THE FORSAKEN LAND (Vimukthi Jayasundara, 2005)

I have added the following entry to my 100 Greatest Asian Films list.

Recurrent civil war since 1983 in Sri Lanka has had a devastating effect on the land and its people. Writer-director Vimukthi Jayasundara was both rewarded and censured for his Kiarostaminian Sulanga Enu Pinisa, winning the Caméra d’Or (for best first feature) at Cannes and being warned by his government to make films praising the national military rather than criticizing it. In 2009, another film by Jayasundara, Ahasin Wetei, was released.
     Embedded in the opening credits is a long-shot of an armed soldier at night in a vast barren landscape. In a bravura long-shot the next day, a woman and a girl both aim to board a bus. The woman is walking leisurely across a field to the bus stop; the girl is on the road, running fast to reach the stop and not be left behind. She makes it; the woman gives her a lift up. Like most of Jayasundara’s images, this one is poetic, ambiguous and emotionally sweeping. We see the shared experience of two anonymous characters and something more elusive: the possibility that both are the same character, at different stages of her life, doubly inhabiting the same haunted frame. We eventually learn that the two are aunt and niece. In another long-shot a stripped-naked man is tossed into the river by fellow soldiers; a solitary bird perches on the branch of a bare, solitary tree. The bird flies off, but either another bird or the same one lands on the tree. Odd-man-out; two birds or one: both aspects of the mise-en-scène strangely connect. Both niece and aunt, the soldier’s daughter and sister, are subsequently referred to as “Little Bird.”
     Episodic, elliptical, minimalist, powerful, Jayasundara’s near-speechless film includes marital infidelity, unwanted sexual attentions, two suicides, a graphic scene of torture, a grotesque military murder.

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PONETTE (Jacques Doillon, 1996)

Writer-director Jacques Doillon, who is the father of three girls, to his everlasting disgrace made Ponette, a pornographic exploitation of a four-year-old’s coping with the death (by road accident) of her mother. It’s a piece of “sensitive” trash.
     Preposterously, Victoire Thivisol won best actress at Venice; the child does nothing but react as she has been directed to. There is no “performance” here, good or bad.
     There is the possibility, I guess, of a theme: the collision between Catholic education (as a child processes it) and the reality of such a loss as Ponette has suffered. It is momentarily interesting that a peer should assail grief-stricken Ponette with the nonsense that God must have taken her mother as a consequence of her, Ponette’s, bad behavior.
     There is a heartless, despicable passage where Ponette receives some sort of compensation for her loss of her mother. The latter appears to Ponette, and to us, in the flesh. Such cruelty as Doillon’s is impossible for me to process. One is left to wonder just who responds to this sort of film.
     The New York Film Critics Circle named Ponette best foreign-language film of the year.

SECOND CIRCLE (Aleksandr Sokurov, 1990)

What, if anything, does Aleksandr Sokurov’s Krug vtoroy have to do with Dante’s second circle of Hell, to which those who lusted, such as Francesca and her brother-in-law, are consigned? Regardless, the film is visually transparent, with its color repressed almost to the point of monochrome. This is, after all, a film in which a young man attends to the details of burying his father. This includes a draining confrontation with insensible bureaucracy. The colors, then, suit a consciousness steeped in a sense of mortality, without recourse to the spirituality that might enable the man to bring his grief to fruition and retain a sense of an indestructible spiritual bond with his father. Sokurov, of course, intends a criticism of the Soviet Union, which hasn’t been hospitable to Russia’s historic Orthodox Christianity. In something of a visual coup, Sokurov conjoins his wan colors with deep contrasts of light and dark, thus managing simultaneously to suggest a suppression of spirit and the attendance of spirit that is being suppressed! Films do not get more formally brilliant than this.
     The pre-credit opening is staggering. Walking towards the camera, the man proceeds through a whited-out landscape during a blizzard. When it grows more intense, the dark figure crouches to withstand the storm. The sound of the storm continues as the credits appear. Thus Sokurov stresses the primacy of the individual, while the storm suggests the social and political forces arrayed against the individual that deny this primacy. We may well imagine as we watch the opening that we are looking directly at the spirit of the man.
     For me, though, this is an arid, arduous film that only too successfully realizes its formal/thematic aims. The protagonist’s Kafkaesque ordeal of getting Father buried is painfully rendered in painstaking detail.