HEADING SOUTH (Laurent Cantet, 2005)

In the late 1970s Haiti attracted tourists from up north. Ellen, a Wellesley College professor, 55, has been finding her “Roman Spring” at a beach resort there for the past six years. Brenda, a 45-year-old divorcée from Savannah, nastily competes with Ellen for Legba, who, when he was 15 three years earlier, inspired Brenda’s first orgasm. Unbeknownst to Ellen and Brenda, because she is discreet, Sue, from Quebec, also shares a hotel bed with Legba, where at least he gets some sleep. Legba’s eventual murder may seem irrelevant; but Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud, from Dany Laferrière’s La chair du maître, draws a bracing connection between the 1915 U.S. occupation of Haiti and the corrupt, brutal regimes of Papa and Bébé Doc Duvalier half a century, and more, later.
     Ellen and Brenda embody selfish U.S. presumption. The former’s viewfinder shows a rear view of Legba, as he lies naked in her bed, that recalls the view of him that Brenda, freshly arrived, espies on the beach. This reduction of Legba to a mere image is underscored by two things: Brenda’s “love” for him because of the way he looks at her—a practiced look soliciting loot by which he helps his mother in her Port-au-Prince slum shack; the fact that Legba is the only main character denied a revealing personal monologue. In charge of the hotel restaurant, Albert moves beyond family history in his monologue: “This time, the [U.S.] invaders . . . have more dangerous weapons than cannons: dollars, so that everything they touch turns to garbage. The whole country is rotten.”
     Legba and a former native girlfriend, who is being kept, likely, by a Duvalier official, are murdered together—by her “guardian angel,” her master’s chauffeur. In the dead of night.
     This is Cantet’s strongest film.

THE BURGLAR (Valeri Ogorodnikov, 1987)

Valeri Ogorodnikov’s The Burglar (Vzlomshchik), which seemed lame to me when I first saw it many years ago (the Soviet Union still existed at the time), now seems worse—a formal mess that collapses at the finish into sappy, overwrought melodrama. Perhaps my main interest in movies is the nudging of fiction in the direction of documentary and the nudging of documentary in the direction of fiction. The Burglar should fascinate me, then, since it’s chock-full of documentary techniques that are applied to a work of fiction. For example, in two instances—an interview of a singer; the police interrogation of a pre-teen criminal—a discreet jump-cut effects the appearance of an edited television news piece. But to no avail, given the formulaic (non)resolution to which this film is headed.      Humanity is simply not part of Ogorodnikov’s mix. We have a father and two sons; their wife and mother died a year ago. The man drinks and holds his social life above the needs of his boys, one of whom, “the burglar,” lives at home; the other is a punk rock performer. They all live in (what was then) Leningrad. Presumably the father acts the way he does out of some sense of loss because of the death of his wife; we can supply that bit of humanity, but it is nowhere in the film—not in any bit of the mise-en-scène, not in any accent of the performance that the actor gives. The boy becomes a thief, stealing a synthesizer from a community center, in order to keep his brother from stealing it. That’s what he says, and we believe him; but he might as well be Coleridge’s Iago—actually, Shakespeare’s Iago is plenty motivated—for all the depth of indication of his motivation that the film provides. Perhaps Ogorodnikov simply couldn’t face the enormous pain inherent in his dramatic (and social) material, so, instead, he played with homages to Truffaut and Milos Forman and let the film devolve into a facsimile of Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story, two excrutiating Hollywood products. Above all, none of the intended poignancy of kids scrambling for some sense of their own identity and individuality in Gorbachev’s liberalized Russia filters through. This is not a good film, although (until the last cornball shot) it employs an exceptionally agile and alert camera.

TRILOGY (Lucas Belvaux, 2002)

The experimental narrative form of Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogy may be described as three overlapping circles of plot. The same event that’s central in one film may be peripheral in another; a character who is major here may be “supporting” there.
     The recycled cast of characters includes three schoolteachers: Cécile, who is married to hypochondriac Alain; Jeanne, who used to be the lover and sister radical of Bruno, the terrorist who has just escaped from prison after 15 years; Agnès, a morphine addict whose husband, Pascal, is a cop who, hunting down Bruno, must decide whether to kill him to keep a supply of morphine flowing from the crime boss who used to be Bruno’s ally. The first film, a comedy, is titled “Un couple épatant”; the second, “Cavale,” is a thriller; the last, “Après la vie,” a melodrama. Writer-director Belvaux has said that the three films, which don’t constitute a chronological series, can be viewed in any order.
     Each film is about what their marriage means to its participants. Noticing that on a specific Saturday Alain’s behavior changes and thus suspecting infidelity, Cécile asks co-worker Agnès’s spouse to check things out. Jeanne’s settled life, including spouse and kids, is her barrier against political disillusionment that Bruno’s escape threatens to crash. Morphine is the glue of Pascal and Agnès’s relationship; when Pascal can no longer express his love for her by providing it, because of the crime boss’s interference, Agnès takes to the streets in search of a fix; there, Bruno becomes her protector, and she his.
     Trilogy contests the stereotypical narrative tyranny that assigns certain characters greater importance and other characters lesser importance. Correlative to this, Belvaux argues for the equal importance of all our lives, each of which intersects the equally important lives of others.

THE RIDER NAMED DEATH (Karen Shakhnazarov, 2004)

“Terrorism is the triumph of the individual over the State.”
     Karen Shakhnazarov’s The Rider Named Death (Vsadnik po imeni Smert), from the novel that Boris Savinkov (Andrei Panin, excellent) based on his own experiences as the leader of a Socialist Revolutionary Party activist cell in 1905 Russia, concerns their terrorist activities in anticipation of the Bolshevik Revolution. What a bewitching film this is—one to whose assassination scenes the most agonizing slow motion I have seen is applied.
     One of the film’s finest aspects is its unearthing of a variety of motives for individuals to participate in a terrorist organization. But, above all, its fascination lies in the members’ interior conflicts—ambivalences of which even some of those racked by them aren’t conscious.
     The first half of this film proceeds by scenes; the second half, by shots. If you have had trouble explaining the difference to someone, this is the film you can use in order to experience a pedagogical breakthrough.
     Shakhnazarov has been making films for thirty years. This is the first one I have seen, however. His ability to project the fog of violence by creating a space pitched halfway between dream and reality is yet another of his accomplishments here.