MY KID COULD PAINT THAT (Amir Bar-Lev, 2007)

Amir Bar-Lev, whose Fighter (2001) followed two Holocaust survivors along the route by which one of them escaped from a Nazi death camp, has now made a dazzling, even more brilliant documentary. (In Binghamton—near where I went to college.)
     The “star” of My Kid Could Paint That is Marla Olmstead, who started painting when she was 2, and whose abstract oils by the time she was 4 had taken in $300,000. A worldwide phenomenon, Marla fell into disrepute—or, rather, her parents fell there—when a 60 Minutes piece anchored by Charlie Rose assailed her work, through an “expert,” as fraudulent. Bar-Lev, who at that point had already begun shooting this film, wants to believe, he says, that Marla’s work is her own.
     Documenting Marla’s creation of a painting from start to finish would seem to resolve the matter—except that the result is vastly inferior to other work that Marla has signed, which evidences defter, more intricate brushwork.
     Bar-Lev is close to irresistible as he painfully plumbs and weighs “the truth,” especially against his own need to “impose” some sort of “story” on his material. Marla herself is certainly irresistible; throughout, Bar-Lev expresses his love for children, not only with Marla, but with her equally adorable younger brother. But one must feel disconcerted when Marla begs her father for assistance with a painting as though she is used to asking for his help; and Marla’s mother, Laura, becomes almost a figure of evil as she dissolves into fluent tears at Amir’s suggestion of something being amiss and in the next breath, incredibly, asserts that crying isn’t something she normally does.
     Bar-Lev, with agile visual wit, punctures the Olmsteads’ self-serving self-portrait by devising painted/animated backgrounds for scenes of their “realistic” li[v]es.

WOMAN OF THE YEAR (George Stevens, 1942)

The best Tracy-Hepburn films are George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib (1949) and Frank Capra’s State of the Union (1948), and they owe more to Judy Holliday and Angela Lansbury than to the lead pair. The worst film Tracy and Hepburn made together is the vapid, sentimental visual atrocity Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967). Their first film, the one in which all the sparks between them are visibly fresh, is Woman of the Year, which George Stevens directed from Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner, Jr.’s Oscar-winning script.
     Sam Craig and Tess Harding work for the same newspaper as a sports reporter and an international affairs commentator. The two fall in love, marry, and simple Sam thus moves into Tess’s complicated world. They separate, but Tess sets out to win Sam back by proving she’s “yar”—oh, I’m getting Hepburn movies mixed up!
     This isn’t exactly a bad movie, although (typically for Stevens) it is a slow, long one. It has its amusing moments, such as when Sam explains a baseball game to Tess and she (sort of) catches on. But like many good moments in this trying movie, it’s canceled, here, by the explanation that we’re fighting in World War II to preserve baseball as the encapsulation of the American way of life. Hm.
     The film’s principal weakness is Katharine Hepburn. (The film is less reliant on Tracy’s even worse performance.) Hepburn, radiant and Rita Hayworth-level gorgeous, isn’t willing to poke around in the mental muck of Tess’s strident use of her sexuality to get her way. Too high-toned to explore Tess’s pathology, Hepburn keeps her performance rarified.
     Fay Bainter does the best acting as Tess’s feminist aunt who (like Gloria Steinem) comes to marriage late. First things first.

BARAN (Majid Majidi, 2001)

Without doubt the worst Iranian film I have seen, but an art house success here nevertheless, Baran was written and directed by Majid Majidi. This is distressing; I very much liked Majidi’s The Color of Paradise (Rang-e khoda, 1999), although that also was largely a storytelling film and, hence, of greatly limited interest when compared with recent Iranian masterworks by Abbas Kiarostami and others.
     Distributed in the States by Buena Vista, Baran is, alas, a Disney film to its bone. It reeks of selfconscious sensitivity—rather like the later Afghan film Osama (Siddiq Barmak, 2003), another trier of intelligence and patience. And it’s just as cold and muted as Osama. Baran also wears its cornball quasi-humanistic message on its sleeve. Can’t we just all get along?
     Those in conflict on this occasion, in Iran, are Kurds and Afghan refugees, the result of the Soviet Union’s war against Afghanistan. The premise of the film is that a young Kurd worker is replaced at his construction work site by a young, illegal Afghan, relegating him to being the “tea boy” who buys and brews tea and dispenses it to the laborers at the site. The Kurd, Lateef, is resentful, and he tries everything to ruin the Afghan’s work record, which is poor, in fact, even on its own account. Rahmat, this Afghan, isn’t strong enough to lug 50-pound bags of cement, as his job requires. In fact, Rahmat isn’t really Rahmat at all, but Baran, a girl disguised as a boy because the income from this job is necessary for her family’s survival. (Osama would also turn on a Yentl masquerade.) When Lateef learns from spying the truth about Rahmat, he falls in love with Baran, and this shifts his whole perspective. Instead of her scourge, he becomes the Afghan girl’s protector.
     For me, the silent, anonymous romantic feelings that Lateef comes to harbor are absurd. One doesn’t fall in love with someone simply on the basis of the person’s gender. There has to be something in particular about Baran that draws Lateef’s heart to her. As it happens, we are left to conclude that Baran’s plight is the principal attraction—a possibility that numbs the whole idea of love. Wouldn’t it have been a more reasonable premise that Lateef fell in love with Baran while still believing she was Rahmat? This would not have been much better, but it would have admitted at least some basis in the reality of human emotions. “Oh, you’re a girl, I love you!” “Oh, you’re a suffering girl, I love you!” I cannot accept either of these possibilities.
     There are informative long-shots of the building site as the laborers go about their work, but the central drama is specious. Let me make one more point: It’s impossible to believe that anyone in the film, much less everyone, was fooled into believing that Rahmat is a boy. The casting of a pretty boy in the role of Lateef isn’t the help that the filmmakers may have counted on, because the difference in appearance between a pretty boy and a pretty girl is vast and deep.