SEPTEMBER 11 (11'9"01, 2002)

Has it been nine years already? Was it that long ago that Alain Brigand's portmanteau production premiered around the world. Maybe it doesn't seem that long ago to me, as an American, because it didn't premiere in my country until the summer of 2003. I remember that there was some concern that certain episodes might offend overly sensitive Americans, or that some were downright anti-American. I've had the DVD for awhile but haven't gotten around to watching it until this oppressively commemorative weekend. The anthology's reputation promised an antidote to the monotony of mood prevailing during the extended observance of what the vulgar call the "ten year anniversary" of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. I dimly remembered what the various segments were about from the reviews I read, but I wasn't sure what attitude I might encounter. I ended up being surprised at the prevalence of irreverence over solemnity or stridency. Brigand promised his eleven directors "complete freedom of expression" as long as their segments wrapped up in eleven minutes, nine seconds and one frame of film. It wasn't nine minutes, eleven seconds and one frame because this was a European project and they put the day before the month, sensibly enough, and that gave the directors more time to work with. As for complete freedom of expression, judge for yourselves.

Brigand opens provocatively with a segment by an Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf, which sets the irreverent tone that keeps creeping into the proceedings. Her episode is a kind of thematic sequel to her movie Blackboards, since it focuses on a teacher desperate to impart knowledge to people mainly concerned with survival. It takes place in an Iranian refugee camp for Afghans where the children help make bricks in biblical fashion until a teacher lures them into a makeshift classroom. The day, of course, is September 11, 2001, and the teacher wants to tell her students that something of global importance has happened. But they know already: two people fell down a deep well, and one or both may be dead. She's clearly freaked out and expecting nuclear war ("You can't stop atom bombs with bricks," she tells the workers) but her explanation of what's happened in New York, and her insistence on a moment of silence only inspires a childish debate on whether God actually kills people and why he might be crazy enough to do so. Finally, to get them to at least visualize the enormity of the event, she takes them to the base of a tall brick-kiln smokestack and hopes they can imagine it falling. Whether they do remains uncertain.

How many heavyweight French directors turned Brigand down, do you imagine, before he finally recruited Claude Lelouch? He had his moment in the sun with A Man and a Woman back in the Sixties, but I doubt anyone would automatically think of him representing his country in this sort of project. Nor does he do his nation much credit with a gimmicky segment about the stormy romance of two French deaf-mutes living in New York and apparently breaking up on the dread day. In a gambit that makes his episode a bookend to another we'll see later, Lelouch films without sound to emphasize his characters' obliviousness to the awful events playing out on a nearby TV screen. He aims at empathy with the bereaved by teasing a lover's regret at wishing her beloved gone without realizing that he may well be very gone -- but the sooty reappearance of the beloved, who's apparently had a very eventful day, allows for a cheap, happyish ending. This may be the lamest segment of the film.

But it has competition from Egypt's Youssef Chahine, the only director narcissist enough to put himself in his segment. He's just returned from New York as the disaster happens, and is pressed by a female reporter to comment on it at a press conference. He begs off, needing time to think, and goes to Lebanon, where he meets the ghost of an American soldier killed in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing. The ghost, who proves to have once been the fiance of the reporter, asks for empathy for his and other Americans' suffering, while the director is torn between his humanist instinct and his desire to reprimand an American for his insensitivity toward the victims of American violence. Still, he finally feels compelled to visit the soldier's grave at Arlington, where he meets the reporter again, as well as the soldier's father and the ghost of a suicide bomber who chides Chahine for showing sympathy to an enemy. Sometimes you try to do the right thing and you just can't win, and that pretty much describes Chahine's segment. But his heart was in the right place.

Bosnian director Denis Tanovic (of No Man's Land fame) contributes a trifle that takes the news from New York to a small town that holds a vigil on the 11th of each month to remember the Srebrenica massacre. It focuses on the friendship of a wheelchair-bound man and a young woman who lost loved ones in the massacre. It's one of several episodes that implicitly deny the centrality of the attacks on America by emphasizing the preoccupations, rational and irrational, of other peoples and nations. In this case, there's a call to cancel the monthly vigil because of the atrocities in America, but the protagonists insist on carrying on as usual to honor both their own losses and those of the Americans. The episode is well-meaning and unobjectionable but is also probably the least memorable of all the segments.

The goofiest segment by a wide margin comes from Burkina Faso and director Idrissa Ouedraogo. It has the naive absurdity of an Our Gang short, as a group of young protagonists become convinced that Osama bin Laden is hiding in their town and hope to collect the $25,000,000 bounty by capturing the terrorist leader. The kids seem to have some visual basis for their suspicion, but their target, whoever he may be, proves slippery, altering his itinerary whenever they plan an ambush. The boys rush about hoping to nab him with spears and machetes, only to see him disappear into an airport, where a guard insists firmly that bin Laden is not in the country. But as far as they're concerned, their chance at fame and fortune is flying away. Hope springs eternal, however, since President Bush may visit the country soon. Surely he'd be worth a large ransom, wouldn't he?... I'm not sure what point Ouedraogo wanted to make with that apparition of bin Laden, but I found this episode charmingly silly and admired its inclusion in the anthology.

A couple of the directors are ringers insofar as they don't actually represent their nation's reaction to or reflections on the terror attacks. One of these is the U.K.'s Ken Loach, who uses his time to commemorate the events of September 11, 1973 -- the day when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Marxist government of Chile. Narrated by a Chilean exile in London, this is a mostly documentary segment with stark, dramatic footage of the Chilean upheaval, perpetrated with American encouragement, climaxing with black and white footage of a burning building, the presidential palace blasted by bombs from a seditious air force. This is the sort of segment Americans were probably expected to bristle at, but Loach's point is not to suggest that the U.S. deserved what it got because of its role in the Chilean coup. Instead, we should take its closing lines at face value; the Chileans will empathize with Americans every September 11, and hope that Americans will someday reciprocate.

If Claude Lelouch can get away with a silent segment, then Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu will try to top him with a mostly sightless segment. He confronts us with a black screen as he builds a tower of found sounds from September 11, from the noise of explosions and crashes to the angry words of call-in ranters. Every so often the screen will flicker to life with footage of people jumping from the twin towers, and it will roar to life with footage of the towers falling -- only then the screen goes silent. The screen finally lightens so Inarritu can close with the textual question, in Arabic and English, "Does the light of God guide or blind us?" His is probably the sort of segment most people would have expected from this film. It's the only one that confronts the attacks directly or tries to convey the horror of them without a mediating personal or national perspective. As such, apart from the technical gimmickry, it's one of the least imaginative segments, though it may well have the purest raw power.

Israeli director Amos Gitai takes a "welcome to our world" stance, showing us a car bombing in his own country that gets upstaged by the news from New York to the chagrin of a pushy TV reporter. In a hard-boiled segment shot in a single take, Gitai illustrates the terrible normality of violence in Israel by showing reporters, first responders, police and bystanders all jostling for space and attention in the absence of the awe Americans felt during their own admittedly much larger disaster. The overall effect is blackly comic, though I'm not sure if Gitai really meant it that way.

The other ringer in the picture is Mira Nair, who while officially representing India contributes what's really the first of two American episodes. Based on true events, it follows an Indian Muslim family's trauma as their son goes missing on September 11 and becomes a terror suspect. His family is questioned by the FBI and increasingly shunned by their New York neighbors until the truth is recovered from the Ground Zero wreckage. The son, a onetime police cadet, had volunteered on the spot to aid rescue efforts and had fallen with the towers, dying a hero. This is the one segment I can envision being expanded into a feature film and improved by the expansion. As it is, Nair's segment is no great exercise in style, but the story has a truthful simplicity that's impossible to botch.

The official American episode comes from Sean Penn, who directs arguably the most crassly audacious segment of all. It is likely to offend, not because it makes any provocative political statement of the sort you might expect from Penn, but because it commits a twofold atrocity. It uses the destruction of the towers as a sight gag, and it compels us to look at Ernest Borgnine, admittedly then still a spring chicken of 85 years, in his underwear.  The mighty Borgnine plays a slightly senile widower who talks to his dead wife regularly and seems to live mostly in his own little skyscraper-shadowed world where he can't get a potted plant to grow. In a daringly obscene bit of magical realism, the fall of the first tower allows a strong ray of sunlight to shine into Borgnine's bedroom (the historic pall of smoke notwithstanding) and not only wake him but bring his potted plant to fully blooming life. The old man is overjoyed at the miracle and tries to share his joy with his beloved wife, but in a moment of illumination, if you will, he tearfully acknowledges that she simply isn't there. You may not believe what you've seen -- that is, you may not believe that Penn actually conceived and directed such an outlandish anecdote, but the episode has a primitive power in its preposterous play for pathos like something out of classic silent film.

The elder statesman of the creative team was Japan's Shohei Imamura, and that earns him the chance to top the Penn segment. In his final cinematic work, the great man tops the project with a dollop of "WTF???" in the form of a period piece set at the end of World War II. His protagonist is a demobilized Japanese soldier who's Kafkaesque reaction to the horrors of war is to become a snake. That is, he crawls about on his belly, never uses his hands, swallows rats and tries to bite people. It's all very interesting in a demented way, but its relevance to the overall project is tenuous or tangential at best. The problem isn't that it doesn't refer to the 2001 attacks directly, but that Imamura imposes relevance simply by inserting a sentence in which an officer declares the Japanese aggression a "holy war" and closing his segment, and the film, with the bald statement (pay attention, Muslims!) that "there is no such thing as a holy war." Thanks for clearing that up, Imamura-san!

So did you expect something besides a mixed bag? Had every segment been as sensitive and appropriate as some may yet think correct, had the whole film been about heroism or resilience or whatever the official theme of the decade is, it would have been intolerable. Instead, it's as wild and erratic an anthology film as you'll probably ever see, and that, the faults of individual episodes notwithstanding, is a good thing. Does it do justice to the event? I'm not sure. Does it honor people's losses? That doesn't matter. September 11 succeeds as a cinematic event and a collective, kaleidoscopic portrait of a moment in history, and it should have been part of somebody's television schedule during the commemorative weekend. Of course, you can watch it whenever you want if you can find a copy, and its historical value alone makes it worth your effort.

MAX MANUS (2008)

It seems as if the 21st century revival of Jean-Pierre Melville's Resistance thriller Army of Shadows has inspired a small genre of neo-Resistance films, including Denmark's Flame & Citron, France's Army of Crime and, debatably, Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Perhaps it has to do with a now-universal sense of being under siege in the age of terrorism, or with a subconscious itch to emulate Islam's intrepid bomb-makers, or with a feeling of envy toward or inadequacy compared to the heroes of the World War II (aka "greatest") generation. Whatever the impetus, Max Manus is Norway's entry in the field, based on the real-life exploits of the country's greatest resistance hero, as told by him in a two-part memoir. It appears on an American DVD with the tacky subtitle "Man of War," as if Manus were a video game hero -- an impression his name doesn't exactly dispel.

 

Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg have directed a slick thriller with impeccable production values about a man who established his belligerent credentials before the war came to Norway, fighting for the Finns against the Soviet invasion of 1939. In his own country, Manus (Aksel Hennie) becomes known as "the window jumper" for his desperate attempt to escape the Gestapo early on, though he eventually owes his freedom to a friendly, patriotic nurse after he's hospitalized under guard.  He makes his way to Scotland, where the Brits train a special Norwegian unit of guerrilla commandos to carry out acts of sabotage against the Germans. Through skill and luck he earns the reputation of an escape artist among his own people and his Nazi antagonists, and earns recognition as the leader of the resistance -- a status ultimately confirmed when he gets to ride shotgun in the King's car during a victory parade. His campaign climaxes with his attempt to blow up the SS Donau, a cargo ship converted into a deadly anti-aircraft platform. Belying German efficiency, Manus and his team manage to board the ship without papers by telling the crew and guards that they're electricians on a repair job. As it happens, the Donau does have electrical troubles, but it and the harbor also have soldiers with a habit of peppering the water with machine-gun bullets just in case anyone happens along in an inflatable raft who doesn't belong there. Manus's gang will have to run that gauntlet if they want to watch their handiwork go boom....

Max Manus is efficiently made on every level and will satisfy anyone looking for realistic World War II action, but it isn't really anything more than an efficient war film until the final reel, when peace demoralizes Manus more than any wartime setback. He wasn't the only one for whom the war was a liberating experience before his country was liberated, nor the only one whom war made more important than he ever could have been in civilian life. Victory deflates him, and he crashes hard, his depression compounded by a bad case of survivor's guilt illustrated by ghosts toasting him in his flag-draped apartment. He's drawn out of his self-pitying shell by the love of a good woman, but Ronning and Sandberg film his triumphant ride in the victory parade both as an epic payoff to the great adventure and as a reminder that Manus's alienation persists on a level that isn't readily abandoned. As the crowds hail him, he gazes into the rear-view mirror in a manner just slightly reminiscent of Travis Bickle at the end of Taxi Driver.

The closing title cards inform us that Manus struggled with alcoholism and emotional issues for the rest of his life, but still managed to run a business and play the part of national hero with what looks like a natural modesty, based on the documentary footage included on the DVD, for another fifty years. For me at least, those final scenes, well performed by Aksel Hennie, were a bigger payoff than blowing up a warship, and they make Max Manus something more than a simple patriotic saga. For some men of war, victory and peace don't automatically mean happiness ever after. They just mark the start of a different kind of struggle.

Here's a trailer that includes actual English-language dialogue from the picture, uploaded to YouTube from jrroenberg.

THE DON IS DEAD (1973)

As a young Warner Bros. producer, Hal Wallis helped get the studio's legendary gangster genre going with Mervyn LeRoy's Little Caesar. More than forty years later, Wallis was the one surviving producer of that era to get a post-Godfather crack at the genre, producing this adaptation of a Marvin H. Albert novel for his independent unit at Universal. As a matter of fact, there's something old fashioned about The Don is Dead, a melodramatic element and an emphasis on romance, however brief, that dates the picture just as much as its aping of The Godfather in other respects.

Directed by Richard Fleischer in the midst of his last interesting run of films -- it follows Soylent Green and precedes Mr. Majestyk and Mandingo -- the film traces the repercussions of a don's death. The late Don Regalbuto was one of three Mafia family leaders in his unnamed city, and while his son Frank (Robert Forster) is poised to inherit, members of the national Commission question whether the reckless hothead -- he'd nearly been ambushed making a heroin deal in the opening scene -- is ready for the responsibility. Orlando (Charles Cioffi), the consigliere of a jailed don, proposes dividing the Regalbuto territory between his boss and Don Angelo (Anthony Quinn), while Angelo himself sweetens the deal by naming Frank heir to his own family. During the transition, the Fargo brothers, Vince (Al Lettieri) and Tony (Frederic Forrest) are allowed to become independent operators, albeit on call when the dons need their services. The Fargos are Frank's friends and had saved him from that ambush, but Tony is tiring of the life and wants to get out of the business.

Almost at first sight you can tell that Orlando is a backstabbing schemer -- he talks too smoothly, for one thing -- and he's soon at work driving a wedge between Angelo and Frank. His master plan, if you can believe it, is to provoke a romance between Angelo, a lonely middle-aged man, and Frank's girlfriend Ruby (Angel Tompkins), an aspiring singer-songwriter, while Frank's in Italy making a drug deal. Angelo is implausibly moved by the treacly tune he hears on Ruby's demo tape, and she reciprocates his promise to promote her career by sleeping with him. Had Angelo been as central a character as Quinn's star billing promised, we might have gotten more buildup of his emotional life or prior lack of one, to make his crush on Ruby plausible. But since there's no real main character here, and no one person's perspective dominates, Angelo's romance looks exactly like what it is, a creaky plot device of the sort you might well have seen during Wallis's salad days in the Thirties and Forties.

Of course, when Frank returns he gets an anonymous note telling him that Ruby has moved into a new apartment provided by a new sugar daddy. He tracks her down, trashes her apartment, and beats her to a pulp. An enraged Angelo orders a hit on Frank, then has second thoughts, but too late to prevent a parking-garage ambush that kills Frank's consigliere and makes a gang war a certainty. The Fargos are drawn into it, Tony very reluctantly, and when Frank agrees to a meeting that's an obvious deathtrap without waiting for Tony's advice, he ends up getting Vinnie killed. From this point, Tony emerges as the central character, tracing a Michael Corleone-like character arc from smart, reluctant hood to cold, ruthless crimelord, with the unctuous Orlando standing in his way....

The Don is Dead struck me as a doubly old-fashioned film, despite Seventies style bloodshed and a suspenseful, often sinister modernist score by Jerry Goldsmith. There's something hokey about the whole using-a-woman-to-manipulate-rivals storyline, all the way through to the abrupt, almost arbitrary deduction that exposes Orlando's scheme. At the same time, this film, made in the shadow of The Godfather, reminded me of the obsolescence of the Puzo-style narrative focusing on the highest echelons of organized crime. Fleischer's film is like Coppola's in its formality, emphasizing the often stilted rituals of mafia deliberations as an illustration of the "just business" parallels of crime and corporate culture. In the same year, 1973, Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets would begin to make that style of crime film obsolete. From then on, American cinema's focus would begin shifting toward working-class organized crime and its vulgar excesses. American audiences seemed more interested in seeing criminals claw their way up than in watching them reign as a shadow ruling class. By the standard Scorsese set, Don is lacking in aggression and animal spirit -- even a proverbial Seventies beast like Al Lettieri is toned down while playing a relative good guy. Nor, of course, does Don stand comparison with the Godfather films. Fleischer puts together a few suspenseful moments, but some parts are shockingly inept, like Lettieri's death scene that obliges the actor to stumble into and topple over not two but three stacks of crates. The film has a terrific cast of character actors who do well here, with the conspicuous exception of a pretty bad Robert Forster as Frank, but Don never accumulates the power it should have. Given its historic pedigree and the opportunity Hal Wallis had to realize a synthesis of the Warners tradition and the Seventies sensibility, that's a damn shame.

Wendigo Meets VAMPIRE EFFECT (Twins Effect, 2003)

Available this month on FEARNet on-demand is an edited-for-America edition of the most popular Hong Kong film release of 2003, a star vehicle for the hot pop duo Twins, whose members are not related to each other. It seemed like a good opportunity for my friend Wendigo to see his first Chinese vampire film -- not counting The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. But the film, co-directed by Dante Lam and Donnie Yen, proves not to be a "Chinese vampire" film. The nation's signature hopping menaces are nowhere to be found. Instead, we deal with "European" or European-style blood-drinkers, even if our lead vampire, Prince Kazaf (Edison Chen), is clearly Asian. He's the youngest son of the King of the Vampires and is just establishing himself in Hong Kong, in an abandoned Christian church, against the objections of his aide-de-camp Prada (Anthony Wong). The fear of holy symbols is passe, Kazaf insists.

Kazaf seems blithely unaware of the local efforts of the Anti-Vampire Federation, whose ace slayer Reeve (Ekin Cheng) has just lost his partner to a particularly brutal attack. The Federation sends him a new assistant, Gypsy (Gillian Chung), who somehow seems completely ignorant of vampire lore and the basics of vampire fighting. For her and our benefit, Reeve explains that slayers gain super strength and speed by drinking an extract of vampire blood, and must take an antidote within a certain time or else turn into vampires themselves. Gypsy gets off on the wrong foot with Reeve's sister, Helen (Charlene Choi), who's just broken up with her latest boyfriend. The two women fight over a giant stuffed bear that Helen has trashed because it reminds her of the boyfriend. Their fight escalates to a martial-arts battle with poles, with the presumably untrained Helen more than holding her own against the junior slayer.

At a nightclub, an angry Helen snatches a drink off someone's table and drains the glass. The glass was full of blood, and belonged to Kazaf, who scrupulously drinks blood and never sucks it. He'd politely tried to warn her, but he's impressed, smitten in fact, by her brazen fearlessness and overall cuteness. Even though Prada warns him not to play with "food," the prince asks her out on a date, cluelessly setting it for mid-afternoon. A hastily-concocted sunscreen saves the day. But while this mismatched couple fall deeper in love, the vampire civil war you might have read about on the news, like Reeve did, comes to Hong Kong. Duke Dekotes (Mickey Hardt), the most European of vampires, has killed the king and Kazaf's elder brothers, and now wants to kill the youngest prince, take his essence, and use it to open the Day For Night, the ancient book of vampire secrets that will allow Dekotes to walk by day without looking like an actor in bad blackface. Kazaf's first inkling of this is the failure of his weekly shipment of premium bottled blood to arrive from Dad. The Duke's minions killed Reeve's previous assistant, and his reign of terror will force an unlikely alliance -- not Reeve and Kazaf, necessarily, but definitely Gypsy and Helen....

Screencap from lovehkfilm.com

Wendigo was probably more worried about this film being a vampire comedy than it being a Chinese film. As it turned out, he feels that the Hong Kong talent brought some interesting ideas and effects to the vampire genre. He was impressed both by the stuntwork and the effects that make the vampires and vampire-fighters capable of incredible feats of leaping and climbing. He liked the mix of makeup and CGI that differentiate the vampires, Kazaf and other "good" vampires having just two Dracula-style incisors while the Duke's "evil" vampires have fully fanged sharkgrins. The dusting of vampires and the Duke's transformations into a massive bat-creature also impressed him. Conceptually, there's nothing particularly original here, but Wendigo found the backstory an interesting blend of the obvious Buffy influence (female slayers as ditzes) and some less obvious borrowings from Blade (an empowering artifact activated by vampire essence, the risk of the slayer transforming, etc.). The concept of gaining powers from a vampire serum has been seen elsewhere, but Wendigo suspects that it might resonate particularly well in China, given the country's alchemical traditions.

As a vampire comedy, Vampire Effect is at least more tolerable than many we've seen in our series. It often tries too hard to be comical, going so far as to recruit Jackie Chan to appear in two scenes. One is simply awful: Helen and Kazaf crash Jackie's wedding to a drunken bride, where Chan has nothing better to do than mug over his bride's antics and his loss of the wedding ring. He redeems himself in his second appearance as an ambulance driver transporting Helen and a dying Kazaf (starving for blood, he refuses Helen's offer of hers) while the Duke's minions give chase on motorcycles. This chase and fight scene lets Chan do some of his characteristic stuntwork, and has one genuinely silly moment when Helen and Jackie try to fend off the vampires by squirting blood packs at them the way you might throw scraps of meat at a vicious guard dog. As well, as a non-American comedy, this film isn't afraid to play some moments completely straight and let some major characters die. Those breaks in the goofiness make many of the goofy parts more bearable. There are more misses than hits, as you might expect, but ultimately Wendigo found the film endearing rather than obnoxious, cute like an idiot puppy that remains sort of adorable even as he bumps into walls. The movie grows on you. We were won over, as far as we were going to be, sometime between the moment Helen responded to Kazaf bearing his fangs with, "You're being a jerk!" and the ambulance chase. Effect is really little more than a star vehicle for a pop duo, but Twins really do more than anyone else, in his judgment, to make the film bearable if not entirely entertaining. They have an indisputable charm despite the often incredibly tacky, 80s-ish outfits they wear, and they throw themselves into the absurd Chan-style action with enthusiasm and some skill. Wendigo can't objectively recommend Vampire Effect to true vampire-cinema fans, but he will say that if you happen to stumble across it on FEARNet or elsewhere, you may actually be entertained for a while -- and that's more than he can say for a lot of vampire comedies. He isn't ready to call this one of the best such films, but it's definitely above average.

Here's a Hong Kong trailer for Twins Effect with English subtitles, uploaded to YouTube by 1980Alain.

DARATT (2006)

On the evidence of two of his five feature films, the Chadian director Mahamat Saleh Haroun makes modern fables for a war-torn continent. His stories simple and accessible. He has a modernist pictorial sense with an eye for the way a patch of color will stand out in a drab setting, but his narrative style in its eschewal of flashbacks or manipulative twists has the stark austerity of classical silent film. Daratt ("Dry Season") is a story that could have been told about America after the Civil War or any place or time when the impulse for revenge grapples with the need for reconciliation.

While Chad will be at war again at the time of Haroun's latest film, A Screaming Man, Daratt finds the country winding down a conflict. It isn't winding down to everyone's satisfaction, however. One village is outraged to learn that the country's truth and reconciliation commission has recommended against prosecuting alleged war criminals. A blind elder orders his grandson Atim (Ali Bacha Barkaim) to go to the capital and kill a man named Nassara, who had killed the father Atim never knew.

As a civilian, Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro of Screaming Man) runs a bakery. After stalking him awhile, Atim confronts his target during his morning distribution of day-old loaves to the neighborhood poor. Nassara assumes that Atim's just another charity case and offers him a loaf. Atim takes a couple of bites and spits them out contemptuously -- but doesn't shoot the baker. He comes back the next day to tell Nassara that he doesn't want charity, but a job.

From here things get fairly predictable. Nassara becomes the first true father-figure Atim has known, while Atim begins to seem like the son Nassara hasn't yet had -- though his wife is expecting. The men have some character traits in common. Both are quick-tempered -- Nassara warns Atim that he can be dangerous when angry, while Atim repeatedly quits or spurns Nassara at the slightest provocation, only to return every time. Nassara is no ogre of a war criminal but a vulnerable man, forced to use a voice-device due to a slit throat from long ago and challenged by a rival baker with a truck. Atim is no relentless avenger -- having not known his father, his mission is more a matter of obligation than passion. Still, he rebels at every hint that Nassara might be a father to him, especially after Mrs. Nassara loses her baby, and Haroun keeps us in suspense throughout over Atim will finally do....

The ending may strike viewers as implausible in one way or another, but Daratt works overall as a parable of reconciliation. Djaoro marks himself as an actor to watch with his two films for Haroun. Barkaim faces a challenge as the moody Atim, but he convinces us of the character's seething conflict of emotions. Visually, Daratt is an exercise in tone and texture. I find Haroun's placement of color -- the blue of the bakery door, patches of green elsewhere -- against sunbaked walls nearly as entertaining as the drama of Atim and Nassara. Haroun's are films about poverty that are also visual treats. They're windows into a world we should all know more about, and discoveries like these are what global arthouse cinema can sometimes still be about.

WHITE MATERIAL (2009)

Forty-five years ago, the late Gualtiero Jacopetti made Africa Addio, a controversial documentary on the violent consequences of the European withdrawal from Africa. On the evidence of Claire Denis's fiction film of two years ago, the brutal process described by Jacopetti is still going on, and it wouldn't surprise me if she, like the late Mondo maestro, has been accused of racism for portraying Africa, or one particular francophone patch of the place, as a dystopian killing ground. But her film happens to be about Europeans who have stayed on, and one in particular who'd determined to stay on past the point of common sense. The theme seems to be misplaced loyalty, since Maria (Isabelle Huppert) doesn't really have a stake in the Vial coffee plantation, which is owned by her former father-in-law. But somehow she's ended up running the place, since the old man's gone feeble, the ex-husband's a schemer and her son is shiftless before he goes crazy. But she knows no other life than the plantation, and she's determined to get the latest crop in despite a civil war, the withdrawal of French military protection and the mass flight of her regular workers. Everyone else seems to realize that time is running out, but all Maria knows is that, as long as there are five days left, she can get the crop in. The plantation could well become a battleground between government forces and rebels loyal to "The Boxer," a charismatic but wounded leader who just happens to be hiding out on Vial land, as are some straggling child soldiers who pose a constant threat to everyone.

All sides seem to be waiting for just the right opportunity to pillage the plantation, but Maria stubbornly refuses to give up on it -- that'd be like giving up on her lazy, tatted-up son, who's bad enough before the child soldiers catch him. They only steal all his clothes, but that's enough to turn the lad into a gun-toting skinhead who tries to stuff his freshly cut hair down a maid's throat and ultimately betrays the Boxer to the government. A bloodbath and inferno ensue just as Maria struggles to get back home....

Above, Isabelle Huppert regards an airdropped surivial kit with disdain. Below, she's probably regretting that decision right about now.

White Material is strong stuff, an unflinching look at a country, if not a  continent, descending into chaos. This is the first film I've seen from Claire Denis, who's considered one of the top French directors of this generation, and it made an impressive first impression. She has an eye for atrocity and a classical pictorial sense. She portrays much of the violence and bloodshed indirectly or symbolically. When soldiers skulk quietly through a home slitting the throats of doped-out child soldiers, we don't see the cuts, but we see the spray of blood on the inside wall of a bathtub, and we see the bathwater turned red. In an abstract sense the most violent image in the whole film is the sudden appearance of a severed goat's head in a pile of coffee beans like a mythological omen of doom. But there's one moment that's arguably more violent for being more shocking, but as it's meant to come as a shock I can't really elaborate on it. Suffice it to say that, shocking as the film often is, that last bit will probably shock you afresh.

Isabelle Huppert gives a commanding lead performance -- she actually instigated the project by suggesting that Denis adapt a Doris Lessing novel, though the story eventually used is original -- that emphasizes Maria's forceful personality without contradicting the director's underscoring of her essential vulnerability. While Maria may come across as futile of foolish, she doesn't come across as crazy or stupid. I suppose that makes her a tragic heroine. Meanwhile, the biggest surprise of the film from a Mondo 70 perspective is the strong performance given by none other than Christopher Lambert, the old highlander himself, as Maria's ex.

It's ironic casting given Lambert's past casting as Tarzan, but it's also not the sort of film an American expects to see the poor guy doing. I don't know if this was seen as a comeback role in France, but it certainly goes some way toward re-establishing Lambert's credibility in A or arthouse pictures -- and it's certainly a better role than he might get in any American comeback vehicle -- he is, in fact, rumored to be appearing in The Expendables 2, just to show you what I mean.

Watching A Screaming Man last week revived my interest in African cinema and piqued my interest in Denis's film about Africa. I suppose it'd be a fair hit to accuse her of objectifying Africa or not giving enough space to an authentic African viewpoint that could contextualize the mayhem without making the continent look barbaric. But White Material is less a commentary on Africa (in the debatable manner of Africa Addio) than a portrait of a European in Africa or, more generally, a character study of someone who feels a sense of belonging to a place where the feeling isn't mutual. It's about alienation imposed upon an individual who can't alienate herself from a situation even when it might be in her best interest. In that sense, it could take place anywhere -- and if the world keeps up as it seems to be going, it might.

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (2011)

You have to laugh. There's no other way to deal with Jason Eisener's attempt at an instant-cult film, an affectionate burlesque of 1980s vigilante movies. For my purposes, "burlesque" is a particular type of comedy, something different from parody or satire. While parody makes fun of genre conventions, and satire exposes their unreality, burlesque exploits the artificiality of genre and the artificiality of drama itself without repudiating or negating what it exploits. Burlesque laughs with its material, not at it, sharing with its audience the fundamental joke -- "that's not real!" -- while continuing to play the material with as straight a face as necessary. The core form of burlesque is slapstick comedy, which subjects characters to traumatic violence without truly traumatizing them. Hobo With A Shotgun is a slapstick comedy, as is only proper, since the action movie as we know it evolved from silent comedy. It's the sort of film where a character can have her arm ground to a gory point by the blades of a lawn mower, and can immediately use the sharp stump to stab her tormentor -- all this less than 24 hours after her head had nearly been cut off by a hacksaw. You may not find that funny, but it's meant to be funny. By hyper-exaggerating the already exaggerated violence of vigilante movies -- not to mention post-apocalypse films and spaghetti westerns -- Hobo takes cinematic ultra-violence back to its comedy roots. So it's probably no accident that its hero is what once would have been called a tramp.

The story is an amalgam of spaghetti western, vigilante film and post-apocalypse in a retro, 80s-ish setting. The man known only as the Hobo (Rutger Hauer) arrives in Hope Town, renamed Scum Town by a graffiti artist. The place is far behind the times, assuming the time to be the present and not the actual 1980s. A video arcade is one of downtown's main attractions and stereotypical spike-haired punks lurk in the background. An entrepreneur films bumfights with an old-timey camcorder. There's little evidence of an economy, even a criminal one. The town is ruled by a ruthless, nihilistic and sadistic family, "The Drake" and his two sons, who demand applause whenever they put enemies to death and freely dump sacks of cocaine everywhere to keep the populace dependent. They seem motivated by nothing more than cruelty, and they cultivate cruelty in their followers. Topless girls beat a man dangling upside down with bats like he was a pinata. In the arcade you can hit a homeless man in the foot with a huge hammer as if he was the bell-ringing test of strength at a carnival. Not even children are safe. They are torched alive in school buses and dumpsters, or else molested by Santa-clad predators. The unmotivated cruelty of Scum Town and its rulers reminded me of spaghetti westerns, and the impression would be reinforced by the arrival of a mysterious stranger. But the same lack of motivation costs Hobo much of the contemporary relevance -- apart from its essential compassion for the homeless --  that vigilante films may have had in their own time. It's less Death Wish than Death Wish 3, for those keeping score. Still, it's cool to see an action film with poor folk at its heart.

Once upon a time, Rutger Hauer was such a beautiful man that Anne Rice thought him the ideal actor to play the Vampire Lestat. Now he is a Hobo with a Shotgun, and there's no illusion that this film will do for him what The Wrestler sort of did for Mickey Rourke or JCVD might have done for Jean-Claude Van Damme. Hauer is clearly a limited performer at this stage of his career, but like many a beloved B-movie performer he gives his all here. At his best, he sells the salient point that, for all his heroism, the Hobo is as crazy as a bedbug. He's hobbled sometimes by writer John Davies's desperate attempts to give the character memorable lines, but he gives a completely sincere performance that helps make the Hobo a figure of pathos amid the carnage in keeping with the cinematic heritage of homelessness. To put Hobo in historical perspective, think of it as Chaplin's Easy Street with exploding abdomens, decapitations, and lots of wirework to sell shotgun blasts. Hauer's Hobo even has a girl to pine over, though his relationship with Abby the spunky prostitute (Molly Dunsworth) is more quasi-paternal than romantic. By modern standards, the Hobo's admirably free of backstory baggage; Davies and Eisener resist any temptation to explain why the old man is riding the rails at the start of the show. This sort of hero needs to be a stranger -- or an everyman -- in a way few action heroes today are allowed to be. There's something primal in his anonymity that'd be lost if there were a why to his wandering or his madness. When he grabs the shotgun off the pawnshop rack to stop an armed robbery, abandoning his dream of a one-man lawn-mowing business, it's not to resolve a daddy issue or to redeem himself for some past failure. It's simply the right thing to do, and would be for anyone, as far as this film's concerned.

Hobo With a Shotgun has a lot going for it creatively, from the queasily colorful cinematography of Karim Hussain and suitably grungy location work to a collaborative score that opens with a gloriously overripe pastoral theme that reminded me of Riz Ortolani's beautiful themes for such stuff as Goodbye Uncle Tom and Cannibal Holocaust and closes with a poignant train whistle. It's evocative and allusive in many ways, especially in its use of The Plague, a team of killers who show up like post-apocalyptic menaces and star in their own video game yet look more like robot refugees from a Republic serial.

 

There's a wonderfully gratuitous moment when the Hobo wakes up a captive of the Plague, and sees the duo tending, with considerable effort, to their pet octopus. The moment hints at depths of unsounded weirdness that enrich the film's fantastical feel. On the other hand, the primary villains are Hobo's main weakness. The Drake and his boys seem to see themselves as entertainers keeping the masses docile with dope and deadly circuses, but they're not very entertaining themselves. Neither the roles nor the actors really rise to the level of surreal supervillainy the concept needs to thrive. The weirdest any of them get is to wear hockey skates into battle; they seem pretty mundane otherwise. But there's a lot to enjoy here without them, whether you're a genre buff who recognizes all the influences at play or a fan of over-the-top violence. However, there's not much here for those with over-refined scruples or, alas, for people with purely contemporary taste in action. Hobo's retro approach will seem pointless -- or, worse, simply cheap -- to those accustomed to CGI mayhem and the god's-eye perspectives it makes possible They'll be hard-pressed to understand why Eisener made the film this way, and at that point an exploitation film arguably ceases to be pure exploitation. It may be scandalous to say so, but this gruesome exercise in deliberate obsolescence comes closer to being a work of art. But don't let that keep you away; if you're looking for a wild catharsis to break the tensions of the moment, Hobo With a Shotgun is a mad, epic, hilarious riot that lives up to its hype.