THE SEASON OF MEN (Moufida Tlatli, 2000)

The inferiority of Arab women is maintained by their men as a matter of prerogative but also by the women themselves who hand down their traditional lot to their daughters. Aicha, in Moufida Tlatli’s very quiet, magnificent Maussim al-riyal, is different. Aicha contests husband Said’s “rule,” providing a positive example to their daughters, Meriem and Emna; yet the principal arena in which she asserts herself, ironically, ties her to those traditions of male authority she chafes against. Eleven months out of the year Said lives in Tunis, selling rugs, while wife and daughters remain together on the island of Djerba. Aicha bucks tradition by petitioning her husband to join him in Tunis—a radical step toward self-determination that nonetheless reinforces Said’s centrality in her firmament. Said relents, saying she can join him if she stops giving him daughters and does what she is supposed to do: give him a son. But the boy she bears him, dear, increasingly uncontrollable Aziz, is autistic. This isn’t the outcome Said bargained for. When the marriage disintegrates, Aicha takes her offspring to Said’s closed-up family house that, contrary to her hopes for a fresh start, reawaken her memories of earlier misery there—memories I’ve already highlighted, to which one must add Aicha’s mother-in-law from hell. Attracting others, Aicha comes to head a commune of female joy and suffering.
     From Tunisia, the film tightly weaves together—with thin or invisible transitions—past and present. Both Aicha’s daughters appear to extend their mother’s misguided (because male-fixated) jab at feminism, one by her love affair with a married man, and the other by her continued postponement of sexual relations with her spouse. A visual refrain shows Aicha weaving carpets. Shots of her face through the machine suggest her ongoing imprisonment.

YOU ARE WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE AND FOUND WANTING (Lino Brocka, 1974)

Conjoining a coming-of-age tale with a social melodrama, Tinimbang ka ngunit kulang is likely to remind some of Carson McCullers, although the adolescent protagonist here is a boy and the self-righteous resolution of the plot is far afield of McCullers’ humanity and sensitivity. Be forewarned: the biblical title, from the Book of Daniel, refers to “Junior,” a teenaged schoolboy, not to God, but we are creepily led to believe that this boy’s at least tentative judgments against the inhabitants of his Filipino village coincide with God’s. Until this resolution the film, written by Mario O’Hara from his novel and directed by Lino Brocka, is intermittently affecting (and as often irritating), but the finish kills everything. With vivid use of subjective camera as Junior makes his way through a crowd and judges every person in sight, the film ends in a dirty wash of moralism. Writer and director apparently share Junior’s and the camera’s point of view.
     In the course of this long film, Junior learns that his father, Cesar (Eddie Garcia, giving the one good, restrained performance), is an adulterous lecher; similar revelations pertaining to what goes on behind closed doors (such as wife-beating) in this Roman Catholic village complete Cesar Jr.’s moral education. Because of his sanctified perception of reality, we are to assume, the boy, becoming more and more of an outsider himself, is drawn to the village’s two outcasts, the leper Berto (played pitifully by O’Hara) and the homeless, mentally ill Kuala, whom he closely befriends. When Kuala becomes pregnant with Berto’s child, the village kills Berto’s dog and, eventually, Berto. The film ends with Kuala dead as well and the baby in Junior’s arms—although where he is taking the newborn is anyone’s guess.

THE ISLAND (Kaneto Shindô, 1960)

A far superior work to his tacky Onibaba (1964), Kaneto Shindô’s Hadaka no shima—Naked Island—chronicles the existence of a peasant family living on a small Japanese island. In solemnly gorgeous black and white (the cinematographer is Kiyomi Kuroda), the film proceeds without dialogue in profound quiet that’s punctured by ambient sounds. The sounds are precious for the human life that they reflect by their being heard (by the family members, by us), while the interwoven quiet and silence focuses attention on the routine activities in which the family is engaged. Two things, in reality one, emerge: a song of labor; a song of survival.
     The best part of the film is its first movement. Husband and wife row to the main island in their group of islands to draw water from the communal reservoir: water used for irrigating their dry, mountainous farmland, bathing, drinking. Laboriously they carry the water in pails on their backs once they return to their island; when the wife rows their older boy to school on the main island, she draws more water and returns with it. We are watching a routine. The camera records her flipflopped feet as she climbs as carefully as is humanly possible so as not to spill a drop. When she does spill a drop, her husband dutifully smacks her across the face. She doesn’t flinch, and they get on with their work. Husband and both sons get to bathe before dinner; wife bathes afterwards, wearing an unaccustomed smile, in the dark.
     Indeed, the routines that Hadaka no shima observes with documentary precision are fully fleshed out. Shindô’s film is unlike Hiroshi Teshigahara’s inhuman Woman of the Dunes (1964) with its schematic evocation of the myth of Sisyphus. Regrettably, what might have been a masterpiece disintegrates into plot (the catch of a prize fish; a son’s death). But one recalls the opening movement—and the seasonal divisions, such as the breathtaking burst of cherry blossoms.

THE DOE BOY (Randy Redroad, 2001)

Exquisitely photographed by Laszlo Kadar, beautifully acted by James Duval as 17-year-old Hunter Kirk, The Doe Boy is Randy Redroad’s remarkable feature debut. The film is, I understand, semi-autobiographical.
     In an Oklahoma town in the mid-1980s, Hunter exists between cultures; his father is white, his mother, Cherokee. Hunter plainly identifies more with his Cherokee heritage; he is close to his mother and closer to his maternal grandfather than to his father, who, embittered about much that hasn’t panned out in his life, is one more “stupid fucking white man” (Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch, 1995). But Hank and Maggie Kirk are a loving couple, and they both cherish their Hunter, who is even more of an outsider for being a “bleeder,” a hemophiliac, who now may have AIDS as a result of his routine transfusions.
     Sometimes this moody boy seems to be daring the world, or at least someone or other in it, to give him a bloody nose. When the only other hemophiliac Native American in Oklahoma dies of AIDS, Hunter is terrified, dissolving in tears in his father’s arms: one of several gut-wrenching scenes. At the same time, new possibilities in his life have just turned up: he has moved into his own apartment and has a first girlfriend.
     Hunter confronts his fear in the setting of his greatest shortfall: the woods where, as a child accompanying his father on a hunting outing, he shot to death a doe, mistaking it for a buck. Thus his nickname, Doe Boy. The film charts Hunter’s working his way through the stigma of a disastrous past. Instumental in this regard is his grandfather’s flute, which offers more hope for his future than his father’s gun.
     Hunter learns how to pry life from the shadow of death.