MIFF 2004 FILM FESTIVAL NOTEBOOK

By Joel Johnson

 DAY 6 

After a couple of nights of doing just two movies, we are going to get into high gear and do three films. If this were Sesame Street, the letter-of-the-day would definitely be “P.” We are going to start at Railroad Square with Proteus, a Canadian–South African coproduction directed by John Greyson. We will head down to the Waterville Opera House to follow that with Piaf…Her Story…Her Songs, featuring renditions of Piaf’s music by Raquel Bitton, and then see Nina Davenport’s post-9/11 road movie Parallel Lines.

PROTEUS
Canada, 2004  100 Min. 35mm in English

Those familiar with the work of Canadian director and coscreenwriter (with Jack Lewis) John Greyson will not be surprised that Proteus has a gay theme. It is set in what is now South Africa during the early Dutch colonization. The actual timeframe is 1725–1735, but being truly historically accurate to that time is certainly not emphasized. The film begins with a trio of women wearing overdone bouffant hairdos and fashions more accurate to 1962 than 17-anything. The women are transcriptionists, and they are concerned about how to translate a rude word into English. We then see an African running away from something or someone. The camera swings away from the African man to a group of white men, attired appropriately in eighteeth- century suits complete with tri-corn hats, and they are collecting plant samples. A Land Rover pulls up and two white police officers—one wearing eighteenth-century garb and another looking very twentieth century—get out. They are looking for a black man that they say is a thief. The white men say that they haven’t seen him, but he is quickly discovered hiding in a chest the white men are using. He begs for the white men to help him, but he is taken away to be tried. Although he is found innocent of the most serious charges against him, the black man (Rouxnet Brown), who uses the Dutch name of Claas Blank and is able to read and write, is found guilty of a seemingly minor offense and sentenced to ten-years hard labor. This brings us to Robben Island, the infamous South African prison that once housed Nelson Mandela and other dissidents sentenced for political activities against the apartheid-regime of South Africa. The prison holds both black and white prisoners. There Claas manages to get himself the plum assignment of helping prison administrator and botany researcher Virgil Niven (Shaun Smyth) cultivate the protea flower. There’s supposed to be a homoerotic attraction between Niven and Claas, but this needs to be underlined by the dialogue references for the audience to appreciate this. A second assistant to Niven is Lourens (Brett Goldin), a white man who displays stereotypical effeminate mannerisms. But this story is basically about a love affair between Claas and Dutch sailor Rijkhaart Jacobsz (Neil Sandilands). Jacobsz is labeled a “faggot” for the audience when he is first introduced. Claas tries picking on Jacobsz which backfires resulting in Claas’s African friend being flogged to death for stealing some eggs. Their shared inadvertent guilt for their fellow prisoner’s death results first in animosity and then desire. The film tries to draw a line between the injustices heaped upon blacks and gays in the 1700s and apartheid of 200 years later that legislated a cruel racial caste system that imprisoned Nelson Mandela in the early 60’s. The anachronisms make that a heavy-handed exercise and distract from the period accuracy. One wonders if the choice was an artistic one or more motivated by economics. The acting is adequate, but hardly stellar. One senses that need for human connection more than love motivates Claas and Jacobsz’s desire. The actors are only partially successful in engaging film viewers in their characters’ plights. The film has a sauntering pace that gives it little energy. The result is a film that can only muster a two star rating from me.

PIAF…HER STORY…HER SONGS
USA/France/Canada 2003; 94 minutes; 35mm; in English and in French with English subtitles

1/2

The next film is one of the best treats of the festival thus far: Piaf…Her Story…Her Songs. This film blends concert footage from a terrific performance by Raquel Bitton of twenty Piaf standards with Bitton’s own narrative of Piaf’s life; various archival film, pictures, and newspaper accounts of the events in Piaf’s life; a visit to the Piaf Museum in Paris; reminiscences from a dinner with Piaf’s surviving family, friends, and musical collaborators; and from a memorial mass for Edith Piaf. Edith Piaf, for those of you who are not familiar with her, was born poor, rejected by her mother, neglected by her father, and spent her formative years growing up in her grandmother’s bordello. She became a street musician and eventually was discovered by a cabaret owner. He invited her to perform in his cabaret. Her passionate singing style—perhaps the all-time ultimate torch singer—made her a star on both sides of the Atlantic (she made several trips to the United States to sing) and indeed around the world. She was, at one time, the highest paid entertainer in the world. She also lived a very colorful life, both heroic and tragic. She inspired passion in others and had many passionate love affairs. Though it is generally well-known that she had many lovers, the film does not seek to catalog her bedroom guest list. The heart-and-soul of this film and of the Piaf phenomena itself was the music and its passionate delivery. Bitton and the orchestra put together to support her in the concert segment do a fantastic job in delivering Piaf’s music. Director George Elder photographs the concert in a way that captures the energy of the performances and yet doesn’t draw attention away from that performance. Some in the film audience could not resist the temptation to join the applause of the film’s concert hall audience. I did resist the temptation, but it was clearly there. The film could have included more specific details about her life and provided more historical context, but the audience in the screening that I saw was certainly not complaining about that. The film received ovations at both its conclusion and the conclusion of the credit sequence. Raquel Bitton sang a couple of songs for the audience and graciously participated in a Q & A session. Gauging from the audience size and enthusiasm, I suspect that this film will have more than a little support in the festival’s audience favorite balloting.

PARALLEL LINES
USA, 2004; 98 minutes; video; in English

1/2

I had thought that the final film of the day, Parallel Lines, would have little chance of being as affecting as Piaf…Her Story…Her Songs, but Nina Davenport’s very personal documentary about traveling across the United States from San Diego to Manhattan in the wake of September 11th was very powerful. Nina Davenport is making a habit of doing very personal, very intimate documentaries. Her prior film Always a Bridesmaid (2000) dissects her own love life. In this film, Manhattanite Nina is in San Diego for her work when the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City. She is reluctant to return to a traumatized New York City and face the prospect of looking out her apartment window at the emptiness in the New York skyline where the World Trade Center was. She decides to drive home from San Diego beginning in early November 2001, with the plan to be back in New York City in Times Square for New Year’s Eve 2001. She will take secondary roads stopping along the way to talk to people about how the events of September 11th have changed their lives. The parallel lines of the title are taken from the centerlines painted on these roads to signify no passing. A petite and attractive woman traveling alone, Nina is very brave and very successful at gaining the trust of so many people and allowing them to tell their own stories. Although she does occasionally ask questions, she largely lets the individuals tell the stories of their lives and their specific feelings about the events of September 11th. A mosaic emerges of a variety of lives lived with daily struggle and a diversity of feelings about the tragedy. We don’t know whether there are interview subjects that she chose not to include in the film or whether she deliberately chose not to try to reach certain types of people, but the people included are common, ordinary people who work in areas that make them readily accessible to someone just traveling through or who may simply be hanging out at places that make them easily accessible. Some of the interview subjects may be described as being from the margins of our society. There are no business executives, no high-level government bureaucrats, no active military personnel, no technocrats, no computer geeks, and no people for whom talking to Nina would take too much time away from their busy lives or for whom it would be too risky to open up their lives to Nina and her video camera. Although the events of September 11th seem to have unified the country in sadness at the needless and tragic loss of life, there are those thinking about how we generated such antipathy to motivate indiscriminate mass murder and others simply wanting harsh retribution on Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives. Some feel the national tragedy very acutely while others feel it as something far away and nearly unreal. The tragedies in their own personal lives overshadow the distant tragedy for thousands that they do not know. Some simply are too busy sorting out their own lives and trying to survive. However, the result is a powerful, thought-provoking examination of how Americans live their lives and how they think about this tragic national event. One may not always agree with or even understand some of the interview subjects, but their humanity is well-documented in Nina’s footage. The film is capped by Nina’s near-arrest in Washington, D.C., as a potential terrorist for mounting her video camera on her car. She is fortunate since an illegal alien from Nepal taking video during this period in New York to memorialize his visit there was swept up by the FBI and has been detained for more than two years. She does get out of DC and make it back to her apartment in New York City in time for the New Year. It is a poignant homecoming for her and a very poignant film that she has provided to all of us.

 

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