Where is the friends home?

*Kiarostami *79m *1987 *Iran *Khane-ye doust kodjast? *

Perhaps the most poignant of Kiarostami's films, it immediately reminds you of Ray's great Pather Panchali. This is a magical film about childhood and how large life looms when we are small, and the often well meaning insensitivity of grown-ups in failing to see the child's viewpoint.It is a spell binding and lyrical description of the life of hill folk in a secluded corner of Iran. It's the first film of the so called Koker trilogy. This very region was devastated by an earthquake in 1991 which became the subject of another magnificent movie, Life and Nothing More.

The film opens in a primary class-room and Mohammad is rather severely scolded for doing his homework on scraps of paper instead of a note-book--this is the third time he has been reprimanded for this mistake. The teacher warns him of expulsion the next time. Later it so comes about that Mohammad's notebook gets left behind with his equally timid friend Ahmad and we see him fretting and worrying for his friend, vainly trying to explain to his mother the gravity of the situation and the need to return the book to his friend who lives in a not so near neighbouring village. The harried mother, as she goes around the domestic chores of washing and cooking, is deaf to the complicated scenario which the child is trying to convey. In the process, we are treated to exquisite vignettes of domesticity--there is beauty and poetry and serenity in the slow rhythmical unfolding camerawork as it lingers over the details of the idyllic existence of these poor and good mountain folk in the lap of nature. (They have electricity.)

The six/seven year old Ahmad decides to take matters into his own hand and hiding his friends notebook beneath his cardigan, bolts out of the house and across hill and dale toward's the friends village some kilometers away. But he does not have the address and inquiries reveal that there are many others having the same name. There are storms and wild animals (dogs) and many a stranger, some helpful, more indifferent to the boy's quest.  It is a blend of humor and pathos. Memorable is an old timer's extended harangue on the benefits of corporeal punishment, and how his own father's unfailing regularity in thrashing him once every fortnight was responsible for making him the man that he is. "He gave me a penny once a week and a beating once a fortnight. Even if he forgot the penny, he never forgot to thrash me."  Old age is indeed a reversion. The film has one of the loveliest and most satisfying endings.

The story is told with flawless and meticulous realism from the child's viewpoint and we share the anguish and heartbreak of this artlessly profound tale of childhood which I can think only of Satyajit Ray's above mentioned film to place besides. It's a film with the lightness and delicacy of a feather. It is also a loving and intimate ode to the country of it's origin.

(P.S.: You don't need to see it twice to understand it.)

The Trial of Joan of Arc

*Bresson *1961 *62m *Florence Delay as Joan *

Perhaps it is a mistake to watch Bresson's characteristically muted version of the tale immediately after Dreyer's. Florence Delay's Joan seems like an attractive and intelligent university student (which in fact she was). The film is a record of the rapid fire cross examination. It is pointless to compare it with the other film since they are different objects which should be seen for what they are. In some sense, the two films are complementary. (Bresson, incidentaly, is said to have "detested" the Dreyer film for it's "grotesque buffooneries".) Bresson's film has the power of less of everything--sound, score, expression. It's far from the write-off some people try to make of it.

The film is closely based on the transcripts. As the movie states, history has left an authentic portrait of the maid in the form of the trial records and witness statements of the burning.. It is for us to decipher. The film opens with a powerful portrayal of Joan's rehabilitation twenty five years after her execution, as her mother, draped in black, is led in to proclaim her daughter's innocence. We see only the black folds of a dress move diagonally towards the top left corner of the screen to the peeling of bells. Perhaps it is this triumphant and joyful note which distinguishes this film from Dreyer's essentially tragic viewpoint. What the two director's do share is a feeling for the sacred.

Bresson's  Joan is a clear-headed, intelligent and articulate young woman for whom the voices of divine instruction and counsel are a matter of fact. She is a match for her interrogators and her repartee is without pause for reflection, never varying from the monotone which is Bresson's trademark.

The film has the austere beauty by which he is recognized (comparable to the serene objectivity of pure mathematics) and gives a starkly realistic picture of the historic events, under-embellished (we the audience must fill in the blanks) and truthful. It whets my appetite to know more about this  personage who's life-experience plumbs unknown and unexplored depths of human experience.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

*Carl Th Dreyer* 1928 *Silent* Denmark* 82m*

I was slightly wary of taking on a silent film, howsoever acclaimed. A musical score by Einhorn (later appended) is available in the DVD as an option. The score is deservedly praised for being a great piece of music, but I find it distracting, since the movie was conceived as silent cinema and has more than enough power to sustain itself on it's silent feet. It is a movie on which the word mesmeric is not too much of an exaggeration. It reveals what is possible within the limits of silent cinema. In fact, silence becomes an asset in a theme so elevated, since no amount of acting can easily scale this stratum of life, a whisker away from the primeval mystery of life and death. ( Einhorn's choral composition is a worthy companion piece but redundant and intrusive as a score.)  Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ , on a similar theme, is also after all virtually silent. Dreyer's film peers far deeper into the soul than Gibson, for the focus of the camera is unsparingly on the face and expressions of Joan and the inquisitors. Dreyer, unlike Gibson, is much more interested in what is going on within Joan's heart than outside. Dreyer's Joan is an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation. Pauline Kael called Renee Maria Falconetti's portrayal of Joan the greatest cinematic performance. Indeed, we see the courageous young girl locked in a battle of faith, a monumental inner struggle between her "voices" and the grimacing faces of her tormentors, as she hurtles to her doom at least in the usual sense of the word. The struggle is all too human a one and between the director and the actress, an extraordinary dramatic portrayal has been achieved.

The film focuses on the trial of the nineteen year old girl just before she was burnt at the stake on charges of heresy. Joan of Arc was a fifteenth century peasant girl who reportedly after the age of twelve had a series of divine visitations exhorting her to lead the French to victory against the English occupation forces. Subsequently she did lead the French forces in a series of inspired victories. Finally she fell into the hands of elements favorable towards the English and found guilty in an orchestrated ecclestiastical trial. The transcripts of the trial are preserved in a remarkable document and the film bases itself on these. Joan was later declared a saint and her life acquired a legendary status, becoming an icon of French culture and nationalism. It is an achievement of this great film,  to have captured this great drama, resembling those of Socrates and Jesus, in human terms.

The film spans a short period and the action takes place mostly in a makeshift court room. The film is in close up and we see the tears forming or rolling, beads of perspiration erupting, a fly settling on her eye, which she removes. The judges are now leering, now glaring or gesticulating threatningly with a finger. We are taken through a roller coaster of inner turmoil, as Joan reacts: in turn courageous, humiliated,  scared. The acute angles of the walls thrust alarmingly inward and the dwarfish figures of the armed guards totter around in an inebriated medieval pantomime. The key element is the mysterious inner resource on which she draws and which has propelled this young girl through a series of military campaigns as an inspired leader

A soldier venturing into battle sees death as a distinct possibility but there is usually a good chance of not being harmed. He in no sense is choosing to die, though he is risking it, as we all do to a lesser degree when crossing a street. MLK also chose a path knowing the possibility of the ultimate cost but possibility is qualitatively different from certainty. If death be thought of lying at the summit of a staircase, in the case of Joan's case the trial may be thought of as a slow ascent, with a harrowing choice to be made at each step. She does falter and look back, as when she signs a "confession", but finally whatever call she hearkens to has the day. She doesn't want to die. She just wants to finish the job she has to do and then return to normal life and wear ordinary clothes. But fate won't have it so. There is nothing of perverted bigotry in her. She is just fortunate enough to have inside her something which is beyond ambiguity, the level of absolute certainty which is the great inner resource.

"Joan of Arc is so uplifted from the ordinary mass of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years."...Winston Churchill

"Had she not been as ordinarily human as she was, she would have been intolerable."...Shaw
Dreyer's comments
Roger Ebert's review

Crimson Gold

*Jafar Panahi*95m*2003*Iran*

Yet another engrossing film from the thriving Iranian vineyards. I wonder why it's banned in Iran--is it because it shows people being arrested for dancing or because it shows that crime exists in Iran? In any case, as a bonus, it provides a view of life in Iran in an urban setting. The events shown could have happened anywhere, so religion and geography are only skin deep in impact.

The film opens with a failed robbery and a homicide followed by a suicide. Hussein is a slow, heavy, depressed pizza delivery man, on psychiatric prescription drugs, due to marry soon. He experiences repeated humiliation due to his lowly social status, finding himself trapped in a prison of servitude and want. The best part of the movie consists of his series of incursions into an expensive jewelry shop. The first time he is not even allowed inside. The second time he comes more appropriately dressed but the inside of his pocket and his status are all too transparent, and the rebuff is so painful that he comes out, stunned and dizzy.

Perhaps interesting as an account of just one more of the myriad prisons of the mind we construct for our own confinement. Like a rat in a trap, Hussein makes a clumsy attempt to escape, before his life snuffs out.

The film itself shows the maturity of the art in Iran. It discharges smoothly, never loosing a grip on reality, or lapsing into caricaturisation. These are living, breathing people. It has little of the third world in it, and if anything, proves that Iranian cinema has already come a long way in discovering it's identity and voice.
Review by Howard Schumann

Au Hasard Balthazar

*Bresson*95m*1960*France*

This is the  biography of a beleaguered donkey named Balthazar, which at many times seems an autobiography, since the film-maker projects so poignantly the animal's viewpoint. We also witness the coming of age of Marie, the daughter of a teacher, running parallel to the bumpy ride which is the donkey's karma. The line which divides man from beast after all is not so sharp. The girl's sufferings do not seem to be all that different, since she too is  helplessly swept downstream by the overpowering current of events, repeatedly abused and rejected.

It is also a movie about the ugly side of human nature, man's capacity for violence, on a scale animal's are incapable of, and for which his very intelligence becomes a potent instrument. This aspect our our nature is visible when we see by turns the drunkard Arnold, the villain Gerard and a mill owner belaboring the donkey. The encounter with animals brings out the worst part us, more particularly when no body is watching. It is the same streak which is manifest in our relationship to each other and to the environment, which religions of the past have in vain tried to civilize. What sight can be more revolting than of a person uncontrollably thrashing a donkey or tying a burning newspaper to his tail, which, in another situation, all too easily becomes another human being--a slave, an employee, a woman, a foreigner or the "enemy"?

One of the most interesting sequences is where Balthazar is taken to a zoo and encounters a tiger, a monkey and a pair of polar bears, all in cages. It is as though they all communicate through the bond of shared suffering, or at least recognition and acceptance, which demolishes momentarily the divide of species. The monkeys squeal is an expression of  primeval life force. The tiger seems benign and contemplative.

The closing sequence when Balthazar dies due to a stray bullet is one of transcendent beauty.  He is surrounded by a flock of sheep as he kneels before collapsing, almost like adoring magi, silent in tears and compassion,  in a gentle requiem. It is as if he encounters his kindred at last. It is a sublime moment in cinema, biblical in tone, beautifully framed by the Schubert melody( linked below).

Bresson is sometimes described as a spiritual film maker. Be that as it may, he is a humane and compassionate one, empathic with suffering.
Bresson website
Schubert 959