four films

Even 

during the long haul flight that took me to Melbourne last July, flying over cities and landscapes and crossing continents, I took the opportunity to see films I would otherwise not. On such a flight, the film and I are foreign.

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In this way, I chanced on Tommy (2014) by Tarik Saleh, which despite the title is the story of Estelle, who returns to Sweden from the tropics. Tommy opens with historical footage of a bank robbery that took place in Sweden, and then focuses on Estelle and her mission. Estelle contacts the men involved in the robbery, saying that Tommy had sent her to claim his share. By the end of the film, while getting to the place where the money had been hidden, they learn that Tommy is no longer alive; Estelle had kept the truth. With the unfolding of the intrigue and Estelle’s revelation about Tommy, it appears that she is sure to succumb to the Swedish underworld. What undermines the film's thriller status is the turning point based on Estelle’s surrender; she accepts to give her life for that of her child. An underworld figure understands Estelle's sacrifice and gives her a chance. With this scene, the director reveals the empathy he has for the female lead character.

In an interview, Tarik Saleh states that he wanted to tell the story of the women who play along with the underworld men they are attached to, though he was aware that a lead female figure would not have guaranteed commercial success. Is it by chance that the title of the film is ‘Tommy,’ and that the memory of him that Estelle awakens, drives the narrative?

  Who is 'Estelle' then, we might ask? 

I am yours (Jig er den), 2013, Iram Haq

As the Scandinavian Film Festival was running in Melbourne, I jumped onto two trains to the Como Cinema in South Yarra, just in time to see I am yours (2013) by Iram Haq. It was a cold night  in the city, and I was alone. I nestled into the cosy seat, in which I felt glued by the end of the film. When the lights came on to allow cinemagoers to leave, I was not cringing because of the bravery of the film, but for the fact that it seemed all eyes were “foreign” (but that’s another story).

Courageous film, courageous filmmaker, courageous leading actress. As the director, Iram Haq navigates scenes that highlight the lead protagonist's naiveté, viewers gain sympathy for her. In fact, the pace of the film stitches events and zooms into streets, homes, parks such that Mina’s life appears out of control, and poignantly brings home the vulnerability of which she is hardly aware. As a character, Mina feels she is in control of her life, and on a certain level this is true. Viewers see her trying to manoeuvre a passage into urban Europe, access motherhood, and search for identity as a woman. Despite this, the vulnerability that Mina experiences means that she is emotionally shipwrecked in the face of relationships whose boundaries are undefined since they are played in the interstices of living and growing in a foreign society. Crucial relationships with her mother, her boyfriends, and even herself are stretched such that there is no place for feelings, and no way of knowing how to be in the world. Isolated and misunderstood, Mina struggles to find acceptance and to provide security for her son, from whom she retrieves some of the preciousness of life. Without guardian angels, it is clear that might Mina must source warmth, hope and affection deep within herself.

But can she access enough?

School of Babel (Le cour de Babel ), 2014, Julie Bertucelli

Grateful to have gotten in to see School of Babel as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, having braved the rain and the cliff like escalators at Parliament Station, then crossing Collins Street to reach the Kino Cinema in the depths of Collins Place. We were placed on a waiting list, before being free to enter. As it turned out, my daughter may have been the only teenager in the audience.

School of Babel is a “juicy” documentary-film, with moments of sheer hilarity. The cultural background of the teenagers and their families range from Irish to Romanian to Senegalese, and they are all in the “same boat” facing integration. In contrast, the unique personalities of the teenagers shine through the screen, and like a cast of stars they capture the attention of viewers. The documentary-film was also a film within a film, as the director, Julie Bertucelli, follows the class at work producing interviews, shooting lessons and documenting experiences, The student film was presented at a competition, winning an award.

At the parent-teacher interviews, the framing a mother or a father and their child, broadens our view, and shows that ways of interacting between parent and child that are unmistakably familiar; this kind of insight lets stereotypes to fall away, and rather highlights the complexity of a student’s experience, from home to schoolyard to classroom.

Often I recall, the statement made by  Zygmant Bauman: “We have to learn to live permanently with difference.” As I see it, difference cannot be measured solely by the advantage of language, it is refreshing, then, to see a film that goes out of its way to show that the acquisition of language reflects a person’s unique cultural make-up: expressing the self, communicating and interacting in a safe, non-judgemental environment is about barely comprehending to opening to a sense of place.

In the film, the class of teenagers improving their grasp of French in order to join the academic stream is not just about teenagers struggling to be accepted, or for them to accept their new situation, it is rather a window into the role they play within their “foreign” family, and their position in such an abstract, undifferentiated place as “foreignness” itself. The teenagers in the film are mediators of the cultural difference they experience first-hand, between the nationality of their parents and a foreign country, between their parents’ life projects and their humanity. In this, they have the task, which is common to all teenagers, of etching an identity, and along with it a grasp of the wider society; to do that they need to bridge the language of the self with the “language” of a nation.

School of Babel is about growing through difference, and perhaps falling in love with language while discovering one's potential.

La meglio gioventú (Best of Youth), 2003, Marco Tullio Giordano

    Best of Youth by Marco Tullio Giordana is an affresco of forty years of Italian political and social life. It follows the lives of two brothers from a middle-class Roman family. The film opens with the brothers as students of medicine and meeting a young autistic woman, Giorgia, whom they try to save from an institution. Her gaining of autonomy through the course of the film is an allegory for a nation bent on social progress, having left behind both the Monarchy and Fascism with the end of the Second world war. As a result of the work of Franco Barsaglia, who suggested that communal homes were a more humane solution for the mentally instable, meant that by the late 1970s people like Giorgia were free. Of the two brothers, perhaps the wiser and more stable, one becomes active in the legal processes for deinstitutionalisation.

In the six hour film, Marco Tullio Giordana is not looking for answers to the nation’s woes and the divided affections of Nicola and Matteo, rather he gently brushes away the dust of memory to put the spotlight on critical moments in recent Italian history and the way a family survives and wades through the times. The floods in Florence in 1966, with the many volunteers that went to rescue books and art pieces; the student demonstrations in Turin in 1968;  the deinstitutionalisation of the asylums in the 1970s; the Red Brigades and the Moro Affair; the Mafia related bombings in Palermo in the early 1990s, right up to the 2000s. In setting these milestones, working as nodal points by which the story unfolds, the camera focuses in on the brothers who have chosen diverging paths and developed ideologies in such opposition that they are on either side of the barricade. At the Turin student demonstrations, for example, the brother who has enrolled in the police force is in charge of the attack on the demonstrators, which include his own brother and friends. Marco Tullio Giordana strives for equanimity, showing the protagonists to be mere players, albeit passionate ones in events of an ideological nature, who are under forces greater than themselves, and a nation struggling for identity. What brings the brothers down to earth is the ideal of the “family;” in fact the scenes where family members come together emanate the most serenity, though with an underlying touch of pathos that usually accompanies the representation of the traditional family as an indestructible unit buffeted by an inhospitable world. Brothers, sisters, wives and children are bound by the law of family, while at the same time, as individuals and inescapably actors in social dramas and ideological allegiances, they represent its most fragile par,. While the brother who chose to represent the plight of those deemed insane raises his daughter, his ex-wife serves time as an ex-member of the Red Brigades. 

    Best of Youth plays in between black and white, true and false, left and conservative, ideological and familial. It is neither a critique nor an explanation of Italy and the events that have shaped it, but rather in the fashion of master painters it is an affresco. Luigi Lo Cascio plays Nicola, the socially conscious, family oriented brother, while Alessio Boni plays his brother, Matteo, with the intensity and sense of damnation reminiscent of Christopher Walken’s portrayal of a soldier in the Deer Hunter (1978, Michael Cimino). 

(c) Silvana Tuccio, November 2014