Film review – The NeverEnding Story (1984)

2 April 2013
The NeverEnding Story: Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) and Falkor (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer)

Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) and Falkor (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer)

A year after the digitally remastered ‘print’ of Labyrinth (Jim Henson, 1986) was re-released in Australia, comes the digital re-release of another beloved children’s fantasy film from the 1980s: Wolfgang Petersen’s The NeverEnding Story (1984). It is a film that contains a significant nostalgia for Generation X who grew up imagining they were riding Falkor the luckdragon in between being traumatised by Artax dying in the Swamps of Sadness and having to endure the kids in the grade above them doing jazz ballet routines at assembly to the film’s theme song. As was the case with Labyrinth, not only does The NeverEnding Story hold up magnificently well, but it demonstrates a level of thematic and technical sophistication that elevates it above most films targeted at younger audiences that have come out since.

Loosely adapted from the first half of the 1979 novel Die unendliche Geschichte: Von A bis Z, by the German author Michael Ende, who came from Bavaria where the fantasy sequences of the film were shot, The NeverEnding Story presents the case for the importance and power of imagination. Like Labyrinth it celebrates classic fantasy and science-fiction literature, naming the works of key authors such as JRR Tolkien, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Also similarly to Labyrinth, the protagonist of The NeverEnding Story, Bastian Bux (Barret Oliver), is an adolescent who prefers the world of fantasy to the real world. However, while Sarah in Labyrinth must learn to find balance between the real world of responsibility and the comforts of the fantasy world, The NeverEnding Story firmly presents the real world as one that Bastian legitimately would want to escape from. While Labyrinth is a coming-of-age story about an older child navigating the path between maturity and innocence, The NeverEnding Story is a far more straightforward tale about the joys of childhood wonderment triumphing over apathy.

The introductory scenes to The NeverEnding Story very efficiently introduce the real world as one of injustice, sorrow and loneliness for Bastian. He is bullied on the way to school, does not seem to have any friends and is emotionally distant from his father (Gerald McRaney) who struggles to understand that Bastian’s retreat into the world of make-believe is partly a way of coping with the death of his mother. Bastian is shown struggling to open a jar, establishing his lack of physical strength to reinforce how vulnerable he is. Even for children who have not been through the same level of trauma, Bastian is an endearing character who is very easy to identify with.

Bastian is an unusual protagonist, as the audience does not identify with him as the conventional hero of the film, but as a kindred spirit discovering the same story that the audience is. Similar to The Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), the fantasy story is presented through the narrative device of it existing within a book in the film. (As a curious footnote, The NeverEnding Story has a line about young people preferring video arcades and The Princess Bride opens with the disinterested grandson playing a computer game, demonstrating how in the 1980s computer games were blamed for youth disengagement in a way that social media is today.) The key difference between the stories in the two films is that while the story of The Princes Bride is kept at an almost ironic arms length, the story of The NeverEnding Story spills into the real world.

Hiding in the dark school attic, which is filled with mysterious objects such as old theatrical costumes and science laboratory skeletons, Bastian occupies a transient space between the world of the book and the world he comes from. The gateway is the book itself, although the attic production design effectively suggests the scares and delights Bastian experiences as a reader. The film very effectively edits between the adventure story in the book and back to Bastian in the attic, to constantly remind the audience of his presence as the reader and to slowly introduce the idea that he can influence what he is reading. In a more practical sense, the cuts back to Bastian also allow the film to make large leaps in time and space in its depiction of Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) as he travels across the world of Fantasia to find a cure for the Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach).

The device of Bastian being able to influence the world of Fantasia and ultimately save it is integral to the key themes of the film. The Empress is sick due to the arrival of a force called The Nothing, which as it grows snuffs out all it comes into contact with, as if those things never existed. Over the course of the film Bastian and Atreyu learn that Fantasia is the world of human dreams and hopes, and as humans on a whole have stopped being imaginative, Fantasia is now under threat unless Bastian’s imagination is powerful enough for him to act in time.

In an astonishing breaking of the fourth wall moment, the film goes one step further to directly appeal to the cinema audience. After the Empress tells Atreyu that Bastian has been with him all along, she then speaks directly to Bastian through the pages of the book. And then she looks directly into the camera – so appearing to look out into the audience – and tells Bastian that like Atreyu he has never been alone as the cinema audience have been with him the whole time. It is a remarkable moment where the audience are directly informed that the story only exists because they are experiencing it, and stories such as this can only survive by us engaging with them.

The appeal for a childlike view of the world in place of cynicism and cold rationalism, certainly juxtaposes against the free market materialism of the 1980s, where anything without an obvious economic value was increasingly seen to be worthless. The aftershocks of the 1980s political climate and corporate culture born out of Reaganomics still resonate thirty years on, making the appeal for finding shared humanity through art, literature and cinema just as relevant now. One thing that is especially alarming about The NeverEnding Story in a contemporary context is how the dramatic scenes of The Nothing devouring Fantasia evoke images of extreme weather conditions as a result of climate changes. This creates a new context for the film’s heartfelt message about embracing new ideas and creativity rather than continuing on with business as usual.

The power of imagination message could have potentially been somewhat saccharine if it were not for the emotional complexity within the film. Atreyu is not just Bastian’s idealised self, but his alter ego whose adventures reflect the process Bastian undertakes to heal after loosing his mother. Early in the film Bastian’s father tells him to stop daydreaming and start facing his problems, which proves to be terrible advice since it is Bastian’s ‘daydreams’ through reading the book that allow him to heal. In this sense The Nothing also represents the emotional void left by the death of a loved one and by renaming the Empress – a maternal figure who benevolently rules Fantasia – with his mother’s name, the void is filled with new ideas and rebirth. Through Atreyu Bastian constantly encounters death, including the infamously upsetting death of Artax scene, while constantly being pursued by G’mork (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer), Bastian/Atreyu’s shadow who serves The Nothing. And the trials faced by Atreyu are ones that Bastian also must face, including having his self-worth tested (and almost failing) and being confronted by his true self, Dorien Gray style.

The magic of Fantasia would not have been communicated to the audience if it were not for the gorgeous production design, cinematography and optical effects used to create the fantasy world and its wondrous inhabitants. Watching The NeverEnding Story again in the age of digital effects draws attention to how far special effects have come in the last few decades. Compared to the photorealism of contemporary CGI special effects, the techniques used in The NeverEnding Story seem closer in spirit to the work of film pioneer Georges Méliès than even films made a decade after The NeverEnding Story was originally released. However, as Martin Scorsese demonstrated in Hugo (2011), those early effects possess a remarkable tangible visual pleasure that deliver a type of cinematic spectacle that digital technologies are yet to truly capture. So while the animatronics and puppetry used to bring Falkor (also voiced by Alan Oppenheimer) to life are clearly dated and even a little clunky, there is enough detail and movement in the luckdragon’s face to convey an enormous amount of humanity and character. Similarly, the combination of puppetry, dialogue and voice acting (Oppenheimer again) is all that is needed to make the Rock Biter’s ‘big, good, strong hands’ speech completely heartbreaking.

The NeverEnding Story remains a testament to the power of imagination and the type of inventive cinema that was possible in a pre-digital era. Dark, frightening and often upsetting, it treated children with respect and in return delivered an ultimately uplifting conclusion where everything works out alright, even if the weakest aspect of the film is the very final scene that more naively than maliciously indulges a childish revenge fantasy. It is a minor quibble for a glorious film that may on the surface seem like an episodic series of set pieces, but is in fact a rich and detailed exploration of a child’s mind as they travel from grief to renewed hope. And like Fantasia itself, such a film can only exist if there is an audience to see it and believe in it, making its remastered re-release one of the most welcome cinematic treats of 2013.

Thomas Caldwell, 2013

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Film review – The Loneliest Planet (2011)

25 March 2013
The Loneliest Planet: Alex (Gael García Bernal), Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg)

Alex (Gael García Bernal), Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg)

How much can a film be defined by a single moment? How much information can a film withhold so that the audience must fill in the gaps? How much can the relationships between characters be reduced to small details while still maintaining coherence? These are some of the questions raised by writer/director Julia Loktev in her second narrative feature film The Loneliest Planet. Shot on the startling Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, the film portrays a journey taken by Alex (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Nica (Hani Furstenberg). The audience is given very little information about the pair other than that they are engaged, clearly in love and seem to be seasoned travellers who enjoy exploring other cultures and environments without touristic comforts. Leading the couple through the vast and beautiful wilderness is local guide Dato (Bidzina Gujabidze) a man we know even less about until close to the end of the film. Relying on assumptions and prejudices brought into the film by the audience as much as anything shown on screen, The Loneliest Planet is something of a distant cousin to Roman Polanski’s 1962 drama Knife in the Water, where a relationship is threatened and the presence of a mysterious other man is used to unsettle.

From the beginning The Loneliest Planet introduces the levels of ambiguity that will define the film. The sound of a woman breathing heavily while some kind of wooden furniture rhythmically clatters suggests sexual or possibly violent activity. It turns out to be neither, and the film is full of similar red herrings. The lack of incident, but the attention paid to small details and actions suggests that something is always about to happen. The result is compelling, unnerving and sometimes confronting as it becomes clear that a lot of the anxiety from watching the film is the audience’s own doing. Loktev knows that a narrative about a likeable couple travelling in a remote part of Eastern Europe is going to evoke a collective awareness of horror film conventions and possibly also cultural prejudices. The constant concern for Nica’s wellbeing, small acts of insensitivity such as Alex and Nica being flippant about a rock Dato hands them, the awkward language and cultural barriers between the characters, and the constant visual reminders of how small and isolated they are on the landscape, create a growing unease that Loktev prods and pokes at.

The long shots of the three characters on the landscape become a reoccurring image throughout the film, acting as both chapter marks and visual representations of how the three characters relate to each other. The distance between the characters physically represents their emotional distance, and throughout the film Loktev includes similar long takes where the framing and placement of the characters in triangular shapes is highly suggestive. The long shots are initially also used to convey the beauty of the environment that these characters pass through, while in the second half of the film after the pivotal moment, these shots instead take on a melancholic sense of loneliness, vulnerability and remoteness.

The pivotal scene comes almost exactly halfway into the film’s running time and the pace and length of the film ensures the audience feels the passing of time before and after that point. The most important part of the moment only occurs in seconds, with the continuation of the moment only taking a few minutes at the most. And yet it defines everything that has occurred previously and everything that comes after. It’s a moment that captures an impulsive action that is immediately regretted, with the character in question then attempting to amend, knowing full well that the damage is done. It is perfectly timed, as without the lengthy context before it, the moment would not have the same power. Without the lengthy conclusion after it, its effect on the characters would not be able to fully resonate.

Relying predominantly on framing and acting rather than dialogue or action, Loktev represents an almost ideal relationship plummeting into crisis. If the first half of the film was primarily concerned with hinting at what could threaten the bond between Alex and Nica, the second half adopts a similarly minimal and ambiguous approach to explore how they respond to what has occurred. All the time Dato is with them, as mysterious and compelling as the dramatic scenery surrounding them. The careful and controlled drip-feed of minimal character and narrative detail will be alienating for some, but audiences used to actively engaging with cinema will find much to relish about The Loneliest Planet. It is an intensely beautiful film that almost does not need what little action and characterisation it has to remain so absorbing. Situated somewhere between the Slow Cinema movement and a psychological thriller – but not really much like either – The Loneliest Planet is an impressive film by a very confident and observant filmmaker.

Thomas Caldwell, 2013

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Film review – I Want Your Love (2012)

12 March 2013
I Want Your Love: Jesse (Jesse Metzger)

Jesse (Jesse Metzger)

The début narrative feature film by Travis Mathews has received considerable attention in Australia for the wrong reason. Scheduled for Australian festival screenings in February, March and April, I Want Your Love has been refused the film festival exemption that it requires to be publically screened as a non-classified film within Australia. This exemption has been refused by the Australian Classification Board on the grounds that were the film to be formally classified it would be given an X18+ rating due to it containing explicit sex scenes without a narrative context. This is effectively stating that the film is closer in tone to pornography than narrative cinema, and it is therefore banned from being screened in most Australian states, including at film festivals to discerning adult audiences. What is most unfortunate about this decision is that not only is the graphic sex in I Want Your Love crucial to conveying character information and therefore part of the narrative, but the film is overall an excellent work by a talented emerging filmmaker.

I Want Your Love should be receiving attention for announcing the arrival of Mathews as a new voice in realist cinema. Coming from a documentary background, Mathews delivers a fly-on-the-wall look at the lives of a handful of gay men living in San Francisco over one weekend. At the centre of the narrative is Jesse (Jesse Metzger), a performance artist in his early thirties who is moving back to the family home in Ohio. He is holding a going-away party in the apartment he shares with close friend Wayne (Wayne Bumb), who is unsure about whether it was a good idea to have his boyfriend Ferrin (Ferrin Solano) move in. While putting on a brave and optimist face for his friends, Jesse confides his doubts and concerns to his neighbour Keith (Keith McDonald), an older man who is also an artists and serves as something of a mentor and father figure to Jesse. One of Jesse’s biggest concerns is moving away from his ex-boyfriend Ben (Ben Jasper). Similarly to Andrew Haigh’s outstanding Weekend, I Want Your Love uses its focused time period and small cast to express and explore some of the aspects of modern gay identity without attempting to be a definitive work. It is an unapologetic film that doesn’t attempt to dilute or ‘introduce’ the viewer to a segment of society that is not usually depicted in cinema beyond stereotypical or tokenistic inclusions.

With tight framing and a small ensemble of actors with the same name as the characters they play, this is an intimate work that attempts to express interior thoughts and emotions. From a distance the characters are all confident and expressive, freely discussing their feelings and desires. On this level alone I Want Your Love is an enjoyable 70 minutes in the company of a likeable group of people, but the film really shines when it shows us what is happening beneath the surface. Often actors are filmed in close-up to capture the small gestures and expressions that undermine what they are saying. Under the surface emerges a picture of people at various crossroads in life who are no longer sure about what they are doing, who they are with and even who they are. In this sense Mathews’s film is thematically universal and part of a long tradition of actor driven character pieces that incorporate a documentary aesthetic.

Where I Want Your Love pushes boundaries is the way it uses unsimulated sex to further express the status of the relationships and state-of-mind of the characters. Michael Winterbottom did something very similar in the 2004 drama 9 Songs, where the actors having sex on camera was used to communicate the evolution of their affair. I Want Your Love is perhaps even more successful in appropriating actual sex away from pornography and into narrative cinema since there is a better sense of the non-sexual scenes flowing on into the sex scenes. The transitions are far more seamless and draw less attention to the fact that the audience is watching unsimulated sex. It’s a bold innovation that non-pornographic films have experimented with since the late 1960s, more frequently in the past fifteen years. While cinema has never shied aware from exploring sexuality, even during periods of intense censorship, there is a rawness and honesty to depicting real acts of sex that opens up new ways of understanding the role sex plays in the everyday life. Without coyness, sensation or titillation, unsimulated sex is a refreshing way of exploring love and desire in a way that previous approaches to sex on film have not been able to achieve.

While there is a campaign for the Australian Classification Board to overturn the refused exemption status for I Want Your Love to allow for festival screenings, Australian audiences can still legally view the film via the film’s official website. It would be a shame if this impressive film did not receive the audience it deserves, especially considering how rare actual sex-positive films are. The irony of the situation is that far less graphic films that nevertheless perpetuate reductive sexual stereotyping and objectifying are commonplace and widely available. Films like I Want Your Love that explore aspects of sexuality and human connectivity with such affection and lack of judgement, are a rare gift that should be celebrated and not shunned.

Thomas Caldwell, 2013

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Film review – The Paperboy (2012)

4 March 2013
The Paperboy: Jack Jansen (Zac Efron)

Jack Jansen (Zac Efron)

Early in Lee Daniels’s film adaptation of Pete Dexter’s 1995 novel The Paperboy is a moment demonstrating how the film will function as an inverse of social conventions. The protagonist Jack Jansen (Zac Efron), a young college dropout who has moved back to his home in southern Florida, is lying in his bedroom when the house maid and film’s narrator Anita Chester (Macy Gray) enters. After some playful banter that suggests the young white boy and older black woman do not see each other in a master/servant context, the pair decides to swap places. Jack pretends to fuss about the messy state of the bedroom while Anita drops to the ground and declares she is going to lie around and jerk off all day. Set in the early 1960s in a notoriously conservative part of America, this swapping of racial, gender and class roles evokes the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s writing on the carnivalesque. The use of humour, the grotesque and parody to subvert social norms, hierarchies and notions of good taste runs throughout The Paperboy, a film noir that is set in the bright blistering heat of the Florida sun, the inverse to the shadow filled metropolises of traditional film noir.

The initial set-up for the film is a journalistic investigation into an alleged wrongful arrest. Jack’s older brother Ward Jansen (Matthew McConaughey) arrives back in town with colleague Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo) to write about Hillary Van Wetter (John Cusack), a man on death row for the murder of a despised local sheriff. Also in the picture is Charlotte Bless (Nicole Kidman), a woman with a background of becoming romantically obsessed with inmates who now wants to marry Hillary. While The Paperboy at first glance seems to be a fight against injustice and police corruption narrative, the investigation into Hillary’s presumed innocence soon falls into the background to function as the catalyst for what the film really wants to explore: an Oedipal dynamic between Jack, Charlotte and Hillary.

As an overtly sexual woman who desires dangerous men, Charlotte is quickly identified as the film’s femme fatale. Jack is instantly drawn to her and it is no coincidence that she’s a much older woman and Jack does not have a mother of his own; hence the symbolic son and mother relationship of the Oedipal scenario. The symbolic father is Hillary whom Jack believes he has to rescue Charlotte from since she desires him against all common sense. Keeping with the inverse of expectations theme, Hillary is revealed not to be a suffering victim of injustice but a crude, misogynist and racist man. For a film with so many sexual allusions, the most explicit scene is when at Hillary’s command Charlotte mimes giving him oral sex. The scene is confronting and uncomfortably comical, and constantly shows the reactions of the disturbed and bemused onlookers who include Jack. The moment is a lurid encapsulation of a psychoanalytic primal scene, where Jack is traumatised watching his symbolic parents engaged in a sexual act. The presentation of Charlotte as symbolic mother and object of desire for Jack is further perverted when she urinates on his jellyfish stings; an act that is both bizarrely nurturing and sexual.

And yet Charlotte is not a traditional femme fatale in the sense that she is not blamed for bringing about the downfall of the male hero. Her sexuality is not deceitful and she is always open about her feelings and attitude towards sex. Within the context of the other characters Charlotte is a character of striking honesty and purity. Unlike investigative journalist ‘heroes’ Ward and Yardley, Charlotte keeps no secrets about who she is. The only other character that compares to her in this regard is Anita who functions as Jack’s moral compass. The Paperboy contains several touching and tender moments between Jack and Anita to suggest the extent in which boundaries concerning race, sexuality and gender are artificial and constructed.

Nevertheless, The Paperboy is a gleefully carnivalesque film, but a contemporary one since it parodies not just dominant culture but what dominant culture perceives to be its binary opposite. To put it another way, the film’s camp aesthetic means that the targets for derision are across the board. The film portrays heterosexual sex acts as perverse and grotesque, but does the same for homosexual acts. There are both male and female characters who are presented as caricatures, and both white and black characters are portrayed as deceitful. The lower classes are mocked and so are the upper classes, as represented by Jack and Ward’s father WW Jansen (Scott Glenn) and his girlfriend Nancy (Nikolette Noel). Yet underneath the borderline hysterical plot twists and oversaturated colour scheme is the empathy between Jack and Anita, and also between Jack and Ward. The portrayal of the relationship between individual characters, when free from how they identify as belonging to particular social groups, is what is crucial to why The Paperboy is more than a giant southern American freak show.

The most arresting part of The Paperboy is saved until the end when the film makes its definitive attack on cultural hegemony. The film concludes in the dangerous yet cinematically beautiful swamp, which exists as a transgressive space of otherness in a similar way to the oft mentioned but never seen Chinatown in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown. Such primal and exotic spaces that exist outside of what is considered civilisation are often evoked in film noir and other American genres, and are designed to somehow destroy the male hero. However, in the topsy-turvy world of The Paperboy this is not a space that has been defined by external cultures, but one that has been defined by white, masculine, heterosexuality at its most perverse and deadly. The ultimate threat that Jack faces is not due to his exposure to black culture, or homosexuality or to female sexuality. Instead the threat is monstrous dominant American culture as personified by the swamp people.

Everything about The Paperboy seems designed to undermine expectations and the result is an exhilaratingly unpredictable film with moments that induce shocked laughter as well as moments of surprising empathy. By creating a film that at times seems so gaudy and out-of-control, Daniel proves himself to be a master filmmaker. Lurid use of music and superimposition create delirious sequences to convey Jack’s point-of-view. One sequence is after a jellyfish has stung him; another is to convey his sexual obsession with Charlotte. Both moments are similarly hallucinogenic to capture the madness and intensity of his longing for Charlotte. Shot on widescreen 16mm and then blown up to the size of 35mm, the film has both an old fashioned yet otherworldly feel, in keeping with its subversion of film noir style and themes. Audiences willing to surrender to the cinematic subversions and transgressions found within The Paperboy will be rewarded with an experience that is both strangely familiar and yet seems entirely unique.

Thomas Caldwell, 2013

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Film review – Amour (2012)

24 February 2013
Amour: Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant)

Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant)

Even though Amour has been released internationally under its French name, it is still a film titled Love. While many films often have the word ‘love’ in the title, few filmmakers are as bold (or perhaps foolish) to have that loaded word used as the title for their film. This is probably because most films about love are really about romance or other idealised variations about what love is. Few films really explore the question of what it means to love, not necessarily because of the complexity that is potentially involved, but because of the challenge required to express an understanding of love at its purest. Filmmaker Michael Haneke has approached the task by depicting the slow decline of Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), an elderly woman living in Paris whose husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) looks after her as her body and then mind start to fail. The result is a triumph for Haneke and a deeply beautiful film.

As a filmmaker renowned for his ability to provoke, challenge and confront audiences with their own hypocrisy, Haneke may not seem like an obvious choice to make a film about love. However, he is perfect because of his ability to remove all traces of sentimentality and romantic notions of love that popular culture has trained audiences to believe in. So instead of young lovers discovering that they are one another’s soul mates, we see an elderly couple whose companionship has long moved on from the moment where most romance films end. Never before has Haneke’s highly formal and almost didactic approach to representing human behaviour so clearly expose him as a humanist at heart.

The film opens with Haneke asserting that the audience are voyeurs, witnesses to a private space and occupying an ethically ambiguous position. It is a favourite technique of Haneke’s and here it is established with a flashforward of the authorities bursting into Anne and Georges’s apartment; literally bursting into the space of the film in the very first frame. The film then goes back in time to show Anne and Georges enjoying a live music concert (we later learn the performer was once a student of Anne’s) before taking a train home together. As they enter their apartment they talk about somebody having broken in and how this concerns them. It is not only a typically Hanekesque moment for both recalling the flashforward and providing a narrative red herring, but it serves as a metaphor for the audience having ‘broken in’ to their lives. Later death becomes the intruder in their home. A pair of scenes involving a pigeon serves a similar purpose as it represents an unwanted visitor and also serves as a calculated distraction from other events. Eventually the pigeon exists to express the kindness that ultimately characterises the film.

Through all the difficult scenes of Anne’s decline and Georges’s frustration, kindness pervades. Even Haneke is kind towards the various supporting characters who commit acts of insensitivity to differing degrees; suggesting they have good intentions without full comprehension of the outcomes. For example, Anne’s former student Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud) unwittingly comes across as overly dramatic in how he expresses his sympathy, leaving Anne unable to listen to his music anymore. Likewise their daughter Eve (Isabelle Huppert) seems irrational compared to her parents, but Haneke shows us that she has not been able to get accustomed to what is happening to her mother due to other parts of her life demanding her attention.

Finally there is the kindness and affection between Anne and Georges that is initially shown through their daily domestic interaction and later through the scenes of Georges looking after Anne. Both of them struggle with the fact that what is happening to Anne is robbing her of her dignity. The way the pair attempts to make the situation more bearable for the other, often against the wishes of each other, is a significant part of what makes Amour a film of such integrity. The other strength is Haneke’s meticulous framing and camera position so that the camera only ever gets as close to the characters as it needs to, rather than opting for indulgent close-ups at every opportunity to elicit easy sentiment. Amour becomes the opposite of the film that Georges saw as a child and describes to Anne, which was manipulative and completely forgettable, but shamefully left him sad beyond belief afterwards without registering its power at the time. Amour is anything but manipulative or forgettable, but its emotional power is similarly not fully felt until the final credits are rolling.

Unlike the film Georges saw, Amour is not a film to feel ashamed about for having been moved by it. It is distinctively a Haneke film and yet its formal elements and moments of self-awareness seem designed to reward the viewer rather than punish them. By stripping back any aspects of film style or narrative that feel false or constructed, Haneke ensures that everything that happens between Anne and Georges is an act of intense kindness and personal sacrifice shared by people who love each other unconditionally. The scenario is upsetting, but the execution is genuine and pure, making Amour a film of heartbreaking beauty and Haneke’s masterpiece.

Thomas Caldwell, 2013

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River of Life and Death: Women, Religion, Power and Purity in Water

12 February 2013
Water: Chuyia (Sarala Kariyawasam)

Chuyia (Sarala Kariyawasam)

Water is the third and most accomplished film in director Deepa Mehta’s Elements Trilogy, which consists of three films that are thematically linked together rather than being films with an ongoing story and reoccurring characters. Water is set in 1938 in the holy city of Varanasi, which is situated in India on the banks of the Ganges, a sacred river in the Hindu religion. The film is unusual for having three protagonists – Chuyia (Sarala Kariyawasam), Kalyani (Lisa Ray) and Shakuntala (Seema Biswas) – all of whom are widows. Due to very conservative interpretations of Hinduism, the three women are expected to live the remainder of their lives in poverty and chastity in a segregated temple with other widows from the area. As widows they are regarded as spiritually unclean and an economic burden on their families and society.

In the background to their stories is the beginning of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s campaign to drive the British out of India and establish an independent India movement through non-violence. The hope and progressive thinking that Gandhi introduced into Indian society provides a stark contrast to the sad and oppressive lives that the widows must endure. Through the lives of the three main characters, Water exposes and comments on the appalling treatment of widowed women in some parts of India, since even today the attitudes that are depicted in the film in the 1930s still exist. It also uses the treatment of the widows to represent larger issues about how religion is misused by people in a position of power to deny human rights.

While specific colours dominate all the Element Trilogy films, the use of white and blue in Water is especially important in the way the film engages with notions of purity. In the context of the film white is both the colour of mourning and traditional notions of purity. This makes it a particularly oppressive colour since the widows do live a death-like existence due to religious instruction to remain chaste out of respect for their deceased husbands. This concept of purity is aligned in the film with religious hypocrisy designed to keep the widows subservient since doing otherwise would mean caring for them properly and therefore having to spend money.

Blue is the colour of water, which has the power to give life and to take it away. Furthermore, in Hindi water represents feelings, intuition and imagination, which are all characteristics that are traditionally associated with femininity. This is appropriate since the film is about women and the way women are expected to behave. However, when removed from the motif of water, the colour blue is used in Water to challenges the dogmatic representation of purity as self-denial and obedience. Rather than following a set of social and religious rules designed by people in power, expressions of true love and compassion are presented in Water as true moments of purity and these moments are evocatively associated with the colour blue.

Deepa Mehta and the Elements Trilogy

Deepa Mehta was born in India, but migrated to Canada in her early twenties. Her films draw upon both western cinematic traditions and Indian customs to pursue a feminist ethical agenda. She explores power structures in Indian society, both historical and contemporary, to critique the inequality created through gender discrimination, religious hypocrisy and class. Mehta first received international prominence in 1996 with the release of her critically acclaimed and highly controversial Fire, which was the first film in the Elements Trilogy. The same-sex relationship themes caused considerable unrest from many conservative religious groups and political parties that even resulted in a cinema being burnt down. The hostility towards Mehta from groups within India meant that production for Water was shut down in 2000 when protestors destroyed the sets the night before shooting began. Mehta had to relocate production from the banks of the Ganges in India to Pakistan and the film could not commence shooting until 2005.

The common themes in all the films in the Elements Trilogy are religion being misused for political purposes, women being made subordinate, the oppression of female desire and forbidden love. In Fire the forbidden love is between two women and Mehta explores the politics of sexuality not just between the same-sex couple, but within the dynamics of two passionless arranged marriages. The second film in the trilogy is Earth (1998) set in 1947 during the dissolution of the British Indian Empire. It was a time of enormous religious tension between the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims as 12.5 million people were displaced as geographical divisions were formed based on religious demographics. The nature of forbidden love explored in Earth is between a man and woman with different religions, with Mehta exploring the politics of nationalism and how this can manifest in religious extremism and violence. In Water the forbidden love is the widow Kalyani falling in love with another man, which is seen to be an act of betrayal against her dead husband. Mehta explores the politics of religion to highlight how religious hypocrisy is used to ensure women are undermined and made subservient for economic purposes.

Chuyia

The first of the three protagonists in Water is Chuyia, a child who has become a widow as a result of an arranged marriage to a man she never met. At the beginning of the film she is presented as something of a free and rebellious spirit despite the absurdity and unfairness of the situation she is placed in. Happily eating a sugar cane she is introduced gleefully playing with the feet of her dying husband as he is being transported. It is not until the reality of having to live in the widow’s temple sinks in that she displays any actual signs of grief and the contrast between her colourful and decorative clothes to the white robes she is forced to wear is very pronounced. However, even once in the temple Chuyia stands out as a force of life with her head painted by Shakuntala in bright yellow turmeric and the flurry of quick edits as she runs through the temple, providing a playful and disruptive break to the static and slow camera movements that are otherwise used within the temple.

The sense of playfulness within Chuyia is expressed throughout the film through her constant movement and the movement of the camera during many of the scenes she is featured in. Her catatonic stillness during the film’s conclusion is therefore devastating to witness. What happens to Chuyia comments on the dual symbolism of the Ganges in the film to purify and to take away life. While the Ganges is the site for purification for Hindu people, it is also the passage to the upper class homes where Chuyia is tricked into prostitution. It is fitting that Chuyia’s escape from Varanasi is in the arms of Narayan (John Abraham), whose father has committed so much damage, and by train. While water is traditionally a symbol of change and progression, in Water the Ganges ultimately becomes like institutionalised religion – a destructive force that destroys lives while continuing the pretence of being about purity. The train on the other hand is a force of modernity and progress that takes Chuyia and Narayan into Gandhi’s new India and away from the oppressive traditions and abuses of power in Varanasi.

Kalyani

Chuyia isn’t the only character who is harmed by the Ganges as Kalyani is literally killed by it when she drowns herself after being denied marriage to Narayan, ironically by his father who had been using Kalyani as a prostitute before turning on Chuyia. Throughout Water Kalyani is compared to Chuyia as an older version of the woman Chuyia may have become if she stayed in Varanasi. Kalyani is also a widow who was married to a man she never met and she was being prostituted by Madhumati (Manorama), the exploitive older widow who runs the temple. When Kalyani’s long hair is cut off by Madhumati, who presumably only allowed Kalyani to grow it long in the first place to appear attractive as a prostitute, the scene mirrors the earlier scene when Chuyia’s hair is cut before she enters the temple. The graphic matches establish the strong relationship between Kalyani and Chuyia, and the danger of Chuyia sharing the same fate.

Kalyani’s religious devotion is important to note as being different from the misuse of religious rhetoric that is seen throughout the film. Mehta is not attacking religion in Water but critiquing the way it is used for economic and political gain. Kalyani’s faith and charity represents religion in its purest and most noble sense. She compares herself to a lotus flower, which is a divine symbol in ancient Asian traditions representing the virtues of sexual purity and non-attachment. When Kalyani first appears in the film she is shot from a low angle so she majestically appears above the rest of the temple. Chuyia even momentarily thinks that she is an angel. Kalyani is also shot from a similar low angle during the various scenes with Narayan, although scenes when she is in the temple and he is on the street are often framed so she appears behind the bars on the balcony to give the impression of her being imprisoned.

Kalyani is also strongly associated with the colour blue and says when she remarries she will wear blue, the colour of Krishna. Blue is not only a colour commonly used to represent water, but in the film is the colour of life and associated with characters during moments of spiritual transformation. The very romantic sequence when Kalyani sneaks out to be with Narayan features a heavy use of blue light and blue backgrounds to indicate the purity, in the true sense, of the love that has developed between the pair. In this way blue is used in the film to symbolise falling in love as an act of spiritual transformation. The other major use of the colour blue for a moment of spiritual transformation is associated with Shakuntala in the moment when she follows her conscience despite it so significantly conflicting with her religious beliefs.

Shakuntala

The moment when Shakuntala is bathed in a blue light is when she directly stands up to Madhumati to free Kalyani. Up until that moment Shakuntala had been an enigmatic character. She is another widow at the temple, somehow above Madhumati’s authority but until this moment had never directly challenged her. Even more so than Kalyani, Shakuntala displays a sincere devotion to her faith that frequently manifests through her taking on a nurturing role with some of the other widows including Chuyia and Kalyani. While something of a peripheral character during most of the film, which focuses on Kalyani through the eyes of Chuyia, Shakuntala emerges as the final protagonist when she directly confronts the religious rhetoric that she has been living by to make sure Chuyia leaves Varanasi so that she won’t be abused again.

Towards the end of the film, possibly as a result of witnessing what was happening to Kalyani and Chuyia, Shakuntala begins questioning her faith. This culminates in the scene when she confronts the priest Sadananda (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) about the scriptures concerning widows. A sympathetic character, Sadananda explains that the relevant scriptures do list a life of self denial as one of the options for widows, along with being burned with her husband or marrying the husband’s younger brother. However, he also reveals that there are now new laws in favour of remarriage, but religious groups have ignored these laws since the laws do not suit them. This is a crucial scene in the film since it directly addresses the danger of religion having too much power and influence to the extent that it can bypass the law for its own end. It also exposes how religious beliefs can be hijacked to serve the needs of people in a position of authority.

Water concludes with Shakuntala performing an extreme act of kindness, generosity and sacrifice by saving Chuyia from the widow’s temple and Madhumati’s clutches. The audience are not completely certain about what Shakuntala’s risks by doing this, but it is a reasonable assumption that by defying Madhumati and the local customs Shakuntala will at the very least be cast out of the temple to fend for herself in an environment hostile towards widows. Her act of defiance is also one of religious defiance against a set of powerful beliefs she had lived with her entire life.

It is significant that Shakuntala takes Chuyia away from the Ganges, and all it represents, to the train and other symbols of progress. Not only is Ghandi, who is on the train, a symbol of the future but he speaks into a microphone, which represents new modes of mass communication that would allow messages such as his to travel further than they ever had before. As a member of the new generation of Indian people, Chuyia has a chance to reap the rewards of these changes so ‘escapes’ on the train with Narayan who by accepting the responsibility of looking after her is somewhat redeemed from his previous passivity and inaction. On the other hand, Shakuntala is left behind, with the train receding into the background, as she is trapped in an old way of life. Water ends with the arresting and provocative image of Shakuntala starring into the camera in a mixture of sorrow, hope, despair, uncertainty and defiance. Her bold glare into the camera could even be read as a challenge to the audience to confront the injustices within their own lives.

Originally published in issue 64 (Summer 2012) of Screen Education.

Thomas Caldwell, 2013

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Film review – Lincoln (2012)

7 February 2013

Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis)

Collaborating for the second time after first working together on Munich (2005), director Steven Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner have made a decent film that nevertheless feels overly burdened by the responsibility of depicting historical detail. Set during the American Civil War in January 1865, Lincoln focuses on President Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) as he attempts to abolish slavery in the USA by passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in the House of Representatives. Two major goals of the film seem to be to faithfully document a crucial moment in history through entertaining fictionalisation and to use Lincoln’s involvement as a way of shining some light on the type of person he was. Lincoln mostly feels like one of Spielberg’s straight-faced historical films with a couple of key moments reminding audiences just how good Spielberg is at coaxing an emotional response from the audience with cinematic spectacle.

For most of the film’s running time, Lincoln depicts the political machinations that went on during Lincoln’s push to bring slavery to an end. It is detailed, long and occasionally dry. The historical worthiness does relent during some scenes, especially when a group of Republican Party operatives led by William N Bilbo (James Spader) appear to deliver welcome levity to key scenes. The inner conflict experienced by the Radical Republican Congressional leader Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) when he must compromise his progressive beliefs about equality in order to get the anti-slavery amendment through, provides the film’s most interesting examination of moral and political complexity within the democratic process. While Day-Lewis is remarkably good as Lincoln, the scenes depicting his personal life with his wife First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field) and son Robert Todd Lincoln (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) simply do not resonate the way the scenes with Stevens do.

The moment where Lincoln really impresses is when Spielberg delivers the type of grand emotional pay-off sequence that is usually associated within his spectacle-driven blockbusters. The scenes where the House of Representatives vote to end slavery is filmed with suspenseful intensity that then gives way to immense relief and joy as the amendment is passed. The editing is short and clipped, and every shot seems to begin a few seconds after the action in the frame has begun to give the impression that progress is occurring so rapidly that not even the film itself can keep up. For any dull patch that may have come before, this exhilarating sequence does much to redeem the film. In terms of narrative structure, the previous Spielberg film that Lincoln ends up most resembling is Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which while a more consistently entertaining film still provided a dramatic change in pace and style at the end to deliver a long feel-good sequence as a sort of reward to the audience for hanging in for that long. There is even a shot of Day-Lewis as Lincoln walking into the glowing light coming from the window – signalling the dawn of a new era – which is almost identical to one of the final shots from Close Encounters of the Third Kind of Richard Dreyfuss walking into the glow of the alien spaceship.

Ultimately Lincoln suffers in comparison to other films. Michael Apted’s 2006 historical biopic Amazing Grace, about William Wilberforce’s campaign to end the slave trade in the British Empire, far more effectively expressed the political mood of the era as well as exploring how Wilberforce’s private and public life affected each other. In Young Mr Lincoln (1939) director John Ford and actor Henry Fonda used a relatively minor episode in Lincoln’s life to demonstrate far more convincingly and compelling how his personal convictions about equality, justice and democracy influenced his actions.

As one of the most influential, popular, successful and important filmmakers of the past 40 years, Steven Spielberg has specialised in having audiences willingly submit to his masterful emotional manipulation. A swell of music with a slow zoom into a wide-eyed face, and suddenly Spielberg has you sharing the wonder, horror, delight or bewilderment of the character on screen. Moments like this exist in Lincoln and there are moments where Kushner’s witty dialogue shines through to remind us that the participants during this extraordinary period of social change where humans as well as historical figures from textbooks. However, for the most part Lincoln is not a significant inclusion into Spielberg’s filmography despite the noblest of intentions and undeniable cinematic craftsmanship.

Thomas Caldwell, 2013

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