THE HORSE OF PRIDE (Claude Chabrol, 1979)

Detailing a way of life that has passed from Earth, and capturing the rhythm of that life, Le cheval d’orgueil is based on Pierre-Jakez Hélias’s autobiographical novel. Claude Chabrol’s beautiful film depicts an impoverished, tight-knit, deeply religious Breton village in the years 1908-1918.
     A representative of Hélias as an old reminiscing soul narrates. Since the three-day event with which the film begins is the wedding of his peasant parents, Pierre-Alain and Anne-Marie, “facts” organically yield to tall tales and small tales—“histories” in a community that’s steeped in the oral tradition of storytelling. What we sometimes “see,” with or without narration, may have happened or may not; in one instance, a panning camera in a field teases into legend a series of melodramatic suicides illustrating both the desperation wrought by poverty and the communal interconnectedness ironically reflecting on this “chain” of events. The sequence, darkly hilarious (compare Jon Jost’s stark, rapid-fire series of suicides in The Bed You Sleep In, 1993), includes an elderly woman’s crossing herself just before dispatching her soul to Hell. The macabre humor (including children’s All Saints Eve pranks) reminds one of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Parson’s Widow (Prästänkan, 1920).
     Unimaginable: a film more loving than this one is toward children. There are priceless moments between Pierre-Alain and his son. Chabrol being Chabrol, feelings run deep without being sentimentalized.
     The title refers to the one “horse” that the Hélias family can afford: for Pierre-Jakez, his grandfather’s and his father’s shoulders—“the best horse,” he pronounces them, summoning continuity in the face of the Great War’s more-than-interruption of the family’s and community’s way of life. “We were of the earth,” the narrator explains. “The earth was our only happiness”—but such happiness that a war-torn world could not retain it.

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A SCREAMING MAN (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2010)

Adam (Youssouf Djaoro, so-so, despite acting prizes), the fiftysomething protagonist of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Un homme qui crie, is dignified, composed, quiet; the title refers to his suppressed turbulence, his inner Munch. In N’Djamena, he is the pool attendant at a prestigious hotel; the former champion swimmer is proud he was the first person to have such a job in Chad. Adam is also proud of his twenty-year-old son, Abdel, whom he has gotten a job as his poolside assistant. Adam’s perfect life, though, is now shattered: the hotel has now been privatized, and the owner, Madame Wang, sees no justification for two employees at the pool. Adam is demoted to gate attendant, replacing the current occupant of the job, who has been let go. Abdel explains to his father that he also has “obligations.” (Abdel still lives at home.) Is there a way, perhaps, for Adam to get his old job back? Chad’s long civil war continues. The district chief has been hounding Adam for a contribution to the war effort. One day, the police come to take Abdel away to impress him into military service. The young soldier suffers a fatal injury in combat. Adam is the image of guilt as N’Djamena evacuates in the face of incoming rebels.
     Much of Haroun’s filmmaking is excellent; this includes, late, a haunting traveling shot to the Chad River. However, my synopsis of the plot should suggest how ridiculous and schematic Haroun’s script is. I could not agree more with the politics of this film, its denunciation of globalization, the current expansion and repackaging of colonialism/capitalism. But Haroun makes his case thinly and melodramatically. I also did not like his Abouna (2002); however, his Daratt (2006) gave me hope. I am now done watching his films.

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GO WEST (Buster Keaton, 1925)

Combining amiable slapstick and atmosphere, Buster Keaton’s comical western, Go West, follows Friendless, Keaton’s character, as he hops trains both east and west, leaving his small town in Indiana, in hopes of finding a job. The earnest youth suffers from low “social standing,” which taxes employment prospects in the Land of Opportunity. The cut from him in his low-key hometown to his appearance in New York City is hilarious: Friendless, face down on the pavement in New York City, is repeatedly run over by oblivious swarms of pedestrians’ feet hurrying in either direction. What chance does he have amidst this “hustle and bustle”?
     Friendless “goes west,” exiting involuntarily the train he has hopped when the barrel in which he is hiding—one of a pyramid of stacked barrels—rolls out the car door. Packing the derringer he found inside a lady’s lost purse in the city, Friendless lands a job on a struggling cattle ranch, where he goes hungry by repeatedly arriving late to the bunkhouse table following the clang announcing mealtime. On balance, though, his ingenuity helps him meet the challenges that his alien job poses. And he is not yet done with trains. It is he who eventually takes the cattle to Los Angeles for slaughter—this, after befriending Brown Eyes, the sweet cow who has assuaged his loneliness. Dressed in a red devil’s garment, Friendless attracts a stampede like the earlier human one on the other coast. Capitalism is the devil’s work, and any other animal than Brown Eyes might have been the boon companion that Friendless must sacrifice to earn a paycheck and survive. But, for the moment, the viewer may be laughing too hard to process the biting satire hidden, as if in a barrel, in this formally brilliant comedy.

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THE REST IS SILENCE (Helmut Käutner, 1959)

Superior to Akira Kurosawa’s Hamlet film, Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960), Helmut Käutner’s Der Rest ist Schweigen, from West Germany, was first to move Shakespeare’s play up to the present and out of a royal court and into the world of business. John H. Claudius—note the middle initial— returns home from the U.S. upon news of the death of his father, the head of Claudius Steelworks, who presumably died in an air raid. John is suspicious of this official explanation from the get-go, believing that his father was murdered by the deceased’s brother, who runs the family business, and who just happens to be married, unexpectedly, to his former sister-in-law, John’s mother.
     But you know the story, which survives here only in a highly superficial form, with many fewer deaths and no philosophical dimension, no perplexing ambiguities. (However, a suggestion of deceptive appearances is signaled by blood-tinged opening credits in what turns out to be a black-and-white film.) Most important here is the shifted context referring to the West German postwar recovery, the “economic miracle.” When greed and the lust for civil power are widely being promoted, making corruption rampant, how difficult is it to abdicate one’s soul and dispatch a brother?
     The irony’s the thing: What passes for West German postwar rehabilitation is the exact same mindset that pursued war and led to the Holocaust: the dismissal of the claims of humanity that a rhetorical question sums up: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
      Käutner employs a slightly low, upturned camera, perhaps to impute to his characters (including his Hamlet) an odious self-importance and allows dreary grays to dominate effectively the visual tonality. His Ophelia, rechristened Fee, is handled delicately from the start. Our introduction to her finds her encased in glass—in the back seat of a car looking out the rear window. She is looking at her Hamlet, who has departed without realizing her presence, but her doleful gaze might also be meant for us. When she, later, completely crumbles, we, again outside, see her inside a translucent greenhouse where, entombed as the living dead, she decapitates flowers to convey her shattered soul. John is also outside, looking in at her, oblivious to his role in her destruction.
     The film’s most electric scene: the stage performance, bedecked with interpretive dance, that might have caught the conscience of John’s uncle if only he had had a conscience.
     Hardy Krüger, bespectacled but more abrasive than melancholy, plays John H.

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ABOUNA (Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, 2002)

A crowd-pleasing piece of tripe, less from Chad than from France, Abouna is an African film by way of fabricated myth. Two brothers, 15-year-old Tahir and 8-year-old Amine, search for their father, who, their mother discovers one day, has abandoned them. Now the lost mother bears some ancient resonance; the lost brother, Romantic resonance. But the lost father? We’re in sentimental territory here, and writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s discreet shot of the deadbeat dad himself glancing into the camera as he crosses the desert in flight is insufficient to counter the fatuousness of the premise. One father more or less doesn’t make a dimestore’s worth of difference. Cynically and noxiously, Haroun must have realized this himself and thus takes the life of one of the boys and, as the film ends, leaves the mother in a precarious state of health. Good grief!
     The title, Abouna, translates as “Our father,” and refers to God as well as Dad. Double good grief! We are supposed to embrace the pathetic notion that wartorn Chad has suffered this loss of fathers and that our pair of semi-orphaned brothers has suffered, symbolically, the human consequences. Or have the boys humanly suffered the symbolical consequences? It hardly matters. This is one of the least convincing films I’ve seen.
     Haroun is from Chad but was educated in Paris. Doubtless he felt he had lassoed Great Significance by linking his absent father to God. What a fool! The connection this material needed to work is not between Dad and God but between him and his sons. A perpetual male crisis promulgated by war: Isn’t that what Haroun should have been after? Haroun is too cleverly French for his own good. He should have guillotined his pretentiousness before it took hold.
     A lot of his material is suggestive, full of promise. The boys find themselves at the Chad-Cameroon border. They must cross a momentous bridge in order to continue their search. But, throughout, symbolism asserts itself a little too strongly; everything becomes schematic—everything human(e) evaporates.
     The boys’ mother declares their father “irresponsible” when they ask her why he left. She will not be similarly so; ironically depriving them of all parental guidance, she ships the boys off to a strict fundamentalist school, where Amine is teased for not being able to swim. In a Most Meaningful Moment, Amine gently helps birth a grasshopper. Needless to say, Amine, who is asthmatic, is the brother who will die.
     Haroun had better clutch his brace of international prizes, because his film vanishes in one’s sight even as one watches it. He has strung symbols as others string pearls.