GAN (Ruthie Shatz, Adi Barash, 2003)

From Israel and Canada, Garden is a deeply affecting film because of the loving friendship of the two homeless boys, gay male prostitutes in Tel Aviv, that the film documents, the harshness of their circumstance and the courage with which they daily face this, and the extraordinary degree of trust that filmmakers Ruthie Shatz and Adi Barash drew from them, as reflected in the boys’ openness to the camera. One cannot easily shake off this brilliant film.
     How did the boys come to where they are? “You’re free,” the voiceover of one explains; “No one asks you where you’re going, where you’re coming from, what you do or don’t do.” (All this turns out to be untrue.) The other’s voiceover: “I gotta pay rent.” (“I don’t get into those cars willingly. . . . I have to, to live.”) Dudu, 18, is an Arab Israeli; Nino, 17, a Palestinian, tries securing a permit that will allow him to stay in Israel—a complicated matter. Both come from abusive homes; once, Nino tried going home, but (wrongly) suspecting him of collaborating with Israelis, the Palestinian secret police interceded and shot him up, abundantly scarring him. “Your pocket is your only friend,” someone says; but Dudu and Nino share a heartrending friendship. (They are not lovers.) Dudu accompanies Nino by train to the reformatory (Nino has beaten up and robbed someone and tried selling drugs to an undercover cop); Nino encourages Dudu to stop using heroin.
     At one point, a social worker in an outreach van asks Nino if he has many dreams. Nino: “Not a lot, but a lot of running away from things.”
     And there are matters not specific to them with which the boys also must contend. “What happened?” Nino casually asks Dudu. “Another suicide bombing?”

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PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (Peter Weir, 1975)

An occasion for mystery develops from a private girls’ school Valentine’s Day picnic excursion to Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia, in 1900: three of the girls and one of the chaperoning teachers vanish. “Nobody knows what happened.”
     Actually, the film opens with a wide-angle shot of a dreamy landscape and the voiceover of one of the girls who will disappear, Miranda: “What we see, and what we dream/ Are but a dream—a dream within a dream.” This is a misquotation of lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “A Dream Within a Dream.” Ironically, another student, Sara, is not allowed to participate in the picnic because she has failed to learn the lines of another, obscure assigned poem. Headmistress Mrs. Appleyard informs the orphan, “I expect you to be word-perfect in half an hour.” Earlier, Miranda warned Sara that she mustn’t be so attached to her, because she, Miranda, will soon be gone.
     Based on a novel by Joan Lindsay that owes nothing to anything that ever happened (despite the contrary myth that has become attached to the film), Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is full of references to the Fall myth. There is Mrs. Appleyard’s name. There is her warning to the girls before they depart for Hanging Rock not to climb up once there and to be on the lookout for “venomous snakes and poisonous ants.” All in white, including gloves, the girls are a picture of innocence; a sentimental teacher, chaperoning at Hanging Rock, calls Miranda a Botticelli angel. Once watches have inexplicably stopped at noon, the teacher will follow four of the girls up to Hanging Rock. Except for one girl, Edith, who comes tearing down in horror, the barefooted others disappear.
     Artfully composed and edited, Weir’s somewhat labored film weaves a fragile, haunting spell. There are telling juxtapositions; after a resting girl says, “We may be the only creatures in the world,” a closeup of ants disputes her inadvertent allusion to the Fall myth. Stunning image: a high overhead shot of the young climbers making their way through a narrow vaginal crevasse.
     The school’s downward spiral, culminating in Appleyard’s suicide, feels protracted, stodgy, predictable—and lifted from Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour.
     Hanging Rock is a sacred Aboriginal place. On one level, the deaths and their aftermath symbolize white guilt for the European rape of native Australia.

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THE REVOLUTIONARY (Paul Williams, 1970)

Jon Voight, brilliant, is A—as in Josef A., which rhymes with Josef K.—in the Kafkaesque The Revolutionary, adapted by Hans Koningsberger from his own novel. The film, though shot in London, is populated by Americans; the exact setting is inexact: “somewhere in the free world.” A is a philosophy student, suspended for politics, whose radical activism culminates in a stunning freeze frame that locks him into a limbo of perpetual uncertainty and ambivalence: Will A carry out his backup mission of killing an anti-labor judge? This would be A’s first homicide for the cause.
     Paul Williams—this is not the same person as the lyricist—had already directed Voight, who plays an amiable high school jock, in Out of It; now, post-Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969), he gave the tall, hunky actor the part of a bespectacled intellectual with a sense of history, who yearns to educate his fellow radicals as well as share their commitment. It would remain Voight’s best performance.
     That would be achievement enough. But Williams conveys a lost and achingly lonely life, amidst poverty and hectic activity—a world pitched between the existential and the satirical. Although Williams has made films since, it says something terrible about the American film industry that an artist capable of such a visionary work as this should have fallen into obscurity. Moreover, Williams made this sober, thoughtful, substantial film at a time when numerous silly, exploitive films about politicized, disaffected people, mostly teens and twentysomethings, were being made.
     The passage in which A and an older compatriot hijack a pawnshop, giving back items for free to owners and paying money for new items while allowing the owners to keep their possessions, is tonally remarkable. The radicals’ attempt at giddiness doesn’t come off—pointedly.

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BLISSFULLY YOURS (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2001)

From Thailand, the lovely, brimming Sud sanaeha takes us into the mountains, forest and water at the Thai-Burmese border; but it opens abruptly in Khon Kaen, in a forest-green draped clinic that in fact had been where writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s parents, both medical doctors, practiced. Min, a patient, was there once before; the rash for which he was treated—an expression of his being in an unfamiliar country—has spread. Those who have brought him, Orn and Roong, argue with the doctor as to who is responsible for this outcome. But things aren’t what they seem. The middle-aged Orn, who claims that Min is her nephew, or her husband Sirote’s nephew, and Roong, Min’s girlfriend at the moment, may have deliberately manipulated Min’s condition to force this new visit to the clinic, the main objective of which is to secure a health certificate for Min so that he can get a job. Min doesn’t speak, presumably because of a sore throat, but the doctor’s examination finds no such condition. In truth, an illegal Burmese immigrant, Min speaks the little Thai he knows with an accent. Nearly halfway through the film, the opening credits roll, and Roong and Min, having borrowed Orn’s car, are off to their picnic. Shots of the road behind and in front of the car give the illusion of real time.
     Vast sky and the sun-dappled forest, accompanied by sounds of insects, bring the young pair into a world with relaxed rules; walking to their destination, Min strips off his shirt and pants. An abrupt cut from Min and Roong picnicking to sex on the forest floor suggests that the lovers are the same two; but they are Orn and lover Tommy, whose motorcycle, we hear, is stolen when they are done. Wandering in search of Tommy, who is nowhere to be seen, Orn runs into Min and Roong, who has told Min that she thinks Orn is a “phony.” We recall this when we realize that Orn, stranded, is most glad for their meeting because it reunites her with her car. But everyone’s motives for everything in this film are divided, ambiguous, complex. The “phoniness” is, in truth, reality.
     Moong draws Orn into the water teasingly, mockingly. Orn, alone as Moong plays with Min’s cock, dissolves into tears. She wants to have a baby; but Sirote is reluctant to do this, still traumatized by the drowning death of their child. Since Moong’s connection to Orn may go no deeper than Orn’s being someone she hired to get Min a health certificate for work, we are left to wonder whether the water-bit of Moong’s is thoughtlessness or deliberate cruelty—the former, I suspect.
     This Wordsworthian film chides all attempts to simplify human nature and behavior. It spotlights the bliss of in-the-momentness, of Nature’s wonder and beauty, placing these in a context that riddles them with unexpected change: Min’s voiceover, which loses such moments to shifting circumstances over time.

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UP AND DOWN (Jan Hrebějk, 2004)

Eventually both story-lines of Horem pádem, from the Czech Republic, intersect. One is fine; the other, terrible.
     The film begins with two truck drivers unloading their delivery of illegal Indian immigrants in the middle of nowhere in the dead of night. They discover that a baby has been (accidentally) left behind. “Got any formula?” one asks at their first stop, a pawnshop. “I didn’t steal it,” Mila, who has been aching for a child, explains to her husband, security guard, Franta, whose criminal record is the reason they cannot adopt; “I bought it!” “My God,” Franta notes upon seeing the infant boy. “He’s black!” Mila opines that little Franta’s skin color will lighten over time.
     I find this story, which is broad farce headed for disaster for Mila and Franta, forced, crude, unfunny. Because of its racial prejudice, Franta leaves the football-spectator club to which he belongs; when the baby is confiscated and returned to his mother, Franta is back with his buddies yelling at the television screen during a match, “Black motherfucker!” This is, for me, grotesque point-making.
     But the other story-line, which deals with a complicated family situation, is affecting. Otakar Horecký is a university professor who is very ill. Hana, his partner, with whom he has an 18-year-old daughter, used to be his son Martin’s girlfriend; as a result, twenty years ago Martin moved to Australia, where he has a wife and son and currently runs a surfing shop. Martin (Petr Forman, Milos’s son, wonderful) at times feels a failure. Meanwhile, Martin’s mother, Vera, has yet to agree to a divorce; she remains devastated by her spouse’s abandonment of her.
     Keep your eyes pealed for a piercing freeze frame; look forward to a very moving coda in Australia.
     Jan Hrebějk directed.

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