Written by Elena Soarez and directed by Andrucha Waddington, and beautifully photographed by Breno Silveira in impoverished, rural northern Brazil, Eu Tu Eles is an irritating and schematic comedy-drama that could be described as “Brecht Lite.” Its protagonist, pregnant Darlene, is jilted at the altar, doubly mocking the white of her wedding dress. Three years later, having left and returned to Bahia, she exudes a lack of progress except that now she has a son. She marries Osias, who is older, because his house offers a measure of security. Osias thus acquires a workhorse. Darlene has another son, but everyone, including us and Osias, suspects from his appearance that Osias is not the father; she falsely assures Osias the infant’s complexion will “lighten up.” When his cousin, Zezinho, moves in, Osias is not worried, musing, “He’s a man, but not that much of a man.” Darlene attempts running away with her boys, but Osias, first, confiscates the older son and gives him away and, next, forces Darlene, defeated, back. Darlene’s affair with Zezinho, who provides some measure of friendship and kindness, generates yet another son, this one light-skinned. Osias suppresses jealousy as best he can. One more fellow, this one young like Darlene, moves in upon Osias’s invitation, which Osias only extends to gall Zezinho and remind him whose house he is hanging up a hammock in. The new housemate is Ciro, who works with Darlene in the sugar cane fields; he provides her with a measure of passion—and with another son. Get the message? No one man can satisfy a woman’s many needs.
Osias officially registers all Darlene’s sons as his own. Since Darlene is his marital property, so are her children.
Patriarchy is dealt a limp wrist rather than a blow.
Archive for November 8th, 2008
ME YOU THEM (Andrucha Waddington, 2000)
November 8, 2008ARIEL (Aki Kaurismäki, 1988)
November 8, 2008A brilliant tragicomedy of the discontinuous lives of the working poor, Ariel is the second part of Aki Kaurismäki’s “proletarian trilogy.” Taisto Kasurinen’s unhappy lot in life, we are given to understand, was set prior to the film’s action and will continue beyond its completion. At the outset, the closing of a coal mine deprives him and his father of their jobs; the latter gives Taisto the keys to his convertible and announces his intention of committing suicide. Taisto doesn’t believe he will do this, even after he brandishes a gun, for the simple reason that he has not already done this in a perpetually hard, unfair life. But we hear the offscreen shot and see Taisto looking down at his father’s body, which remains out of camera range. What we see reflects what Taisto sees, because we see him and his fate reflects his father’s.
Taisto, on the road, is beaten and robbed. He becomes a day laborer and sleeps at night in a mission flophouse. Nights are as black as oil. He meets Irmeli Pihlaja, who gives up her job monitoring illegal parking ticketing cars in exchange for dinner, and has sex with him. “I hated [my ex-husband] from the start.” Taisto: “That’s unusual.” Irmeli: “That’s what you think.” The two, along with Irmeli’s self-sufficient young son, become a family. Irmeli takes a factory job cutting meat.
But the law puts Taisto in prison after he runs across one of the men who robbed him and he tries taking back some of his money. With Irmeli’s help, he escapes, and the three plan on fleeing aboard the Mexico-bound Ariel under a mockingly gorgeous, dusky blue sky. We hear “Over the Rainbow” sung in Finnish and recall Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ill-fated schooner, Ariel.
Poignant. Devastating.
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
EDMOND (Stuart Gordon, 2005)
November 8, 2008Apparently no relation to Michael Gordon, the fifties-blacklisted filmmaker of An Act of Murder (1948) and I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951) and the grandfather of gifted Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stuart Gordon directed Edmond. Gordon, a horror movie director, is experienced at directing David Mamet on stage. But as things go, Edmond is a “Mamet film” because Mamet wrote it, basing his script on his own 1982 playlet.
It’s a slasher film, where the one-night slasher is a Manhattan businessman in his off-hours, but one dressed up in pretentiousness as it charts the slasher’s descent from a miserable marriage to blissful contentment in the arms of his prison cell-mate. Oh, brother—or, rather, oh, bro.
Sparked with misogynistic, racist and homophobic outbursts and tirades, the film takes aim at political correctness and at the toll that the suppression of political incorrectness exacts. As satire goes, the film is lame. It lives instead for its gushes of blood.
William H. Macy plays the lead role. Since Macy himself is married in reality to a nasty-nasty woman not unlike the one that Mamet’s own wife plays in this movie, my advice to her would be: stay away from him anytime he holds a knife. You have no idea how desperate a housewife you could turn out to be.
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