MIRAGE (Svetozar Ristovski, 2004)

“Hope is the worst evil, for it prolongs the torment of man.” — Nietzsche

Directed by Svetozar Ristovski from a script by him and Grace Lea Troje, Iluzija is a sober, serious although largely predictable and dull film from Macedonia despite flashes of deadpan humor. Its protagonist is a pre-teen boy, Marko, who is bullied by his older sister, Fanny, at home and by vicious classroom peers who resent his high intelligence (with grades to match) and the fact he is their Bosnian teacher’s “pet” in Macedonian class. Marko’s mother, who is abused by her husband, Marko’s father, is uninterested in either her son’s academic record or the poetry he writes. Meanwhile, Lazo, the husband and father is in a deeper rut than usual; out on strike from the factory where he works, he principally occupies himself with getting drunk every day. His attitude toward his son, drunk or sober, remains warm and paternal; but this serves to make wife and daughter feel even more estranged from Marko. Marko’s teacher praises his poems and encourages him to enter a competition that would take him to Paris if he should win. (”What is life without hope?” he rhetorically asks.) The patriotic poem that Marko writes as a “test,” for an Independence Day celebration, turns out to be something that the teacher disparages and rejects. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” he tells Marko, throwing the poem into his face. Meanwhile, Marko has attached himself to another surrogate father or “big brother”: “Paris,” a gun-toting thief, who gives Marko false hope that he will take Marko with him when he leaves for Paris. Paris, though, leaves without Marko, leaving behind something else: a gun.
     Adorable Marko Kovacevic gives an astute, sensitive performance as Marko; his transformation from a shy, quiet boy into a cold-blooded killer is more believable, almost, than we want it to be. Contributing to this outcome in Veles, the town where the action is set, are regional conflict and the town’s current occupation by NATO “peacekeepers.” So much that is out of his control is driving Marko’s life to its dead-end.
     I am not going to get into that parlor game where reviewers aim to decipher whether Paris is real or imaginary; the gun certainly seems real. His counsel, note, is the antithesis of what the teacher tells Marko: “Even the finest flower comes to stink in the sewer.” However, better than the dialogue that Paris spews are the images we associate him with. In Veles a transient, Paris is holed up in an abandoned car in the
“train graveyard.” Indeed, a visual refrain in the film consists of forlorn shots of train tracks going nowhere. It is noted that trains pass through town without ever stopping. It is possible, if Paris exists, that he would not have been able to take Marko along with him.
     Shorn of his opposite-image surrogate fathers, Marko can claim only one authentic father: Lazo. With his son by his side as they walked home down along the train tracks, Lazo told him: “Marko, you can be whatever you want in life; but just don’t be a rat.” Ordered to name names once he is the only student who is caught after he has been impressed into joining others in committing vandalism after-hours in a school building, even though his capture is the result of the others’ having locked him in a burning room, Marko heeds his father and “rats out” no one. Is it possible that hope is not the only “illusion” to which the title refers? There is the possibility of Paris, of course; but what of the murder that Marko commits? Perhaps that, too, is an illusion—compensation for a life that appears to be without hope.
      Vlado Jovanovski is good as Laso; an hilarious moment arrives when Marko asks him if he also wrote poetry as a boy and he responds with something betwixt a grunt and a sigh, as if he is thinking, “Lord, is this really a son of mine?” It is my favorite bit in the film.

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CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, 1961)

This monumental film by anthropological documentarian Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960), marks the invention of cinéma vérité, the name given it by Rouch. An unconcealed “living camera,” “a highly portable lightweight camera connected to a synchronized sound recorder” (Sadoul), was used by the cameraman accompanying an interviewer who asked random Parisians in the street in the summer of 1960 a simple question: “Are you happy?” This was during the last years of colonial France’s participation in the Algerian War.
     Rouch’s film, then, was plain, unvarnished truth—except that the field of documentary, on that score, has been riddled with ambiguity from the point of inception. An interviewee, for instance, may be subsequently shown in his or her life, in his or her rooms, and the degree to which these episodes are staged, or partially staged, isn’t disclosed. Indeed, even in the absence of overt staging, the visible camera itself draws the individual whom it has followed into a selfconscious, or semi-selfconscious, performance—a considered confessional, or the viewable reënactment of what is ordinarily a privately pursued activity. Moreover, the candid conversations between Rouch and Morin that frame the film: done in front of the camera, to what extent are these also “performances,” in these instances, by the filmmakers themselves? The film opens with the sound of a siren: a warning, perhaps, that we the audience should be wary of whatever that follows that purports to be “the truth.”
     The question itself, “Are you happy?” turns out to be ambiguous. What after all constitutes “happiness”? The response “more or less” suggests the incapacity of some people to commit themselves to the certification of their own misery or happiness. One woman expresses outright her perplexity at the question, finally answering it evasively, “I’m happily married”—a ready cliché that almost invites us to discount its accuracy by its insistence on something that the interviewer in no way intended to challenge. Of course, hers is also a time-capsule utterance: the studied remark of a woman insufficiently liberated to gauge her own happiness apart from the current stability of her marital union, that is to say, her ardent hope for her husband’s happiness.
     Another interviewee is a laborer at the (now defunct) Renault automobile factory. His remarks are penetrating; he works, he says, 24 hours a day. Only nine hours are spent daily at the factory, but even his sleeping time, by readying him for the next day’s work, is work-centered and -determined. On the patch of ground outside his and his mother’s small house, he performs an after-work ritual of kickboxing practice: a letting-loose. Later, we learn that his participation in the film has cost him his job.
     The initial interviewer that we see is none other than Marceline Loridan, in time a filmmaker herself, here, a few years before uniting with Joris Ivens, and seventeen years before their marrying. Perhaps the most stunning moment in the film occurs when an interviewee, in a sit-down session with her, the filmmakers and others, refers to the woman he tried having a sexual relationship with, and Loridan confesses to being that woman. While she discloses some of her own personal history, the camera lights on the number from Auschwitz tattooed on her arm. Born Rosenberg, Marceline has an impossible time with the question of her own happiness: glad to be alive, she must remain burdened by the extermination of her parents. At one point, emotion floods her heretofore neutral, composed (and wonderfully Jewish) face. Later, she resists the claim she had become theatrical, surmising that she was “reliving” her past instead. Indeed, is there any certain point of “truth” in such a convolution and complex of loss, pain and survival?
     I left this brilliant, irreplaceable film knowing I might flash back to it each time I visited, or revisited, one of Loridan Ivens’s films. I will likely therefore remain under its spell.

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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.

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