Time of the Wolf
2003/DVD 2006
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Hakim Taleb, Lucas Biscombe
Review by Nancy Keefe Rhodes
In early January 2006, I saw my first Michael Haneke film at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City one cold, slushy night. There's a moment in Caché – in English, it means Hidden – where, utterly without warning, a man slits his own throat, loosing a jet of blood across a kitchen. Even now, I feel my own head jerk back, how my hands clenched the seat arms, hear our – the rest of the audience's – noisy collective gasp. The success of Caché – with its meditation on how camera surveillance has penetrated our lives and its riff on the costs of colonialism at a time when North African migrant workers were rioting in French suburbs – introduced the Austrian's work to a wider US audience. DVD release of earlier Haneke films quickly followed that spring. Tellingly, Caché's own DVD cover features a white background rent with a single jagged red slash.
Such moments of disorienting recoil are Haneke's calling cards. In The Piano Teacher (2001), a film with certainly more than one such moment, my candidate for most viscerally gasp-inducing is that in which Isabelle Huppert's teacher leaves the auditorium during her nervous star pupil's dazzling recital and booby-traps the girl's coat pocket with shards of broken glass. Somehow this moment is more unsettling than successive ones - it's as though Haneke has broken the act itself into shards - in which we first hear her scream, then see the blood-drenched hand held mid-air.
Haneke's most violent moments sometimes occur just off-screen – we see the resulting bloodspray, after which his women, literally unable to stomach events, vomit – or the violence is other than merely physical. That gash on Caché's DVD cover as much represents another boundary violated: the breaking of the "fourth wall" convention of live drama – from which Haneke comes to cinema – in which action spills off the stage, characters speak directly to audiences or some provocation occurs that transforms one's safe spectator experience to participatory immediacy. Haneke opens the cage door. And from The Seventh Continent (1989) on, in most of his scripts – except for adapting novels twice – this occurs over and over with characters named some variant of Anne and Georges Laurent; their children, when present, often named Ben and Eva. As if, as a culture, we keep not getting the lesson right.
In Haneke's new Funny Games, set on Long Island and pretty much a shot-for-shot re-make of his 1997 film of the same title, the moment of most recoil for me arrives near the end. As Ann (Naomi Watts) – bound, gagged, her husband and son dead – crosses a small lake in her sailboat, perched on the edge of the deck, one of her captors, Paul (Michael Pitt), with a cheery "Ciao, bella!" and not so much as a glance in her direction, shoves her overboard. (She drops from sight as quickly, as disposably, as that first kid shot in the library dropped from the frame in Gus Van Sant's 2003 Columbine-inspired Elephant). But much of what repulses people about this film, with its veneer of opera scores and lovely God's-eye cinematography, occurs earlier – during the three times Paul or Peter turn to the camera to taunt the audience about torture-as-entertainment and then during a truly disorienting sequence in which Ann shoots one kidnapper, we may momentarily exult and Paul uses a TV remote to re-wind – erase – that possible outcome. Funny Games is assaultive, masterful and left Carousel Mall's multiplex quickly. In the shorthand parlance of my group of regular movie buddies, it's "not for Laurinda."
Despite making Funny Games anew – and he's working on a film now about how ritual punishment in a rural northern German school in 1913 contributed to Fascism's rise, the working title of which is The Teacher's Tale – Haneke did make one film (his first after 9/11) that's gentler, comparatively easier on his women, and full of grief for us all. Well, it's not exactly without its violence. But one appreciates Time of the Wolf (2003) more, understanding Haneke's usual bent.
Here, affluent city-dweller Anne Laurent (Isabelle Huppert) – a panicked looter shoots husband Georges very early - crosses the French countryside with teen-aged daughter Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) and young son Ben (Lucas Biscombe) after some convulsive catastrophe turns Europe to wasteland. Because she has "behaved correctly" in the past to a local woman we assume was a shopkeeper or maid, Anne receives a bag of biscuits through a narrowly cracked door. A violent feral boy (Hakim Taleb) hesitantly joins them and soon pulls an overcoat from a corpse which he offers to Eva. Initially she's repulsed, but in the next scene she's wearing it, and Eva remains this boy's single tenuous thread to any make-shift community. An unstopping refugee train zooms by but he guides them to a country train station. Several incidents of frail generosity occur, flickering before the tide of chaos – an old man shares a cup of milk with his wife, one woman calms another down, in a fitful night there's a faint, scratchy Beethoven sonata on a tape recorder.
Fragile, traumatized, increasingly given to wandering off, Ben hears garbled talk from some travelers of the Jewish legend of "the Just" – those 36 humans whose presence offsets all humanity's evil-doing – and decides to sacrifice himself. Beside a signal fire on the tracks in a vast night, a sentry stops him, cradles him, says his willingness is enough. Then someone watches from an open box-car door, rumbling monotonously across an empty land. Haneke's endings are aggressively ambiguous. Of course we might prefer it meant the next train stopped for Anne and her children. But it's hard not think that "Never again" is the simple lesson that we're still missing, all of us fellow travelers.
*******
This review appeared in the 4/3/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where "Make it Snappy" is a regular column reviewing DVDs of movies that didn't open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth.
AGORA: Dragged from her chariot by a mob of fanatical vigilante Christian monks, the revered astronomer was stripped naked, skinned to her bones with sharp oyster shells, stoned and burned alive as possibly the first executed witch in history. A kind of purge that was apparently big business back then.
.jpg)
4/5/08
4/3/08
Water Lilies: Filmmaker Sex Fantasies And Borderline Kiddie Porn
Water Lilies Movie Review
Borderline kiddie porn featuring sexual girl-on-girl garbage sniffing of one's favorite female object of desire, post-feminist burying instead of burning bras as female self-hatred, and gal pal how-to tips on deflowering your best friend.
Koch Lorber Films
Unrated
0 stars
Am I missing something here, or are movies increasingly becoming the new legally protected venue for filmmakers with dubious motives, to engage in borderline kiddie porn? Over the past year or so, both studio and indie films have cropped up in which underage actors simulate graphic sex and masturbation, and perform oral sex on adults.
And now Water Lilies has arrived in theaters, an admittedly occasionally poignant but reprehensibly lewd and voyeuristic cinematic obsession with teenage sexual and emotional turmoil. In other words, a filmmaker can request minors to posed nude and indulge in sexual behavior for the camera, however simulated, that would land anybody else in handcuffs. So ironically, the MPAA goes to great lengths to create a stringent regulatory system as to what minors can see in movies, but not what they can do on screen.
French director Celine Sciamma's film debut Water Lilies, is a coming of age tale playing out around swimming classes at a suburban Paris high school. Three glum teens in contrasting states of physical maturity, also represent the most deplorable generic female caricatures. There's the popular beautiful blonde bitch (Adele Haenel) who cock teases everyone in sight but is also frigid and possibly a closet lesbian; the shy, mousy introvert (Pauline Acquart) who looks about twelve and may or may not also be a lesbian, feeding her erotic fixation on other females by hanging around the pool ogling the bathing nymphettes when not stealing and sniffing the garbage of her primary girl object of desire, and later deflowering her as a favor; and finally, the chubby, slovenly outcast and butt of ridicule (Louise Blachere) who divides her time between stuffing her face, what else, and luring the handsomest high school hunk into hot sex because she's desperate for any male attention. Though her eventual act of revenge against her sexual humiliation is as ridiculously unreal as a scene in which she buries her bra in the garden to protest her fate as the designated town fattie.
In the end, one comes away from Water Lilies with absolutely no idea who any of these young girls are aside from their carnal sexual urges. How do they feel about the world around them, what joys in life fill them with wonder, who are their families and nurturers, what books are they reading? Minor details this filmmaker apparently couldn't care less about.
Prairie Miller
Borderline kiddie porn featuring sexual girl-on-girl garbage sniffing of one's favorite female object of desire, post-feminist burying instead of burning bras as female self-hatred, and gal pal how-to tips on deflowering your best friend.
Koch Lorber Films
Unrated
0 stars
Am I missing something here, or are movies increasingly becoming the new legally protected venue for filmmakers with dubious motives, to engage in borderline kiddie porn? Over the past year or so, both studio and indie films have cropped up in which underage actors simulate graphic sex and masturbation, and perform oral sex on adults.
And now Water Lilies has arrived in theaters, an admittedly occasionally poignant but reprehensibly lewd and voyeuristic cinematic obsession with teenage sexual and emotional turmoil. In other words, a filmmaker can request minors to posed nude and indulge in sexual behavior for the camera, however simulated, that would land anybody else in handcuffs. So ironically, the MPAA goes to great lengths to create a stringent regulatory system as to what minors can see in movies, but not what they can do on screen.
French director Celine Sciamma's film debut Water Lilies, is a coming of age tale playing out around swimming classes at a suburban Paris high school. Three glum teens in contrasting states of physical maturity, also represent the most deplorable generic female caricatures. There's the popular beautiful blonde bitch (Adele Haenel) who cock teases everyone in sight but is also frigid and possibly a closet lesbian; the shy, mousy introvert (Pauline Acquart) who looks about twelve and may or may not also be a lesbian, feeding her erotic fixation on other females by hanging around the pool ogling the bathing nymphettes when not stealing and sniffing the garbage of her primary girl object of desire, and later deflowering her as a favor; and finally, the chubby, slovenly outcast and butt of ridicule (Louise Blachere) who divides her time between stuffing her face, what else, and luring the handsomest high school hunk into hot sex because she's desperate for any male attention. Though her eventual act of revenge against her sexual humiliation is as ridiculously unreal as a scene in which she buries her bra in the garden to protest her fate as the designated town fattie.
In the end, one comes away from Water Lilies with absolutely no idea who any of these young girls are aside from their carnal sexual urges. How do they feel about the world around them, what joys in life fill them with wonder, who are their families and nurturers, what books are they reading? Minor details this filmmaker apparently couldn't care less about.
Prairie Miller
4/2/08
Taste of Cherry
1997/DVD 1999
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Cast: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari
Review by Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Years ago one of my sisters sent me a postcard from a Boston museum of a John Singer Sargent painting of a simple, square, sun-washed stucco house, I think in Capri, across whose clean, rectangular lines fell the shadow of a tree, sinuous and lacey. I've never seen that painting again and I can no longer locate the postcard. But I remember staring at the painting and the sudden blossoming pleasure I had in seeing it was as much a painting of the tree as the house.
It's no surprise, really, that Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami – also a landscape photographer of considerable renown who leans toward stark, nearly abstract groupings of trees against fields of snow – should come up with a similar image late in Taste of Cherry, his 1997 tale of a lonely, modern city-dweller who spends his last day alive seeking, with singular tunnel vision, someone to cover his grave. By the time Kiarostami trains his camera on Mr. Badii's living room window, we've spent the day with this man and we know his plan.
Beginning in downtown Tehran at a street-corner labor pool whose beseeching swarms of supplicants he passes by, the finicky Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives on, out of the city's center to the outskirts. There he offers money to a construction foreman at a deserted site who's been talking in a phone booth that's incongruously planted in the middle of a muddy field. This man, apparently with his own money problems, mistakes Badii's offer for a sexual advance and angrily turns him away. It's a huge sum Badii offers – 200,000 tomans, nearly six months wages for the average Iranian worker.
Mr. Badii drives on, picks up a young soldier (Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari) who's walked all night from his Kurdish village to get back to his post on time for his duty. Badii fondly remembers his own military service, but he makes the slender boy increasingly nervous. Dropping his not-quite-jelled military reserve, the boy sprints down the hill in panic once he sees the open grave. Badii stops a while with a construction site guard, an Afghani refugee who offers to make him tea in his rickety shack on stilts at the foot of towering slope from which a bull-dozer's constant din and dust rains down. The guard's fellow refugee, a seminarian, turns Badii down and fails to dissuade him. But even here, in this construction site as vast and desolate as any on-screen since those of Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang in his 1994 Vive L'Amour, simple hospitality abides. And when Badii's wheel goes off the edge of the road, muddy laborers cheerfully haul him back.
At last, Mr. Bagheri (Abdolrahman Bagheri), an old Turk who's been out on foot hunting quail for his taxidermy students at the national natural history museum – a place of ornate, scrolled gates and deep, serene lawns, the only site of man-made order and beauty in this city – agrees to the deal, after relating his own close call with suicide decades ago and the sick child whose care Badii's money will secure.
It's Bagheri – after all, he's also found some famously nervous birds in a most unlikely spot too – who supplies the film's title, the culmination of his inventory of nature's bounty. "The world isn't the way you see it," he asserts. "Do you want to refuse all that? Do you want to give up the taste of cherries?"
Now, after dark, Mr. Badii paces in that living room, straightens up some items, picks up some papers from a desk and then puts them away, perhaps in a drawer, before he shuts off the light and leaves the building to descend his front steps and drive in his tan American Range Rover through a black night to that fresh hillside grave overlooking a glittering Tehran.
This living room scene is a layered, triply remarkable image. First, Kiarostami shoots it through sheer curtains, so we watch Mr. Badii in silhouette. Like many aspects of this film – the long shots, the vast, raw construction sites on the city's expanding outskirts where much of the story occurs, or the fact that Badii is almost never in the same frame with the person he's talking with – this heightens his isolation. But there's more than that. It's hard not to think later – this is a film that stays with you, unfolding in the next days – of the image of the ancient cave with its fire-thrown, flickering shadows – illusions that we mistake for what's real. Perhaps no matter how modern our architecture becomes, we are still in that cave.
Second, there's that old saying about the eyes being the windows to the soul. That strikes you suddenly near the end of this scene, when Mr. Badii turns the lights off and his living room window goes dark and blank – just as he intends to do in short order. It's a moment startling in finality – he means to do this – and unexpectedly, because now you see how much you've hoped he'll change his mind, sad.
Finally, throughout this scene, across the front of Mr. Badii's house falls the graceful shadow of a young tree trunk and branches, swaying faintly in a rising wind that signals rain. Like the golden sunset that Mr. Badii watched earlier – shimmering above a really deeply ugly cluster of squat, new cement boxes – this tree illuminates both the effortlessness of the natural world and how she casts her shadow across all the progress that we make and do.
Taste of Cherry was the first Iranian film to take top honors at Cannes, and even then critics argued about its ending, a brilliant extension of the thread that all is not as it seems. That ending – with its hillside lushly green, its cherry trees in bloom, its young soldiers lounging, its film crew chatting and Louis Armstrong's "Saint James Infirmary Blues" exulting – so moved Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum that he insisted defiantly that for once he would too write about the ending.
Martin Hogue, who teaches architecture, screens this film on Monday, April 7th at the Warehouse Auditorium in downtown Syracuse at 7:00 PM, part of his course, The City in Film, an extended exploration of how the city has functioned in movies as a character of shifting identities rather than a mere backdrop - appropriate work, it seems to me, for a school of architecture that has moved itself off its lofty hilltop and into the city's urban core, and some of whose students are still grumbling about that inconvenience. He's wouldn't mind if you dropped in to watch either.
*******
This review appeared in the 3/27/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where "Make it Snappy" is a regular column reviewing DVDs of movies that didn't open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1997/DVD 1999
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Cast: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari
Review by Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Years ago one of my sisters sent me a postcard from a Boston museum of a John Singer Sargent painting of a simple, square, sun-washed stucco house, I think in Capri, across whose clean, rectangular lines fell the shadow of a tree, sinuous and lacey. I've never seen that painting again and I can no longer locate the postcard. But I remember staring at the painting and the sudden blossoming pleasure I had in seeing it was as much a painting of the tree as the house.
It's no surprise, really, that Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami – also a landscape photographer of considerable renown who leans toward stark, nearly abstract groupings of trees against fields of snow – should come up with a similar image late in Taste of Cherry, his 1997 tale of a lonely, modern city-dweller who spends his last day alive seeking, with singular tunnel vision, someone to cover his grave. By the time Kiarostami trains his camera on Mr. Badii's living room window, we've spent the day with this man and we know his plan.
Beginning in downtown Tehran at a street-corner labor pool whose beseeching swarms of supplicants he passes by, the finicky Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives on, out of the city's center to the outskirts. There he offers money to a construction foreman at a deserted site who's been talking in a phone booth that's incongruously planted in the middle of a muddy field. This man, apparently with his own money problems, mistakes Badii's offer for a sexual advance and angrily turns him away. It's a huge sum Badii offers – 200,000 tomans, nearly six months wages for the average Iranian worker.
Mr. Badii drives on, picks up a young soldier (Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari) who's walked all night from his Kurdish village to get back to his post on time for his duty. Badii fondly remembers his own military service, but he makes the slender boy increasingly nervous. Dropping his not-quite-jelled military reserve, the boy sprints down the hill in panic once he sees the open grave. Badii stops a while with a construction site guard, an Afghani refugee who offers to make him tea in his rickety shack on stilts at the foot of towering slope from which a bull-dozer's constant din and dust rains down. The guard's fellow refugee, a seminarian, turns Badii down and fails to dissuade him. But even here, in this construction site as vast and desolate as any on-screen since those of Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang in his 1994 Vive L'Amour, simple hospitality abides. And when Badii's wheel goes off the edge of the road, muddy laborers cheerfully haul him back.
At last, Mr. Bagheri (Abdolrahman Bagheri), an old Turk who's been out on foot hunting quail for his taxidermy students at the national natural history museum – a place of ornate, scrolled gates and deep, serene lawns, the only site of man-made order and beauty in this city – agrees to the deal, after relating his own close call with suicide decades ago and the sick child whose care Badii's money will secure.
It's Bagheri – after all, he's also found some famously nervous birds in a most unlikely spot too – who supplies the film's title, the culmination of his inventory of nature's bounty. "The world isn't the way you see it," he asserts. "Do you want to refuse all that? Do you want to give up the taste of cherries?"
Now, after dark, Mr. Badii paces in that living room, straightens up some items, picks up some papers from a desk and then puts them away, perhaps in a drawer, before he shuts off the light and leaves the building to descend his front steps and drive in his tan American Range Rover through a black night to that fresh hillside grave overlooking a glittering Tehran.
This living room scene is a layered, triply remarkable image. First, Kiarostami shoots it through sheer curtains, so we watch Mr. Badii in silhouette. Like many aspects of this film – the long shots, the vast, raw construction sites on the city's expanding outskirts where much of the story occurs, or the fact that Badii is almost never in the same frame with the person he's talking with – this heightens his isolation. But there's more than that. It's hard not to think later – this is a film that stays with you, unfolding in the next days – of the image of the ancient cave with its fire-thrown, flickering shadows – illusions that we mistake for what's real. Perhaps no matter how modern our architecture becomes, we are still in that cave.
Second, there's that old saying about the eyes being the windows to the soul. That strikes you suddenly near the end of this scene, when Mr. Badii turns the lights off and his living room window goes dark and blank – just as he intends to do in short order. It's a moment startling in finality – he means to do this – and unexpectedly, because now you see how much you've hoped he'll change his mind, sad.
Finally, throughout this scene, across the front of Mr. Badii's house falls the graceful shadow of a young tree trunk and branches, swaying faintly in a rising wind that signals rain. Like the golden sunset that Mr. Badii watched earlier – shimmering above a really deeply ugly cluster of squat, new cement boxes – this tree illuminates both the effortlessness of the natural world and how she casts her shadow across all the progress that we make and do.
Taste of Cherry was the first Iranian film to take top honors at Cannes, and even then critics argued about its ending, a brilliant extension of the thread that all is not as it seems. That ending – with its hillside lushly green, its cherry trees in bloom, its young soldiers lounging, its film crew chatting and Louis Armstrong's "Saint James Infirmary Blues" exulting – so moved Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum that he insisted defiantly that for once he would too write about the ending.
Martin Hogue, who teaches architecture, screens this film on Monday, April 7th at the Warehouse Auditorium in downtown Syracuse at 7:00 PM, part of his course, The City in Film, an extended exploration of how the city has functioned in movies as a character of shifting identities rather than a mere backdrop - appropriate work, it seems to me, for a school of architecture that has moved itself off its lofty hilltop and into the city's urban core, and some of whose students are still grumbling about that inconvenience. He's wouldn't mind if you dropped in to watch either.
*******
This review appeared in the 3/27/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where "Make it Snappy" is a regular column reviewing DVDs of movies that didn't open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Water Lilies Young love in search of a relationshp
Water Lilies
Celine Sciamma
Water Lilies is about three 15 years old teenager girls, all of them just at about the same psychological stage of budding sexuality, meet at the swimming pool during those long summer days when children are meant to fend for themselves and parents, adults cease to exist.
Water Lilies is a film for whom? Not for children, not for teenagers who would find it cold, calculating dispassionate tale about what they are supposed to feel, do and think once sexuality becomes a part of their everyday life.
I think this movie is for men, for those who want to look at what is considered a problem for young teenages: the loss of their virginity, finding their sexual identity.
Are all girls first homosexuals before becoming heterosexual as Celine Sciamma suggests?
This theme of young relationships goes far to present sexuality without benefit of human relations to sustain this new ingredient in a young girl’s life It is becoming so common it is almost trendy. Water Lilies seems to focus more on informing men about girls rather than in finding something to cherish, to love and identify with in the character’s presented plight. That is also true of Juno, where it wasn’t the relationship that was paramount but rather the result of going outside of the box, no pun intended, with the result of an unwanted pregnancy. For whom will the theme of a girl’s emerging sexuality have sufficient meaning and depth to ensure importance or will it deteriorate into just another semi pornographic moment?
Water Lilies does show tremendous talent and for a first effort it is outstanding. I hope the next film by this talented film maker will embrace a subject worth seeing, done with a delicate touch. and a wealth of human interaction without resorting to explicit sexuality recreated by underage children for the pleasure of their adult audience.
For a short (14 minutes) superb film on the same subject, I recommend MAN. But who watches short films? Maybe you.
Linda Z
WBAI Women’s Colective
Celine Sciamma
Water Lilies is about three 15 years old teenager girls, all of them just at about the same psychological stage of budding sexuality, meet at the swimming pool during those long summer days when children are meant to fend for themselves and parents, adults cease to exist.
Water Lilies is a film for whom? Not for children, not for teenagers who would find it cold, calculating dispassionate tale about what they are supposed to feel, do and think once sexuality becomes a part of their everyday life.
I think this movie is for men, for those who want to look at what is considered a problem for young teenages: the loss of their virginity, finding their sexual identity.
Are all girls first homosexuals before becoming heterosexual as Celine Sciamma suggests?
This theme of young relationships goes far to present sexuality without benefit of human relations to sustain this new ingredient in a young girl’s life It is becoming so common it is almost trendy. Water Lilies seems to focus more on informing men about girls rather than in finding something to cherish, to love and identify with in the character’s presented plight. That is also true of Juno, where it wasn’t the relationship that was paramount but rather the result of going outside of the box, no pun intended, with the result of an unwanted pregnancy. For whom will the theme of a girl’s emerging sexuality have sufficient meaning and depth to ensure importance or will it deteriorate into just another semi pornographic moment?
Water Lilies does show tremendous talent and for a first effort it is outstanding. I hope the next film by this talented film maker will embrace a subject worth seeing, done with a delicate touch. and a wealth of human interaction without resorting to explicit sexuality recreated by underage children for the pleasure of their adult audience.
For a short (14 minutes) superb film on the same subject, I recommend MAN. But who watches short films? Maybe you.
Linda Z
WBAI Women’s Colective
4/1/08
The Memory Thief
The Memory Thief
Gil Kofman
Plot:
Lukas, acted by Mark Webber (The Hottest State, Broken Flowers, Storytelling) is a young man working as a tollbooth clerk when a chance encounter with a Holocaust survivor suddenly ignites an obsession with the survivors and their horrific recollections of evil His journey to learn, intellectually and emotionally what happened during those troubled times brings the viewer into a world where questions are asked and answers are sought with more success than we are usually afforded. The questions I found most pressing were:
How can one continue to believe in a God when there is nothing but the ill will of a God in clear evidence?
Why is it that few survivers talk to those near and dear to them about their experience in the war, the horrors they survived. And most importantly, when the experience is embraced, is talked about, what is the possible result? How much memory of pain suffering and inhuman treatment can a person survive and still live what is thought to be a "normal" life.
These question are poignantly offered and attempted to be answered in this film It is an attempt that will stay with you long after the lights come up and you look around and know it was only a film. Obviously the question of how to survive the Holocaust can be asked of most horrors of war that many people today are forced to endure.
I recommend The Memory Thief for the superb acting and for the compelling story and the honesty in treatment of this timely subject.
LindaZ
WBAI Women's Collective
'Memory Teeth'
Opens at New York City's Quad Cinema May 9
located at 34 West 13th Street in New York City
Gil Kofman
Plot:
Lukas, acted by Mark Webber (The Hottest State, Broken Flowers, Storytelling) is a young man working as a tollbooth clerk when a chance encounter with a Holocaust survivor suddenly ignites an obsession with the survivors and their horrific recollections of evil His journey to learn, intellectually and emotionally what happened during those troubled times brings the viewer into a world where questions are asked and answers are sought with more success than we are usually afforded. The questions I found most pressing were:
How can one continue to believe in a God when there is nothing but the ill will of a God in clear evidence?
Why is it that few survivers talk to those near and dear to them about their experience in the war, the horrors they survived. And most importantly, when the experience is embraced, is talked about, what is the possible result? How much memory of pain suffering and inhuman treatment can a person survive and still live what is thought to be a "normal" life.
These question are poignantly offered and attempted to be answered in this film It is an attempt that will stay with you long after the lights come up and you look around and know it was only a film. Obviously the question of how to survive the Holocaust can be asked of most horrors of war that many people today are forced to endure.
I recommend The Memory Thief for the superb acting and for the compelling story and the honesty in treatment of this timely subject.
LindaZ
WBAI Women's Collective
'Memory Teeth'
Opens at New York City's Quad Cinema May 9
located at 34 West 13th Street in New York City
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
