Film Atlas (Georgia): Repentance

Country: Georgia

Film: Repentance / Monanieba (1984)

The death of Varlam Aravidze, a charismatic public figure, is the cause of solemn mourning and fond tributes in the Georgian town where he once served as mayor. But when his exhumed corpses shows up in his family's garden the next day, it becomes clear that someone doesn't wish him to rest in peace. After being dug up twice more, Varlam's son Abel and grandson Tornike lie in ambush and arrest the culprit: an unassuming cake decorator named Keti Barateli. At her trial she admits to desecrating the grave but doesn't plead guilty, explaining by way of an extended flashback. As a child she witnessed Varlam's rise and his abuses of power as a hypocritical functionary of the Communist party. He befriends Keti's parents, Sandro, an artist, and Nino, whose beauty Varlam covets, imposing on them with his oafish joviality and superficial  intellectualism. Varlam pressures Sandro to make socially conscious art (by which he means pro-government art depicting heroic progress), but Sandro eloquently insists on his independence from ideology. Soon after Sandro is arrested and sent to a work camp on the strength of a slanderous letter signed by rivals. Varlam defends his self-serving adherence to what he sees as his duty; calling the will of the masses his "holy of holies." Keti never sees her father again, but when lumber from work camp is waylaid at a local depot, she finds his name amongst hundreds of others curved on the timber. Meanwhile, the culture of groundless accusations and mindless persecutions spins completely out of control and even Varlam becomes disillusioned with the cause he spearheaded.

Back in the present day, Keti reiterates her promise that if freed she will continue to harass Varlam's corpse. Tornike is shaken to the core by the trial. He knew his grandfather only as a popular hero and kindly madman whom he frequently visited in an abandoned silo where he lived out his final days tormented, as Tornike now realizes, by guilt.  He sides with Keti, and is outraged to realize that his father, even knowing the truth, plans to have her locked in an asylum to protect his family's reputation and position. Abel defends his father, saying that it was a politically complicated time and that Varlam was merely carrying out his job, but his son argues that, "Man is born a human being first. He becomes a public servant later." Abel suffers nightmares and questions his motivations, but can't even be sure that his pangs of conscience are not just fear. It falls on Tornike, young enough to be repulsed by the pragmatic 'justice' of his father and the courts, to make an extreme act of repentance.

Only a handful of Soviet Bloc films dared to question the witch-hunt mentality and aimless persecution of Communist Party's ideological purges before the fall of the USSR. Examples include The Joke (from the Czech Republic) and Interrogation (from Poland), but Repentance is especially interesting for the ethical and moral scope of its three act structure. In the first part, the audience is kept thoroughly in the dark about who Varlam was and why someone doesn't want him buried, mirroring not just the confusion of the Aravidze family, but foreshadowing the anguish of not knowing the truth that Keti and other victims lived with for decades. The second act, told entirely in flashback, is the longest, and is a terrifyingly real though frequently surreal study of resistance (Sandro) and complicity (Varlam) with Avtandil Makharadze delivering a chilling performance as the perpetually-grinning two-faced mayor. But it is the third act that is perhaps the most rare and compelling, as we watch the second and third generation decide how to deal with a legacy of injustice, sin and guilt. Abel, his wife and his son each react very differently to the revelations about their vaunted patriarch and their conflicting desires to deny, cover-up, ignore, rationalize, underplay, absolve or do penance for his crimes becomes the film's most profound and intricate moral statement.

Director Tengiz Abuladze (who made Repentance as the third part of a thematic trilogy) doesn't employ particularly fancy camerawork or staging. His style is primarily realist, but inflected with moments of dark comedy as when a fire hydrant geyser quite literally drowns out the whole of Varlam's debut speech. In stark counterpoint are frequent digressions into dreams, in which the indirect and amorphous forces of oppression manifest themselves in scenes of warning, danger and horror. Perhaps the longest and most telling is a scene in which Sandro stands trial before Varlam, a white grand piano and the blind Lady Justice. There Sandro learns that the plan of the half-crazed friend who accused him is to name thousands of people as conspirators in bizarre and impossible schemes in the hope of unmasking the absurdity of the trial. This plan is doomed, of course, to backfire and feed the flames of the witch-hunt. Absurdity has long been a mainstay of Soviet Bloc cinema both as a means to evade censorship and to grapple with history, but Abuladze seems skeptical of its effectiveness, which perhaps explains his strange, ambivalent and yet undeniably potent mixture of realist and surrealist modes to tell the epic story of Repentance.

My Favorites:

Repentance

Kin-Dza-Dza

Salt for Svanetia

Major Directors:

Tengiz Abuladze, Otar Ioselliani, Irakli Kvirikadze, Sergei Parajanov

Film Atlas (France): Children of Paradise

Country: France

Title: Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis (1945)

Children of Paradise is, in the opinion of many, myself included, the great romantic epic of classical cinema. At its center is Garance, an elegant courtesan who attracts the attention of four men in the ‘Boulevard of Crime’ theater district of the 1830’s: Baptiste, a kindhearted gentle mime, Frederick, a charming waggish actor, Lacenaire, a coldblooded calculating criminal and Edouard de Montray, a rich, jaded count. Baptiste falls in love with Garance first, and perhaps most purely, but his insecurity and timidity prevent him sealing the relationship while Frederick, Lacenaire and the count all press their various suits.  Years pass and all the men become great successes in their respective fields. Baptiste is married to Nathalie, a fellow mime, who loves him passionately and is probably a better match, but doesn’t fill the Garance-shaped hole in his heart. Frederick goes to see one of Baptiste’s now-acclaimed performances and runs into Garance in disguise. This triggers a new round of encounters and heartbreaks whose tragedy, though profound for our characters, is swept away in the tumult of the times.

My brief plot summary can hardly do justice to the formidable, yet nimble 3+ hour script, divided into two parts separated by a number of years. Not only does the story effortlessly leap and glide from character to character, but it manages to preserve their distinctive personalities while mixing them together in every combination, never failing to bear forth dialog of sparkling wit and wisdom. Even the secondary characters like the rag-man Jericho or the ill-fated Nathalie have moments in the spotlight as strong as any lead role in a lesser film. Part of the movie's romantic magic is its sense of place: carnival-season in a row of packed Parisian theaters and the even busier street outside.  Everywhere there are people, in good spirits despite everything, and the film shares their unfiltered excitement even as its sails down its bittersweet trajectory. The film's production values are all the more impressive considering the conditions of its creation: shot in Nazi-occupied France with shortages, rationing, destruction, censorship and the constant threat of being shut down in part because the show doubled as a front for resistance fighters and Jewish exiles.

My Favorites:

Children of Paradise

Last Year at Marienbad

Diabolique (1955)

Forbidden Games (1952)

The Intruder (2004)

Olivier, Olivier

A Very Long Engagement

Bob the Gambler

A Prophet

Z

Amour

Jules and Jim

Eden and After

A Man Escaped

Belle de Jour

My Night at Maud’s

Blue Is the Warmest Color

Monsieur Hire

Sundays and Cybele

Diva

A Heart in Winter

Amelie

A Self-Made Hero

Kirikou and the Sorceress

A Sunday in the Country

Rust and Bone

My American Uncle

Beauty and the Beast (1946)

Holy Motors

Leon Morin, Priest

Celine and Julie Go Boating

Breathless (1960)

Rififi

Napoleon (1927)

Summer Hours

The Lovers (1958)

Pickpocket

Alphaville

The Man Who Sleeps

The Apartment (1996)

The King and the Mockingbird

Human Resources

Read My Lips

The Earrings of Madame de…

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Carlos the Jackal

Lovers on the Bridge

Shoot the Piano Player

The Raven (1943)

Ridicule

Mr. Freedom

Perceval

The Three Crowns of a Sailor

The Mother and the Whore

Certified Copy

Hiroshima Mon Amour

Money (1928)

Contempt

The Rules of the Game

Douce / Love Story (1943)

City of Lost Children

The Fantastic Planet

Ponette

The Professional

Time Out

Elevator to the Gallows

A Christmas Tale (2008)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Jean de Florette

A Man and a Woman

Bay of Angels

Cleo from 5 to 7

Triple Agent

Eyes without a Face

Weekend (1967)

The Beaches of Agnes

The Beautiful Troublemaker

Chloe in the Afternoon

Chronicle of a Summer

A Judgment in Stone / The Ceremony

Trouble Every Day

Irma Vep

Major Directors:

Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard, Claude Berri, Luc Besson, Bertrand Blier, Robert Bresson, Laurent Cantet, Leos Carax, Claude Chabrol, Patrice Chereau, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Demy, Claire Denis, Arnuad Desplechin, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Haneke, Jean-Pierre Juenet, Rene Laloux, Patrice Leconte, Louis Malle, Chris Marker, Jean-Pierre Melville, Max Ophuls, Francois Ozon, Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, Alaine Robbe-Grillet, Eric Rohmer, Raoul Ruiz, Jacques Tati, Francois Traffaut, Roger Vadim, Agnes Varda

Film Atlas (Finland): The White Reindeer

Country: Finland

Title: The White Reindeer / Valkoinen Peura (1952)

The White Reindeer opens with a pregnant woman, a witch or so the narrator tells us, fleeing across an inhospitable snowscape pursued by wolves. She gives birth and dies, not a very auspicious start for Pirita, our cursed anti-hero. She grows into a beautiful young woman and catches the eye of handsome Aslak during a sledding race. The two are soon married but Aslak, a reindeer shepherd, is frequently away from home leaving Pirita at the mercy of loneliness, boredom and depression.

Seeking greater romantic fulfillment, Pirita visits an alcoholic shaman who encourages her to sacrifice the first living thing she sees on her way home to a pagan god. The first living thing she sees, unfortunately, is her husband and their pet albino reindeer doe. She slaughters the doe, becoming irresistible to men as part of the bargain, but the cost is high: she turns into a shape-shifting reindeer vampire and gradually succumbs to her unnatural hunger.

Few places lend themselves to black and white cinematography like Lapland and its unbroken canvas of snowy hillsides. The landscape alone is enough to hold one’s attention, but the primary interest of The White Reindeer is two-fold: it works as both an ethnographic slice-of-life into a rural Finnish past (where skiing and reindeer are the primary modes of transportation and, I would hazard, you’ve never seen so many reindeer!)  and as an old-fashion though oddly effective horror story in the tradition of fairytales and folklore.

Perhaps the peak of the latter experience is the scene in which Pirita makes her sacrifice before the pagan altar, a twisted monument of antler and bone shot from unexpected angles, before passing out into nightmare visions. Below these surface layers is a rather ambiguous interplay of feminist and patriarchal themes that touch upon topics of marriage, sex, domestic life and the role of women without any clear agenda, except perhaps a growing fear at the breakdown of “traditional” values.

My Favorites:

The White Reindeer

Inspector Palmu's Error

Stolen Death

The Man without a Past

Frozen Land

Major Directors:

Aki Kaurismaki, Mika Kaurismäki

Film Atlas (Ethiopia): Harvest 3000 Years

Country: Ethiopia

Film: Harvest: 3000 Years / Mirt Sost Shi Amit (1976)

Harvest: 3000 Years borders on documentary. It begins leisurely with shots of a family going about their daily routine in the Ethiopian countryside. Their lives are structured around ceaseless toil: plowing fields, planting trees, cutting grass, carrying loads, shepherding cattle, washing clothes, grinding flour, etc. But we also see, occasionally, children at play, men bragging about happier days, women dreaming of better futures for their families and always the richness of the enduring land. A few stories slowly emerge from these scenes. There is Kebebe, a politically-minded 'madman' who talks to himself (or perhaps to us), describing the perfect home where he lives: fresh air, running water, wide open doors at the front and back. The camera zooms out to reveal he shelters under a bridge. Kebebe has an ongoing verbal vendetta with the local landlord, a lazy Western-clad despot who rarely rises from his front porch and then only to berate his silent sweating servants. Chief amongst these is Kentu, an obsequious underling whose family struggles to make ends meet. During a flood, Kentu's daughter drowns trying to rescue one of the master's cow, but callous and greedy as ever, the landlord only adds to their troubles by demanding an even larger share of the year's harvest. Kebebe snaps and beats him to death with a stick, leading to a police standoff around 'his' bridge. When the dust settles, the military seizes the harvest anyway, but the last shot implies that a new generation of active resistance may've been born from out of the incident.

Harvest: 3000 Years is not an easy film. It's slow, long, shot on rather rickety 16mm black and white, and takes a distinctly abstract approach to storytelling. One has to keep in mind that director Haile Gerima shot the film in the tense interim of bloody military coups that took Ethiopia from a stagnant monarchy to an equally ineffective socialism, with the director successfully evading unwanted attention from either side. It is also one of the few African films I've seen willing to put its poetic sensibility ahead of purely narrative concerns, and the result is emotionally honest and moving even if, at times, confusing. It is full of quiet moments where the camera tracks the rhythms of rural Ethiopian life, but its political agenda is never very far away. The children especially, through dreams and visions that portend a change, are beginning resist their lot, even to radicalize, a transition that Gerima situates as a natural consequence of the country's economic divide and low standard of living. And then there is the film's central mouthpiece, Kebebe, who has half-chosen half-been-forced-into insanity as the only sane thing to do in an insane world. His monologues, freestyle rants full of wily humor, sober truths and political lucidity, are some of the film's highlights and a stinging contrast to Harvest's predominantly silent observations.

Gerima camerawork favors shooting from extreme distances leaving us with tiny figures on large canvases that emphasize the smallness of human endeavor and yet the universality of their struggle. He frequently uses long zooms where he can keep movement in frame by pivoting the camera using only slight nudges. These long shots are punctuated at a few rare but key points, including the start and end of the film, with extreme close-ups that literally put a human face on Africa's battle for independence, equality and the basic necessities of survival.

My Favorites:
Harvest: 3000 Years
Crumbs

Major Directors:
Haile Gerima

Film Atlas (Egypt): Cairo Station

Country: Egypt

Film: Cairo Station / The Iron Gate / Bab el Hadid (1958)

Madbouli, our oft-absent narrator, is a newsagent in Cairo's bustling central train station who claims to have seen many stories strangers than those he sells. This one began when he took in Qinawi, a crippled street urchin without a past and little hope for a future. Qinawi defends himself with a desperate sense of humor, but he's lonely, sexually frustrated and the butt of many jokes cast down from the higher social strata. He longingly spies on a pair of young lovers that rendezvous at the station, and dreams of marriage with Hannouma (Hind Rostom, the "Marilyn Monroe of the East"), a fiery, flirtatious eye-catcher who sells cold drinks without a permit. She strings Qinawi along so he'll hide her beverage bucket during police raids and because she considers him essentially harmless and amusing, but in reality she is engaged to Abu Serih, a handsome labor organizer and born leader on the cusp of winning better pay for the station porters.

Unable to accept the growing reality that Hannouma will soon marry another and leave, Qinawi loses his grip on reality and latches onto a murder story of grisly dismemberment being covered by the very papers he peddles. He clumsily lures Hannouma to the station warehouse, but she senses something is up (she thinks he is trying yet again to seduce her) and sends a friend, who Qinawi, in the dark, stabs and stuffs into a trunk. He later tries to blame Abu Serih, but his erratic behavior doesn't allow him to fool anyone for long. As night falls, he corners Hannouma in the rail yard and chases her among the trains as the police surround the area. Madbouli steps forward and tries to calm down Qinawi, now totally insane, by describing his imminent wedding festivities. Asking him to don his bridegroom robes, several men slip on a straightjacket.

Egypt was already one of the centers of Middle Eastern cinema by the 1930s, but few had any interest in challenging the prevailing popular comedic and romantic formulas until prolific director Youssef Chahine emerged in the 1950s. The result of his interest in sordid tragedy among the lower castes, Cairo Station, was a domestic failure but a rare international breakthrough. Chahine himself took on the difficult and rather unflattering role of Qinawi, a character too pathetic to hate, but too ominous to like; something between a scrappy underdog and a creepy stalker (a fresh and shocking character type in 1958). Chahine builds up an ill-omened tension around Qinawi by, in keeping with his tendency to lurk, conspicuously not revealing his face for the first ten minutes. In the shack where he lives, Qinawi pins up images of scantily clad women cut from the papers he sells, an ordinary enough act of sexual sublimation that grows darker as the film progresses; he later draws a bucket on the arm of a favorite picture and finally, after hearing about a sensational killing, almost absent-mindedly clips off the head and limbs of a pinup. His conflation of image, imagination and reality and his tendency to escape into voyeurism and fantasy, makes him something of a prototype for the deranged antiheroes of the 1960s and 70s (think Peeping Tom, Psycho or Taxi Driver), but it's a credit to Chahine's minimal-dialog performance and the carefully selected class-conscious scenes of his daily routine that he remains oddly sympathetic.

Chahine also proves himself one of the most interesting cinematographers of the era, with extremely dynamic compositions that incorporate camera movement, staging along criss-crossing diagonals and constant interplay between foreground and background elements. He frequently shoots through windows, around corners and in shifting crowds, always keeping the essential information clear while pushing the boundary of what he can fit in the frame. One of my favorite examples is Qinawi buying a knife at a cutlery stand (the first screenshot of this post), a scene sliced up by the verticals of dangling, swaying blades in front and the prison-like iron bars of a gate behind. Another winner is the climactic nighttime chase, with its chiaroscuro lighting and metallic labyrinth of engines, carriages and rails, shot with all the noirish authority of an Orson Welles finale.

My Favorites:

Cairo Station

The Nightingale's Prayer / The Curfew's Cry

The Mummy
The Square (2013)

Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story

Major Directors:

Henry Barakat, Youssef Chahine

Film Atlas (Ecuador): Ratas Ratones Rateros

Country: Ecuador

Title: Ratas, Ratones, Rateros (1999)

Salvador is a punk, but he’s more or less an OK guy. He lives in a rundown complex with his preoccupied parents and paralyzed grandmother and runs petty cons with a neighborhood pal and his none-too-bright girlfriend. He’s small fry and he knows it, but he can’t quite commit to playing it smart and keeping his head down. Enter Angel, Salvador’s cousin. Angel is a thug, a selfish irresponsible low-life careening from person to person leeching money however he can and whatever the consequences. He’s a little bit smart, a little bit charming, a little bit whatever he needs to be to get what he wants and leave someone else holding the bill.

When Angel shows up, men are already on his trail from a former deal gone sour. He convinces Salvador to let him lay low in the gated villa of Carolina, a rich and beautiful relative. Carolina discourages Salvador from getting involved with Angel, but hangs out with assholes that are Angel’s upper-middle class equivalents. Before long Angel has Salvador caught up in grand theft auto and worse. Salvador, mistakenly idolizing Angel, never fully realizes the mess he’s being drawn into until he’s already deep in over his head. Angel, though, does what he always does: he runs away.

Ratas, Ratones, Rateros (also known as Rodents) is a movie about quicksand; the way one gets trapped by the belief that going a few steps further is better than turning around and beginning the long haul back. The worse it is to face what’s behind you, the easier it is to make the next bad decision ahead, the one that will make it that much harder to turn back at the next crisis. Rodents is also a movie about contemporary Ecuador with the guts to air a lot of dirty laundry that many countries would've censored: juvenile delinquency, salty regional slang, the lack of positive role models, the widening gap between rich and poor, the proliferation of drugs and prostitution. But most interesting, for me, Rodents is also a rather creepy character study centered more on Angel than on Salvador. We need Salvador as our surrogate, our (semi-)sympathetic introduction into the story, but Angel is riveting and begins systematically stealing scenes and steering the narrative towards a cliff. He is pathetic and infuriating but also capable and exciting. Yup... he's an asshole, and one of the best in cinema, in part because he is as expert at lying to himself as to others, in part because actor Carlos Valencia brings him to life body and soul and in part because director Sebastián Cordero is generous enough to let him hijack the film.

Expect to hear more from Cordero as his recent U.S. debut, Europa Report, a hard SF thriller which makes cool use of split-screen, has helped him establish a much bigger profile.

Major Directors:

Sebastián Cordero

The Movie Game 3.0: Categories!

Though my main focus right now is the Film Atlas project, during the last week or so I've also been working on a major update to the Movie Game. (Playable for free on the right-hand sidebar of this blog. If you are having trouble viewing it on a mobile device, try switching to desktop view.)

If you haven't played it yet, the rules are simple:

1. Click the "Draw Cards" button. Cards can be plots, sets, props, characters, etc.

2. Think of a movie that fits both.

It's that simple! Best if played with a group (but you can test your skill alone), taking turns and with no real point system.

Version 1.0 introduced the classical game, which is designed for everyone, even those who don't know actors or directors by name. If you've seen a few movies and have either a good memory or a bit of creativity, you'll do just find.

Version 2.0 added a bunch of options for advanced players who want cards to include specific actors and directors (like Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Connelly or Alfred Hitchcock) either individually, in batches or in themed sets. It also introduced difficulty settings so you can play at your own level.

Version 3.0 (RELEASED TODAY) introduces CATEGORIES! When you select a category the first card is always guaranteed to fall under this general topic. Categories include Genres, Time periods, Styles, Filmcraft, Villains, Transport, Love & Death, Nature, Wardrobe & Makeup, and many more. It's not a precise science, but you'll get the idea.

Some of the categories might sound a little odd, but experiment a little and you'll find lots of fun ways to create specially themed rounds. Some of my favorites include:

• Games - Each card in this category requires you to get another player to guess the movie you're thinking of (which still has to fit your other card), under specific rules, like playing charades, describing only the costumes, or by quoting dialog.
• Connected - When playing using this category, each movie will be connected in some way to the last movie used as an answer. For instance, the title might be required to start with the same letter or the film may have to share a cast member or a similar plot.
• Challenge - Challenge cards require you to think of a movie where you can remember something specific about it, like who did the music, what the poster looked like or who recommended it to you.

I've also upped the total number of cards in the main game to well over 900. Including the cast, crew and special sets there are now over 3000 cards in the movie game! The combinations are endless (well, not technically, but it's in the vicinity of 10 million).

Enjoy!