I've been meaning to see K-Pax, a film with Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges, since it first came out. It's ostensibly based on a novel, but the parallels between K-Pax and Man Facing Southeast are unavoidable, although apparently legal action was dropped.
Man Facing Southeast is an Argentinian film from 1986, and I saw it for the first time a few years later. Wow, 25 years old now. The story in both is that a man in a mental institution claims to be an alien, despite being completely human. No laser, no special powers, maybe a little off the charts, but no obvious signs of being an alien. In both, the man is exceptionally intelligent and a polymath.
In both films, the alien (Prot in K-Pax, Rantes in Man Facing Southeast) spends his time in the mental institution performing miraculous (but not scientifically impossible) interventions with patients while showing talent in art, science, and math far beyond what would be normal. In both, the psychiatrist in charge is intrigued enough to get personally involved.
While Man Facing Southeast leave the ambiguity in place, K-Pax attempts to reconcile the ambiguity with an obvious and trite explanation, which leads to a personal reconciliation for Bridges' character and his son. Bridges and Spacey are charismatic actors, but the last part of the film gets tiring and has what amounts to a boring and indefensible climax/conclusion. It was as though the writer could make up his mind about the central plot point, so produced two endings and interleaved them.
There is an explanation for this. One of South America's strongest literary traditions is magic realism, which is similar to science fiction and fantasy, but not quite the same. In books by Borges or Marquez, the world is altered to account for something exceptional and inexplicable. No justification or explanation is offered. In the US, we have a strong sci-fi/fantasy tradition, but it has to be explained: think about X-Men or Heroes, in which superpowers are explained in evolutionary terms.
Man Facing Southeast doesn't directly address the tension of the is-he/isn't-he question. We're intentionally left unsatisfied, because in reality, any satisfying answer would act as a trick ending to be guessed. Think The Sixth Sense, which worked well, but made every subsequent film by Shyamalam a guessing game and a yawner.
What could I have done differently? I could have rewatched Man Facing Southeast, or just watched a different movie altogether. Still, I'm glad that I watched it; Bridges and Spacey are great actors; although their chemistry in this film was not ideal, they were still fun to watch. I could also have accepted what I knew would be true, which is that K-Pax would explain itself to us and answer any question it proposed. It's not a painful thing to do if you are anticipating it, and if you aren't holding the film up to the unrealistic measure of a very artistic that was an exceptional success (artistically) and a personal favorite. The similarities may be too striking to discount, but they didn't have to make the experience painful. I often find myself not having fun at my own expense (in situations like these); no one wins, and I end up losing. I know that this is shocking if you know me, but I think I might be able to periodically overthink things a bit. Just a bit.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Hadewijch by Bruno Dumont
I will start this by saying that I've never liked Bruno Dumont's films. They strive for greatness but end up being a mix of confusion and pedestrianism. My first exposure to Dumont was Twentynine Palms. I was excited to see that film, but it went nowhere and offered no insight into the characters. Was it plot-driven, rather than character-drive? That would have required a plot.
In Hadewijch, we meet a young nun about to be thrown out of the convent because of what is ostensibly her religious zeal, but is really because she's a conceited behavior problem. She has isolated herself from the world because she's bat-shit crazy, not because she is really passionate about religion. We never gain any insight into her religious fervor, but that's not surprising, since we never learn anything about her. Per the rules of French cinema, she prays in a slurred whisper with occasional sharp consonants, and since she's mostly babbling, the translators chose not to subtitle much of it.
After the convent, she runs to a shrine, cries a bit, and then heads home to Paris and her family. She barely interacts with her parents, is supposedly in school studying theology (although we never see her in school or studying). She is invited by several young Muslim men to join them for a drink and then a concert. One of the young men makes a pass at her, which she blows off. This is significant. Really, it is. Sure. Yawn.
Through the young man, she meets his brother, an older man who acts as a lay theologian for a poor, public-housing group of Muslims. He invites her to one of her theological discussions (think Bible study, but a bit more didactic and abstract). She wasn't wearing a bra, and one of her fellow classmates openly gawked at her breasts through her thin shirt. This upset her, she later explains, because she only loves Christ.
In continuing the non-sequitor that is Hadewijch, she's now recruited to travel to some Muslim country, perhaps Lebanon, perhaps Palestine; regardless, it has just been bombed. Dumont is a master of indirection: he never says "the Jews did this", but the idea hangs heavy in the air. Celine's character now decides to become a terrorist, commit a terrorist bombing in Paris, and then feel really, really bad about it. Cue dramatic music, an attempted Ophelia-style suicide, and a rescue by a hero, and close curtains.
Honestly, I found the movie xenophobic. The Muslims are all unemployed and uneducated, and apparently by the time you've met your second French Muslim, you're now in the world of international Islamist terror. Celine's savior is a Frenchman, a habitual criminal who spends most of the film's timeline in jail for a parole violation, but hey, he's employed and presumably Christian.
This could have been a good film about the dangers of religious fervor, but it wasn't that. The nuns are straight out of The Sound of Music, and the only other religious people (two Muslims and Celine) end up being terrorists.
What could I have done to make this a better experience? I think I should have read some reviews from more insightful reviewers. Perhaps I'm just missing something. I should also NOT have gone in with the thought "I'm seeing a film by a terrible director". I don't know that I would have enjoyed the film more, but I doubt I would have enjoyed it less.
Am I glad I went? Yes. Dumont has style and panache that are unique to French film. He does go in for languid shots of inaction, but his cinematographer is excellent. Even if this were a parody of recent French film (and it seemed like that at times), it was a good parody.
In Hadewijch, we meet a young nun about to be thrown out of the convent because of what is ostensibly her religious zeal, but is really because she's a conceited behavior problem. She has isolated herself from the world because she's bat-shit crazy, not because she is really passionate about religion. We never gain any insight into her religious fervor, but that's not surprising, since we never learn anything about her. Per the rules of French cinema, she prays in a slurred whisper with occasional sharp consonants, and since she's mostly babbling, the translators chose not to subtitle much of it.
After the convent, she runs to a shrine, cries a bit, and then heads home to Paris and her family. She barely interacts with her parents, is supposedly in school studying theology (although we never see her in school or studying). She is invited by several young Muslim men to join them for a drink and then a concert. One of the young men makes a pass at her, which she blows off. This is significant. Really, it is. Sure. Yawn.
Through the young man, she meets his brother, an older man who acts as a lay theologian for a poor, public-housing group of Muslims. He invites her to one of her theological discussions (think Bible study, but a bit more didactic and abstract). She wasn't wearing a bra, and one of her fellow classmates openly gawked at her breasts through her thin shirt. This upset her, she later explains, because she only loves Christ.
In continuing the non-sequitor that is Hadewijch, she's now recruited to travel to some Muslim country, perhaps Lebanon, perhaps Palestine; regardless, it has just been bombed. Dumont is a master of indirection: he never says "the Jews did this", but the idea hangs heavy in the air. Celine's character now decides to become a terrorist, commit a terrorist bombing in Paris, and then feel really, really bad about it. Cue dramatic music, an attempted Ophelia-style suicide, and a rescue by a hero, and close curtains.
Honestly, I found the movie xenophobic. The Muslims are all unemployed and uneducated, and apparently by the time you've met your second French Muslim, you're now in the world of international Islamist terror. Celine's savior is a Frenchman, a habitual criminal who spends most of the film's timeline in jail for a parole violation, but hey, he's employed and presumably Christian.
This could have been a good film about the dangers of religious fervor, but it wasn't that. The nuns are straight out of The Sound of Music, and the only other religious people (two Muslims and Celine) end up being terrorists.
What could I have done to make this a better experience? I think I should have read some reviews from more insightful reviewers. Perhaps I'm just missing something. I should also NOT have gone in with the thought "I'm seeing a film by a terrible director". I don't know that I would have enjoyed the film more, but I doubt I would have enjoyed it less.
Am I glad I went? Yes. Dumont has style and panache that are unique to French film. He does go in for languid shots of inaction, but his cinematographer is excellent. Even if this were a parody of recent French film (and it seemed like that at times), it was a good parody.
Week 2 of Classes Done
After a full two weeks of Fall Semester at UNC Charlotte, I'm in a happy state of exhaustion and appreciative of the extra day off.
ITCS 1600 is going well. The students seem to be responding to the material we're covering; they understand what is expected of them, and to some extent the "why" of what we expect of them. What I have yet to figure out is how to track student progress on a reasonable sliding metric; this became particularly apparent when Evie Powell told me that only about half of my students had signed up for Snag'Em, and of those only 8 had completed the initial survey. Getting direct info from Evie on the location of the survey seemed to help, but in the future I would ask Evie to delete my account, or create one with a different email, in order to refamiliarize myself with the process. It's not that the link is hidden, but I can see the cause of the confusion.
ITCS 1600 is going well. The students seem to be responding to the material we're covering; they understand what is expected of them, and to some extent the "why" of what we expect of them. What I have yet to figure out is how to track student progress on a reasonable sliding metric; this became particularly apparent when Evie Powell told me that only about half of my students had signed up for Snag'Em, and of those only 8 had completed the initial survey. Getting direct info from Evie on the location of the survey seemed to help, but in the future I would ask Evie to delete my account, or create one with a different email, in order to refamiliarize myself with the process. It's not that the link is hidden, but I can see the cause of the confusion.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)