Guilt and Punishment (Battle in Heaven)

The range of human emotions is such that it is difficult at times to portray them convincingly. If an actor is serious about his or her craft, it behooves them to try to avoid falling into formulas that seem all too commonplace or automatic, and that carry with them more than a hint of artifice. This is the problem that I see with much of the emotional states that are portrayed on telenovelas, in which the characters find themselves in a series of stock situations which call for reactions that are highly stylized and, because they are repeated over and over in a repertoire that is never renewed, have become trite and meaningless. We have, after all, well-paid actors who look beautiful but who fail to convey the emotional complexity of life.

In Carlos Reygadas's films, we see an attempt to break away from convention and instead strive for a more authentic mode of representation. We see characters who frequently are unable to fully express their emotions and, instead, greet us with blank faces that attest to moments of despair and suffering. This is the case with the film "Battle in Heaven", the last of the trio of Reygadas films that I have recently seen.

The film is situated in the capital of Mexico, that ennervating universe of desires and conflicts and bottled energy that encapsulates the soul of an entire nation. Having never been to that city, it exerts a strange attraction as well as repulsion for me. It does, indeed, present a squalid yet modern, cosmopolitan yet cut-throat, intimate and yet alienating face that seems to adhere as well to any major metropolitan area, but in this case is accentuated by the fact that it is perceived as the ideological center of a wounded culture.

Tenochtitlan has not recovered from the historical traumas of the past, and as such, in my conception, it is permeated with an at times suffocating historical air that carries with it a strong emotional connection. If the conception of the city is that of a space where people can reconfigure themselves to assume new identities and seek a new destiny, such as we imagine is the impulse behind so many relocations from the countryside to the city, then this instance is different. Mexico City is not quite New York, and instead it seems as if the voyage carries with it a different ideological significance, that of a return to the heartland and to the essence of being, one that is not to be found in the provinces that are so far away.

This conception underlies the movie, and is heralded by the ceremony of the lifting of the flag that takes place in the symbolic heart of the city, the Plaza de Tlaltelolco, the area that was once the capital of the Aztec empire. The protagonist, Miguel, is a member of the guard that is tasked with the ceremony, and this can't help but evoke a sense of the suffering and roiling chaos that accompanies this particular city, with its own particular history that involves conquest and a desperate struggle for survival. It will also involve a quest for redemption.

Miguel is a man who is suffering, and this suffering is expressed in a form that is typical in Reygadas's movies, in a shell-shocked expression that precisely avoids the hystrionics of telenovelas. While melodrama is predicated on given patent expression to that which is hidden, on revealing what Peter Brooks called the "moral occult", here we have characters who instead seem unable to find an outlet for the expression of their internal states, and instead struggle to find a medium for expression. We have the protagonist in the movie "Japon", who limps his way to a barren canyon community in a desperate journey which is supposed to end in suicide, and we have the Mennonite farmer Juan in "Stille Licht" who sits passively at home, unable to bear making the break that will involve rupturing his family. These characters seem awkward and hesitant while they ponder the consequences of their decisions, and that lends to these films a languid air that is filled by tortuous pauses and stationary intervals in which the characters spend many minutes gazing at the world, haunting so to speak their circumstances and their particular personas who find themselves so bereft.

In this instance, Miguel is haunted by guilt. As the movie proceeds, we find out that he and his wife have committed a crime, having kidnapped the child of a friend with the intention of demanding a ransom, only to have the child (a baby, in reality) die while in their custody. These characters, as is the case with so many other characters in Reygadas's films, carry an uneasy secret, and Miguel in particular seems unable to fully recover from this event.

It is an unfortunate reality that life in many major Latin American cities is plagued with many dangers, and kidnapping has becoming an activity that has become endemic to the region. It is justified in so many ways that recall, at times, an attempt to assert a form of political autonomy by disappropriating outsiders of their economic assets, but it is also a crime that hits closer to home, and in this instance, assumes the contours of a betrayal. Their neighbor is a poor woman such as themselves, a widow after all, and one is left to speculate if her husband might not have been a member of the security forces who might have lost his life while carrying out his duties, thus generating a settlement that was coveted by Miguel and his wife. It is a morally reprehensible act, and the two culprits seem to recognize and lament what has happened, although the man is unable to resolve it as easily as his accomplice.

What complicates the matter is that Miguel is a driver/employee for Ana, a cosmopolitan, European-looking woman who is the subject of his obsession. He yearns to achieve a degree of intimacy with her that will somehow resolve his conflict, and this yearning can't help but assume another symbolic meaning by virtue of the racial and ethnic differences between them. He is a stocky middle-aged mestizo who is not handsome, and she is a beatiful, young and wealthy woman who seems not to carry any of the emotional burden that accrues to the underclass, and instead lives a life of idle excitement. She works, after all, as a boutique prostitute, not out of necessity but out of a need for cheap thrills.

She is the antithesis of the Virgen de Guadalupe, a licentious, white, young and seemingly vacuous woman who obsesses him with the vision of a person who has feels no guilt and as such, would seem to be impervious to pain. And it is as a consequence of this perception that we can imagine that his attraction devolves into a form of resentment and hatred that will lead him to commit an act of violence against her, one that will do little to lift the burden under which he is struggling. Sex does not necessarily convey intimacy, and the numerous sex acts that are portrayed in graphic detail in this film, both with Ana as well as with his wife, seem to accentuate his isolation and to indicate the degree to which he has walled himself off.

In the end, after deciding to turn himself in, he commits another act of violence that catalyzes a true process of repentance. With all the subterfuges that are available to humanity, he is unable to hide his fear and guilt, and in this way breaks through to attain a degree of authenticity that would seem to have eluded him before. He is a murderer, in the first instance by accident and in the second by intention, and he now becomes a penitent, ironically following the advice of his wife who had asked him to join a procession earlier to help ease his guilt. But his repentence is not to be an uplifting experience, and with any repentence there must needs be an act of punishment that will help to lift the burden. And such is the case in this film.

The film is filled with many awkward moments and with long and languid takes that exert at times a hypnotic effect, but at others seem almost amateurish. There is little of the sustained break-neck pace of other films such as one finds in the classic from earlier this decade, "Amores perros". Reygadas instead opts for silences and intervals of passivity, and we have many instances in which the characters look at each other without saying anything, as was the case with his other films. This technique of silences and absence suggests a vacuum that seems to point out the way in which the modern sensibility has become isolated from his or her surroundings, as if silence were tantamount to a barrier that everyone carries around with them. It is suggestive, but it also seem a little pretentious at times precisely because it mutes the cacophony of modern life, a cacophony that is pervasive and jarring and disturbing but also, at times, vibrant with the promise of life.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011

Battles on All Fronts (Red Angel)

Earlier today I saw the 1966 Japanese film "Red Angel". It was directed by Yasuzo Matsumura, a New Wave director whose film "Blind Beast" I had seen a few years ago. This film, shot in black and white, narrates the experiences of a Japanese nurse during the campaigns in China in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a period in which the war became a desperate and losing venture. It is a chronicle of self-discovery, guilt and compassion for the way in which the main characters can lose and then recover their humanity.

The nurse is a young woman in her twenties by the name of Sakura Nishi. She is very innocent, and has been inserted into a desperate situation, in which she sees first hand the suffering of men who have no real commitment to the war or the ideologies that justified it, but are trying merely to survive and hold on to a remnant of their humanity. It is affirmed, once again, the war is a brutal, degrading and dehumanizing experience, and the scenes in which the surgeon (Dr. Okaba) is forced to amputate one and another limb as he struggles with the tremendous overload of patients would horrify anyone. He has become an automaton, and yet, he displays a fragile humanity that will end up seducing the nurse.

There are various battles that are being waged at the same time. The Japanese are battling the Chinese, but the characters struggle with themselves as well as with other. In the final sequence, in which a group of barricades soldiers struggle to survive an attack of enemy soldiers after having been decimated by an outbreak of cholera, reveals a desperate situation that is stark in its contours. Indeed, throughout the film, the ideals as well as the ideology of war are systematically deconstructed and refuted by the spectacle of suffering that overwhelms the protagonists. War is hardly a rational enterprise, nor can a doctor nor a nurse continue to function as professionals in an environment in which they are forced to decide who will live and die. And yet, this situation brings them together, and nurse Nishi will gradually seduce the doctor as the two characters struggle to consummate a moment of intimacy and warmth.

It is at times a very dark and brutal film, with difficult scenes that reveal as much the gore and the anguish of characters who have been wounded, as well as the emotional angst and the desperation of others who seek to find a source of inner peace. What are precious moments of peace and tranquility are overwhelmed by the circumstances, and they become that much more unsettling but also, ironically, inspiring.

I look forward to viewing more of Matsumura's films. He has a considerable filmography, but unfortunately few of his films have been translated. I am hoping this will change gradually in the next few years.



Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011

Complicit Memories: Waltz with Bashir

Earlier today I had a chance to see the 2008 Israeli film "Walt with Bashir", detailing the way in which a former soldier reconstructs him memory. It is an animated film that investigates a compelling subject, and it framed around a series of interviews with friends as well as public figures as they try to reconstruct the experiences of the main character, who is evidently trying to deal with a sense of guilt that has been repressed. It has a meditative quality that is heightened all the more by the interspersing of action sequences in what turned out to be a brutal campaign, that of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the early 80s.

The main protagonist is an artist who is jolted by the nightmares that are shared with him by a friend. He is made to reflect on the fact that he seems to have lost his memory, and this awakens a form of obsession that leads to undertake a journey. What is fascinating is that this is a deeply personal journey, and the languid motion of the animation contributes to this sense. The characters seem to be at times very static, as this is furthermore highlighted by lyrical scenes of detachment and what one character, a psychologist, would term "dissociative syndrome". This is the experience whereby a character separates himself from his surroundings and views his experiences as though through a distant lens, becoming in a sense a spectator.

These scenes of detachment are frequently very beautiful. There are scenes on a beach in front of deteriorated high rise buildings, where the night is lit up by the slow fall of flares that light up the characters who emerge from the water. There is also a fantasy sequence in which one of the soldiers has lost consciousness on the boat that is conveying him and other soldiers to Lebanon, and dreams of a giant, beautiful woman from the sea who takes him with her for a swim on the ocean, escaping what is certainly perceived as a situation of extreme danger. The sea is a symbol, as asserted by another friend, for feeling and emotion, but this is an association that is never fully explained. In particular, if is indeed noteworthy how the characters become passive as they are overwhelmed or, better yet, enveloped by this all-encompassing medium. They are seperated, and what seems to be happening is that they use it as a form of escape, as a means to bury that which is indeed most troubling.

And there are many troubling elements to this experience. They are encountering a country that has been devastated, one that is in the grips of a civil war, in which the Christian Falangist leader, Bashir Gemayel, will be shortly assassinated. What might have begun as a mission to safeguard this transition and furthermore secure the border becomes instead a long, lengthy and wearying campaign in which they will meet with determined resistance. They will be subject to continual ambush as sniper fire and RPGs are aimed at them repeatedly, sapping them of their strength and the vitality of their emotional resources when it doesn't kill them outright. And this leads to a sense of futility, to a sense of a fate that is not to be avoided, and to feelings of dread and guilt over the mayhem that is in evidence, where they are so overwhelmed by fear that innocents die by the scores.

If the absence of memory can be equated with a form of death, then this is something that is suffered by many of the soldiers as well. They become transformed by this experience, and they fall into a state of automatism, in which they carry out acts that will later have tragic consequences. The main act which is being investigated here, of course, are the massacres of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon by the Christian Falagist soldiers, an act to which it is asserted the Israeli forces were complicit.

It is ironic the parallels become this episode and other infamous episodes such as that of the Warsaw ghetto. It is precisely as if the descendents of the first became strangely inured and insensitive to the similarities which are, of course, quite compelling. There has been a loss of memory, and in this case, this reveals the way in which memory is malleable and fragile, stretching to serve other needs. Is is a subject that has become an obsession for myself as well, as I am forced to speculate on how memories change, and how they fail to truly preserve an accurate account of past experiences, much less invest them with meaning. This can be a very uneasy discovery, for it means that consciousness is never as stable an experience as we might have assumed, and it is also fraught with perils. The thread of continuity is a fictitious one, in which it is impossible to follow the true trail of crumbs, given that these crumbs don't precisely lead to noteworthy landscapes (the house of Hansel and Gretel) but also to the avoidance of other landmarks.

If we use memory to protect ourselves, it is an uneasy medium, like the ocean, that can also envelop us and submerge entire experiences until they are dredged up at the most innocuous moments, by seemingly random cues. It is a complex web, is it a subterranean matrix of ever-shifting tectonic plates, is it a web of associations that is ever being spinned in accordance with our own emotional needs. It is indeed a work of fiction, one that must needs be recollected and which assumes different contours at different moments of our lives. Memory is, indeed, another non-linear dimension that is takes the contours of another form of space-time.

In this case, the trail of memories leads to a shattering examination of the circumstances surrounding the massacres. It is indeed a tragic experience, in which the characters dissociated themselves as they refused to confront the need for immediate action to stop the mass killing of innocents, in which so many civilians were rounded up and systematically murdered. The chief characters seem to offer explanations for why they failed to act, and this is indeed an impulse that was shared by others who have been witness to tragic episodes, such as the German civilians who surely knew what was taking place as the Jewish community was being persecuted, or as, in more recent episodes in the tragic string of genocides and massacres, other communities were targeted. (I mention this because of the recent capture of the Serbian general Ratko Mladic, who is accused of having masterminded the mass killing of Bosnians during the 1990s.)

The film ends with actual footage of the Palestinian refugees as they are allowed to reenter their camp, after the massacre has come to an end. There are senseless scenes of people lying in bloody piles in destroyed houses, including as well many women and children. There can be no release from the guilt of this episode. Memory or, in this case, the lack of memory (amnesia) has acted as a complicit agent, and this film is an effort to combat this amnesia and restore a sense of true cohesion. The characters have finally stopped drifting.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011

Graduation as the beginning of a lifelong exile

As I write this, during that emotional period known as graduation season, I am reminded of a quote by the writer Moritz Thompsen, one that he used as the title of one of his books of reflections. It was titled "Traveling is the saddest pleasure", and it captured the contradictions of an experience that is embued with many strands of conflicting emotions. If I may try to modify this idea, I would apply it as well to the experience of graduation, and the journey upon which we embark after this ritual of passage. With years of retrospection, I am able to look back and reflect that is can hardly be termed a solely celebratory event. It signifies a moment of transition but also, for many of us, a moment in which we will leave behind the essence of our lives to embark upon a period of exploration. In the end, it is a process that may leave us with a deep feeling of nostalgia and loss.

Yesterday I went to a scholarship event that I have been attending for several years. It is held in the heart of Los Angeles, at a community organization that provides arts facilities for the surrounding community. It was, as always, an immensely enjoyable event.

Attendance initially seemed lower than expected. Last year it was very crowded, but yesterday, perhaps because of the pervasive gloom or because of a myriad of other commitments, attendance was lower. The organizers put up a canopy directly in my line of sight, but I somehow managed to find a spot from which to appreciate the entertainment.

Seeing the scholarship awardees accept their certificates brought back many memories for me. I remember what it was to be seventeen years old and about to embark upon university experience. It is with a sense of great expectation that we embrace this moment, but there is also an element of sadness as well as anxiety. We realize even then how much we have changed, especially for those of us who come from working-class, immigrant backgrounds. While we might not have necessarily fit in well in our communities, they were the only ones we knew. Could we have anticipated how our university experience was to heighten our loneliness, and how this initial seperation, however much we may insist that we will remember our families, already signifies an escape from which we won't be able to return?

The kids seemed genuinely humble, and it is uplifting to see them acknowledge all the support they have received. We are all filled with expectation, and we see these young minds as they take their first steps. It is a culmination, but it will also signify a turning point. In my case, it signified the inability to ever really feel comfortable once again with my family and with the community I left behind.

Here are a few photos I took of the event.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011

Redemption aboard "La Bestia"

The "beast" to which I am referring in the title is the name that is colloquially given to the train that runs from the south of Mexico to the border with the United States, and it encapsulates an awareness of the threats and dangers that are encountered by hundreds of thousands of immigrants as they venture from Central America to the land of eternal hopes and dreams, the United States.

This train, and the way it and the sage of immigration as well as the outcast and marginal groups that arise to accompany this process, is in evidence in the 2009 film "Sin Nombre". I had a chance to see this film yesterday, and it was an absorbing but also a very frightening film.

It details the saga of a gang member by the name of Caspar who live in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. His gang is the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, a gang that has seen explosive growth in the last two decades and has cast a long shadow throughout the region.

I first heard about this gang in the late 1980s when I was coversing with a Salvadoran immigrant in my former place of employ. He was a cleaner and I was an engineer, and he quite amiably told me about his experiences as a recent immigrant. The Maras were known even back then as a particularly violent group, having been formed by Central American youths in response to the gang culture they encountered as practiced by Mexican-American gangs. It was supposedly a protective organization, but it quickly moved to criminal enterprises, and it was seeped with a sense of radical rebellion against the outsider status of all relative newcomers.

This gang established a foothold in the McArthur Park area of downtown Los Angeles, within walking distance of the famous landmarks and skyscrapers of the area, and it was to quickly spread throughout the region, as well as establishing footholds in other American cities. With the deportation of criminal gang members, it was also to flourish in Central America, and it has seized on the smuggling of immigrants as a lucrative side business.

In this film, we are introduced to Caspar, a young man who seems somewhat bitter and who appropriately bears a tattoo of a tear under one eye. He manages to convince a young boy of about twelve years old to join the gang, and helps to initiate him. The boy is an innocent character who seems to be looking for a nurturing figure, and it is apparent that he is seduced by the idea of companionship. He quickly receives the nickname of "Smiley", and he looks up to Caspar as a mentor, even helping him as they murder a captive member of another gang.

The crux of the conflict lies in what is an inevitable process, which is that wherein the bond between the two will be dissolved by the corrosive culture of the gang. This culture, while seeming to offer the possibility of cohesion and companionship for all outcast members of this society, is also one that is characterized by brutal authoritarianism, and the leader, a man bearing frightening tattoos throughout his body as is the case with many members of this gang, is a particularly vicious thug. The companionship is rooted in a culture of war, in the desperate struggle for survival, and in such a culture there is little room for empathy with others. It is a culture that degrades its members, and this will be the case with Smiley, the boy who has joined.

The impetus for break will reside in the murder of Caspar's girlfriend by leader of the gang. It will prompt Caspar to rebel, and in the midst of a typical episode of robbery of the migrants as they travel on "La bestia", he will have a change of heart. He will murder this leader in retaliation, and from then on his journey will take the contours of a form of spiritual regeneration, while at the same time recognizing that he will be subject to reprisal. He is, in effect, a "dead man walking".

It is supremely affecting to see the struggles of this stream of migrants. They wait hopefully on the tracks, and they suffer immensely, being exposed to the elements, suffering from hunger and thirst, and frequently falling victim to accidents while riding on the train. Dismemberment and death are common for these immigrants, and in addition many of them are caught and deported, as well as being robbed, both by the authorities as well as by common criminals such as the members of the Maras. They are part of a human exodus that is supremely vulnerable, and their struggles and their dignity are much in evidence. People yearn for better opportunities, and the societies as well as the systems that produce these streams of human dreamers can't help but be indicted. As the uncle says to his niece, Zoraya (or Zayda), there is nothing for her in her hometown.

What ensues is a pursuit where the migrants try to reach the border while Caspar tries to avoid his fate. He is being pursued by the Maras, and it is a virtual certainty that he will be caught, and yet, he undertakes to help Zayda and her family as he continues to ride on this train. Little does he know that Smiley has sworn to kill him as well, in order to ingratiate himself with the gang, and we know that there will be a fateful encounter between the two before the film is over, in which we will reflect on how human bonds are so easily forged as well as, achingly, broken.

In the end, Zayda reaches her destination, and Caspar fulfills his destiny as well. We can't help but view this as a journey of redemption, with the promise of a new beginning at the end, as Zayda begins her new life in the United States. We are also left to reflect on the millions of stories brought by so many migrants, and of how this process of migration is tantamount to an ordeal of self-regeneration. From such suffering we are imprinted with the memory of pain, despair, but also of hope that continues to motive all the disempowered peoples of the worlds, those who are seeking a new chance at redemption.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011

Film Noir Redux

Yesterday I had a chance to see Christopher Nolan's film from 1998, "Following". It is a film noir exercise where the audience is placed in the role of the detective, trying to understand the twists and turns of this film. As a puzzle it is meant to be engaging, but somehow, it give one the sense of a movie that is simply an exercise in problem solving and not a truly engaging film with a deeper plot.

Perhaps it would be possible to highlight the characters, in particular, the lonely loser who goes around randomly following others in a desire to breach the gap between himself and the rest of humanity. Or, we could focus on the debonair thief who looks like a stock broker but who in reality dedicates himself to breaking and entering into apartments to steal and, as a side venture, wreck havoc by selectively implanting or removing items. (Yes, we all have a private box that we consider the repository of our most meaningful items, and that we perversely hide while wishing to reveal it to others, but this conceit does not sustain a film.)

The female femme fatale character is one who is supposed to reveal a dual nature, dangerous but also vulnerable. This seems to be a stock character but, somehow, this femme fatale doesn't have the looks nor the persona to fill this role. It may be just my personal preference, but a frumpy blonde with a British accent is not exotic and, if anything, is even more conventional and off-putting than that of a New Jersey housewife. There are no sexual sparks in this film, no dynamism, and the obsession of one of the characters for this woman never rings true.

There are twists and turns and we see an evolving relationship between the two thieves, but things are never as they appear. There are certain non-linear elements to this film, a trademark for Nolan, who will anticipate and insert future scenes at various moments, offering tantalizing glimpses into the future. We can anticipate, for example, that the two improbable friends will have a falling out, and at the same time we can see that the woman will move from supposed victim to a more threatening character. But I can't escape the feeling that the characters are lacking in depth and that, instead, they are just chest pieces being moved around to further the aims of a plot that will be revealed to have a more conventional denoument, an instance in this case of unveiling as it is revealed that the innocent thief has been maneouvered into a cage from which he can't escape. It was all an elaborate set-up.

It didn't convince me. Was this all a frame-up to get the innocent voyeur/stalker to take the blame for a murder that was to be committed? It seems all to convenient, and it is difficult to believe that in real life all the actions can be orchestrated so smoothly. There is much more disorder, much more chance in real life, and this is part of the reason why, when I became an adult, I became disenchanted with Sherlock Holmes as a sleuth (but not as a character). One may rely on deduction and on the correct interpretation of clues, but deduction is not infallible, and it always seemed to me that sleuths of this type who relied on the correct interpretation of physical clues were on flimsy ground. The best clues are provided by human motives, and it is a truism that our motives can be sordid, greedy, predatory but also, occasionally, uplifting. There are characters that persist, roles that persist and that form part of our biological substrate. We all crave comfort and familiarity and security.

Ultimately, we may be predictable, but we aren't that predictable. Jungian archetypes may form part of the stock characters who populate our conscious (and unconscious) beings, but in this case, while there are certainly deceptive and predatory individuals, no thief nor psychologist nor sociopath is as masterful as the one portrayed in this film. It seems too elaborate, too smooth and, ultimately, too convenient. It would involve imposing certainty on a chaotic system, for while human motives run along familiar channels, they are still subject to the intervention and influence of dynamic systems. That is part of the nature of life in our modern-day societies.

We are perhaps too fascinated as a culture by individuals who seem to be amoral, and seem to have a surfeit of deviousness and intellect that are applied to the service of inscrutable motives. That is part of the appeal of these characters, the source of delicious anxiety as we reflect on the villain who is smarter than the rest of us, the financier who manipulates Wall Street, the politician who successfully coopts a cause and furthers his or her aims, the serial killer who taunts the police in the course of his or hers (usually his) predations. These characters work to achieve their hidden aims by manipulating others seamlessly and undetectibly. They have a charisma and charm that seduces others, but this is also something that can be fatal precisely because it is deceptive and because it is always uncovered. There is a weakness, a vulnerability, an Achilles heel or a fatal flaw that, by continuing my reference to Greek concepts, will reveal itself and lead to an instance of recognition that will doom the character. (At least we would like to think so, although I am reasonably certain that many of these manipulators are able to get away with their acts because nine tenths of them are never caught. However, this matters not for the aims of catharthis, where is is enough that one case be presented in a public fashion to show how tragedy but also the necessity of social sanction are demonstrated and fulfilled.) Perhaps that is the meaning of the motif that is investigated in this film, that of the hidden box that reveals one's true character.

However, this film ultimately seems like an empty, mechanical exercise. It is possible to have a wonderful, memorable film with great characters and little plot, but not the reverse. We have plot, we have shifts, but I care not a whit for the characters who don't convince me at all. Perhaps this film was the necessary prelude to Nolan's other films, for the haunting characters one finds in "Memento" and, especially, in his "Batman" films. In this case, the contents of the box proved to be inconsequential because it is the box that usurps the heart of this film.

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011

Unease

It has been another pair of uneasy days for me. I feel my depression threatening to overwhelm me once again, as if I were in deep waters and an incessent number of waves were threatening to submerge me. It is difficult to think clearly in these circumstances, although I try to go through the motions.

Although my mood is in no way connected to this film, I thought I would mention that I recently saw "Village of Dreams", a Japanese film that was released a few years ago. It details the upbringing of a set of twin boys who were growing up in a rural region of Japan in the immediate post-war period. It is an idyllic evocation of life and early experiences, with Seizo and his brother who are entirely irripresible and open to life in its stunning novelty.

They boys fish repeatedly, they pull pranks, they are impulsive and mischievous and innocent the way we imagine all children are. It is true that they were not easily accepted in this small village, but they had an upbringing that, as one of the brothers confesses in an audio overlay at the beginning, constitutes the core of their spiritual being. It is their center.

What I also found touching was their experiences with another outcast, a poor boy who joins them in the middle of the school year and who is subject to the anger and repudiation of the teacher as well as the entire community of adults. He is a big boy, resourceful, and it becomes apparent that he is homeless and has to fend for himself.

He, the homeless boy, tries to cultivate the twins as friends, and even wrangles an invitation for himself to their home, but he is refused and turned back. He also bears the brunt of the teacher's rage for a prank pulled by the twins at school, and is beaten mercilessly.

The boy leaves shortly afterward, and we are left to wonder about his destiny. It is obviously an episode that impressed the boys deeply. As it was, they already had an artistic temperament, and would grow up to be illustrators of children's books. They have lives that are creatively fulfilling, and they enjoy a close relationship.

I would hope as well to someday reach the sense of peace that they have attained. I'm not sure what my spiritual center is, however. My childhood was not as happy as theirs. Perhaps I would have been more akin to the child who was ostracized and expelled in this movie.

This movie, nonetheless, is a reverie of an idealized time. I think we will never be able to view our past without sentimentality. We are constantly recreating it and the sense of conclusion constributes, as times, to an impulse to fictionalize.

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2011
Copyrights ORomero 2011