LA PETITE JERUSALEM (Karin Albou, 2005)

Teenaged college student Laura works the nightshift as a janitor in a school. Hers is an Orthodox Jewish family living in a suburban Paris ghetto: her sister, Mathilde; their mother, a Tunisian immigrant; Mathilde’s husband, Ariel; Mathilde and Ariel’s four young children. Their occupation of cramped quarters is perhaps the visual aspect of La petite Jérusalem’s material that writer-director Karin Albou handles best. Closeups of family members passing one another in narrow corridors of their shared apartment contribute to a portrait of emotional and intellectual suffocation. This means that the film is keyed to the subjectivity of a single character: Laura, who prefers Kant to the Torah, and with whom, she has stated, Albou especially identifies. One must add that Albou, whose father is Jewish, is herself a convert to Judaism.
     Unfortunately Laura, who is charming, is far from being the most interesting character. We see little evidence of Laura’s commitment to philosophy beyond her daily “philosopher’s walks,” patterned on a piece of Kant’s own habitual behavior, and her romance with a Muslim boy strikes me as convenient and schematic. Laura chooses to remain behind in Paris after Ariel decides for the others that they are moving to Israel. We see Laura in profile advancing, as if on an airport electric conveyor, and back projection shows life quickly passing in the opposite direction. The impression is pointlessly, frustratingly ambiguous. Is Laura going forward with her solitary, independent Parisian life? Is she joining her family in Israel?
     More interesting than Laura is her sexually repressed sister, who tries expanding her capacity for sexual pleasure to curb Ariel’s infidelity. Albou isn’t quite up to keeping Mathilde’s expanding pleasure from seeming like more subjugation to Ariel’s prerogatives; but I wish Albou had explored this material more fully.

LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA (Chantal Äkerman, 1978)

Parisian Belgian-born Chantal Äkerman’s most emotionally exacting film, Anna’s Meetings, centers on Parisian Belgian-born filmmaker Anna Silver. Her arrival in Germany to show a film occasions the static, symmetrical, long-held opening shot of a vacant train station stairwell. A train finally pulls in at the opposite platform; eventually, before the train continues, out of the right-hand lower corner of the screen a swarm of humanity appears and descends the stairs. Patient, orderly, by contrast with the platform’s rigid design these people are a teeming mess! They disappear down below, eventually followed by the independent filmmaker, all alone in a foreign country. Äkerman’s stand-in speaks French slowly, Germans speak French haltingly to her, both to be understood.
     Anna has come together with a soul for the lonely night: Heinrich Schneider (Helmut Griem, heart-piercing), a schoolteacher. In bed, Anna aborts their awkward foreplay (“We don’t love each other”) but visits Heinrich and his five-year-old daughter on her birthday in Bottrop, during which time Schneider reports his wife’s abandonment, a fellow schoolteacher’s denouncement and discharge for being “anti-social,” and laments Germany’s twentieth-century history: “What will become of [my country]?” We add our own perspective and answer, “Reunification.”
     It grates that Heinrich doesn’t acknowledge the Holocaust. In Cologne, Anna next visits Ida, a Polish Jewish friend and war refugee, who remarks: “We have no family [in Germany anymore]. They’re either dead or all scattered.” Holocaust, diaspora. Äkerman herself is Jewish.
     For all the solidity of subway station stairs, this film is about transients/transience: the bluish landscape fleeing outside the window on the train to Cologne.
     In this episodic film denoting a fractured Europe, Anna cannot commit romantically as she tries coming to grips with her lesbianism. “In transit”—which much of the film is—translates into transience.
     Searing.