MUSLIM (Vladimir Khotinenko, 1995)

A tremendous work whose greatness steadily accumulates, Vladimir Khotinenko’s Muslim (Musulmanin) embraces the complexity of both familial and village life, and places these in an urgent moral context. Its protagonist is Nikolai (“Kolya”) Ivanov, who has returned to his rural home a hero, having spent seven years as a prisoner-of-war in Afghanistan. While in captivity, the soldier converted to Islam, and the film records his readjustment to peasant family and farming community, as well as the reactions that his alien religious devotion elicits. Superbly written by Valeri Zalotukha and color cinematographed by Aleksei Rodionov, Muslim won for Khotinenko the Special Grand Prize of the Jury at the Montréal World Film Festival and, for its brilliant young lead, Yevgeni Mironov, the best actor prize of the Russian film critics.

The film opens in what deceptively seems a spirit of joy. Tall, slender Kolya, with his prayer shawl covering his neck and draping his shoulders, is striding through a sunlit, grassy field, on his way home. He is singing; his paean fills the air. But the words of his sung prayer reflect the experience of war in Kolya’s recent past; one lyric beseeches God to protect Muslims from those who would assault them, as the Soviet army, to which Kolya belonged, did in Afghanistan, a Muslim nation, which it invaded in 1979. The unwinnable nature of the war, which made the invading army (as in Vietnam) the target of guerrillas, the Muslim freedom fighters, the mujahadeen, had a number of consequences. One is the frustration level of the Soviet soldiers, who as a result resorted to committing unspeakable atrocities against Afghan soldiers and civilians. Another, of course, was the eventual widespread unpopularity of the war at home, which contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union four years prior to the appearance of Khotinenko’s film, which therefore resonates with this history and ironic outcome.

However, there are ironies more specific to Kolya that his opening journey through the fields ignites as the film unfolds. A Christian who has been reborn as a Muslim, at the outset Kolya seems the very image of confidence, integrity and assured identity—like Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper, the highland lass who, singing while at work in the Scottish fields, appears to Wordsworth the foot traveler to be at one with her work, with no shred of discrepancy left over for personal anxiety, even pertaining to the eventuality of death. But why is Kolya going home at all then, venturing into his Christian past? He later says that God told him to do this. This strikes analytical us as sheer rationalization. Kolya is homesick, so he has (unconsciously) invoked God to provide a rationale for his doing what he desires to do, what his former self wishes to do, and this need of his to rationalize undercuts the integrity of our first glimpse of the boy. Despite appearances, Kolya is, in fact, at odds with himself—a point that his two names, his Russian one and his new Muslim one, Abdulla, hammers home. Indeed, at one point Khotinenko poignantly dissolves from a photograph of the innocent Christian boy that Kolya once was to a closeup of Kolya, in the flesh, in a field—the former warrior, Afghan captive and, now, Muslim that he has become.

Why did Kolya become a Muslim anyhow? We may speculate an overidentification with his captors to compensate for the discombobulated self wrought by captivity. It is also possible that Kolya’s conversion implies a repudiation of his side’s torture and killing of Afghan Muslims. Back home, a stranger, a Russian, shadows him. We later learn that this man’s mission is to assassinate Kolya for desertion. That the “hero” may in fact be a deserter contributes to the theme of the madness of war, and the extent to which civilian perception of war mismatches the reality; but it also lends credibility to the idea that Kolya’s religious conversion, on one level, sought to stabilize an identity that war’s cruelty and viciousness had tossed into chaos.

It is also the case that Kolya’s memory of his own home life lacked the capacity to calm him during the ordeal of his separation and captivity. The horrific experience of war doesn’t wipe out and replace extant problems in one’s life. At least in Kolya’s case, war adds to and perhaps even deepens these problems. Kolya returns home to the chaotic life he had left behind to go to war. His mother, Sonia (Nina Usatova, marvelous*), loves both her sons, handsome Kolya and his older brother, Fedya; but Kolya is the one she dotes on. Silent, for the most part, upon his return to the village, Kolya nevertheless warmly mutters “Mama!” at the sight of his devoted mother in loving hysterics at having her dear boy back home. However, Kolya’s relationship with Fedya is more complex. When Fedya hugs him, a villager notes that he used to beat Kolya—a sign of the older brother’s jealousy, which Kolya’s current status as war hero can only enrage. Indeed, in Kolya’s absence, we learn, Fedya attempted to appropriate the girlfriend, Vera, whom Kolya had left behind. Before long, a war of a kind erupts between brothers, as Fedya tries to reassert the advantage that being the elder brother, in his mind, confers on him—a distinction now meaningless to Kolya, because of the ordeal away from home that he has undergone. Thus, for perhaps the first time, Kolya responds in kind to one of his brother’s frustrated assaults, nearly bludgeoning Fedya to death, in a reaction that provides a powerful index of his immersion in war and its diversion of his passive, gentle nature. In another sense, we see the calm façade of Kolya’s Muslim identity erode and implode, exposing the violent Christian—the identification that war has helped forge in his mind—just below the surface. This alters our view of the recurrent shots of the young convert praying in the fields, seemingly in harmony with nature. Kolya’s outburst of near lethal violence gives an edge of desperation to these moments. Calm isn’t what Kolya has achieved; it’s what he longs for.

A particular family incident encapsulates the sorry state of the homefront and its extension of the war. In Kolya’s absence, fearing the worst, the boys’ father and Sonia’s husband hanged himself. Unconsciously, Fedya more than likely blames Kolya for his father’s suicide, again deepening the longstanding quarrel between brothers; it is just as likely, and in his case perhaps not so unconsciously, that Kolya blames himself. When he returns and is told of his father’s fate, a painfully brief point-of-view shot indicates Kolya’s eyeing the hook from which his father hanged himself. This is a reminder of the wide net of horror that war unfolds. For Fedya (who served a prison term while his brother was away), though, the family tragedy may be more complex; he also is riddled with guilt. Why is he not lovable like Kolya? (He certainly isn’t; but who can say that this isn’t the result of his feeling less loved than his brother?) Why was his own presence insufficient to compensate for Kolya’s absence and feared fate? Why did he prove inadequate to the task of keeping his father alive? It is Fedya who has had to bear the burden of Sonia’s suffering: the loss of a mate compounding the feared loss of the favored son. Eventually, Fedya succumbs to family precedent by hanging himself from the same hook in the ceiling beams—only, in his case, he is rescued by his brother. In a second outburst of violence, Kolya arduously tears out the hook with his bare hands. In a sense, it’s a futile symbolical attempt to undo the war and its consequences.

Throughout the film, the land is visually portrayed as a source of strength for members of the farming community. But the village leader, beset with greed, is selling the land, parcel by parcel, to wealthy business interests in Moscow, moving the villagers toward eviction. The intrusion of and the shift to capitalism (encapsulated by the U.S. dollars that are replacing rubles even in this small rural village) represent the ultimate price that the Soviet war with Afghanistan exacted: the dissolution of the socialist state. Therefore, Zalotukha and Khotinenko have shrewdly Chinese-boxed the family drama of the Ivanovs inside the broader national drama.

The finale is terribly ironical, deeply disturbing and utterly unmerciful, as befits the film’s tragic dimension. The stranger who has been shadowing Nikolai makes himself known. He won’t kill him, he explains, because he has converted to Christianity. Thus the religious experience of this man parallels that of Nikolai, to whom he explains that the New Testament has transformed his existence, precluding killing even a deserter. As a favor to him, won’t Kolya make a sign of the cross to seal their détente? On principle, Kolya cannot do this, so the “reborn” Christian shoots him dead. At the last, Muslim delivers a slashing critique of religion’s—in particular, Christianity’s—contribution to violence and war, humanity’s most enormous orchestration of violence. We are left limp; Nikolai Ivanov survived so much, only to die this brusquely and absurdly. War.

* Another superb performance is given by Ivan Bortnik, who plays Kolya’s loving godfather.

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MOBUTU, KING OF ZAIRE (Thierry Michel, 1999)

The principal attraction of Thierry Michel’s Belgian documentary about the despot born Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, co-written by Lye Mudaba Yoka, Professor of Literature at the University of Kinshasa, is the riveting nature of the man’s story—and its Shakespearean dimensions. Born in the colonized Belgian Congo, Mobutu grew up continually humiliated, and smart. In 1949, he was impressed into the Belgian Congolese Army for rancorous behavior. In 1956 he joined the Congolese National Movement, which agitated for independence. After he negotiated this independence, Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s—later, Zaire’s—first elected prime minister, appointed Mobutu to his cabinet. But the loyalist betrayed his mentor, angling for his own grab at power. Later that year, a coup d’état, which Colonel Mobutu headed, left in presidential power Lumumba’s coalition partner, Joseph Kasavubu. Early in 1961, Lumumba was assassinated—by African mercenaries at the behest of Eisenhower’s C.I.A. (Michel omits all mention of U.S. involvement.) Mobutu betrayed Kasavubu, seizing power for himself in 1965. Mobutu cashed in on Lumumba’s reputation by rehabilitating it in 1966. In 1972 he renamed himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga: “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” His “presidential” reign, which increasingly mired Zaire in poverty, instability and corruption, lasted thirty-two years. In 1997 a coup removed Mobutu, and Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
     Michel’s lively, always engaging film isn’t exactly probing; Shakespeare Michel is not, and we never gain access to whatever veins of guilt may have penetrated Mobutu’s mind and soul. However, we note Mobutu’s gradual passage from a slender, spectacularly handsome, often smiling young man to a stocky, glum, ugly, medal-festooned dictator. A picture is worth a thousand words.

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JAWS (Steven Spielberg, 1975)

Jaws, which inaugurated the “summer blockbuster,” is an enormously popular thriller-adventure that meshes reality and fantasy. The “reality” is a coastal resort town, Amity Island, that’s open for summer business and is determined to remain open for business. The “fantasy” is a primordial sea beast—the “Great White Shark”—that’s snapping at swimmers in the ocean. The fantasy threatens to shut down the reality, consigning normal commercial profits to the deep. This is a worthy progressive theme.

Unfortunately, Jaws is tedious, hollow and unnecessarily long—and, worse than the fact that it generates not one real thrill, let alone stoppage of the heart, for all its hoary and clichéd attempts to do so (the mechanical shark is laughably unconvincing), Jaws is a cruel, dehumanizing film—one that fails to develop its potentially rich material, even to a minimal extent, because it chooses to focus instead on the audience, which it relentlessly tries to manipulate. The result, therefore, is scarcely better than Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954), one of the works from which it generously borrows for its monster-antics, and a favorite of its director, then-28-year-old Steven Spielberg. Goodness knows, I have a store of quarrels with Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), from Thomas Mann; but compare Visconti’s treatment, wherein Venice is loath to deter its tourist trade despite an outbreak of cholera, and Spielberg’s half-hearted treatment of a similar theme in Jaws. Visconti can draw upon his heartfelt Marxism for the appropriate anger and sense of outrage over the fact that the well-being of tourists is being cavalierly dismissed by business and official local interests; but upon what can Spielberg draw? Apparently nothing. A potent theme is thus drowned in a sea of mechanical thrills. It is indicated in the set-up, and we look forward to its development; but the theme never really surfaces to help make whole or to pull together an expert assemblage of scenes and set-pieces. (Verna Fields, who won an Oscar, did the cutting.) One exaggerates the achievement of Jaws by calling it a bad movie. There is no movie here, for thematic unity has been sacrificed for the sake of young Spielberg’s pornographic agenda. There isn’t a movie because Jaws, like the Peter Benchley novel on which it is based, isn’t about anything at all.

There are two major parts of the plot. The first relates instances of the menace that the shark visits on Amity Island, the local reaction by terrorized tourists, the police chief, and the corrupt, oblivious mayor, and the organizing of the hunt for the shark. The second, the hunt, draws upon Moby-Dick but lacks the elemental mystery, not to mention the startling humanity and philosophical richness and depth, of Herman Melville’s novel. Three characters are involved here: the police chief, who, it turns out, is terrified of the water; a young, goofy marine biologist; a fisherman obsessed with catching the monster—the movie’s Ahab, and also its Ishmael. The last of these, Quint, is given a long histrionic speech in which he reminisces about a World War II experience that plunged him and other sailors into shark-infested waters. Obliquely, the passage—perhaps the film’s high point, and its rare nod to a kind of humanism—links the film to science-fiction/horror movies of the 1950s that refer to the upsetting of Nature that resulted from U.S. atomic bombing and testing. Quint’s vessel, the USS Indianapolis, had been torpedoed by the Japanese when it was on its way home after delivering the A-bomb. Sharks claimed the lives of some 800 sailors. John Milius wrote Quint’s speech, whereas the rest of the film was written by Benchley, Carl Gottlieb and Spielberg himself.

Jaws lacks the intense unity, the simple single-mindedness, of Duel (1971), the previous effort by Spielberg that it most resembles. The dumb nature of the tractor-trailer incomprehensibly pursuing the commuter is (greatly) enlarged in the later film and, of course, moved from the road to the sea; but there hasn’t been any addition of richness or resonance. In too many ways, Jaws takes its personality from the shark. If there is a “character” with whom Spielberg seems to identify, it is the shark, which terrorizes tourists and hunters much as the director is trying to scare the wits out of us. Nothing else seems to engage his interest. The essential difference between an artist and an entertainer is that the former is focused on giving formal expression to his or her ideas and feelings, while the latter is focused on the audience (or on some projection of an audience). Many filmmakers operate in imaginative space somewhere in between these two polar dispositions; Spielberg, on the other hand, is pure entertainer. Yet he is a curiously dour, joyless entertainer, as though he is holding in severe check emotions of his own that he doesn’t trust. This also contributes to the inhuman personality of Jaws. Subsequently it would help dictate the saccharin and sentimental quality of certain films of his—films that rely on bogus feelings rather than searching out and expressing genuine emotions.

Among American filmmakers, two of Spielberg’s great loves are John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. In one scene, music from The Quiet Man (1952) is played in homage to Ford; in another, as the police chief, seated, reacts to a horrific shark attack, Spielberg zooms forward while simultaneously pulling back the camera—a visual technique invented by Hitchcock for Vertigo (1958). Indeed, the all-male hunt, with the (mostly) unseen enemy somewhere out there in the water, recalls Ford’s military adventure in the desert, The Lost Patrol (1934), and Spielberg’s many attempts to generate suspense smack (at least combinately) of Hitchcock. But, sadly, Spielberg is without the concern for his characters that is one of the hallmarks of Ford’s and Hitchcock’s cinema.

Rather, Jaws beats the heartless path of The Godfather (1972), a film that pioneered—in America, that is—the pornographic technique of manipulating the audience into a state of delighted anticipation of each subsequent act of mayhem or violence. Prior to The Godfather, Hollywood films as a matter of course generated, or at least tried to generate, concern for their characters, especially vulnerable ones in peril or at risk of falling into peril. With the fifties horror films of which Spielberg insists he is enamored, the audience is encouraged to be anxious for those characters who are in a situation of grave danger. With Jaws, Spielberg appeals instead to the basest elements in our nature; in his hands, we cannot wait for the shark to claim another victim. Francis Ford Coppola, perhaps horrified by the monster he unleashed, never resorted to this manipulative method after The Godfather. But, beginning with Jaws, Spielberg made cold-hearted audience manipulation, in various guises, his signature tack. However, Munich (2005) suggests that he, too, however belatedly, rues the kind of filmmaking that was his stock-in-trade for at least twenty years. (In Munich, Spielberg resists titillating us with deaths, making each one, instead, seem pitiably horrible.) Regrettably, in the interim, the upshot of his spectacular transformation of the whole way in which popular entertainments operate has been a coarsening of the culture and a deadening of the American heart. The social and political consequences for the United States have been enormous; it is not too much to say, as a result, that Jaws is the single most influential U.S. film ever made—although one must add, needless to say, that Spielberg’s film has been a contributory, not a sole, cause of such complex, overdetermined phenomena as seventies “me-ness” and the mass school shootings of the 1990s.

Nevertheless, it is inaccurate to attribute originality to Spielberg’s procedure. The model for the cold-blooded cinema that Jaws exemplifies can be found in another time and place. The Third Reich created the approach in films that Coppola’s Godfather resurrected; in those propagandistic works, audiences were encouraged to savor each new incidence of derision and abuse that befell Jewish characters. By pursuing this approach of Coppola’s, Spielberg—indirectly, inadvertently, carelessly, obliviously—copied the Nazis.

“Don’t go in the water!” promotions for this film shouted. It might be better still not to go anywhere near Spielberg’s toxic film.

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A WALK IN THE CLOUDS (Alfonso Arau, 1995)

As bad as it is, Mexican director Alfonso Arau’s A Walk in the Clouds is required viewing for those with an interest in the history of cinema. For Arau’s first Hollywood film remakes a minor classic, a formative work of Italian neorealism, Alessandro Blasetti’s Four Steps in the Clouds (Quattro passi fra le nuvole, 1942; Cesare Zavattini was one of the authors of the script). But the newer film, unlike the spare original, is a lavish romance; someone who made Like Water for Chocolate (1993) could not have done it differently. The alterations, though, are hard to digest. Whereas the traveling salesman whom Gino Cervi portrays in the Blasetti film returns to his wife with his heart intact, the one whom Keanu Reeves plays Arau conveniently annuls out of a marital mismatch so that the boy can remain with the girl who has captured his heart. In either version, after they meet on a bus the salesman accompanies the girl home as her “husband” in order to help her hide from her parents the fact that the baby she is carrying was conceived out of wedlock. Both times, the ambience of place—a simple farm in the original; a splendiferous vineyard and estate in the remake—causes the boy to tarry beyond the brief agreed-on stay prior to his “deserting” her. But while poor Paolo must return to reality after taking “four steps in the clouds,” lucky Paul gets to remain in his dream for the rest of his life. Thus does magic realism replace neorealism.

Forrest Gumpish, Arau’s film is therefore ridiculous, nearly mythologizing its handsome young hero while dottily lingering on a computer-enhanced landscape of the most fulsome physical beauty. (Emmanuel Lubezski is the color cinematographer; David Gropman, the production designer.) Two lousy performances, moreover, tear at the bewitchment: Giancarlo Giannini as the girl’s rude, arrogant father, and Anthony Quinn as his father, who—the old softie—helps the lovers along. Nearly endearing through long familiarity, Quinn’s fatuousness does light damage, and Quinn and Reeves share one inspired moment: an inharmonious duet, with their age difference—fifty years—nicely bridged by intoxicant; but Giannini’s melodramatic posturing is unbearable, especially when his rigid patriarch tearfully crumbles in a contrived parable about pride. Worse still is the extent to which Arau, a pro-Spanish, anti-Mexican Indian bigot, fondly indulges the rich, complacent, emptily aristocratic Napa Valley family, the Aragóns, which Giannini’s character heads. Nor do I care for the heady eroticism that Arau draws from grape harvest shenanigans, with girl and boy at one point frolicking about in a vat of the oozing fruit, especially since the couple never, well, couple. Absent real sex, the atmosphere is way overheated. How we want these children to stop sublimating and “get it on.”

The film, then, is a mirage of endless California dreaming. Formally, it is dreadful, both overcomposed and laden with tweaking reaction shots that slow the pace to that of sludge.

Yet amidst all these shortcomings the film does engage one issue. In 1944 Paul Sutton, highly decorated, returns home from the European arena. Shielding herself from war’s unpleasantness, Paul’s wife, Betty (Debra Messing, inept), has left unopened a cache of his letters—letters, she now learns from Paul, that are full of his plans for their peacetime life together; voluminous letters that, along with the simplest dreams they express, are what kept Paul sane amidst the horror and devastation of war. Images of this wartime experience of his, conflated with images of the orphanage he grew up in, along with his fear of losing Victoria, the girl from the bus, continue to stab Paul’s consciousness—shafts of memory rendered for us in desaturated color that comes very close to black and white. No wonder this boy is charmed by a place—glowing, tranquil, rarefied, remote—as seemingly out of time and apart from earth as the Aragóns’ estate is. It’s romance to him, so steeped in war has he lately been.

The hangover from war, then, is the one legitimate theme here. Victoria Aragón (lovely Spaniard Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, her acting hampered by her battle with English) tells Paul that he is the noblest person she has met. But in fact Paul is hiding inside this nobility of his, groping for an antidote to the ignobility with which war has confronted him. Thus he is drawn to Victoria, whose fetus, he tells her, is a miracle of new life. In this light, we understand that Paul’s impersonation is as much for himself as for his damsel in distress; for the pretense of being Victoria’s unborn child’s father becomes an acting-out of Paul’s consuming wish to reverse his own orphaned past and to resolve anxieties over an uncertain future. This wish, though, also terrifies Paul for holding out to him what may prove to be false hope; and so, although he reluctantly pursues it, prodded by Victoria’s grandparents, Paul much prefers instead the safe nobility that enforces his fidelity to a grossly unsympathetic spouse. Thus he engages Victoria at a self-protective remove, to which the spousal pretense lends a bit of irony. And when he challenges Victoria’s father to show his family his love for them, Paul is also challenging himself to come out of his own shell.

Inability to cope with life following combat service, once called shell shock, has since been renamed war psychosis, a post-traumatic stress disorder. (For a remarkable documentary look at the condition, consult John Huston’s 1946 Let There Be Light.) The fact of the matter is, however, that most combat veterans do cope, sometimes shakily, but with steady courage. I cannot praise Reeves enough for doing such justice to this aspect of his role. His is an almost unendurably moving performance, a tribute to all those countless veterans who, like Paul Sutton, uncomplainingly do all they can not to submit to war psychosis, silently determined to pay whatever price that coping with civilian life may require. I do not wish to be unfair, but, given the reactionary nature of so much of this film, I am inclined to dismiss as accidental the radical implications that arise in this single area. Indeed, does Arau even know that Paul’s heroic struggle to keep mentally afloat contests the U.S. myth that war duty is just a job from which, unless “weak” to begin with, one readily and easily moves on? (In an effort to preserve the myth, the U.S. government suppressed Huston’s Light for a quarter-century.) There is no reason that actor Reeves, himself a Canadian, should know this, either. However, I suspect that simply by pursuing the truth of the character it was his responsibility to play Reeves intuitively unearthed the larger context. What credit goes to the film should go to Reeves, not Arau.

Reeves clearly and cleanly conveys that, as civilian, Paul isn’t done with the war, nor is it yet done with him; nor have Paul’s prior problems vanished under the duress of his combat experience. Once again showing “courage under fire,” though, Sutton prevails. By provoking the release of Victoria’s father from the shell of a fear-ridden ego, Paul likewise effects his own release—and acquires a family, a home, and a peacetime purpose to boot. But before he and his future father-in-law reach their joint bounty, a sweeping fire teases them (and us) into believing that everything, including the vineyard, is lost—for Paul, a clarion call to redemptive action. Persevering, he finds life in the aftermath of fire, just as he does in the aftermath of war.

Reeves’s wonderful acting is to-the-bone. Sutton’s enforced ease as, beneath the surface, he goes about the challenging business of stabilizing a war-skewed soul all but hides his movement towards—this is the film’s core symbolism—the fire of grace. But we hear this struggle in the speech pattern that Reeves brings to Sutton: clipped, just shy of being brusque, yet now and then tinged with barely controlled emotion. (The same actor, this, who as Siddhartha in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, 1994, aptly spoke with the fluency of a river.) Thus is Sutton’s civilian round of combat, coping with life, waged behind a protective screen of nobility that is rendered transparent for us by an artist who, himself persevering, gives a patient, tenacious, cumulative performance. Kenneth Branagh is right about Reeves: “He just keeps getting better and better.”

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TRANS (Julian Goldberger, 1998)

Trans is yet another example of a fine first feature by a well-trained young American film artist. Julian Goldberger has made a couple of features since (A Thousand Guns and The Eulipion Chronicles, 2002 and 2003), which I haven’t seen, but Trans marks him as a promising filmmaker. Shot on 16mm stock, it’s about a 16-year-old’s adventures as police hunt him down after he escapes from juvenile detention lockup in southwest Florida, by way of a roadside work detail. He is desperately trying to get passage to somewhere in Colorado, to reunite with his mother, and now he has a gun. Goldberger wrote the script from an original story by himself, Michael A. Robinson and Martin Garner. This is the film that beat Adaptation to the swamps.

The film is divided into two parts: pre-flight and flight. Prior to his escape, along with two other boys on the work detail (who quickly ditch him), the focus is on the inhumanity at best, and the barbaric cruelty at worst, that detainees suffer in the state’s juvenile detention facility, which apparently exists only to punish and crush the spirit of young, vulnerable detainees. On the basis of the film’s restrained, unmelodramatic portrayal of life and discipline in the facility, I would say that the state is doing one helluva job.

One example of the regimen to which the boys are subjected is a daily morning roll call, where each, standing at attention, responds to his name as it is read by the officer in charge who is standing at the front of the room and, as part of this response, addresses the officer at least twice as “sir.” Horrifying. It’s understood that the boys aren’t permitted to “talk back” to the officer in charge, but of course it’s by “talking back” that kids learn to speak up, which they will need to know how to do if they ever are to become functioning citizens in a democracy. By-rote displays of humiliating respect: what might that teach them? This military-style obedience that the detainees are required to master is intended to counteract their lawless, egotistical ways. (Let’s face it: in the case of adolescents, especially boys, the distance between individualistic and “lawless” seldom requires much of a leap.) But the egotism of adolescence is a necessary means by which kids build, or invent, their individual personalities. There are indeed limits that society must impose on what people can and cannot do, and it may sometimes be necessary to be educative in this regard; but it’s hard to see how the boys here, including the protagonist, are being given either effective guidance or education. They’re simply being punished for being kids—a point stressed by the fact that we never learn the “reason” why any of them has been incarcerated. (Realistically, we know that their “crimes” are minimal, of the sort for which kids used to be spanked by parents, because the sad truth is that kids who today commit “serious” crimes are usually tried as adults.) And there is something else that’s resonant about the roll call. The officer in charge is an African American. The protagonist is white; his friends in detention are white. By the grace of the state employment system, a black man is given the opportunity, in a restricted setting, to oppress whites in a manner suggestive of the way that blacks are still being oppressed by the larger society in which whites, the majority, are in charge. The black officer is lucky to have a job, but regrettably the job diminishes his humanity by exploiting his capacity for meanness in general and racial vengeance in particular. Alas, whether consciously or unconsciously (or somewhere in between), U.S. society often proceeds in this way, turning groups of people against one another so that they miss the affinity of oppression that they share. Later, the same point is made positively rather than negatively when a group of black teens befriends the white boy on the lam, offering him a place to sleep, for example. His lack of racial bigotry is just one of so many behavioral things about the boy that endear him to us. He’s a good kid, and that makes all the more gripping and socially telling that we see him, because of the desperate situation he is in, turn into (with regards to a kind woman who gives him a ride, in part to assuage her own loneliness) a cold-hearted thief. Remember Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)?

The boy’s name is Ryan Kazinski. I love the ethnicity of this. (Would a Goldberger have it some other way?) I love the ethnicity of Kazinski because it blurs the boundary between inside and outside, “real American” and pariah. Moreover, this blurred boundary helps make explicable the shared dedication to hip hop among American youth, black and white and whatever else, that 8 Mile (Curtis Hanson, 2002) leaves unexplored and unexplained. Goldberger is analytical of this as a sidelight in his film; a white rap artist is at the center of 8 Mile, but the film never gets around to analyzing the phenomenon. Trans proceeds by analysis; 8 Mile, by sentimentality.

One of the most moving aspects of the film is Ryan’s relationship with his younger brother. Both are fatherless, and their mother is in Colorado, leaving the younger brother on his own now that Ryan is incarcerated. Their relationship covers both Ryan’s pre-flight phase and flight phase. We learn, from Ryan’s voiceover, that he nearly drowned his brother when they were both much, much younger; I suspect that Jon—I’ll call him that, because Ryan Daugherty plays Ryan Kazinski and his real-life brother, Jon Daugherty, plays Kazinski’s younger brother—is all the more devoted to his brother for that near-fatal event. In any case, Jon bicycles the long stretch to the detention facility to provide Ryan with cigarettes and, once, when Ryan is locked in solitary confinement (an underlit cell in which there’s nothing for him to do but go crazy), is turned away, as though he deserves to be punished along with his brother. Later, after he has escaped, Ryan visits Jon for a place to sleep before he tries setting off for Colorado; Jon, unable to have his brother stay for a spell during which he will again become too firmly attached to him, implores him to leave at once after beseeching him to turn himself in. State heads should roll for what we see children being put through here. (However, given that America is America or that, at least, Florida is Florida, those state heads will get medals.)

Even theft doesn’t provide Ryan with the means of making it by bus to Colorado. He ends up in the sky, in a private airplane, after the gun in his hand, at his side, convinces a freelancing pilot to take him up. (A lovely touch: Ryan, by the circumstance that the state has unfairly put him into, has become a thief; the gun that Ryan doesn’t use suggests, on the same basis, his capacity, as gentle as he is, if circumstances sufficiently provoke him, to become a murderer.) This event brings to a crystalline point Ryan’s fervid wish for freedom.

Unlike Antoine Doinel in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), from which Goldberger borrows, Ryan is an elemental character, not a complex one. Ryan’s odyssey, while distinctive and not trite, isn’t, like Doinel’s, massively moving. Nor can his flight borrow the resonance of the two Jewish schoolboys’ flight from authorities, after they have fled a train transporting them to a death camp, in Jan Němec’s agonizingly suspenseful Diamonds of the Night (1964). For the record, both Truffaut’s and Němec’s films, like Goldberger’s, were first features.

Apparently I’m in the minority in thinking that Ryan, shot by the police, is, in fact, expiring up in the plane. Regardless, being left there, as in the film he in fact is, more decisively, if lamely and less compellingly, in effect ends his life than the combination freeze frame-inward zoom “traps” Doinel, ending his life, at the seashore at the end of The 400 Blows.

We all have a right to be free—at least absent some compelling reason otherwise. Certain nations, like the United States, try too hard too often to deprive individuals under their power of the freedom that nature, reason, God, what-have-you, rightly and righteously insists they should have. Trans is a small film, but its theme is immense.

My description of the finale suggests the film is less than perfect. It is. It is a minor work, to say the least. Still, it’s an arresting, touching, splendidly executed piece of work. Trans deserves credit for being as good as it is. It won for Goldberger a prize at Berlin.

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