After finishing off yesterday’s write-up (and faffing about a bit), I had to dash for the bus; but my luck with public transport held, and I was only a minute or so late for Love, Lust and Lies, the latest instalment of a 44 year documentary. This project wasn’t started with the same systematic intent as the Seven Up series – towards the end, the documentary maker said that the reason that the three women (who were 14 at the time) were chosen was because they were lively, and decided to tell the truth. The film-maker returned to these women four times; this is the fifth.
The women had some things in common – they all regret how early they left school, for instance, and they all have children. But their lives have gone very different ways, too – one had been married once and it had stuck, the others had married multiple times, for example. And we got to see a bit of the lives of some of their kids.
You wouldn’t necessarily want to be best friends with all of them, but you do wish the best for them, and the documentary itself was engaging and interesting; I think I might try and track down a copy, since I think that my parents might enjoy watching it.
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Countryside 35×45 was the first thing that I’ve seen at the City Gallery since they’ve reopened, and the theatre is impressive, with a screen wide enough to show This Is New Zealand as originally filmed (three screens wide), and mysterious vents under all the seats.
Unfortunately, the seats themselves were… well they aren’t as bad as the worst of the Paramount, and might be slightly better than the Film Archive; but that’s setting the bar pretty low.
The film itself was about the changeover from CCCP passports to Russian Republic ones; people had to provide new pictures, 35mm by 45mm, for these passports, and the film followed a photographer around as he took these photos (as well as doing a bit of other work, like a wedding). There were plenty of older people complaining about the fact that they were going to die soon, why do they have to bother with new passports? And others complaining that they hadn’t been paid for years, where would they travel to?
Actuall…
Wait, I’m sitting in the Embassy with a cup of tea, and they’ve decided to play YMCA over the speakers. What the heck?
Where was I? Oh yes, I was going to wonder whether complaining fulfils the same social function in Russian culture that English humour does, and speculate that it might have been an artefact of translation. Even working with a fair number of foreigners at work, it’s occasionally odd to be reminded that “mustn’t grumble” isn’t a universal truth.
The film was shot in black & white (I nearly said “greyscale”, for which I apologise), and at an odd aspect ratio – I suspect it will have been the same ratio as the photos. (I think they might have digitally aged the film as well, but I suppose it’s possible they just had dirty film-stock.) The shape of the film made me think of paintings as well as photographs, and there were a number of times that I thought you could take a frame and have something you could quite happily put on the wall.
It was surprising how sad the sight of the old passports being shovelled into the fire was – all the pictures from decades ago, curling up in the furnace. A weird little piece, but I’m glad that I saw it.
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I had a bit of a gap, but my spontaneous “let’s drop in on C” fell through when I couldn’t find her, so I fell back on my “go to a cafe and start writing to summon people who know me”, which worked flawlessly; one even generously helped me with my curly fries (hi Soph!).
Then it was off to Draquila – Italy Trembles, a documentary about how the corrupt Italian Prime-minister Berlusconi used the tragedy of an earthquake to boost his polls, and then made sure cronies profited while building a new, needlessly complicated development (and using the army to ban people from the old town). It was as if Hurricane Katrina had been dealt with by corrupt gangsters with construction connections, rather than just by indifferent incompetents.
The film was quite visually dense, which sometimes hurt it when your eye kept being drawn away from the translations by flashy graphics; but it did a good job of explaining how Berlusconi has managed to get away with everything, showing how adding a word here and there to legislation can pervert it’s intent – changing “emergency” to “emergency or big event”, for example, so that the Civil Protection Agency can ignore all laws when constructing swimming pools for an international swimming event; and then changing “public” to “public and private” when people complain that the two pools and 50 “guest rooms” aren’t public, and that it has been converted, in fact, to a hotel.
Berlusconi reminds me a bit of a more successful Winston Peters, insofar as they both seem to get around scandal by twinkling a bit and saying, “Yes, aren’t I so naughty!” and carrying on as before. The power of lacking shame shouldn’t be underestimated. And the way that the opposition has been browbeaten into virtual impotence was sad, as well – the image of the abandoned Democratic Party info tent, that was never manned, was disheartening in the extreme.
In any case, I thought that the film-maker did an excellent job of presenting a complicated situation, and I hope that she goes on to make a lot more… though I suspect that she may have to work outside Italy for a while.
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Then it was out of the Paramount and off to the Embassy for I Killed My Mother, in which a mother and teenage son manage to constantly hit each other’s raw patches and push each other’s buttons, moderately wittily and in French. The write-up in the booklet mentions the exchange where the mother says, “We used to talk!”, and the son says, “I was four, and had no-one else!”
While the son is definitely a bit self-centred (well, as self-centred as a spinning top, really, as is typical for teenagers), the mother also manages to be unreasonable at times, withdrawing permission once its given and overriding social plans that she’s been told about. But they both manage to show that they’re reasonable people, and the son admits that they would probably get on fine if they met as strangers.
It is this kind of story that makes me worry what I would be like as a parent. I remember being a trial for my parents at some points in my teenage years – I suspect all my siblings had our moments – but in general I think we got on alright. Does the fact that I don’t think any of us were particularly spoiled mean that I was the spoiled one, in a sort of inverse to the “if you can’t spot the sucker at the poker table, it’s you” sort of rule? Actually, I think that I’ll be happiest if I leave this line of enquiry alone.
Getting back to the film; it was well made, with some clever shots (they liked the “fill half of the screen with the face and leave the other side empty, to emphasise how separated the people talking are” shot), and a good film, but I feel no need to see it again.
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Finally, it was back to the Embassy for Scheherazade, Tell Me A Story, where the partner of a female presenter is angling to be made editor of the state newspaper, and asks her to back off political stories – so she starts interviewing various women, getting them to tell their stories instead. Unfortunately, everything is political…
At first, something about the movie felt a bit off for me. Then I realised – the problem wasn’t with the movie, the problem was with how I was watching it. Everything was vivid contrasts and melodrama; but that made it an above average blaxploitation movie (except that the minority was Arabic women, rather than Afro-Americans). Or if you prefer, the criteria that they were using to decide on story felt closer to Bollywood movies than Arthouse ones, even though the worldview that they were promoting was very… I’m not sure whether “feminist” is the right word. “Egalitarian”, maybe? Pointing out that having to pay for all the furniture, give up control of their money and having a car, and run the household (while submitting all decisions for the husband’s approval) isn’t fair… well, it feels like common-sense. But as a friend pointed out while we were waiting for the bus, it’s not like things like this don’t happen in the West, even today.
Anyway, I don’t know that I’d call this a “good” movie – there were some really quite clever shots (with the face and reaction of the interviewer hovering on a screen behind the person talking), but some of the sub-stories were quite long and had quite hokey elements. For example, I’d be tempted to shorten the story of the three sisters, and some of the fight scenes could have been better staged. But overall, I am glad I watched it.
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