Film Atlas (Brazil): Keeper of Promises

Country: Brazil

Title: Keeper of Promises (1962)

“Saint or Demon?” asks the headlines. “Mystic or Agitator?” The debate is over Ze, a poor man who arrives in the early morning at Salvador’s Church of Saint Barbara having carried a cross on his back for over seven miles. Discarded behind this modern Jesus is his house (burned down) and his land (divided up among peasants). With him is his unhappy and insecure wife Rosa, who’s used to a better life. Ahead of him is the threshold of the church, the goal of a sacred promise Ze made to save his best friend, Nicolau, who ‘miraculously’ recovered. The skeptical priest finds Ze’s promise a bit exaggerated and pretentious, especially when he realizes that Nicolau is a donkey, and he's outraged to learn that Ze made the promise to Iansa (Saint Barbara’s equivalent in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomble). While the distinction is an abstraction beyond Ze’s simple understanding, the priest now considers the promise a pagan blasphemy and refuses to allow Ze into the church. 

But as the standoff gains attention, a crowd gathers and all manner of unscrupulous persons swoop in to take advantage of the situation: the press sensationalizes the event, café owner Blondie offers him free food to maintain the crowd, a poet memorializes his story to boost sales, a Candomble priestess sees him as a potential figurehead, the local poor mistake him for a Marxist agrarian reformer (after all, he divided up his land). Meanwhile, Handsome, a sleazy pimp, befriends Ze in order to seduce Rosa, whose dissatisfaction gives way to remorse. The couple tumbles towards disaster as pent up anger and revolution stirs to life. “You’re a rebel,” says a policeman to Ze. “I wasn’t, but I’m becoming one.”

The captivating pre-credit sequence in which Ze dutifully drags a cross across desert, field, forest, bridge and alleyway tells a movie worth of visual storytelling before the first word is even spoken. Director Anselmo Duarte (an unprolific man, who never achieves the lasting fame of contemporaries Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Glauber Rocha) cleverly dispenses with Ze’s feat of endurance and allows the mystery surrounding the nature of the promise to temporarily hook the viewer as the film accumulates a mass of political and spiritual connotations. When we learn that Ze did it all to save his beloved donkey, it’s hard not to laugh, but it’s also hard not to love Ze; he’s an innocent fool, but a good man. And in contrast to the film’s deservingly thrashed but rather obvious targets (police corruption, ubiquitous moneygrubbing, Handsome’s oily opportunism, the newspaper with its recently adopted ‘new rules’), the film’s most interesting investigation is into the nature of conviction and faithfulness. Ze’s steadfast loyalty to his promise is fascinating and debated with depth, realism and economy while being thoughtfully paralleled by Rosa’s own struggle with faithfulness (albeit on a more corporeal plane), her moment of weakness and her growing need for punishment or redemption. Even the priest, ostensibly the central villain, strikes me as pretty sincere in his criticism; he is taking an unpopular stance and becomes almost sympathetic in light of the pragmatic archbishop urging him to adopt a political instead of a religious view of the matter.

Duarte is an incredibly mature craftsman, and Keeper of Promises abounds with visual sophistication, especially complicated, though never ostentatious, camera movements and elaborate crowd choreography (including a demonstration of capoeira, a hybrid of martial arts and dance, during the climactic Saint Barbara feast day celebration) that’s contrasted by scenes of stark loneliness and abandonment. An example of the latter is Handsome’s seduction of Rosa in the rainy, seedy, predawn street, which is lent an atmosphere of predator and prey by the cinematography. There’s a meeting scene in Blondie’s café where our attention rests on the window between the speakers as we watch the multitude swarming outside, and different types of tension build in both foreground and background. It demonstrates the ease with which Keeper of Promises works simultaneously on multiple planes, both in terms of composition and meaning.

My Favorites:

City of God

Keeper of Promises
Empty Night / Noite Vazia

Pixote
Neighboring Sounds

House of Sand (2005)
The Bandit of Brazil

Earth Entranced
Carandiru

Ganga Bruta

Limite

Barren Lives
Elite Squad

Major Directors:
Hector Babenco, Ruy Guerra, Jose Mojica Marins, Fernando Meirelles, Glauber Rocha, Walter Salles, Nelson Pereira dos Santos

Film Atlas (Bosnia-Herzegovina): No Man's Land

Country: Bosnia-Herzegovina

Title: No Man’s Land / Ničija zemlja (2001)

A Bosniak squad becomes lost while on a nighttime mission to relieve their front during a standoff in the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. The next morning, when the fog lifts and the sun comes out, they discover they’ve camped in middle of no man’s land, the fatally-exposed fields between enemy trenches. All but Ciki, who crawls into an abandoned trench, are slaughtered. Two Bosnian Serbs are sent in to investigate: a hardened veteran who booby-traps a corpse with an illegal bouncing mine and Nino, a bespectacled, bald-headed rookie. Ciki ambushes the pair, killing the older man and taking Nino hostage. A groan alerts them that Ciki’s friend Cera, the man with the mine underneath him, isn’t actually dead, but he’s now stuck lying on his back lest he get them all blown to hell. Ciki and Nino waste time blaming and threatening each other, at one point almost getting chummy over the realization that they have a mutual acquaintance, and eventually forming a plan to get help. Merchand, a French sergeant with UNPROFOR (the U.N. peacekeeping forces) bypasses official channels to come to their aid, but runs into resistance from his superiors. He manages to pressure them by allying with Jane Livingstone, an English reporter covering the war. After hours of waiting, Ciki and Nino are literally at each other’s throats, but finally a German mine expert arrives. He does not give them good news. Meanwhile, UNPROFOR high command flies in by copter to diffuse, not the bomb, but the PR disaster. Ciki and Nino unleash their frustrations in violence, distracting attention from the trench. The film ends on Cera, still lying on the mine, now alone, with night falling and both sides intentionally misinformed to think they should shortly shell no man’s land.

No Man’s Land is a smart, tightly-paced and deeply pessimistic depiction of Balkan conflict, which uses a single incident as a metaphor for the animosity, absurdity and inefficiency of the Bosnian War. Through Ciki and Nino’s accusations and arguments we come to understand how fully indoctrinated they've become to their respective causes and how narrowly they've restricted their points of view, carrying on an antagonism that long predates open violence. In contrast to other films about opposing soldiers reluctantly becoming friends during prolonged isolation (None but the Brave, Hell in the Pacific, Enemy Mine, Into the White), director Danis Tanovic’s work is a much grimmer portrayal of how entrenched (if you’ll pardon the pun) mistrust, hatred and vengeance can be. Their xenophobia is not about to be melted away by a temporary truce or the brief necessity to cooperation. This is the war, after all, that gave us the phrase “ethnic cleansing.”

Tanovic’s film suggests that, on one hand, those killing and being killed are too physically and emotionally involved to effect a peace or make levelheaded decisions, but that, on the other hand, those with "objective distance" are equally unproductive thanks to apathy, bureaucracy or a superficially high-minded neutrality. This is sardonically played out in UNPROFOR’s pecking order, where men are portrayed as increasingly ineffective and insensitive the further removed they are from combat: Merchand’s colleagues in the field sleep on the job or zone out under headphones (at one point the music bleeding into the film’s soundtrack at a comically inopportune moment), his commanding officer skims girly mags in the safety and relative comfort of the barracks while the colonel back at cushy HQ gets the real thing in the form of a bimbo secretary. Similarly, though the journalist unmistakably has her career to think of, she also clearly cares about the soldiers' lives, while her bosses in the main office are far more concerned with boosting ratings.

In addition to the underlying ethnic, political and religious differences that characterized the Bosnian War, No Man’s Land plays with differences in other configurations as well, including clashes in experience, personality and sense of humor (one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variation occurs when Ciki, rifling through a dead enemy’s wallet, briefly comes across the photo of a naked man). Most noticeably, however, is the film’s focus on language barriers. The soldiers speak Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian, while UNPROFOR primarily uses French, the reporters English and the mine expert German. Miscommunications, non-communications and poor translations abound, constantly undermining (again, excuse the pun) any chance of achieving full understanding. The film ends, notably, with the colonel heartlessly deploying disinformation to sweep the incident under the carpet.

No Man’s Land is unusual for a war film in that it takes place in less than 24 hours, is shot almost exclusively against pleasant greenery in bright sunlight and forgoes scenes of battle, large armies and high stakes. And yet it has a lot to say, unobtrusively using its humble resources to tell a story that draws us in and makes us think. This was Tanovic’s debut film and it won Bosnia-Herzegovina its first foreign film Oscar, a feat he recently came near to reprising when his latest movie made the short-list for 2014.

My Favorites:

No Man's Land

Grbavica

Major Directors:

Danis Tanovic

Film Atlas (Bolivia): Blood of the Condor

Country: Bolivia

Title: Blood of the Condor / Yawar Mallku / Sangre de cóndor (1969)

Blood of the Condor starts in the middle. Ignacio, the headman of a mountainside Quechua Indian community, returns home drunk and beats his wife, Paulina, blaming her for the loss of three babies in childbirth and bemoaning their cursed luck.  Despite his unsympathetic introduction, Ignacio will emerge as one of the central heroes of the film along with his brother Sixto. We learn that sometime after the intro Ignacio is tricked into fleeing a police escort and gets shot, and that Paulina half-carries him to La Paz for hospital care.

There she finds the semi-estranged Sixto working in a factory, his leather jacket and familiarity with restaurants and sports unable to disguise that his lot is little better than if he’d stayed at home. Sixto tries to arrange money for a blood transfer, costing nearly twice his monthly income, stooping to begging and on the brink of purse-snatching to save his brother’s life. At the end, trying to track down a rich white doctor who might help him, he angrily storms a medical conference during the middle of a self-congratulatory speech about adopting Western methods to improve national healthcare. This is all the more hypocritical in light of other revelations; as the film fills in the missing pieces we learn that Paulina was secretly sterilized at a medical center run by the gringo-led Progress Corp (a swipe at the Peace Corp). Ignacio, after learning the truth, rallied an attack on the complex and was arrested, leading to the earlier shooting incident.

Blood of the Condor became one of the iconic examples of Third Cinema, a movement which sought to mobilize passive viewers by foregrounding political, revolutionary agendas, as opposed to Hollywood’s focus on entertainment (First Cinema) and European art cinema’s primacy of personal expression (Second Cinema). Though crude, Condor is strong stuff, celebrating the marginalized and widely discriminated Indian minority while advocating violent community-driven action in defense of their traditions and human rights. Director Jorge Sanjines spent significant time earning the acceptance of the Quechua villagers, all non-professional actors many of whom had never seen a camera before, and his film largely eschews condescension, heroics and soapboxing. In fact, its long respectful sequences of local festivals and cocoa leaf divining rituals may actually go too far, risking the boredom of international viewers. On the other hand, the rather sensible distribution of eggs so that every villager gets a few and the town’s emphasis on collective decision-making, in retrospect, hardly seems like radical Marxism (and perhaps that’s part of the point), but in its day it won both vocal critics and passionate adherents.

Unfortunately the film’s most tangible effect on public policy was the expulsion of the Peace Corp from Bolivia in 1971, though the idea that they were running a sterilization program, a rumor which caught the popular imagination, was entirely fictional. I have mixed feelings about Sanjines kicking the drama up a notch by resorting to an invented wrong instead of sticking to the very real and abundant miseries of socio-economic oppression, but whether you consider it creative license or shameless propaganda, it makes a good story. I have to admit that one of my favorites aspects of Blood of the Condor is its elaborate structure, bouncing back and forth between Ignacio and Sixto’s arcs, presenting rhyming rural and urban paths towards forceful proto-revolutionary self-assertion, but Sanjines later regretted what he considered an artifact of bourgeois filmmaking based on feedback from his target demographic, frequently uneducated peasants, who found the chronology justifiably confusing.  

Sanjines makes excellent use of landscapes, often in bold diagonal composition.

Film Atlas (Bhutan): Travellers and Magicians

Country: Bhutan

Title: Travelers and Magicians (2003)

Travelers and Magicians is a road movie about Dondup, a teenage government clerk who feels stifled by rural life in the Himalayas and hitchhikes towards a festival in the capital, Thimphu, where he hopes to gain passage to America. Dondup is a rather comical character due to his unexamined admiration for Western culture: he wears tennis sneakers and a denim gho (the traditional Bhutanese robe), his room is littered with ads featuring sultry women (and an Uncle Sam Wants You poster) and he struts around his remote village blasting American rock music from his boom box. After missing the only bus out of town he ends up walking and begging rides, gradually accruing a disparate train of fellow travelers that includes a peasant, a drunk, a rice paper merchant, his pretty daughter Sonam and a lute-strumming Buddhist monk.

The monk befriends Dondup despite the latter’s best efforts and tells him a long-winded rabbit hole of a story while plucking his instrument to pass the time. In the tale, a wayward novitiate is whisked from his home by a storm, only to be rescued by an elderly woodsman and his much younger wife. The stir-crazy novitiate, in classical hospitality-violating style, begins an affair with the lusty wife. Their infidelity threatens to come to light, causing him to fear for his life.  The final effect of the story on Dondup, whose fledgling flirtation with Sonam might give him a reason call off his exodus, is left unclear.

Director Khyentse Norbu, a Tibetan lama, offers up this lovely Buddhism-infused fable with a story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure. It’s a very relaxing experience, with a leisurely pace and gorgeous landscapes of mist-covered mountains and forested valleys. The nested story uses a variety of filters, colored lighting and occasional experiments with mattes and focal depth to create a dreamy, fantasy atmosphere that contrasts with the flatter sunlit realism of Dundup’s journey. The monk’s tale is obviously meant to reflect Dundup’s ambitions, but as it develops and darkens it transcends its allegorical purpose and works as a short story in its own right that I ended up liking even more than the frame story. Its relevance to Dundup gets a bit murky and the implied message is pretty harsh, but I didn’t feel like the film was preaching at me so much as preaching to its protagonist. Dundup listens, but I like that his response is ambiguous. Even though the filmmaker’s opinions are clear, Dundup, and by extension the audience, are allowed to make up their own mind. The film lets us consider whether its own philosophy doesn’t apply to everyone or, at least, whether everyone must make their own mistakes, and that’s deeper than I expected from a fable.

Film Atlas (Belgium): All Night Long

Country: Belgium

Film: All Night Long / Toute Une Nuit (1982)

All Night Long (also known as A Whole Night) is a very unusual film. It is a collection of events and non-events taking place during a single summer's night in Brussels; isolated fragments that sometimes tell us everything we need to know about a character (who will likely be on screen only once and only for a few minutes), but more often gives us only a sliver of their life, chosen perhaps at random. Lovers meet. Others part. Some miss their rendezvous completely. Couples embrace, dance, argue, pack suitcases, sit in silence. Lonely, anxious figures pace back and forth in bedrooms, warm stools in sleepy barrooms or strut down cobblestone streets and into darkness. Phones ring. TVs drone. Radios play. Depending on your mood there is either no story or dozens.

I first saw this film alone and late at night while suffering from insomnia. I can't think of better circumstances for it to work its magic. Few films so perfectly capture the essence of night; its sleepy rhythms and lonely mysteries. Experimental director Chantal Akerman isn't afraid of risking our boredom, but it's just as easy to be mesmerized. In All Night Long the darkness may be heavy and oppressive, but its citizens are restless. The camera is omnivorous: some scenes are dramatic climaxes of relationships piled high with untold baggage while others are just incidental moments, unimportant and quickly forgotten. They are all given equal weight.

I find my attention wandering during most Akerman films, and this is no exception, but here it feels as though that instinct is planned, welcomed, and even thematically integrated. The structure lets your curiosity wax and wane, allowing you to jump back in at any moment, free of confusion or guilt. Akerman's work is often labeled Minimalist or Structuralist (note the scary capital letters), and that aesthetic self-consciousness can be off-putting, but here it works as an advantage. We don’t get too close, too involved. We are simply nightwatchers, disinterested voyeurs. The absence of judgement, names or causality is peaceful. The sound design, perhaps the film’s strongest asset, gracefully assists, conjuring the nighttime's bare-boned staccato from clacking footsteps, humming fans, rolling thunder, purring engines, a door slamming shut a few blocks down. All Night Long is not for everyone, but if you can't sleep anyway, give it a chance.

My Favorites:

Mr. Nobody

Broken Circle Breakdown

All Night Long / Toute une nuit

The Son (2002)

Innocence (2004)

Amer
Loft (2008)

The Child (2005)

A Town Called Panic

Major Directors:

Chantal Akerman, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Jaco Van Dormael

Film Atlas (Belarus): In the Fog

Country: Belarus

Title: In the Fog / V Tumane (2012)

By 1942 the Germans have pushed back the eastern front beyond Belarus and established a military police force over their newly occupied territory. Partisans Burov and Voitik journey through a moss-covered forest on a special mission: to hunt down and execute Burov’s childhood neighbor Sushenya, an accused traitor and collabor. Burov arrives while Sushenya, his wife, Anelya, and son are about to eat supper. Despite an outward calm, the adults immediately recognize the finality of this parting and Anelya slowly breaks into tears. The partisan avengers take Sushenya first to a marsh, where he begs them not to bury him because the body would resurface, and then to a pine grove, where he digs his own grave. 

However a surprise attack by the German police mortally wounds Burov before he can kill Sushenya, and the latter rescues him and carries him to safety on his back. Along the way we are shown three extended flashbacks, establishing how the trio arrived at their current situation. 

Burov, an auto mechanic living with his mother, fled across his fields after sabotaging his own truck which the German invaders forced him to keep in good repair for their use. Sushenya, a train station track-walker unwilling to participate in sabotage for fear of the consequences others will suffer, is nevertheless arrested after a disastrous derailment along with the three actual perpetrators, all of whom are hanged. The diabolical German overseer offers Sushenya his life if he agrees to spy for him, but when Sushenya refuses, he's freed anyway. Only later does Sushenya understand that he is bait; his mysterious pardon intentionally designed to draw partisan assassins. Voitik, a resistance member without much initiative, intelligence or courage, was captured returning to his forest hideout after receiving rations from a nearby farmhouse, and led a pair of German soldiers back to them before escaping, his betrayal undetected, during the ensuing shootout. Interspersed with these flashbacks, we follow the three men trying to link up with the main resistance force as a fog descends, symbolic of the fading clarity of justice.

In the Fog is based on a short story by beloved Belarusian writer, Vasil Bykaw, and directed by former documentary-maker turned art-house up-and-comer Sergei Loznitsa. The immaculate virtually all-outdoor cinematography with its landscape painter eye for natural textures and their fluctuations under shades of sun and moon, comes courtesy of Romanian New Wave cinematographer Oleg Mutu (4 Months 3 Weeks 2 Days, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu).

Though a war film, there is almost no action to speak of and the few exceptions take place off-screen. The viewer's attention is focused solely on war’s smallest, most fundamental element: the individual. Through asymmetric flashbacks (letting the audience know something about each character that the other men never learn) and pared down conversations we are given insights into the way ethics, appearances, duty, honesty, reputation and self-regard are warped by wartime conditions. Particularly interesting is the contrast between Sushenya, who’s remorselessly plagued by guilt for a betrayal he didn’t commit (but which everyone, including his wife, suspects) and Voitik, who actually did betray but is never suspected and seems untroubled by guilt. The film’s final lines belong to its most mercenary caricature, two men dispassionately looting a body, furthering the idea that survival and prosperity are inversely proportional to moral maturity. The fog-shrouded final moments imply the corollary, that Sushenya’s overdeveloped moral sense is actually antithetical to life.

But tempering this pessimistic philosophy is an intriguing network of coincidences and ironies that seem to imply cosmic metaphysical forces at play: Sushenya rescuing his would-be executioner, his pacifist non-participation failing to save him from the suspicion and ire first of the Germans and then of the Soviets, Burov destroying a truck at the start of his partisan career only to die for want of even a cart at the end of it, Voitik surviving one unfortunate road-crossing only to meet his fate at another, bookending scenes involving boots, etc. Loznitsa thankfully doesn’t employ these ironies for laughs (he’s serious almost to a fault) or pedagogy (he’s studiously ambiguous about larger meanings), but they give this otherwise reserved and minimalist film its soul-searching complexity. The film’s only structural flaw is that Burov’s flashback, the first, is too straightforward and orthodox, and in a film whose stately long-take style is justified by making every scenes matter, it feels like a wasted opportunity.

Major Directors:

Sergei Loznitsa

Film Atlas (The Bahamas): Rain

Country: Bahamas

Title: Rain (2008)

Rain is a sheltered teenager who lives with her caring grandmother on Ragged Island, a fishing island with a population under 100. When her guardian dies, she takes a boat to Nassau to live with her mother, a prostitute with a drug addiction, gambling problem and HIV infection. They live in a rundown slum called The Graveyard, named for its reputation as an inescapable hellhole. Rain is, unsurprisingly, scared and lonely, trying to connect with her mother, adjust to formal schooling and make friends. Things start to improve when she finds a school teacher who takes a shine to her and develops her natural talent for cross-country running, offering her a shot at a scholarship and a better life. Meanwhile, her mother’s bitter self-destructiveness and emotional defenses thaw, giving her a reason to clean up her life or at least make the attempt.

Although Rain premise takes the form of a conventional underdog melodrama (of a type I tend to avoid), it overcomes its dependency on clichés by staying honest and keeping the crux of the story on the rocky mother-daughter relationship. The mother’s performance is wonderfully real and nuanced. It’s a stubborn last stand against acknowledging that she’s spiraling towards rock bottom; full of pride for her small sphere of independence, undigested anger for herself, her mother and her situation, and a natural but half-atrophied capacity for trust, joy and maternity. The coach-pupil plot fares less well, since the coach, for the sake of the narrative, behaves as though she has no other students and no personal life, tirelessly dedicating herself to Rain without ever dropping her gentle smile. There’s no real insight into the sport, but it doesn’t really matter since it’s just a placeholder. Most will find that the emotional core and the performances are what matter most and those hold up. I particularly liked a few of the minor characters, like the best friend, who is vain and brazen but a good pal, and a crazy homeless preacher whose creepiness comes from the contrast between his obviously sick intentions and the righteous babble he spouts.