IN THIS WORLD (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)

Michael Winterbottom’s In This World is a British film that follows two Afghan refugees, 16-year-old Jamal and older cousin Enayatullah, on their trek from Pakistan to England in search of freedom and a better life. The two leads play or just are themselves.
     The film’s nature is unclear. Is it documentary, or faux-documentary into which real events are interwoven? Regardless, Winterbottom’s use of digital cameras and in-the-moment technique achieve a sense of unfolding reality. The film also is an epic, taking up in the middle of things two adventurers who represent the aspirations of their war-shattered community. Instead of going home, though, the homeless pair are “returning” to where they have never been. Post-Marienbad, this becomes a metaphor for their wrenched, discombobulated lives.
     Early on, a narrator provides statistics pertaining to the human displacement that began with the Soviet war against Afghanistan and whose last wave of refugees the 2001 U.S. bombing generated. The film opens in the Shamshatoo refugee camp, where Jamal, an orphan, was born; earning a dollar a day at a local brick factory, he lives with his brothers and sisters. (About 58,000 refugees occupy this camp.) The “plot”—Enayat and Jamal’s westward journey—immerses them in the people-smuggling business: a representation of all the forces that conspire to exploit the misery of refugees.
     In This World is on-the-run through many transports through many cities, including Istanbul, Trieste and Paris. Along the way, Bressonian issues of risk and trust arise; so do stints in a sweatshop—rare sit-down scenes in an agitated film almost constantly on the move. The film’s most brilliant passage is nearly bereft of light; the image is degenerated to dots as a group of refugees, including Jamal and Enayat, scurry across hills as rounds of bullets are shot at them.

TEN (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Abbas Kiarostami’s experiment, in ten parts, consists of conversations between the driver of an automobile in Tehran—a taxi driver, I presume—and her front-seat passenger, recorded by two digital video cameras attached to the dashboard, one facing the driver, the other facing the passenger. In nearly every shot, therefore, we see either person, not both. (We also see an empty seat.)
     The driver, divorced, has remarried. Her first conversation is with Amin, her ten-year-old son. He lives with her. Obstreperous, he berates her for being a bad mother—one who cares more for her work than for him. He calls her selfish, “a stupid cow,” and alternates between throwing temper tantrums and lecturing her condescendingly in a dismissively calm manner. Amin’s mother is an independent woman contending with a child who chauvinistically sides with his father. (Because of Iran’s strict divorce laws, she tries to explain to her son, she had to lie at trial, accusing his father of taking drugs, in order to be granted the divorce.) In the second segment, the driver discusses the situation with her more traditional sister, with whom she is evidently close. They recall how as children they scolded their mother for working day and night.
     Five other women are among her other passengers. These include an older Islamic fundamentalist, an abandoned wife, a prostitute. Ten, then, is a docudrama in motion, for which Kiarostami wrote a script outlining the encounters, but for which the nonprofessional cast members improvised their own dialogue. It is a captivating study, on wheels, of Iranian gender politics, and of ways in which the country is changing and ways in which it has dug in its heels. It is also cumulative, in which the initially defensive driver is gradually driven to exposing and perhaps realizing her vulnerability.

HERE AND PERHAPS ELSEWHERE (Lamia Joreige, 2003)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Born in Beirut, Lamia Joreige returned there from France, where she has lived for twenty years, for her documentary inquiry Houna wa roubbama hounak, which takes its title from a 1976 Godard film, but which draws inspiration also from Chris Marker’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961), in which Parisian passers-by are asked “Are you happy?” Joreige’s question refers to Lebanon’s civil war (roughly, 1975-90), challenging her birth nation’s official amnesia on the topic (despite a loss of 150,000 lives, its history isn’t taught in Lebanese schools): “Do you know of anyone who was kidnapped from around here during the war?” Joreige travels the old line of demarcation between Muslim West Beirut and Christian East Beirut, prodding memories with her question. At each crossing or checkpoint, a freeze frame implies a residual impasse, war’s ongoing legacy. Late in the film Joreige reveals her own family’s stake in her inquiry into wartime disappearances at the hands of militias.
     About faces, fears and the heartache of survivors, hers is one of the most intensely moving films I have seen. Some interviewees recall the abduction and disappearance of neighbors; others, of loved ones. Some open up, responding with a torrent of recollection; others, wary, hesitate or even stonewall the question, some defiantly, others apologetically. The psychological scars of war achieve a heartrending metaphor when a man reveals the scar from his open-heart surgery following a medical condition that he attributes to the loss of a son in the war.
     Occasionally from the periphery of the gaze of Joreige’s hand-held video camera we see young children. François Truffaut once wrote that children should appear in films only if love is expressed for them. Never have I experienced a film that shows a deeper love for children than Here and Perhaps Elsewhere.

DANCER IN THE DARK (Lars von Trier, 2000)

Critic Gavin Smith has called Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark the first “genuinely tragic musical.” While I think G. W. Pabst’s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931) qualifies as that almost seventy years sooner, Dancer in the Dark is neither the frivolous escapism (think Singin’ in the Rain) nor sentimental garbage (think West Side Story) that accounts for the vast majority of musical films. Although its deviation from some of the guidelines that Trier himself devised cost it Dogme 95 certification (the protagonist’s musical fantasies contest the rule requiring objective reality; the film is set in the past), Dancer applies its alert, light-sensitive handheld video camera to dark, substantial stuff. It’s like a demented cross between I Want to Live! (Robert Wise, 1958) and—Dreyer is Trier’s spiritual mentor—Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). One might call it Breaking the Waves in Song and Dance.
     In early 1960s America, in rural Washington state, Czech immigrant Selma Jezkóva is a workhorse in a wash-basin factory saving her earnings to pay for an operation that might keep her twelve-year-old son, Gene, from inheriting the same disease that’s causing her own advancing blindness. The single mother had come to America, her heart set on redeeming herself from parental guilt by reversing Gene’s prognosis, and her mind full of Hollywood musicals, which continue to be her one outlet for entertainment. However, she had hoped to find the U.S., also, as light, attractive and hospitable as the musical films had made it seem; now, to escape the drudgery of heavy precision labor, she “spaces out” into reveries of these films, where, magically, she is sometimes the star. (She is also rehearsing the part of Maria in an amateur production of The Sound of Music.) These passages, among the film’s high points, address the role of popular culture in American society as palliative for the harshness, cruelty and unfairness of American life; the almost primitive simplicity of the songs and the dances exposes the insufferable ordeal that Jezkóva finds entangling and strangling her.
     Selma isn’t alone in struggling. Her landlord, the local sheriff, reverses his kindness, stealing her savings, under the strain of his own strapped financial resources—a condition he hides from his wife much as Selma hides her failing eyesight, especially at work. Eventually, at his urging, she kills the sheriff. No one believes this suicide-by-proxy; Selma is tried, convicted and hanged for theft and murder. Having refused to convert the money she stole back into payment for an appeals lawyer, she dies believing that her sacrifice will best help her son.
     Heaven knows whether this is correct; Gene becomes an orphan. On the other hand, American stupidity and prejudice suggest that no attorney, however skilled, could reverse Selma’s legal fortunes. Americans, Trier insists, are as blind and deaf to the truth as the Scottish villagers in Breaking the Waves (1996).
     Trier’s Dancer vividly conveys the crushing monotony, and also the constant danger, of factory work. Moreover, like Dreyer’s Passion, Trier’s film splendidly illustrates the possibility of autonomy and moral action even when a multitude of victimizing forces are arrayed against one. Trier has also mounted one of cinema’s most powerful, heartrending indictments of capital punishment; the irony that the U.S. still adheres to this practice of state murder is a sad coda we ourselves can add to the film’s statement. Another asset is that Björk, Sjón Sigurdsson, Thom Yorke and Trier himself have composed and written the most haunting film songs since Friedrich Holländer’s for Marlene Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948). As usual, Trier is amazing with actors, in this instance drawing even from the usually clueless Catherine Deneuve good, solid acting as Kathy, Selma’s co-worker and friend. Most triumphantly, Trier has guided his first-time (and, she says, last-time) film star, Björk, through one of the most enchanting and deeply affecting performances in cinema. The Icelandic pop singer fully deserves her many accolades, including best actress at Cannes, the European Film Awards, the Bodil Festival and, here, from the National Board of Review.

BREAKING THE WAVES (Lars von Trier, 1996)

From Denmark, Sweden and elsewhere, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves is singularly un-Dogmetic. Each chapter introduction includes recorded rock music, accompanied by a gorgeous bit of computer-enhanced Nature imagery. Moreover, the film is ultimately headed toward the supernatural and special effects. The offspring of atheists, Trier considers himself religious, but in the humanistic manner of his idol, Carl Theodor Dreyer.
     In a northern Scottish village, Bess McNeil meets and marries a Danish oil-rig worker, Jan, with whom she shares great sex. Bereft when he returns to work, she prays to God for his permanent return. God seems to answer her prayer in a way that exploits her innocence; a broken neck directs Jan’s return, confining him to a hospital bed, and they are no longer able to have sex. Increasingly she has out-loud, abrupt conversations with God, and she adheres also to her husband’s voice, which directs her to have sex with others for his vicarious pleasure. Thus begins Bess’s descent into a world of danger and degradation that isolates her from family and community, turning them cruelly against her, while welding her to her vows.
     Powerful, abrasive, challenging, Trier’s film questions whether sex sublimates religious experience to the same degree that religion sublimates sex. Its hand-held camera usage testifies to the roughness, the unsettledness, of human experience out in the world and in the heart. It explores the possibility of a chasm between God’s formal reception and messy reality. Bess’s pipeline to what she believes is God’s presence may be moving her in the direction of a marvelous redemption. Her example illumines the current fate of pure faith.
     As light as spirit, this extraordinary film shows spiritual wonders permeating our modern world. Its centerpiece is Emily Watson’s awesome performance as Bess.