WHEN FATHER WAS AWAY ON BUSINESS (Emir Kusturíca, 1985)

The Informbiro period in Yugoslavia began with the rupture between Tito, the nation’s dictator, and Stalin in 1948. It was a politically slippery, dangerous time. In 1950 a sarcastic remark that Mesa Zolj makes to his mistress about a published political cartoon reaches the attention of Zijo, a Party official, who is both the woman’s lover and Mesa’s wife’s brother. Without trial, without even being informed of the charge against him, Mesa must leave family behind in Sarajevo and serve undisclosed time in a work-prison camp in Zvornik. Sena, Mesa’s wife, tells their two young sons that their father is away on business.
     Warm, funny, deeply moving, Emir Kusturíca’s Otac na sluzbenom putu is rich in family feeling, including the pain of estrangement between Sena and Zijo. Sometimes six-year-old Malik is at the center of the narrative; in his father’s absence Malik starts to sleepwalk, requiring a bell to be tied to a string that’s tied to his toe. (The film abounds with historical metaphors.) However, the film isn’t limited to the perspective of children. It also encompasses the turbulent emotions of grownups, although they also are often in a fog of ignorance, if not quite innocence, as to what is happening.
     Eventually Mesa’s family is permitted to join him in Zvornik. Eventually Mesa is released. Before the family returns to Sarajevo, Malik’s girlfriend, the daughter of a Russian Jewish exile, is sent to hospital, where she dies: a medical parallel to the political disappearances that Malik’s father exemplifies. Life goes on, and sometimes it doesn’t, as indeed would be the case in a free country; but in one not free, like Yugoslavia, everything seems colored by the dark trance in which everyone’s waking hours are embedded.
     The performances are superb.

THE SUN’S BURIAL (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)

A nobler sequel of sorts to his Cruel Story of Youth, Nagisa Oshima’s Taiyo no hakaba studies hopeless, desperate, violent youth in an Osaka slum and their interactions with older gangsters who control the neighborhood. Oshima launched the Japanese New Wave the preceding year, a Leftist filmmaking movement focusing on Japan’s social and economic dislocations and demoralization as a result of its defeat in the Second World War and subsequent U.S. military occupation.
     In the neighborhood human blood is procured in exchange for food and clothing and then profitably sold to industry, primarily cosmetic companies. This sounds like a metaphor, and it certainly becomes that in the film; but Western audiences need to know that this was an actual illegal racket in Japan fostered by poverty and starvation and donors’ exploitation by greedy criminals and youth who also were poor and starving.
     As the title suggests, the flaming sun, Japan’s national symbol, figures prominently in the film, but as a setting or dying sun rather than a rising one. In one shot, such a sun is glimpsed by nobody (but us) from the perspective of a hole into which a gang victim’s corpse has been tossed. The film concludes with arson that razes the neighborhood—an inferno likened to the atomic destruction by which the U.S. ended the war.
     Some viewers take the dehumanized characters—constantly they killingly turn on one another—as evidence of Oshima’s inhumanity rather than as commentary on forces that dehumanize humanity. Where is the humanity? In Oshima’s visual poetry—for instance, the weariness of gray skies that distills the sadness and wreckage of these human lives.
     A bit overheated, the film is nevertheless trenchant. Its worthiness becomes especially clear when it’s compared with Hollywood’s syrupy-sentimental West Side Story (1961).

NOUVELLE VAGUE (Jean-Luc Godard, 1990)

“But I wanted this to be a narrative. I still do. Nothing from outside to distract memory.” The futuristic voiceover of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vertigo-film New Wave confounds; its statement opposing interruption is itself an interruption. Roger Lennox’s hard-luck life is interrupted by an automobile heedlessly driven by Elena, a rich businesswoman. “Are you in pain?” she asks. A hand of each reaches through spacious sky (and time?) to touch the other. Elena might as well ask, “Are you in the moment or memory? Alive or dead?” She as easily could be asking herself these questions.
     Characters walk back and forth. In this film, people pace that way outdoors. Indoors, the camera itself tracks back and forth between different sets of characters, the conversation of one set superimposed on the image of another, and the voices of different sets interrupted—or united?—by voiceover. Roger challenges Elena (who has taken him in and become his lover) with the reality of other people, including his, that her self-absorption keeps her from believing in. “Is my brother real?” has replaced “Am I my brother’s keeper?” as a central moral question.
     In a way we also wonder, given Roger’s restrained voice and philosophical detachment. Did Roger actually die as a result of the road accident? (Elena confesses, to him, “remorse.”) Eventually Roger is goaded into mountain water by Elena, who knows he cannot swim and watches him drown. Whose consciousness this water?: his; Elena’s; ours; Godard’s; Roger’s brother Richard’s? Richard, his brother’s identical twin, proves the more aggressive, volatile. He takes over the business. Inserted shots of the Swiss drowning lake haunt the film, which includes another outstretched hand, another drowning.
     Or does it? Resurrection? Second chance?
     We do not “live life.” We navigate its competing claims. Or drown.