TROPIC OF CANCER (Eugenio Polgovsky, 2004)

A brilliant documentary from Mexico, Tropic of Cancer is essential viewing. A stark examination of impoverished life in post-NAFTA Mexico turns into a powerful consideration of how hard some people must work just to survive. This is the third piece by Eugenio Polgovsky, a kid in his twenties who wrote, directed, digitally videographed, and edited. Polgovsky, who was born in Mexico City, is the future of cinema.

From the sign of the zodiac with which its celestial projection intersects, the tropic of Cancer is defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as follows: “the parallel of latitude that is approximately 23½ degrees north of the equator and that is the northernmost latitude reached by the overhead sun.” The unsigned program notes I was handed upon entering a showing of Polgovsky’s Tropic at the 2005 Portland International Film Festival says that the tropic of Cancer “touches Bhopal, India; the dammed Nile River; and Charco Cercado, a small village in the state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico,” which, “[b]ecause of its central location, bordering ten other states, . . . is called the heart of Mexico.” Although it is coolly, pitilessly observant and without sentimental affect, Tropic of Cancer, then, comes from the heart of Mexico.

In a sense, time has passed Charco Cercado by. The parched region—charco, which means puddle, must be a joke—may have once yielded silver and gold, but the mines have long since been exhausted. The desert is now a no-man’s-land of sand, cacti and wild animals. Villagers illegally trap animals, including canaries and other birds, and sell them at roadside to tourists, who stuff them deep into the trunks of their cars to escape customs detection. In a way, these affluent passers-through are also hunters, but they pay little, and the villagers have done all the work. Meanwhile, the adjacent road is furiously busy with commercial trucks: ironic counterpoint to the struggling black market, these legal sales that will eventually fill corporate pockets with inexhaustible silver and gold.

Tropic of Cancer shows the hunt, in particular, of snakes. The process of their capture and bagging is meticulously observed. At home, with the one family on which the film focuses, the wife of a trapper skins a snake—this is not a film for those quick to plead “sensitivity”—and dries the skin. Racks of the skins will be a seductive feature at the makeshift roadside bazaar at the end of the film.

Birds of all exotic stripes are captured and cooped in crowded cages. In one of the film’s wittiest passages, earsplittingly cacophonous ones are released into the desert. Who would buy such unpleasantly noisy creatures?

Children check countless traps—monotonous, necessary work. The young boy with whom the film opens does this. His father is one of the crew trapping snakes; his mother, the one we observe skinning the snake. At home (which is a hut, with the boy’s bedroom door opening to the outside), the boy, outdoors, shows his mother his prowess at hitting tin cans with his slingshot. At first, we take this as mere recreation—a boy at boy’s play. But, later, father and son go off together for an afternoon’s work, passing under a barb-wire fence in order to hunt rodents in the desert, and it’s the boy’s skill with his slingshot that takes down the day’s biggest catch. Would anyone buy such a rat, though? No; that’s not the purpose here. Cut to the big outdoor pot in which the mother is cooking and seasoning that night’s dinner: rat stew.

Tropic of Cancer is one of the great films about marginal lives supported by hard physical labor. It is also about danger. (In Mexico, incidentally, selling protected animals is punishable by up to nine years in prison and a $200,000 fine.) The closing long-shot, at roadside, is as suspenseful as anything in Hitchcock—and it needs to be, because it encapsulates the precariousness of these people’s lives, how their whole existence may depend on a sale. A car slows down so that the driver can check out the wares. As the woman seller approaches the driver, however, the car speeds up and drives off. And the trucks keep rolling by.

CRASH (Paul Haggis, 2005)

Written and directed by Paul Haggis, who authored the script for last year’s execrable Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), Crash has nothing to do with David Cronenberg’s same-titled 1996 film or with the J. G. Ballard book on which the Cronenberg film is based, one of the most brilliant English-language novels of the twentieth century. (Robert Moresco is credited with co-authoring the ingenious, shallow script with Haggis.) Then again, in a work ripe with stylistic and other kinds of borrowings, Haggis’s Crash (hereafter, Smash, out of respect for Cronenberg’s Crash) might be twanging a thematic chord from Ballard’s book. Its location is the ethnically diverse and mutually hostile City of Los Angeles in the present day, where, one of its characters tells us, people avoid touching one another, even in passing on a crowded street, and perhaps compensate, unconsciously, through car crashes. Metal and glass, shielding human skin, have become the new skin in this City of Voluminous Traffic. The Oscar-winning best picture ends (hilariously) with a roadway collision.

Smash makes no attempt to portray or characterize L.A. beyond matters of ethnic diversity, tension and commingling. Rather, it interweaves various lives so that different plot strands—and different races and ethnic groups, and classes—intersect. (If you will, collide.) Given that characters are shot at and shot to death, it is a film that is surprisingly lighthearted in tone. There are a few trenchant passages, but for the most part the film is light, amiable and extremely sentimental. Perhaps it is the unexpected snowfall in L.A. at Christmastime that reminded me of the New York-set Going My Way (Leo McCarey, 1944).

Actually, Smash more blatantly “borrows” from other works. Among these are Robert Altman’s interwoven tapestries (such as Nashville, 1975, and Shortcuts, 1993), Paul Thomas Anderson’s (such as Boogie Nights, 1997, and Magnolia, 1999) and, most especially, the late, lamented television series Boomtown, created by scenarist Graham Yost (Speed, 1994). As in episodes of the latter, the police narrative curves around in a crucial instance to repeat an incident whose human particulars become apparent and weigh in only in the second, much later occurrence. Since Smash largely deals with the L.A.P.D., L.A. criminals and an L.A. district attorney, the resemblance to Boomtown is unmistakable, and not to the advantage of the film. Smash is no Boomtown. (Smash doesn’t attempt Boomtown’s tack of presenting the same incident from the diverse viewpoints of different characters—the Rashomon-thing.)

It is a film far more fanciful than realistic. Examples of this fancifulness are profuse, but let me give one. One of the characters is a Mexican-American locksmith, a hardworking young man. Daniel and his wife have moved to a suburban neighborhood, in large measure to protect their very young daughter, who is still afraid of the gunshots in the street that she remembers from their old neighborhood. When Daniel discovers his child hiding underneath her bed at night, he imaginatively transfers from himself to her the invisible protective cloak he has been wearing, he tells her, since childhood. Now she is invincible! Daniel replaces a faulty lock in the front door of an Iranian-American’s shop. But for the safety he wants, the man really needs a new door, one that closes properly, and Daniel tells him this. The shopkeeper misunderstands Daniel, believing that what Daniel has told him means that Daniel hasn’t replaced the lock, which Daniel has done, and for which Daniel hands him the bill, which the shopkeeper refuses to pay. When the shop is broken into, vandalized and robbed, the shopkeeper wrongly assumes that Daniel is the culprit and tracks him down outside his home. When he pulls a gun on Daniel to kill him, Daniel’s daughter, watching in horror at a window, remembers that she is wearing the protective cloak and rushes out to protect her father. She is between the two men, clinging to her father, when the gun goes off. The shopkeeper’s daughter had mistakenly bought blanks for bullets, and no one is harmed—this, following a lot of slow-motion foolishness drawing out the agony of the child’s parents while they momentarily assume that their daughter has been killed. It isn’t the blanks I mind; who wouldn’t be happy that a child hasn’t been shot? The unrealistic part is this: the film has us infer and asks us to believe that Daniel, joyously relieved, will make no effort to bring the shopkeeper to justice for what was, after all, an act of attempted murder—an act that, had the bullets not been blanks (the fact of which the shopkeeper did not know), might have ended his daughter’s life or his own, or even possibly both their lives. I appreciate that this and other farfetched details contribute to the film’s social optimism; but do you see what I mean by “more fanciful than realistic”? Indeed, I take particular exception to the old loaded chestnut that minorities are expected to behave like saints—at least by lousy filmmakers.

Something else tears at the credibility of this film. Smash is schematic. Let me give an example of the schematic nature of the script. Ryan and Hanson are partnered police officers. Ryan is the veteran; Hanson, the rookie. Ryan is a decent sort; but because Affirmative Action (in his view) cost his father his job, his marriage and his self-respect, Officer Ryan acts like a racist—which means, as an urban cop, he is a racist. Well, his partner, a sensitive sort of guy, wants no part of that. Hanson asks to be and gets reassigned. As a farewell, Ryan warns Hanson that he, Hanson, doesn’t know himself as well as he thinks he does and time will reveal to him his true nature. One night, in civilian clothes, Hanson picks up a young black male hitchhiker and ends up shooting and killing the youth—all this, based on misjudging him and misinterpreting the boy’s words and movements. On the other hand, Ryan ends up heroically rescuing an African-American woman from a burning, overturned car—a citizen, I might add, whom he “finger fucked” in front of her husband, as part of a traffic stop “patting down” the night before in order to flaunt his contempt for blacks. (As the woman herself notes, there is no place in her form-clinging evening dress to hide a weapon.) She had been hysterical that Ryan should not touch her, even though she was pinned in her car, but she looks back at him, dazed and shook to her racist (or reverse-racist) soul, as the medics lead her away after Ryan has rescued her. The implication is that both her and Ryan’s lives are changed forever (a bit of a stretch, perhaps); but I object most to the rigged contrast between Ryan’s and Hanson’s natures and outcomes. Facile; pat; reductive.

That said, the rescue is heartpoundingly exciting and easily the best part of the film. Moreover, Ryan is the film’s most complex character. Matt Dillon, who has never given a bad performance as far as I know, is excellent as Ryan. The scenes in which he tends to his ailing father are wrenching. As an offset, Ryan Phillippe, who is among the most reliable of young American film actors, this time out is dreadful as Hanson. It appears that Haggis hasn’t been the least bit able to help this gifted actor understand what he is playing.

Indeed, the acting in this film is widely variable. Don Cheadle, one of the film’s producers, is good as a police detective, while Brendan Fraser, who cannot speak convincingly, much less act, and Sandra Bullock are atrocious as the district attorney and his nasty, flustered wife. Bullock’s role requires her to move the character into a more sympathetic key. She doesn’t do it; instead, Bullock changes the part on a dime, playing herself (a nice person) close to the bra in the hope that viewers will interpolate the transition that she needed to be working on throughout. Strikingly pretty woman, but one with no acting ability and very large feet.

The bastard that Fraser plays is cheating on his wife with his aide, the film implies. (The couple is childless.) The film also implies that this is okay because the mistress is self-supporting (unlike her rival!) and black. Progress!

There are no pets or animals of any kind in this film. I am beset by competing views. What kind of a person is Haggis that he imagines a world without any animals but us? What a clever guy that Haggis is in portraying our sterile, alienated, lonely contemporary urban world!

Would a cockateel have hurt?

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO SOLD THE SUN (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1999)

Dedicated to street children and their perseverence through incredible hardship, La petite vendeuse de Soleil (The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun) comes to us from Senegal, Switzerland and France. It’s a Third World story whose tone is complex and highly ironical. Djibril Diop Mambéty, the director of Touki Bouki (The Journey of the Hyena, 1973) and Hyenas (1992), a transplantation of Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Visit of the Old Woman, imparts a sunny complexion to the film in order to stress profound social and economic shadows. A mere 45 minutes long, Little Girl is what used to be called a “message movie,” and it packs a considerable punch.

It’s a film about town and village. The city, in Senegal, is Dakar, an urban environment whose sun-baked streets teem with children hustling newspapers and adults begging or trying to earn money by selling from stalls. The film opens in Dakar, and it’s not a pretty sight. A merchant accuses a woman of having stolen some unknown thing from him, and three officers, at his behest, violently arrest her while she protests her innocence and neither merchant nor policemen bother to inspect the bucket she is carrying for the alleged pilfered item. We see her behind bars (in a masterful shot that likens the woman to a caged animal, the camera is pressed against the outside of the bars, which seem enormous), and it appears she has been driven insane by the humiliation and rough treatment. The implication is clear: she was fragile to begin with, poised for the breakdown we witness. She isn’t a thief but a princess, she shouts to the still air.

The film’s title, which refers to a child, not a woman, dissuades us that the prisoner is the protagonist. Rather, we see her as representative of a social vulnerability. Perhaps she is the woman who the girl of the title is in danger of becoming.

Indeed, the scene shifts from city to village, where Sili (Lisa Balera), the film’s main character, appears, and the juxtaposition implies the seemingly indomitable girl’s shared destiny with the mad woman. (The village may be Colobane, Mambéty’s own birthplace near Dakar.) It’s either dusk or pre-dawn, and long shots bathed in a lovely, diffuse blue establish the village where Sili and her family live. By all rights, Sili should be securely asleep, at home, in bed. However, she is on a mission; she must find a way to earn money so that her family can survive. We see her emerge from shadows into the dawn’s light: a girl on crutches, each step a hardship. She reaches the highway, whose few cars at this early, otherwise quiet hour suggest the connection between the village from which Sili, if you will, is commuting and Dakar, her determined destination. One other sound interrupts the silence: that of a man pounding rocks into smaller pieces, to sell for construction work. A closeup of his labor is followed by a more distant shot revealing the mound of broken-up rock that the man has been creating for hours—all night, probably. His making do as best he can, with what’s available to him, becomes a metaphor of the harshness of ordinary existence in this part (and other parts) of Africa (and beyond). Globalization has brought construction, including workers, while those who are native to the region can break up rock. Sili is no less connected to this silent man than to the raving prisoner. He represents where she is starting from, a point of ingenuity, adaptability and resilience, while the woman who has been wrongly jailed as a thief represents where Sili may be headed. In Dakar, Sili also is wrongly arrested as a thief, and, self-assertively, she manages the release of both herself and the strange woman. But Mambéty leaves little doubt that this plucky victory is challenged by the odds against either of these individuals’ prevailing.

A pattern is established early on with the boy who transports Sili in the direction of Dakar. For all her apparent independence and self-sufficiency, Sili is reliant on others. She continually requires rescuing—for instance, when one of her crutches is stolen. Sili’s smiling optimism—she is a little like Federico Fellini’s Cabiria—covers a terrible vulnerability. Sili mentions that her knee was recently injured, hinting that her crippled state hasn’t been of long duration. We speak of people not knowing their own strength. It’s possible that Sili doesn’t know yet her own weakness.

In Dakar, Sili’s blind grandmother sings on the street for the coins of passers-by. But what can Sili herself do to earn money? The sight of swarming boys huckstering newspapers points her in the direction of what she interprets as her immediate destiny. However, Mambéty prefaces this revelation of hers in a disquieting way. The boys nearly knock her down as they go about their business. There are several shots of animals in the film; the animals always appear either passive or tranquil. But these newsboys are like a pack of wild animals. Hyenas. They resent this new seller on their turf, who is a girl, besides. Their first violent encounter with Sili is thoughtless and accidental. All subsequent encounters will be deliberate and confrontational, and even accompanied by death threats. Sili’s vulnerability, encapsulated by her handicap, will prove a magnet for their vicious assaults. They compete energetically with one another, but the competition that Sili poses is something of which they want to rid themselves. Their attitude and actions toward her transform them into a metaphor of unbridled competition—to paraphrase Tennyson, human nature red in tooth and claw.

Mambéty portrays the whole competitive atmosphere as a cauldron of madness. Human beings are debased by this environment; they become beasts or the prey of beasts. The issue isn’t precisely globalization, the integrated global economy, but rather the mechanism of this integration as globalization is currently constituted: capitalism. The part of the world that Mambéty shows cannot withstand the onslaught of forces that competition for survival has unleashed. People should be pulling and working together for the benefit of all (as the kindnesses that a few persons extend to Sili implies), not feverishly working against one another for the sake of the illusion that many, or any, of them will come out on top. Indeed, Mambéty implies, no matter their illusions, the Senegalese are doomed from the start. Those who prevail exist outside the borders of the Third World. They are foreign capitalistic entities, not the hapless individuals whom we see scrambling on the streets of Dakar. (A silent Greek chorus of sorts is the legless boy in a wheelchair who constantly observes, seemingly searching out the truth in everything he sees, but ultimately powerless to weigh in effectively.) Mambéty succeeds in conveying a sense of the manipulation of people’s lives by forces originating outside the upheaved community. The beneficiaries of foreign investment do not appear to be the Senegalese, whose suspiciousness, even hostility, towards one another provides an index of how all their worst impulses are being stirred up. Not that this will help any one of them. We become witness to the destruction of a people’s sense of community and common interest. They no longer seem to inhabit their region but only to rent space there. The “landlord” is the aggregate of corporate interests impinging on the region. According to Tom Zaniello, the author of Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds and Riffraff: A Guide to Films About Labor, “it is France’s collusion with the World Bank that keeps former French colonies at the mercy of economic forces they cannot control.” “The street market in Mambéty’s world becomes,” Zaniello writes, “metaphoric for the world market.”

Sili ends up selling copies of the newspaper The Sun, thirteen at a time, because—this is one of numerous indications of her naïvité —she mistakes 13 for a lucky number. She begins her endeavor in a golden dress that visually puns on the loftier sun, but on her second day of labor she is wearing a different dress, green in front and blue in the back. Mambéty thus characterizes his heroine as, unbeknownst to herself, self-divided as she copes with the reality with which she must contend. Perhaps the green represents the financial growth she seeks, while the blue suggests a lingering connection to the sun in the sky. However, the composite—the appearance that she is wearing two dresses at once—is an exacting visual irony: Sili only thinks she knows whether she is coming or going. Even as she succeeds in making a little money, she is losing ground because her persistent optimism is making her increasingly blind to the vulnerability of hers that she is failing to recognize. (The film’s devastating final shot has her disappearing into the distance as a blur; this is correlative, I’m afraid, to her disconnect from reality—an anticipation that she, like the woman at the beginning, is headed for madness.) From the outset, she exudes a sense of being charmed, especially when someone who recognizes her from the village buys all thirteen of her newspaper copies, paying in fact a lot more than they are worth, as an act of charity. (This is the source of her delusion that 13 is a lucky number.) Therefore, she hasn’t really earned the money, and the implication is that her survival remains mostly predicated on luck. It’s part of the capitalistic delusion that the efforts of individuals bring them just compensation; rather, capital goes to capital—that is, to corporate capitalists. Sili is able to sustain her cheerful disposition largely because of her faith that her efforts will pay off. She has no knowledge of the forces that are arrayed against her.

A boy whom Sili befriends sells a rival newspaper, The Nation. At one point she asks him why his newspaper sells so much better than hers. The boy explains that The Nation is “the people’s paper” while The Sun is the government paper. Employing a child’s illogic, Sili says she will stick with selling The Sun because that “will bring the government closer to the people.” The irony is that even the government is powerless, powerless to govern, that is, now that the nation’s destiny is determined by decisions made outside the country by global capitalists.

Finding themselves in an unexpected pressure cooker, the Sengalese who are portrayed in this film are losing their identity, their ties to their culture, which, by definition, is homegrown. They are becoming part of a global village that derives from a vastly different outlook, to say the least. The ties within the community by which people might help one another are being thinned and stressed, and financial (and other) help from the larger outside world now comes as part of a complex package that postpones individual access to benefits until some indefinite future. The world’s poor are getting poorer—most certainly, culturally and spiritually. The unhappy message of Mambéty’s film is that, for all her hard work and positive attitude, Sili doesn’t stand a chance of prevailing.

Message movies occupy an honorable place in cinema. They are disparaged when the examples considered are largely rhetorical (such as films by André Cayatte or Stanley Kramer), not analytical. Italian neorealism, on the other hand, largely consists of message films whose analytical aspect prevails over the rhetorical. While stylistically different, Mambéty’s film follows the latter model. Indeed, it’s very nearly free of rhetoric, as befits a film the target of whose message consists of those forces that are mostly invisibly underpinning the scenes that the film depicts.

A film that takes its zestiness from the lead character’s innocent, can-do personality, Mambéty’s Little Girl Who Sold the Sun was released posthumously. Mambéty, 53, died before he could complete the trilogy to which this film belongs. The first part of the trilogy is Le franc (1994); the third would have been La tailleuse de Pierre. The umbrella title of the trilogy was Tales of Little People.

THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (Michel Gondry, 2006)

Directing a feature from his own script for the first time, Michel Gondry transcends the cranky foolishness and hard-to-follow narrative trickery of his Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2003), for whose motion-picture story he won an Oscar. On a number of levels, The Science of Sleep (La science des rêves) flies. Its protagonist, Stéphane Miroux, literally flies—in his dreams.

This charming, lovely comedy-fantasy combines the whimsy of Yuri Mamin’s Russian Window to Paris (Okno v Parizh, 1994) and the miraculousness of René Clair’s Paris qui dort (literally, Paris, Which Sleeps, a.k.a. The Crazy Ray, 1923); and, like those comedies, Gondry’s lights on serious issues, including the impact on a grown man of his parents’ quarter-century-ago separation and his father’s very recent death, the mental consequences of unfulfilling labor, the stigma of a lousy track record in love, even globalization. It’s a light meal on a full plate.

Gael García Bernal dazzles as the boy whose dreams and waking reality perilously flow in and out of one another. His is a brilliant comic performance, fierce, vulnerable, hilarious. Since he was six years old, which is to say, since the time of his parents’ separation, his mother, Christine, tells us, Stéphane has inverted dream and reality. Thirty years old (reviewers variously guess his age; but Stéphane proposes to marry a girl in forty years when he is seventy, which makes him thirty in my mathematical book), Stéphane has been toting a burden of guilt. When he is poised to leave his mother yet again, whom he has been visiting in Paris following his father’s death in Mexico from cancer, he apologizes to her for having chosen to move away with his father all those years ago. Doubtless his boyhood departure from her constant care once upon a time hurt Christine, but she isn’t the sort to have let such a wound fester. At once she graciously accepts her son’s apology and dismisses it as unnecessary. Christine lives life lightly, practically and philosophically; she takes things in easy stride, husbanding emotional resources across life’s rough terrain. She has been disappointed so often that each day is a gift. It is she who gives her son a gentle push across the hall so he can say goodbye to Stéphanie, the girl with whom Stéphane has fallen in difficult love. As Christine Miroux, Miou-Miou gives a fabulous performance.

Why must love be so difficult? Where does one begin to explain this in Stéphane’s case? Well, the failure of his parents’ marriage has cast a long shadow on Stéphane. Moreover, his romantic confusion is nationality-deep; Stéphanie, like his mother, is French, but Stéphane has grown up Mexican. (A running gag is how twisted and inept Stéphane’s French is.) A couple of times Stéphane likens Stéphanie to his mother, revealing a sexual depth of confusion as well; for instance, perhaps projectively, he accuses this neighbor of failing to complete what she starts, a comment he also applies (perhaps just as projectively) to his mother. And yet more: the relationship between tenants in the apartment building that Stéphane’s mother owns began with misunderstanding on both sides. Both being artistically ambitious, each has lied, or has acquiesced to a lie, about the paid work that he or she is doing, which in either case is uninteresting, unfulfilling, cut-and-dried. To begin with, Stéphane is more attracted to Stéphanie’s friend Zoé, who applies maternal care to an injured hand of his. He jokes to a co-worker that he will probably end up with Stéphane because he always ends up with the best friend of the girl he really wants. When he joins artistic forces with Stéphanie (he invents; she creates lovely things out of wood and fabric), however, he falls in love for real with Stéphanie (or “for real” as far as we can decipher); unfortunately, she believes he is really still desirous of Zoé. “I do not believe in marriage,” Stéphanie dismissively tells her landlady’s son when he so impulsively proposes by the stairway that she is unsure whether he is expressing real feeling or mocking her. It is hard to miss how hard it is to believe anything that Stéphane says to Stéphanie, whose poise barely conceals a welter of confusion. In a film where it is often hard to distinguish reality and dream, Stéphanie may or may not whisper into a passed-out Stéphane’s ear, “Things will turn out the way you want if you can just stop doubting that I love you.” Does this express Stéphanie’s true heart or Stéphane’s wish-fulfillment fantasy? Ultimately Gondry may be suggesting that sexual romance always proceeds along a blurred boundary between reality and desire, its foundation capable of dissolving in an instant, as happens in the case of Christine’s current relationship with a stage magician, which ends, we presume, with the silent quarrel between them on the street that we quickly glimpse through a bar window.

At thirty, Stéphane is a bit older than the actor playing him and about a dozen years younger than writer-director Gondry, on whom the character is presumably based. This autobiographical grounding, undisturbed by Charlie Kaufman’s clever script interventions, helps explain why The Science of Sleep is a warmer, less vaporous thing than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film I gave up even attempting to follow for all the compelling moodiness of Gondry’s direction. The Science of Sleep has a more profound connection with reality, from which adolescent Stéphane is perpetually trying to escape.

A good many of Stéphane’s dreams are structured as Stéphane TV, a one-man television show that he fantasizes he hosts. In the first segment we see of the long-running dream series, which his head has taken from Mexico to Paris, Stéphane is a one-man band rushing around from instrument to instrument—a harbinger, perhaps, of one of the things he will share with Stéphanie, their both being musical composers. As a non-dream, even anti-dream entity, television tempers Stéphane’s dreaming; it represents reality’s curbing of that dream. TV sets pop up amusingly in Gondry’s mise-en-scène. For example, Stéphane and a co-worker toss the latter’s TV set into the Seine. One or the other notes, “It floats”—and so it does: like a corpse. This may also be a joking reference to past “Will It Float?” segments from an actual TV show, The Late Show with David Letterman, with which Gondry, who now lives in New York City, would be familiar. One morning, Stéphane wakes up cold and shivering from a dream in which he was about to ski with Stéphanie. His bare feet, it seems, are inside a small ice box opposite his bed. With a bit of imagination, one might see the empty freezer as an eviscerated television set. If I’m not mistaken, actual television sets are conspicuously absent from Christine/Stéphane’s and Stéphanie’s apartments, and there may be an implicit causal connection between this absence and Stéphane’s and Stéphanie’s imaginative capabilities. This would make Stéphane’s TV fantasies sorely ironic, by suggesting their limited nature as much as their fantastic reach. A monitor on the set compounds the irony, which is further compounded by the absolutely real audience: us. Of course, Stéphane is his own audience also, but that befits his status betwixt dreams and reality, from which he often goes back and forth, fragmenting into separate shots, some of them of the duration of quick inserts, of a single scene whose continuous action or related actions cover the field: reality; dream landscape. Moreover, Stéphane’s hosting duties indicate his long-standing sense of an inability to control his destiny. However curbed and compromised they may be, Stéphane’s dreams put him in charge. In reality, Stéphane is constantly frustrated by his failure to assert himself successfully—with Stéphanie, surely, but also at work. He comes armed to work the first day with his own calendar illustrations (each month pictures a different worldwide disaster, such as an earthquake), but he is relegated to pasting typeset script on the nondescript calendar pages that have been designed by others and which the business for which Stéphane works merely processes. Curiously (unless this is a dream!), Stéphane eventually gets his “disasterological” calendar published. It is as if the world had whispered in his sleeping ear, “Things will turn out the way you want if you can just stop doubting that the world loves you.” We certainly grow to love Stéphane, and it may be our projective, imaginative intervention that gives him his calendar. Its publication is the result of either our doing or Gondry’s.

His father’s death has deepened Stéphane’s view that reality connects the dots of disasters. His loss of his primary anchor and everyday nurturer justifies afresh the compensatory nature of his dreams. He says at one point, poignantly, that he misses being able to talk with his father; he feels unable to talk with his mother when he is sad. Mere images pop up of his father, both in reality and dreams; but the loss is so fresh, these do little to help. Indeed, mortality and our keen mortal awareness are at the crux of the feeling that we share with Stéphane that we cannot control how things play out in reality. In Stéphane’s case, this is compounded by a feeling that his father’s death brought to fruition: his sense of powerlessness to direct the course of the parental couple; his failure to save his parents’ marriage. Rationally, the adult Stéphane grasps that the collapse of the marriage wasn’t his fault and that he could do nothing to stop it; but, in however subconscious a form, childhood irrationality persists. The facile wisdom that offspring outgrow the stigma of parental marital failure is challenged by Gondry’s film. This may be especially applicable to a good-hearted soul like Stéphane, who hasn’t cast either parent in the role of villain or saint. One might say that Stéphane feels stuck with reality, over which he longs to exert some fantastic kind of control—hence, the toy he devises that allows him to overleap chronology, that is to say, time, in either direction. Again poignantly, Stéphane’s time machine can push him forwards or back only a second—this, the curbing of reality that imposes itself on his attempts to introduce his dream powers into his waking existence.

Gondry has devised a way of showing how parental claims on Stéphane still shadow him as a middle-aging young man. Following her husband’s death, Stéphane’s mother has tricked her son to visit her in France, in her apartment in the building that she owns. She has lied to him, luring Stéphane from Mexico by arranging for a “creative” job that turns out to be noncreative, boring hack work. It takes Christine a while to leave the lover with whom she is staying and join her son in their apartment—an index of her guilt over thus manipulating him. The fact that his mother owns the building indicates the lingering control over his life that Stéphane feels that Christine exerts. Moreover, the woman for whom he falls is his across-the-hall neighbor in that apartment building. Reality has taken Stéphane out of his element. He speaks French clumsily, for example, and communicates largely in English. He cannot control his father’s mortality, his job, his mother, his speech, his jealousy when Stéphanie dances with somebody else at a party honoring him; Stéphane cannot control Stéphane. This periodically—some would say, continuously—enforces on his behavior, image and self-image the appearance of a child, and this in turn implies these parental claims on him. He still seems more somebody’s son than he seems himself.

Christine Miroux is a totally sympathetic character, but there is a daunting aspect to her efficiency and practicality. Her composure and at least appearance of control are in sharp contrast to her son’s demeanor. The death of her long-estranged, perhaps divorced spouse, while it has quietly devastated Stéphane, has now renewed Christine’s opportunity to compete with him for their son’s affections—a battle to which Stéphane remains vulnerable, even across the barrier of his father’s death. Some refer to the “liberated” nature of Stéphane’s fantasies. Nevertheless, the anxiety-ridden basis of these fantasies locates the dreamer under the thumb of distressing and devastating life events. Stéphane’s dreams demonstrate his creativity but not his freedom; rather, their compensatory nature underscores his sense of limits, of powerlessness, of “falling short.” In this context I wish to note how Gondry uses expressively the diminutive nature of his brilliant lead actor, Gael García Bernal. A bit taller than 5’7’’, Bernal is a figure visually overwhelmed by his surroundings. His limited stature, and the psychological weight that Gondry imputes to this, are perhaps most impressively indicated by the rock formations that dwarf Stéphane in dreams. In a dream of work (Stéphane protests! it’s not fair to have to work in one’s dreams!), Stéphane assaults a co-worker while wearing gigantic false hands. These hands, by contrast, make Stéphane seem all the smaller, so that in a single image we are shown both Stéphane’s reach for fantasy and the compensatory basis of the extension. The implication of sexual inadequacy bubbles up to the surface when, in waking reality, Stéphane notes that Stéphanie’s large hands must mean that her penis is bigger than his. But, as I have argued, Stéphane’s worry over sexual inadequacy is part of a richer, broader fabric, to which belong worries over parental marital failure, his success as a son, his ability to find a renumerative outlet in the workaday world for his artistic creativity, and, above all, mortality. Stéphane is something of a basket case—implicitly, Everyman in our current Western world. He can toy with time (as with the ridiculously limited capacities of his time machine), but he knows—if only through the agency of his father’s death—that Time always has the better of him.

Stéphane/Stéphanie: coincidental? Is the girl across the hall in his mother’s apartment building a fantasy projection that identifies Stéphane’s quest as one for self-acceptance and self-love? Well, I would say yes, clearly, were it not for the fact that in directing his script Gondry has helped make Stéphanie achingly real, the reality that is perpetually slipping out of Stéphane’s grasp. Charlotte Gainsbourg, in whom plainness meets prettiness, isn’t apt to strike anyone as insubstantial, and one must also take into account our special relationship as audience with this actress, who first impressed herself on our consciousness—it is the role that made her a star—as Janine, The Little Thief (1988). (Actually, the title of Claude Miller’s film refers to the camera, the thief of images, that proves Janine’s redemption.) Gainsbourg began by engaging our surrogate parental hearts, and we bring this history to her other performances. She is family. Nothing gets more “real” than that.

On the other hand, one may say that Gondry uses the possibility of Stéphanie’s nonreality to suggest the degree of egotism in Stéphane caused by his insecurities and anxieties. (Bernal’s looks are always a bit Delon, but his personality here suggests Jean-Pierre Léaud.) Stéphane’s attraction to Stéphanie is driven by his neediness, the allure of her mundaneness and sanity in a world that has long since spun out of his control. She is his projection to the extent that his perception of her has less to do with her reality than with this neediness of his. Stéphane desires Stéphanie almost by fiat; he wants her to confirm for him his own reality. It is the displacement of his wish that his mother would have done this for him when he was a child. It is fitting who plays Christine, Stéphane’s mother. Miou-Miou is, of course, an institution, an actress who has been nominated for ten Césars—she won for Daniel Duval’s 1979 Memoirs of a Whore—and who may be nominated again for The Science of Sleep. A more charming woman than her Christine is impossible to imagine; but Christine is also daunting, a challenge to her son because her manipulativeness resets Stéphane’s psychological clock to childhood. It is through a kind of inferential back door that Gondry introduces the theme of repressed incest, for, at some level, Stéphanie exists for Stéphane as an extension of her landlady/his mother. However, Gondry has no interest in incest per se; rather, he is conjuring a metaphor for his protagonist’s utter confusion, all the mental matter that remains unresolved in Stéphane’s life.

The form of Gondry’s film is correlative to the confusions with which Stéphane is beset. Stéphane resorts to fantasies and dreams to correct the imbalance that reality imposes on him. I have already addressed the oppressive impact of reality on Stéphane; but what about its correction? For me, the central truth about this remarkable comedy is that the correction preserves and deepens his confusion, challenging our notions about the efficacy of dreams. For Stéphane, there seems to be no real escape from reality, no respite, no refreshment, no recreation that might allow for the possibility of re-creation. With precise irony, Gondry posits an openness to underscore the dead-endedness of Stéphane’s comedy of anxiety.

We are used to films that interweave fantasy and reality; two superlative examples from the late 1960s, when films that did this were especially in vogue, are Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967) and Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . . (1968). In such films, both film fantasy and film reality finally reflect on reality. The Science of Sleep, though, is a bit different. Its fabric is more dense. Whereas other films allow viewers to perceive certain parts as (correlative to) fantasy and other parts as (correlative to) reality, Gondry’s film places an especial burden on viewers, requiring them to summon a higher degree of Keatsian negative capability—paradoxically, a greater degree of relaxation—in order to navigate the film. An action or event that at one point is real may continue linearly and, a heartbeat into this continuation, may enter the fantastic realm; by the same token, an action or event that at one point is fantastic may continue linearly and, a heartbeat into this continuation, may enter the realm of reality. It isn’t a matter of different patches of fabric; in Gondry’s film, a single thread may utterly transform itself before our senses, passing from reality to fantasy, or the other way around. We may say that Gondry has created a film in perpetual psychological motion, for all its shifts and transformations are correlative to two things: Stéphane’s insecurities and anxieties; Stéphane’s confusion as to what is real and what is fantasy as he increasingly resorts to the latter in order to correct the imbalance that the former imposes on his existence. The “correction” of imbalance therefore unbalances him, deepening his distress. This sums up Gondry’s take on modern Western humanity. Gondry finds himself and the rest of us more creative—even feverishly creative—than ever, but this creativity, rather than refreshing us, plants us deeper into a rut where the distinction between reality and nonreality has grown increasingly blurred.

Both Stéphane and Stéphanie prefer randomness to organization; they see organization as a danger that might impose itself on their attempt to mix clear and blue pieces of cellophane—Christine’s scraps—in order to create the perfect make-believe ocean for Stéphanie’s make-believe boat transporting a make-believe forest in search of its mother. Yet the randomness they prize, which at any moment may slip into organization, ironically suggests a mental defense, or barrier, against utter chaos and confusion. Chaos, perhaps, is where dreams and reality uncomfortably converge. The ultimate chaotic “order” of dreams may match the ultimate chaotic “order” of reality.

Gondry places Stéphane’s confusion, his experience of not knowing at a given moment whether he is experiencing fantasy or reality, in a romantic context. Did he really slip that offensive note underneath Stéphanie’s apartment door? It is truly a ridiculous note, in which he asks for her friend Zoé’s phone number. Stéphane begins by believing that he only dreamt of doing this stupid thing. When he realizes he may actually have done it (Gondry perfectly captures the anxiety that we feel when we also realize we have actually done something so foolish), Stéphane retrieves the note from underneath Stéphanie’s door, assuming she has not read it yet. But she has. Later, when Stéphanie refers to the contents of that note, Stéphane excitedly takes this to mean that he and the woman he loves are on the same wavelength—a stunning instance of dramatic irony. Stéphane’s exaggerated faith in this destined romance of his undercuts rather than corroborates our faith in it, projecting us into a mental state that Stéphane’s own demonstrates at other junctures. We don’t know what to believe, what not to believe.

With breathtaking fluidity, Gondry presents his narrative material along a course where dream or fantasy can suddenly spring into reality or where reality can suddenly spring into dream or fantasy. Formally, Gondry does this lightly; but thematically he is being very serious. He is marshaling the resources of cinema to portray our surrogate, Everyman Stéphane, in the flux of modern reality that “locates” on shifting ground our uncertainty, confusion, and incapacity to direct the course of our everyday lives, let alone hold sway over such matters as work and death, all of which have plagued humanity from the get-go.

It is easy to describe Gondry’s film in terms of style. It is a magical film in which the camera comes sufficiently close to Stéphane that we do not realize that the setting in which he appears has shifted from reality to fantasy (or the other way around) until its withdrawal reveals that this is the case. But what is the film about?—I mean, ultimately about? Toward what sort of revelations do Stéphane’s adventures and misadventures tend?

It is tempting to identify Stéphane’s recently deceased father with his son’s toehold in reality and Stéphane’s mother, whose lover (until they quarrel and part) is a stage magician, with magic, dreams, fantasy. But the latter is not a happy sort, as though he is associated with the limits of magic, the souring of fantasy and dreams. (A dinner-time trick goes so awry that Stéphane quips that he would hate to be the lady that the magician saws in half; it gets one of the movie’s biggest laughs while slipping in a bit of Stéphane’s gender and sexual confusion.) In truth, property-owning Christine is a practical person, while one suspects—especially when her son expresses how much he wishes his father were alive to talk to—that Stéphane’s father had been the “maternal” parent. As the one with whom, or in proximity to whom, Stéphane had been living in Mexico since he was six years old, Stéphane’s father may be said to have fulfilled (except for Parisian visits by Stéphane) the role of both parents, with Christine assuming the role of a distant though loving aunt. Christine has tricked her son to join her in Paris, but the routine job in a print shop that she has secured for him may also suggest an attempt to ground her son in some surer, if repetitive and mundane kind of reality. Like an adolescent, Stéphane rebels as if staking out a truth that he can depend on. Stéphane navigates a world whose shifts between reality and fantasy constantly find him at a loss to understand his environment or his own nature and his role in it, and somehow his family situation, wrought by a separation of continents, seems correlative to this.

I have labeled Stéphane an Everyman, a surrogate for us all as we navigate a confusing world where we, too, do not always feel anchored to a solid earth, where we frequently feel overwhelmed by the sense that we have dropped and lost some thread of certainty and reality. We identify with Stéphane’s desire for control, for autonomy, for self-determination. This middle-aging adult, who is made to feel repeatedly like a child again vis-à-vis others, the world, and situations he encounters in the world, suggests the degree to which many of the rest of us feel unmanned by the world. None of us is in Kansas anymore.

It occurs to me that Gondry’s version of Everyman inhabits a “globalized” world. Of two different nationalities and fluently speaking English to negotiate the difference between these nationalities, Stéphane lives in a world whose rules have comprehensively changed. In this light, The Science of Sleep becomes a satirical allegory about globalization, a comedy of anxiety about a man who doesn’t know what to believe or who he is. Correlative to his confusions may be the host of confusions that beset us as we try to make sense of the world as it has recently evolved. This world, we are assured, has become smaller, closer than ever, yet we have never felt more alienated, more at the mercy of financial and economic manipulations beyond our control, arranged for us behind distant closed doors. The reality, we are assured, is that small, poor, underdeveloped countries are being helped up by globalization, but the evidence of exploitation by the developed West—capitalism on a monstrously huge, after all, “global” scale—repeatedly exposes this as fantasy, placing us in a confused moral position: just what is being done in our “global,” single name, that is to say, by the developed West, that our own morality wants no part of? We have heard of exiles, self-exiles (Gondry being one of them); but Stéphane is something else, something newer: a man without a world. Forces beyond his influence have taken the world away—a charlatan’s magic trick the all-too-real consequences of which everyone must live with. This is the emotional tenor of Gondry’s superlative film. As it now exists, even fantasy is of little use for making better the disastrous place that the whole world has become. The Science of Sleep is, beneath all the jokes and sheer delight, a cry of despair, and its lack of romantic resolution—disparaging reviewers, and even some hospitable reviewers, credit Gondry with stronger visual than narrative abilities—in fact ends the surface romantic comedy in the only honest way: in complete uncertainty, irresolution. The film ends in a dream, with Stéphane and Stéphanie riding a horse that in reality had been a toy horse that Stéphanie had scavenged and Stéphane had miraculously motorized. The dream has no wake-up to tell us whether Stéphane and Stéphanie actually become a couple. Carping reviewers want a conventional ending for a film that tackles a no longer conventional world. Gondry has found expressive means for drawing to a non-close close his portrayal of modern anxieties with no end in sight. A facile resolution of his narrative material would have been a disgrace, a lie—but that’s what a certain kind of reviewer wants.

Bernal, who burst upon our attention by castigating Bush 43 for the Iraq War at the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony in 2003, has found in Stéphane a role that preserves that stunning memory of ours. That outspoken Bernal is the perfect agent for Gondry’s protest against a world in which reality and fantasy have become dangerously confused by a terrifying apparatus of power and rationalizations. Stéphane may be overwhelmed; but the actor who plays him, who is not afraid to raise a voice of protest, holds out hope for the rest of us that the current nightmare, like Nazism, is a passing season of madness that our own voices, conjoined, might yet help to dispel.

GOOD MORNING, NIGHT (Marco Bellocchio, 2003)

Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket (1965) remains one of the most impressive debuts in Italian cinema, and Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night (Buongiorno, notte) is, if anything, even more remarkable—further evidence (following proof after proof after proof) that Bellocchio is what he indeed seemed to be nearly forty years ago: after Antonioni and Rossellini, Italy’s greatest film artist.

In 1978, one of the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) in Italy kidnapped and (depending on your point of view) executed or assassinated Italy’s presumed next president, former law professor Aldo Moro, 61, president of the ruling party, the Christian Democrats, which was working on striking a compromise with the Italian Communist Party, thus ensuring that the most idealistic and dedicated among the nation’s Communists, whom the Red Brigade “terrorists” exemplified, would be neutered, that is, enormously diminished in their capacity to influence the government either directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, what most concerned the extremists was the bourgeois appropriation of the Left that accommodation between Christian Democrats and Communists represented, shifting the ground beneath the class struggle that should be the focus of political consciousness and national attention. The Red Brigade, then, was both politically and ideologically driven. Theirs was a mission, fueled by historical imperatives, aimed at keeping alive a vibrant Marxist dream of social and economic justice.

The plan was also an ill-conceived, deluded and violent event that required killing five bodyguards before Moro himself was snatched. The abductors announced that Moro would be tried by them. Parliament replaced Moro with Giulio Andreotti, whose coalition government, including Communists for the first time in Italy’s history, orchestrated a virulent crackdown on terrorism. I can’t believe that the kidnappers actually imagined, as the film suggests, that what they did and what ensued would generate public support for them, but, if they did believe this, their actions backfired. Italy’s political sensibilities were rocked; the Italian people were rocked to their souls. Like the assassination of President Kennedy in the U.S., Moro’s death, many details of which were officially suppressed, invited a national psychosis of self-generating conspiracy theories.

Bellocchio, directing from his own brilliant script, has created a fiction that parallels rather than attempts to reproduce the original event. He has not made an objective film—one, that is, that attempts to see the kidnapping and holding of Moro from an “outside” view that is either official or neutral. The protagonist of his film isn’t Moro; it’s Chiara, who, at 23, is the only female member of this cell of the Red Brigades. Keyed to her participation and observations, the film is shown from the “inside,” from Chiara’s point of view, taking us into a scene that we might not otherwise be able to imagine. Chiara’s turns out to be a changing viewpoint, however, as she takes in the television news coverage, and alternates between her workaday life as a university librarian and her hidden life, as a revolutionary, in the apartment in one buried room of which Moro is being held prisoner. Chiara comes to oppose the execution or assassination of Aldo Moro.

Or, at least, we think she does; for, during his film’s second half, Bellocchio seamlessly interweaves actual action and surrealism that is keyed to the dreams and, perhaps, only the thoughts of the characters, including—especially—Chiara. The first half of the film is riveting and absorbing; in it, the Red Brigade members rent and set up the apartment, commit (offscreen) the kidnapping, and establish their relationships with Moro, whom they confront with their intentions and motives. However, it’s the film’s second part, wherein the apartment-mates clash with themselves and one another, in which Bellocchio’s filmmaking in particular shines. Moreover, intermittently this filmmaking is surprising and riotously funny, especially as the Pope and Moro’s fellow politicians seek public ways to appropriate Moro’s misfortune for their own benefit. With great satirical clarity, Bellocchio reveals how ordinary citizenry became imaginative extensions of the kidnapped and murdered Moro while officialdom instead became extensions of the kidnappers! Indeed, Bellocchio suggests that the state more or less pursued Moro’s end by thwarting any possible exchange of Moro for imprisoned Leftists. Ultimately, Moro’s family opts not to participate in the media event that the public funeral for Moro becomes, retaining his body for their own, very private ceremony. Meanwhile, we see Moro in the flesh, jauntily walking, safe and sound, down city streets—by dint of whose wish fulfillment, we can never be sure. Chiara’s? Other Red Brigade members as well? The Italian people’s? His own? All these?

Bellocchio uses snippets of black-and-white films to convey the dreams of his Red Brigade members. (Otherwise, the film is in color.) Lenin’s snow-clad bench, where Lenin famously would sit and read or meditate, appears from Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934); the shooting to death of partisans, from a boat into the sea, appears from Rossellini’s Paisà (1946). In one instance, one of the Red Brigade members goes to sleep and has a film-dream from which one of his cohorts wakes up. Luis Buñuel showed someone waking up from someone else’s dream in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1971); but in that film the point is that members of the bourgeoisie cannot even lay claim to their own dreams. Bellocchio’s point lies elsewhere; he is showing us the tight community of these dedicated revolutionaries before this community unravels. Part of the unraveling is due to Chiara’s recollection of Rossellini’s film, which, in consort with other elements in her life, leads her to identify herself and her cohorts not with the partisans but with the Fascists. The news reports, a university student at the library where she works who is attracted to her, her own conscience: all these conspire to shift her “inside” view of the act that her group has committed (and the worse one that the group will commit) to an “outside” view, causing her ideological certainty to wobble. The ends may not justify the means.

The distanced, disciplined, highly imaginative way Bellocchio approaches and develops his material compels us to join Chiara in finding political violence inhumane as well as counterproductive—if, indeed, her own view shifts that far.

The title of the film is that of a play written by the boy from the library who challenges the inhumanity of Chiara’s radicalism without himself knowing that she is one of the persons responsible for the crime that is holding hostage the minds and hearts of the Italian nation. In turn, the budding playwright has drawn this title from a poem by Emily Dickinson that begins “Good Morning — Midnight — / I’m coming Home — / Day — got tired of Me — / How could I — of Him?” The entire poem is relevant, but these lines encapsulate the poignancy of Chiara’s predicament as she struggles to negotiate the shifting ground of her convictions. What a reminder, too, of the genius of America’s greatest poet.

With two exceptions, the acting is perfectly adequate. The two exceptions, in the two roles that really require this, are superb. Maya Sansa is perceptive and emotionally thrilling as Chiara. Bellocchio’s tight closeups, which capture each flicker of emotion despite Chiara’s suppression of feelings in order to steel herself to her revolutionary task, facilitate a rich, powerful, subtly inflected performance. Almost as wonderful is Roberto Herlitzka as Moro, whose stream of letter-writing to solicit outside support shifts from methodical to pathetic to hilarious. Funny, also, is how for a while Moro seems to dominate the captors, provoking from Chiara this outburst at one point: “He’s holding us prisoners.” Herlitzka drives his captors crazy by seeming so resigned and passive (I am reminded of Takashi Shimura’s Kanji Watanabe in Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 Ikiru), not to mention bewildered since he is convinced he is the epitome of a just and socially committed leader.

Good Morning, Night placed second at Venice and won for Bellocchio the International Critics’ Prize at the European Film Awards. It’s a film that hasn’t a single ingratiating, manipulative moment in it. Rather, it offers the sheer pleasure of humane feeling and intellectual rigor.