus.