Film Atlas (Chile): The Maid

Country: Chile

Title: The Maid / La Nana (2009)

The upper-middle class Valdes family consists of permissive mother Pilar and fastidious father Edmundo, their teenage children, their maid Raquel, a dog and most recently a kitten. They live in Santiago in a large two story house complete with a walled-off backyard pool. Raquel has raised the kids (favoring the jokester Lucas over Camila, with whom she maintains a stealthy vendetta), kept up the household and continues to wage a personal crusade to keep everything obsessively ordered and spotless (in the first scene she even insists on cleaning up her own surprise party before going to bed). But the Valdes’s are concerned about her dizzy spells and speculates that she is having trouble managing such a large estate alone. Pilar hires a second maid to ease the load, but the move threatens Raquel and her already compulsive and irritable demeanor worsens. Feeling  increasingly undervalued, expendable and bitter, she systematically terrorizes the new hires into leaving, beginning with easy game like a quiet young Indian maid and eventually squaring off against Edmundo’s bearish no-nonsense ex-nanny Sonia. Raquel ends up in the hospital after another dizzy episode and returns to find a new maid, Lucy, installed. Raquel tries her usual tactics, but Lucy, kind, good-humored and understanding, is not like anyone Raquel has ever met.

Director Sebastian Silva filmed in his own childhood home and based the story on his family’s maids (also Raquel and Lucy) and the complicated web of love and power, authority and rebellion, intimacy and inaccessibility he felt towards them growing up. He has a deft and even loving hand for shaping character-driven observational comedy (and it is funny, despite both vicious and heartbreaking moments) with surprising psychological depth, emotional honesty and underlying compassion. Almost any other director would have taken the story in a less interesting direction: a satiric caricature of upstairs-downstairs relationships, a Marxist critique of bourgeois exploiters and oppressed servants, a horror-tinged class-based revenge story. What we get instead is refreshingly natural and human and only occasionally absurd (as life is). Characters’ aren’t pat or predictable, but they make sense, and their quirks give us insight into personalities easy to misjudge. The handheld digital camerawork adds to the intimacy of the familial setting and foregrounds the film’s strongest suit: performances. Catalina Saavedra, as Raquel, is ultimately what clinches the movie, providing a nuanced, convincing emotional anchor that is unique, unforgettable and, I’m tempted to say, near definitive.

My Favorites:

The Maid

Nostalgia for the Light
No

Jackal of Nahueltoro
The Club

Machuca

Julio Begins in July

Major Directors:

Patricio Guzman, Pablo Larrain, Sebastian Lelio, Miguel Littin, Sebastain Silva

Film Atlas (Chad): A Screaming Man

Country: Chad

Title: A Screaming Man / Un Homme Qui Crie (2010)

An African pool, Adam, works as an attendant at an upscale Western hotel in N’Djamena. Though his job is relatively simple, he does it well and with pride, as he has done for decades. It entitles him to respect, a crisp white uniform and access to a vehicle. His coworkers, like the cook and security guard, call him “Champion” in deference to his former glory as a professional swimmer. Business, however, is slumping. The Chadian Civil War is in full swing and rebel forces are approaching the city. Tourism is drying up; the white guests leaving for safer regions. The hotel is sold to Chinese managers who immediately begin consolidating. The final blow comes when Adam is demoted and his handsome headstrong son, Abdel, given his job. Meanwhile, the district chief makes it clear to Adam that he must contribute to the war effort, either by paying a war levy or enlisting his son. Filled with bitterness, shame and anger, Adam puts his son on the draft list, a decision he immediately regrets, and the youth is soon after dragged off to fight. When Abdel’s pregnant girlfriend arrives, seeking shelter and support, Adam resolves to rescue his son.

Despite the wartime setting, this is less a war film than a morality play. Adam and Abdel are essentially apolitical; their interests and aspirations middle-class. It is the generational conflict that director Mahamat Saleh Haroun is really curious about, and he develops this theme with patience and sensitivity. Youssouf Djaoro, as Adam, delivers a quietly restrained, but inwardly screaming performance that captures the stress and strain that precipitates a tough decision and the guilt and anguish that follows a bad one. We watch battles play out behind Adam’s façade of courteous servility. His dignity, even his very identity, is destabilized even as his country, too, falls into chaos. The visuals tie Adam to water, showing him cool and calm when he is tending to the pool and letting him flounder in the dust and sun when he moves physically or symbolically away. Yet it is only when he finally severs his connection to the pool, with its foreign and artificial associations, that he is able to think clearly and, though it may come too late, to finds a measure of peace at a riverside, a body of water that is natural and indigenous. Haroun imbues this simple arc, from a pool to a river, with an enduring emotional impact.

Also check out Haroun's Dry Season, which also tackles father-son relations with similarly unexpected and powerful results.

My Favorites:

Dry Season

A Screaming Man

Major Directors:
Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Film Atlas (Canada): My Winnipeg

Country: Canada

Title: My Winnipeg (2008)

Director Guy Maddin tries to escape his beloved and behated hometown of Winnipeg and, thereby, his past, by riding an impossible somnambulistic night train in this largely-fictional, highly-fantastical “documentary.” Trapped in quasi-nostalgic reveries full of mixed emotions he tries to “film his way out” by reenacting the mildly traumatic minutia of his childhood using his mother (actually actress Ann Savage in her final role) and a crew of hired actors to play his siblings and pets. His dead father, deemed unnecessary to the experiment, is exhumed and placed under the living room rug.

This loosely anchors Maddin’s guided tour through Winnipeg’s local history which encompasses events both real and surreal, drawing as much from dreams and distorted memories as from newsreels and history books. Highlights include visions of sleep-walking strollers jingling the keys (which they are legally allowed to keep) of their former residences, the Winnipeg General strike, corrupt ‘man pageants’, a three-story pool, a romantic stroll past horrifically frozen horses, the failed amusement park Happyland, a strange compromise between rival taxi companies, the television show ‘LedgeMan’ about a suicidal jumper getting talked back to safety week after week and much more.

Maddin’s fervent imagination never fails to surprise but two things remain consistent in his work: his obsessive and stormy relationship with Winnipeg and his adherence to archaic silent-era film styles. My Winnipeg is his tribute to the ‘city symphony’ genre although there are sequences in the style of German expressionism, gothic surrealism and silhouette animation. Yet sharing Maddin’s encyclopedic knowledge of historical film techniques isn’t necessary to appreciating his unique sense of humor which plumbs the absurdity of our desire to mythologize our personal and communal pasts.

Maddin’s tongue-in-cheek revelations about the city’s supposed supernatural affinity (municipal séances, the ghosts of hockey players, his oft-repeated incantation of “the forks, the lap, the fur… the forks beneath the forks!”) is his desperate escape pod from the banality of documentary truth. He’s equally fast and loose with biographical honesty in his overtly-Freudian dissection of his relationship with his mother, comically failing to disguise a fairly conventional middle-class upbringing while highlighting the suspect quotidian details that shaped him. Most successful of all is the blend of sincerity and satire, reverence and ridiculousness in his treatment of Winnipeg; lavishing it with the kind of monumental cinematic treatment usually reserved for the likes of New York City or Paris. The result is both a heartbreakingly touching love letter and a hilariously vibrant send-up unlike any other film.

Sharing a language with their conspicuous neighbor has been a mixed blessing for Canadian cinema, providing it a readymade audience but also making it highly susceptible to cultural imperialism. Perhaps that’s why Canada has so often distinguished itself by fostering oddball auteurs. In addition to Guy Maddin’s docufantasia, my Canadian shortlist included films by body-horror maven David Cronenberg, challenging provocateur Atom Egoyan, prolific animation pioneer Norman McLaren and structuralist experimenter Michael Snow. I'd also recommend the sociologically and emotionally confrontational documentaries of Allan King, like A Married Couple, which similarly deconstructs family life, and, more recently, Sarah Polley's very different but equally original take on the autobiographical investigation of family called Stories We Tell.

My Favorites:

The Sweet Hereafter

The Saddest Music in the World

Possible Worlds

My Winnipeg

Jesus of Montreal

Stories We Tell

Videodrome

Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould
Good Riddance

Dead Ringers

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

Away from Her

Careful

The Adjuster

The Central Region

The Decline of the American Empire

A Married Couple

Goin' Down the Road

The Silent Partner

Exotica

The Red Violin

Incendies

Cube

Family Viewing

Atlantic City

The Brood

Major Directors:

Denys Arcand, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Claude Jutra, Allan King, Zacharias Kunuk, Sarah Polley

Film Atlas (Cameroon): The Child of Another

Country: Cameroon

Title: The Child of Another / Muna Moto (1975)

Ngando, a chiseled young woodcutter, plans to marry his childhood sweetheart Ndomé, but can't afford the dowry demanded by her family and local tradition. Ndomé becomes pregnant with Ngando's child, but instead of forcing her parent's hands, they find another suitor: Mbongo, Ngando's own uncle. Mbongo is a rich and self-serving, but sterile. He already has four neglected wives and is desperate for a child to continue his family name.  One day while Ngando is out chopping wood, Ndomé is abducted and forced into a shotgun marriage. Enraged, but increasingly hopeless, Ngando resorts to desperate measures. He kidnaps his own child during a feast day celebration, but every avenue of escape closes before him.

Muna Moto begins with a 12-minute sequence showing a festival in Cameroon occasionally interspersed with what we will later find out are flashbacks. It isn't clear who, if anyone, is the main character and we are given no intertitles or narration to explain the plot, let alone the rituals we are seeing. Partly, I think this is director Jean-Pierre Dikongue Pipa intentionally throwing us into the deep end, but it's also a way of having a single character's emerge from the crowd in a way that puts it into context: this could be anyone's story. It's a classical example of doomed love, the popular triangle of a beautiful woman sought by both poor peasant and rich cad. What makes Muna Moto transcend its well-worn premise is the striking blank-and-white cinematography and poetic editing. Pipa's images (much crisper than the poor transfer I had to use for my screenshots) are densely layered and blocked out into intricate textures of grey and black. The resulting compositions pull us into the settings (village, forest, beach, etc.) by giving us a sense of place, three-dimensionality and even intimacy. The camera is restless, constantly sliding along or reframing our leads. The edits dive in with inquisitive insert shots of plants, insects, animals, hands and faces. Though not strictly necessary to the plot, we come to know Ngando and Ndomé's world through the accrual of these details, rather than dialog, and we root for the lovers even knowing their inevitable fate.

My Favorites:
The Child of Another
The Great White of Lambarene

Major Directors:
Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Bassek Ba Kobhio

Film Atlas (Cambodia): Rice People

Country: Cambodia

Title: Rice People / Neak Sre (1994)

Poeuv, Om and their seven daughters are survivors of the Khmer Rouge who now raise rice on a 14 plot paddy. Poeuv fears he will leave little behind for his children and theirs, but he hopes to better his lot through hard work and diligence. His plans are immediately threatened when his wife, Om, is bitten by a snake. She lives and it is Poeuv who unexpectedly dies when a thorn in his foot becomes infected. Om is devastated but still has a family to feed and redoubles her work. During the day she is an implacable elemental force, part mother, boss and beast of labor, but at night we see her unraveling. She prays and rants at her late husband, sinks into bouts of drinking and depression and, hoping to ease her burden even at the price of her dignity, makes a fruitless bids for a second marriage. The responsibility and effort eventually drives her mad and her children confine her to a cage. The oldest, Sakha, shaves her head and assumes management of the family. Together they weather plagues of crabs, storms and sparrows. The rice grows. They reap, sift and sell what they can. It is a bad harvest and brings in little. The film ends with Sakha irrigating in preparation for the next year.

Rice People could be called the great film about subsistence farming, bringing home both the cruelty and complexity of nature and the backbreaking labor that living off the land entails. The performances, from what is virtually an all-female non-actor primary cast, are incredibly natural. The younger sisters are not particularly distinctive and they are easy to lose track of, but Om’s violent anguish, fear and tenacity and Sakha’s unflinching pragmatism, competence and maturity are captured with nuance and economy. For me, much of the appeal of Rice People is its respect for its subjects: not just the farmers, but the rice itself. Director Rithy Panh, best known for his documentaries, puts his factual rigor to fascinating use simply showing us the ins and outs of Cambodian agriculture: weaving thatch, punting through lilies, purging crab infestations and, of course, plowing, sowing, weeding, protecting, harvesting, sifting and cleaning rice. Panh lets the rice structure his film, establishing a steady rhythm and visual grace saturated with texture and toil and sun. Though it is slow and somber, it has a sense of poetry missing from more stylish works. Rice People is dedicated to Panh’s family who died of overwork and malnutrition during the Khmer Rouge regime.

Major Directors:

Rithy Panh

Film Atlas (Burkina Faso): Yaaba

Country: Burkina Faso

Film: Grandmother / Yaaba (1989)

Cousins Bila and Nopoko, ten-year-old boy and girl, are best friends. While tending to the grave of Nopoko's mother they spot Sana, an old woman who lives on the outskirts of their village. She helps Nopoko in a game of hide-and-seek and, recognizing her innate kind-heartedness, Bila starts to visit her regularly and gives her the affectionate name Yaaba (grandmother). However the rest of the village considers her a witch and other boys throw stones at her. On the way back from bathing at the local watering hole Bila and Nopoko get in a scuffle with these same kids and Nopoko is cut with a rusty knife. When she falls ill her parents think it's just malaria, but Sana tells Bila she suspects tetanus. Bila's superstitious father invites a medicine man to heal Nopoko, and the charlatan claims that Sana has stolen the girl's soul and must be driven out, leading the villagers to burn down her house. Nevertheless, Bila convinces Sana to make a long journey for proper medicine. Woven with the primary story are other narrative threads including the bickering of neighboring families and a scandalous love triangle. Koudi, who is married to a friendly but impotent drunk, is having an affair with Razougou, a former flame, and it's only a matter of time before they are caught. Bila is friends with both Koudi and her husband, but learns not to take sides.

Idressa Ouedraogo is one of my favorite African directors, in part because of his skill at taking the daily concerns and domestic dramas of village life and structuring them into a satisfying, small-scale and yet wide-ranging story. From the simple incidents of an unremarkable childhood he mines the important revelations of growing up, of learning friendship and fairness, the fragility of life, the fickleness of love, the multiplicity of truth and inevitability of death. Yaaba is also anchored by two incredible child actors, who give performances that capture both the sweetness and meanness of youth and the speed with which they can toggle. But Ouedraogo is an optimist and a humanist, and he leans towards a generous and forgiving warmth, saving his condemnation, and even that's probably too strong a word, for  those who should know better: the worst of the vain, superstitious and dictatorial adults. Yaaba is about as apolitical as you can get, but if there's any agenda it's in its preference for the wisdom of children, mothers and the elderly over the dubious moral authority of men. Mostly, though, Yaaba doesn't feel like it's about messages so much as a memories; the best and worst of your formative years. It's attitude is encapsulated by the first and last image of Bila chasing Nopoko across the rich red earth.

My Favorites:

Yaaba

The Law / Tilai

Zan Boko

Major Directors:

Gaston Kaboré, Idrissa Ouedraogo

Film Atlas (Bulgaria): The Goat Horn

Country: Bulgaria

Film: The Goat Horn / Koziyat Rog (1972)

Karaivan is a shepherd in 17th century Bulgaria. He lives a humble, contented life with his wife and young daughter, Maria. One day while grazing his goats on the mountain slopes, his wife is raped and killed by four Ottomans travelling through the area. The daughter, witnessing it all, goes mute. The father, upon returning, burns his property to the ground in grief. Years go by and Karaivan raises Maria as a son, teaching her to fight and bow-hunt. Finally feeling prepared, he tracks down the Ottomans and wrecks his revenge, leaving a goat horn near the corpses as a signature. But Maria, ill-nourished by her diet of violence and hate, can't help craving peace and love. Karaivan is unwilling, or perhaps unable, to let her move on and lead a normal life.

The Goat Horn belongs to the dubious subgenre of rape-and-revenge thrillers, a tradition I'm not very fond of. So I was initially hesitant about choosing this film (Bulgaria's New Wave war romance The Peach Thief would have been far safer, and its equally good, but arguably less interesting), but something about it kept nagging at me. It owes a great deal more to Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (the oddly highbrow birthplace of the cycle) than the mindless exploitation films that have largely characterized thematically similar films since. This is a movie about uneducated peasants who lead their lives by strict, simple codes. There is almost no dialog and thus no ham-handed debates about the morality of murder or revenge. The stark black-and-white of the cinematography and the hand-built authenticity of the art design compliments this directness. The viewer comes to understand, or at least appreciate, this primitive world of seeing and doing rather than thinking and discussing. But Karaivan and Maria are still human, and even if they don't understand the philosophical implications of what they have been through, they still pay the emotional toll. It is here that The Goat Horn achieves its greatest success: performances that chart the spectrum of loss, anger, revenge and redemption without knowing the words to articulate it.

My Favorites:

The Goat Horn
The Peach Thief