Let the Right One In

One Sunday morning at 11:00 am I attended the Brattle theatre’s Eye Opener series to watch Let the Right One In. I knew I would not like it. I only went for the free breakfast and to support the group; it would not kill me to stay 30 minutes. When 30 minutes was up I thought hum! I can stay another 20 minutes it’s not a bad movie. I ended up watching the entire movie and loving it; what a surprise! I then read the book from beginning to end in three days; that also was thrilling.

It is a great vampire and coming of age film and beautifully filmed in Sweden. It stays true to the book while leaving out a complete chunk around Eli’s so called father. I think this was a problem but understand that it would have made the film run well over two hours.

Oskar is a 12 year old fragile and very anxious boy that is regularly bullied by his stronger classmates. He seems to have no friends until he meets Eli, also 12, who moves in next door to him with her father. She is a pale, serious young girl or is she? She/it/he only comes out at night and doesn’t seem affected by the freezing temperatures. Coinciding with Eli’s arrival is a series of inexplicable disappearances and murders. One man is found tied to a tree, another frozen in the lake, a woman bitten in the neck.

Being a vampire movie, Blood is the common thread - and for an introverted boy likes Oskar, who is fascinated by gruesome stories, it doesn’t take long before he figures out that Eli is a vampire. But by now a subtle romance has blossomed between Oskar and Eli, and she gives him the strength to fight back against his aggressors. Oskar becomes increasingly aware of the tragic, inhuman dimension of Eli’s plight, but cannot bring himself to forsake her. Frozen forever in a twelve-year-old’s body, with all the burgeoning feelings and confused emotions of a young adolescent, Eli knows that she can only continue to live if she keeps on moving. But when Oskar faces his darkest hour, Eli returns to defend him the only way she can… and what an end it is; wow!!

Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson weaves friendship, rejection and loyalty into a disturbing and darkly atmospheric, yet poetic and unexpectedly tender tableau of adolescence. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is based on the best-selling novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.

The Visitor (2007)

What is it about The Visitor that hangs around in your head for so long? I found myself thinking about the movie on and off for weeks after I watched it. I was much taken by how the two illegal immigrants would take the boat to Staten Island just to be able to view the Statute of Liberty. It is such a powerful symbol of democracy and freedom and yet very few people actually get to experience that; it has become seriously corroded.

In some ways this was a brave film to make because it looks at the face of young illegal immigrants to this country a topic for which there seems to be no middle ground. You are either for or against. But the movie manages very skillfully to humanize the issue and we root for the two young protagonists in the hope that they reach their quest for freedom and democracy. To bad that it is not to be!

It is also a wonderful film of opposites; Family versus single occupancy living; communal music versus singular music, and love and friendship versus just existing. Richard Jenkins was terrific as a middle aged, washed-up professor, as was Haaz Sleiman the optimistic, young Syrian musician hoping for a better life in America.

For me it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

Up the Yangtze (2007)

A documentary by Yung Chang a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker currently based in Montreal.

This documentary has been receiving rave reviews. As to be expected the documentary opens with some splendid, haze shrouded pictures of the Yangtze. The film focuses on: The tourist trade, the two million people being relocated from the countryside, the modern cities and what ultimately does the Chinese dream mean?

The film begins at Chongqing, a 13 hour flight from Beijing, and the largest municipality in the world of almost 32 million people. You see coolies (peasants from the area being dammed) carrying loads of luggage onto the cruise boats for primarily western tourists who are coming to view history in the making. The documentary follows one particular peasant farmer family, the Yus’ who live in Fengdu one of the areas to be dammed.

The parents live in a dilapidated building with a tin roof and no electricity. They are unable to read and have no basic education. They are farmers and they know how to grow vegetables the way nature intended. They eat by candlelight. All the animals (chickens, a baby kitten, and dogs) lived in or around the house. This family had three children, two boys and one girl. It was not stated in the documentary but farmers in the countryside are allowed to have two children if the first born is a girl as was Yu Shui. In the past at least, extra children were not registered with the government for fear of fines or worse. Not being registered meant you could not receive schooling.

At the beginning we see the family discussing their concerns on how to pay for their kids to go to school. Yu Shui is 14 years old and has completed middle school (representative of 80% of the population). The decide to send her to work on one of the many tourist boats going up and down the River. We do not learn about the length of her work day but I think we can assume that they work from breakfast to dinner (a long day). I would really have liked to know if it was better than working in manufacturing in the big cities as we saw in the wonderful documentary China Blue www.pbs.org/independentlens/chinablue

The difference between the two types of jobs is that I believe skills picked up on the ship were more transferable. They were taught English and many housekeeping and waiting skills. The luxury cruise only applies to the clientele not to the workers who toil long hours below and above deck and Yu wants to go home. The managers in the documentary seemed to be very caring for their young staff and also your work group watched over you and helped where needed.

To see the tourists on the boat viewing the river and towns running along it reminded me of Stephanie Black’s documentary Life and Debt
www.lifeanddebt
The tourists were not interested in the social aspects of what they were seeing. This was just a dream holiday for them. They were taken off the boat to view one of the villages set up for the dislocated people. The selling point was that each house had a refrigerator, air conditioning and a color TV. I could not help but think this was propaganda and not all the houses would be like this.

Perhaps the biggest shocks was how the under 30 educated urban Chinese from middle class backgrounds were so demanding. It was though they thought that they deserved everything in life right now. Making money was a top priority; their passion indeed to be accomplished by whatever means available. During the documentary one of the training managers who fires one of them says that they were over-confident, arrogant, conceited and full of a sense of entitlement. Pretty damming words!

Occasionally we see pictures of the cities and the first thing that comes to my mind is how much electricity is being gobbled up and wasted as neon lights were all over many buildings all night.

At the end of the documentary we see Yu Shui’s family loading up their humble possessions and sadly moving. As food becomes scarcer around the world I wonder if China will lament the flooding of so much farm land.

Find out more about the documentary by visiting the web site
www.uptheyangtze.com

Bab'Aziz

This week I hurried off to the cinema to see Bab’Aziz by director Nacer Khemir. As is typical with non western stories it takes many detours much like the shifting sands of where the film was shot. It left me wondering what the movie was about but in the end I decided that didn’t matter, for we don’t need to know everything. Perhaps it would be better to describe the film as a visual poem; certainly the music would support this notion.

While the movie is filmed in a desert, which turned out to be Tunisia and Iran the landscape was beautiful and if music can seduce you than this does. I don’t know whether it will stand up without the visuals but I am definitely going to find out.

The story revolves around a blind dervish named Bab’Aziz and his granddaughter, Ishtar. Together they wander the desert in search of a great reunion of dervishes that takes place just once every thirty years. They don’t know where the gathering will take place and apparently none of the other attendees do either, but all believe that their faith will be their guide, which proves to be correct. For they are very in tune with their inner voice.

To keep Ishtar entertained, Bab’Aziz relays the ancient tale of a prince who relinquished his realm in order to remain next to a small pool in the desert, staring into its depths while contemplating his soul. This story is told in fits and starts through the film and it began to remind me of the stories that Queen Scheherazade told her King in A Thousand and One Nights. While Khemir has created a story of longing and belonging it also speaks to death; when our time is up and how we chose to die. It is a beautiful and thoughtful movie; perhaps a love poem to his father to whom it was dedicated. I am going back to see it one more time before it is gone forever!

Into Great Silence

Into Great Silence (Die Grobe Stille) 2005

This documentary was filmed in the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery of the reclusive Carthusian Order in France. Philip Groning, the German director and writer first approached the monastery sixteen years ago for permission to film; he was told that it would not happen soon, and indeed it didn’t. However, as you watch the documentary you will appreciate how time is something that is not hurried.

Unbeknownst to me this was a movie that the viewer participated in! By which I mean, you sat there for three hours watching a move with about as many words as in a three minute song. That said, by the end of the movie I would willingly have sat through it again straight away.

The opening introduction is very slow and it takes 25 minutes before you hear a sound. The opening shots show a row of identical buildings with black roof’s that looked just like Dutch burghers with their tall black hats accentuated by the fact that snow is falling.

Philip Groning lived in the monestry for six months and thus he films the monks daily rituals, prayers, tasks and weekly forrays to the outside world. In fact, so little is going on that you soon begin to appreciate the small things in life, very small, such as the grain in the wood on the floors, the ice crystals on the lettuces in the garden, and the water dripping from the roof very, very slowly. The photographer places great emphasis on light in the documentary which made me think of God saying, “Let there be light” and there was (Genesis 1.3). The documentary builds quietly upon itself and ¾ of the way through it you feel that everything is at one with nature or to put it another way, that to disturb nature is an affront, to live in harmony with it is not.

Every cell appears to have a window that opens out to the wonderful scenery outside. It is this natural world that provides substance to the soul and food for the body. There were a couple of shots of the white cows with their bells ding aligning as they moved around the land munching at whatever, and you thought "what a life” even if later on in their life they are their source of food for the monks.

The monastery is in the Chartreuse Mountains (part of the French Alps) in Eastern France and the original building goes back to 1084. When it rained, the rain seemed like a joyful gift. When the mist hovered over the range it seemed the mist was actually spirits, and when the monks sang their beautiful Gorgonian chants it felt as if they were singing to the spirits, thus creating a bridge to the “other” world.

Today the monastery is closed to the public and the monks support themselves by the production and sale of Chartreuse liqueur, which interestingly was not captured in the documentary at all which seems an ommission.

Toward the end of the documentary the film maker interviewed a very elderly monk on his thoughts about dying. The monk said he was not afraid of death, "the faster you run to God the happier you are". I then recalled how death is a word that you don’t hear much spoken in the U.S. we prefer to use other words such as “passing on” or “deceased” and it made me wonder why such a Christian nation is afraid of death.