thecineman Reviews

Clean, Shaven (1993)

Ranks with "Spider" as two best portrayals of schizophrenia

[28 June 2004]

Peter Winter (Peter Greene) is a tormented schizophrenic man who is let out of a hospital despite suffering from extreme symptoms of nearly continuous auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and a highly fragmented, discontinuous sense of reality. His one steady goal is to find his young daughter, Nicole (Jennifer MacDonald), who has begun a new life as an adoptee, following the murder of her mother. Peter first visits his own mother, a taciturn, emotionally withholding woman who is not at all pleased to see him. Later he discovers his daughter's whereabouts, when her adoptive mother brings Nicole to visit her grandmother (who is as chilly toward Nicole as she is toward Peter). Meanwhile, a police detective (Robert Albert), searching for a serial child killer, has concluded that Peter is his man. A fateful ending is set up when the detective encounters Peter with Nicole at an isolated beach.

There are serious flaws in this film: the screenplay is not well wrought and is too full of ambiguities, especially the entire serial child killing subplot. This is highly distracting. The acting is second rate, except for Greene's and MacDonald's performances. The film's strength lies in Kerrigan's insightful deployment of sound, setting and other effects to create the clinical realism of Peter's schizophrenic experience. Peter's intense, perpetual fear is palpable. Much of the film is shot in his car, where he has placed masking tape over the mirror, and newspaper over several windows, to fortify his privacy. The effect is an impacted atmosphere of paranoid insulation. Peter's hallucinated auditory experience – garbled voices, static and other noise, unaccompanied by any visual representations – is clinically valid. The voices and noise haunt him steadily. He tells Nicole he has had a radio device implanted in his head, with a transmitter in a fingernail. Earlier we had been exposed to his violent efforts to rid himself of these devices using scissors or a knife to gouge them out – forms of delusion-driven self-mutilation that are uncommon but not rare in persons suffering the throes of severe acute psychotic episodes. The use of tight close up camera angles - viewing Peter from just behind his back or in profile in his car - heighten the sense of claustrophobia, the extreme narrowing of Peter's psychotic world. The setting - Miscou Island, in New Brunswick – adds further accents of wildness and isolation to the overall tone of the film.

It can be argued that the detective's pursuit of Peter adds yet another source of paranoid fever to the film, though for me this conceit does not ring true. The fact that someone really is after Peter detracts from the power of his delusions. Other than this, Kerrigan can be congratulated for steering clear of the false visuals (realistically visualized imaginary friends and enemies) and other clinically implausible effects that Ron Howard used more recently in A Beautiful Mind. Anyone – professional or lay viewer – might rightly wonder how Peter could be discharged from the hospital in such poor psychiatric condition. Of course that happens every day in most contemporary short stay hospital settings, because involuntary treatment laws in most states prohibit keeping patients against their will except in the most extreme circumstances of immediate potential for violence. But we are given the impression at the start of this film that Peter had been incarcerated in a more traditional mental hospital, the sort in which people stay for long periods before discharge, until they appear relatively free of symptoms, sometimes longer. Of course these large old facilities are typically short staffed, keen clinical observation of patients may be scarce, and patients not uncommonly can muster a façade of normality to win their freedom.

The depiction of Peter's mother is also troublesome. Her grim withholding of affection for Peter and Nicole resurrects the spectra of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a psycho dynamic fiction popular the 1950s and 60s that accused parents, especially mothers, of causing schizophrenia through self serving, unaffectionate regard for their children. This myth was laid to rest long ago, and it is a black mark against this film to see such a notion resurrected. It does not dispel the power of this negative maternal portrayal when, from a distance, we see the mother crying as she hangs one of her son's shirts on a clothesline near the end.

Clean, Shaven shares with David Cronenberg's film, Spider, the distinction of offering the most believable portraits of highly symptomatic schizophrenic experience that have been brought to the big screen. I prefer Spider because the acting is uniformly first rate and the screenplay is superior. Both films pull the viewer into an exquisitely painful, odd, lonely, and ultimately unrewarding world, into experiences that many moviegoers would, no doubt, prefer to avoid. Dramatically, this is a "C" movie, but the portrayal of schizophrenia rates an "A."

What the #$*! Do We (K)now!? (2004)

A very busy essay documentary for personal growth seekers.

[16 April 2004]

Here's a very busy inspirational film for personal growth seekers. It's based on the premise that everything in the universe is mutable and uncertain, and, this being the case, there is always hope that change is possible. People around the northwest are piling in to see this film; it's a huge word-of-mouth success in these parts. And why not. We all need to have hope, a vision of positive possibilities, especially in troubled times. The film is an example of an increasingly popular film genre that has been called `narrative documentary' or `essay documentary.' It's a filmmaking strategy in which a particular theme is approached from different angles, using different methods - here mixing an array of talking heads, animation sequences, and segments of a dramatized story.

Nearly a score of physicists, molecular biologists, health professionals, and spiritual commentators press in upon us, earnestly explaining the connections between deep science and everyday human experience. These talking heads chatter at breakneck newsbite speed to tell us how quantum physics proves that the world we call real is in fact just a series of possibilities of what's real. This being the case, our convictions about our psychological reality, our presumed limitations, and our assumptions about other people and relationships are also just a few among many possibilities. Acceptance of a helpless victim role and addictive devotion to our pet beliefs thus make no sense. In fact our repetitive negative thoughts and feelings actually affect the microanatomy of our brains, creating a self-perpetuated, ever more ingrained set of expectations and behaviors. But we can choose and pursue other possibilities.

The drama concerns a woman (played by Marlee Matlin) who in the years since a failed marriage has been burdened by persistent negative habits of thought, resulting in poor self regard and caustic appraisals of men, resulting in unhappiness and isolation. But through acts of magical realism, she begins to behave in uncharacteristic ways, and gradually her most cherished if cynical assumptions are challenged. The animated parts are the best thing in the film. There are wonderful views of the labyrinthine jungle of neurons making up the brain, increasing and altering the connections among themselves in ever changing dynamisms as a result of experience. And there are lovable Disneyesque portrayals of chemical neurotransmitters, little anthropomorphic globules of red dopamine hotheads and other blue cool types prancing from site to site inside our heads. These parts are a lot of fun.

Physicist Fritjof Capra wrote of the connections between quantum physics and consciousness 30 years ago in his book, "The Tao of Physics." There's nothing in this film that he didn't cover as well or better way back then. In fact, there has been little progress on this theme in the intervening decades, and for good reason. The comparison of issues of matter and energy in quantum physics with human experience is an example of the all-too-common falsity of reasoning based on analogy. Furthermore, there is no need to complicate matters of human behavior by conflating them with the `noise' of abstract thinking from the physical sciences. Experience does alter both brain chemistry and anatomy. No doubt of that. This is the biological basis of the widely acknowledged fact that ingrained patterns of behavior, thought, emotional response, and addiction are so hard to alter. It is also true that when we do risk new behaviors, when we combat the helpless tendency to repeat response patterns that are familiar, even if destructive, this can lead to positive change and personal growth. It may even, as the film suggests, change our brain anatomy.

But quantum physics need not be invoked to explain or fortify these notions, whether it is related or not. To do so may bring the respectability of `hard science' to psychological processes, but the price may be simply to confuse many people, especially in the dizzying sort of presentation given in this film. (My partner, who is neither a scientist nor a psychologist, found the film edifying but tuned out all the talk by the physicists.) I especially enjoyed the comments of Candace Pert, a molecular biologist who discovered the opioid brain receptor for endorphins, and several of the health professionals. On the other hand, I was repelled by J. Z. Knight, who `channels' the spiritual entity `Ramtha.' Knight is a woman who endlessly blathers stagy banalities but can probably sell oil to a Saudi. One reason for the film's popularity here in Portland is that the location shots in the dramatic sequence were all filmed locally.

The Fog of War (2003)

Morris Versus McNamara and the Political Pundits of the Left

[2 February 2004]

If you're like Errol Morris, and you want to make documentaries about unusual personalities, it's one thing to choose obscure subjects, people like Fred Leuchter (aka "Mr. Death") or men that excel in topiary hedge sculpture or the study of the African mole rat (two of the people interviewed in "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control"). Not many critics out there will be waiting to pounce if you don't get things just right about the likes of people like these. But it's quite another matter if you choose Robert S. McNamara, one of the last century's most towering, controversial, and - some would say - evil characters. "Fog of War" distills more than 20 hours of interviews that Morris conducted with McNamara over a span of two years, when McNamara was in his mid-80s, and the subjects - all various McNamara ventures - range from "his" World War II, through his days at Ford Motor Company, the Cuban missile crisis, and - finally and mainly - his views of the Vietnam War.

As a result, Morris now finds himself in a no man's land of critical crossfire. On the one hand, film critics - people like Steven Holden, Roger Ebert and J. Hoberman - uniformly praise this work. While political pundits of the left - people like Eric Alterman and Alexander Cockburn of "The Nation" - lacerate Morris, accusing him of being overmatched, manipulated, not doing his homework (i.e., being naïve and unprepared), and thus allowing his film to be nothing but a conduit for the formidably crafty McNamara's continuing campaign of self aggrandizement and distortions of history. Whew. I think the controversy here is based on a misconstruction of the film's purposes by the pundits. First, it is quite clear that McNamara, in full command of his fierce intellectual and interpersonal powers, is not about to be pushed around by an assertive interviewer. McNamara is gonna say what McNamara wants to say, period. To drive home this point, Morris gives us a brief epilogue in which he asks McNamara a few trenchant questions about his sense of responsibility for the Vietnam War, why he didn't speak out against the war, and so on. And McNamara won't bite. He stonewalls Morris absolutely, with comments like, "I am not going to say any more than I have." Or, "I always get into trouble when I try to answer a question like that."

More importantly, it doesn't matter very much if Morris or McNamara does not get all the facts straight. If the political pundits went to the movies more often, at least to Morris's films, they would know that his primary interest is in the character of his subjects - their integrity and beliefs and ways of explaining or rationalizing themselves and their lives: he's into people way more than into facts. "Fog of War" is not an oral history, it is the study of a person. For all that, in my estimation, Morris does get on film as close to an acceptance of responsibility for his actions in two wars as McNamara is likely ever to make, short of some dramatic, delirium-driven deathbed confession. He speaks of the likelihood that he and Curtis LeMay would have been deemed war criminals for the fire bombing of Japanese cities, had our side lost. And he speaks clearly when he says "we were wrong" in not seeing that the Vietnam War was a civil war, not a phase of some larger Cold War strategy by the USSR or China. What do the pundits want?

Nor was it Morris's purpose to use Santayana's lesson about repeating history to rail at Bush's preemptive war in Iraq. In fact Morris decided to make this film way back in 1995, after reading several books by McNamara and concluding that he was a quintessential man of the 20th Century, embodying all that was so outstandingly smart and sophisticated and ultimately destructive. The interviews wrapped sometime in 2001, the year before Iraq. As usual in Morris's films, the editing is superb, with seamless use of archival footage and special visuals created for this film. I do think Morris gratuitously flattered McNamara by organizing the film around 11 platitudes of his - many of them banal aphorisms known to most high school graduates, students of martial arts, or your grandmother (e.g., "get the data," "empathize with your enemy," "rationality will not save us," "belief and seeing are both often wrong").

Political pundits, mired in interpreting concretisms from the historical record, not only see too few films but also don't take seriously the symbolic visuals and sounds offered here. Philip Glass has created an edgy, anxious score that feels just right, just creepy enough for the macabre subjects at hand. I'm also thinking of the scenes when McNamara is recounting his pioneering (he claims) studies of auto safety. As we listen to him, Morris shows us human skulls wrapped in white linen being dropped several floors through a stairwell to smash upon the floor below, all in slow motion. The effect is chilling and speaks volumes about McNamara's famed passionless capacity to treat human carnage as a matter of statistical calculation. It is through such poetic characterization that Morris keeps the game with McNamara in balance.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (2003)

Will the Real Hugo Chavez Please Stand Up?

[26 January 2004]

There are three reasons to interpret this film cautiously. First, it was made by people whose roots are far from Latin America. Second, the filmmakers were in Venezuela as guests of the Chavez government, and had been filming a documentary about Chavez for seven months before the coup. Third, we are never told anything specific about the people who orchestrated the coup. The film identifies two leaders, Pedro Carmona (who was sworn in as President during the 2 day coup) and Carlos Ortega, but doesn't say who they are (Carmona was head of the national Chamber of Commerce; Ortega still heads a federation of labor unions). No opposition motives or reasons for the coup are put forward, even for the purpose of discrediting them. Indeed, the film offers no analysis whatsoever of any of the events it depicts.

Chavez comes across as an energetic, gregarious, intuitive sort who is comfortable touching and hugging people everywhere he goes. He disdains free market economic doctrines. We witness demonstrations for and against the government, and exchanges of gunfire, in the days leading up to the coup attempt. Private media sources are portrayed as mouthpieces for the opposition. We are shown how one private television station uses selective footage from a particular camera angle to distort the account of a gun battle in the streets, suggesting that pro-Chavez gunmen are firing at unarmed opposition protesters, when footage from another camera angle (shown in this film) seems to refute this interpretation.

Events during the coup attempt move briskly. The pace, tension, and grainy handheld footage - all remind one of a Costa-Gavras docudrama. The filmmakers are able to shoot up close - close to both pro-Chavez officials and opposition leaders after they take over the palace. (Chavez is taken into custody and driven elsewhere, but we don't see this occur). What lingers are impressions of the grim, quiet, calm of people within the palace, even in the midst of political chaos and noisy crowds at the palace gates. The smug cocksure demeanor of Carmona and his senior associates as they announce the coup. The coolly improvised efforts of the palace guard, who, after two days, bloodlessly seize opposition leaders and retake control of the palace on behalf of the pro-Chavez faction, as Chavez officials reemerge from hiding. Finally an uncharacteristically fatigued, subdued Chavez arrives by helicopter from the place he had been detained. He speaks on state television and in the quietest possible manner tells everyone to `be calm and go home.' It is absolutely the right thing to say delivered in exactly the right tone. This man does have exceptional gifts as a leader.

Taken at face value, this film portrays Chavez as a sunny populist champion of the little guy who's struggling against international fat cats and their domestic puppets to do the right thing for his country. My partner and I left the theater almost feeling infatuated with this warm and earnest man. A majority of Venezuelan voters obviously like him. Chavez was elected to a 5-year term as President in 1998 with 56% of the vote, and two years later, after an overhaul of the constitution, he ran again and won with 59%. It's no secret that the Bush administration doesn't like Chavez: they fear that with him in power Venezuelan oil supplies might become too unpredictable and pricey, and they also worry about Chavez's leftist agenda and hearty embrace of Fidel Castro. The C.I.A. may have aided the coup attempt. Diego Cisneros, who heads the largest private media conglomerate in Venezuela, is an old fishing buddy of George Bush the elder. The ("W") Bush government rushed to recognize Carmona's coup less than 36 hours after it began, and CNN continued to run disinformation bulletins, announcing the coup's success, well after Chavez had reestablished control. I learned on the filmmakers' website that Amnesty International pulled this film from a Human Rights Film Festival in Vancouver B.C. recently because of reports from its Venezuelan affiliate that screening the film could cause harm to some people, presumably associated with AI, in that country. Harm by whom? Certainly unlikely from pro-Chavez people. They couldn't hope for better propaganda than this film offers.

But a darker side of the Venezuelan President emerges from other sources. Information available at the Human Rights Watch (HRW) website and from Reporters Without Borders (RWB) indicates serious compromise of freedom of the press in Venezuela throughout 2002 and 2003, troubles perpetrated both by anti-Chavez and pro-Chavez forces. In 2002, 1 journalist was killed, 58 were physically attacked, and another 16 were threatened. In January, 2002, shortly before the coup, a bomb exploded in offices of a daily newspaper that had published anti-Chavez views. In July, 2002, just three months after the coup, a private TV station was bombed. RWB states that Chavez supporters `.staged many protests designed to intimidate privately-owned news media and repeatedly attacked journalists covering demonstrations.[these events were] spurred on by the President's verbal attacks on the press and the radically anti-Chavez stance adopted by privately owned news media...' In February, 2003, HRW reported that four opposition journalists had been abducted or murdered. In July, 2003, HRW wrote to Chavez, asking him to investigate `critical threats to freedom of the press.'. Journalists whose work supports opposition views `.have been the victims of aggression and intimidation by Chavez supporters,' HRW claimed.

The next elections are scheduled for December, 2006, but under the new constitution Chavez helped create, a referendum can be called for, half way through any presidential term. As of late January, 2004, such a referendum is formally being sought, with nearly 3 ½ million signatures collected. If the petition is validated in February by the government, this would mean a vote in May to either oust Chavez early or support completion of his term. (I gave this film two grades: A- for rare fly-on-the-wall reportage of history in the making, and C- for lack of balance in content and superficial or absent analysis.

Our House (2003)

Developmentally disabled adults trying to fulfill their dreams.

[22 January 2004]

For years I lived a block from a residential group home for adults with developmental disabilities, people who typically had spent years in institutions beforehand. Some stayed at home, others worked at sheltered industries. I waited each morning for the bus with two residents, both with Down's Syndrome, who crossed town to Goodwill each day. The woman was shy: quiet and stable. The man was mercurial. Some days he was calm and friendly. On others he was angry, tearful, frankly delusional at times. Sometimes I was able to `talk him down' as we waited. Now and then he remained so agitated he had to turn back alone toward home. Another man had cerebral palsy. At his best he was gregarious and inquisitive, drawn to visit if he saw me working in the yard. At his worst he was aggressive, and eventually he had to leave the home for assaulting others. What amazed me was the pluck these people showed, echoed by the perseverance of the staff. Surely conditions at the home were far superior to the grim realities of institutional warehousing, anomie, and passive vegetating I had seen on medical school `field trips' in the late 1950s.

Sueno House, in Santa Barbara, California, is such a residential home. Mr. Matossian is on the staff there. Using digital video, he shot footage for this film over about a year, following three of the seven or eight residents. We have more fleeting contact with the others, notably Scott, a gentle fellow who worships one of the principals, Tim Staab. Tim S. has Down's and is an obsessive cigarette smoker. He has stolen cigarettes from stores and written bad checks to get them. For these misdeeds he is on probation and court ordered to live at Sueno House. He also has a devilish sense of humor, loves to tease, and can escalate quickly from benign pranks to aggression, which has landed him in state hospitals in the past. His situation clinically is the least complex of the three principals.

Laura Langston, on the other hand, carries diagnoses of Fetal Alcohol, Tourette's and Williams' Syndromes, autism and OCD. She lived in a state mental hospital continuously from age 10 to 20. Abused physically and sexually as a child, she now vacillates between intense desires to be a woman or a man, to live in heaven or on earth, to live or to die. She has prolonged spells of shouting, jerking her arms and biting herself, and is drawn to religious rituals to find calm. She also melodramatically exaggerates and is manipulative. Tim Warriner is 47. Cerebral palsy left him wheelchair bound with mild spasticity of all four extremities and mild retardation. He has severe congenital malformations of both hands - he was born without thumbs - and had reconstructive surgery when young to reposition one finger to create an appositional thumb on one hand (the procedure failed on the other hand because of gangrene). Physically abused as a youngster, he witnessed his violent estranged father shot to death by his stepfather. He also is alcohol dependent and when drinking will not accept any degree of responsibility for his frequent angry outbursts and related misconduct, invariably blaming others.

Staff are mostly young college age kids, like the ones on my street were. They are calm, respectful, very clear and unambiguous in their communications, remarkably longsuffering in their efforts to aid the residents to get along as best they can. We watch the three principals struggling over the months to manage interpersonal conflicts and their own ambivalent impulses. We see the staff, in response, constantly struggling to strike a balance between honoring the rights - the civil liberties - of the residents (and letting them suffer the consequences when they screw up) versus setting limits for their safety and improved harmony for others. We suffer through Tim W.'s worsening bouts of drinking and consequent eviction. We ride Laura's emotional roller coaster, including a possible overdose of chemicals and a four-hour Tourette's rant. We follow Tim. S. through a crisis when he refuses to stop pestering Scott, and police are called to take him away, face a court hearing, and spend a weekend in jail, his first such experience.

This film gives us a slice of the life lived by residents and staff: it's the real deal. Still, life at Our House, like anyplace, is not without sweet moments of tenderness and even humor. Scott's simple, patient devotion to Tim S. is touching. One day a long harangue ensues between the two Tims over who is dumber. Each acknowledges without chagrin that he suffers from retardation; the question is, who's worse off. It's difficult to convey here how poignantly funny the scene is, and when a staff member confronts them about what they are doing, it's clear that the Tims can see the humor of it too.

There are a few problems. Some viewers have raised an ethical question about the making this film: did Matossian and his colleagues exploit their charges? I think there are hints of this in the filming of at least one person, Laura. Matossian, behind the camera, often asks questions of the residents as he films their responses. In Laura's case, I thought he asked some provocative questions (already knowing the answers) in order to evoke emotionally charged responses from her that would demonstrate her faulty self control as well as her conflicts. For me, this did cross an ethical line a few times. At the end of the film, on printed stills, we learn of events concerning all three principals in the subsequent year after filming. The course of each is remarkably positive. We are informed that Tim. W. has been abstinent from alcohol for 8 months in his new, more controlled group home, that Laura is having fewer tic attacks, that Tim. S. is succeeding at a new job in the community. It would have been useful to demonstrate these improvements through brief follow up interviews.

What stays with me after viewing this film is the same sense I had about folks at the group home down my block. I'm struck by the courage and perseverance of the residents - their steadfast desires to be good people and live well - and of the staff who try to aid them. Sueno House is named for the street it's located on, but it's well to recall that this Spanish word means dream. The people who live at Sueno House, like all of us, dream dreams of a better, more satisfactory life ahead. It's a difficult path they walk toward fulfilling those dreams.

Step Into Liquid (2003)

It's far from "Endless Summer" but it's still a pleasure.

[19 October 2003]

Like watching top notch aerial trapeze artists or gifted dancers, beholding the world's best surfers riding momentous 20 to 60 foot waves is a thoroughly entertaining, at times mesmerizing experience. The young masters of this sport display consummate athleticism, not to mention courage, abandon, an ultimate level in the pursuit of thrills, rivaled perhaps only by the most difficult reaches of alpine skiing. In this film, Brown extends the tradition initiated 37 years ago by his father, Bruce Brown, who made the first great surfer film, "The Endless Summer," released in 1966.

There are interesting contrasts between the two movies. "Endless Summer" was a simple, lyrical ode to the pleasures of youth, following two young amateur surfers as they sought the adventure of new surfs at beaches around the world. A road movie propelled by waves. The music was soft and easy and had continuity, and Brown pere's narration was full of adolescent good humor. "Liquid" is more complex in several senses. It's structure is one of brief separate surfing stories, and it features a larger number of surfers, several of them seasoned pros. It is a more political film as well, setting two of its stories in Vietnam and Ireland, where, Brown suggests, teaching some kids to surf may help right the world's wrongs. It is definitely more techie. Surfers launch into the biggest waves in Hawaii and on the Cortez Bank after being towed into position by large jet ski rigs, analogous to helicopter skiing. Some surfers use a most peculiar hydrofoil board contraption, the stability of which defies simple logic. Technical achievements in filming abound as well. The film also puts a face on danger, featuring in one episode a young man rendered quadriplegic by a surfing accident.

Professionalization, politics, technology, danger. Clear and present overtones in the culture of our times. It follows that, overall, the biggest contrast between the films lies in the seriousness of "Liquid." For all of its narrative allusions to pure fun as the main goal of a surfer's life, and occasional antics that amuse (surfing in Sheboygan, Michigan for one), there is a pervasive earnestness in the stories. Simple fun in 2003 is harder to purchase than it was in flower child times. We are now less innocent. Still, if you liked the original (I have seen it at least three times), you will find this one absorbing as well. What's really fun is to see it in a theater like I did, surrounded by aging (former?) surfers whose laughter helps balance the film's somewhat somber tone.

Vengo (2000)

Dazzling flamenco concert wrapped in a flimsy blood feud plot.

[3 October 2003]

For me there's nothing better than a film about the affairs of exotic people from other lands that is full of spirited music, no matter how flimsy the plot. "Vengo" is an exemplary case. It is the latest in a series of films about Romany people and their music made by Tony Gatlif. He brings impeccable credentials to the task: born in Algeria, raised in Marseille, his mother is Roma and his father a Berber. His best known film is the 1993 homage to Roma music, "Latcho Drom" (Safe Journey), which I have yet to see. "Vengo" is set in Andalusia, in southern Spain, in the city of Seville and surrounding villages. Here a rich tradition of Berber, Romany and Jewish origins has shaped the culture and given the world a distinctive music: flamenco. This film is best viewed as a flamenco concert featuring a number of different singers, instrumentalists, dancers and ensembles, most of whom are outrageously good. The musical numbers are connected by an insubstantial narrative, a loosely unfolding story of a blood feud, a dialectic of deaths, between two rural Roma families. Caco (the flamenco dancer, Antonio Canales, who doesn't get to dance at all here) is a bereaved nightclub owner and heavy boozer whose teenage daughter was killed by members of the Caravaca family. In return Caco's brother Mario killed a Caravaca man and is hiding in Morocco. The Caravacas now demand their turn for revenge and, in Mario's absence, let out word that they plan to murder Mario's son, Diego (Orestes Villason Rodriguez), a 20-something man who suffers from cerebral palsy. Caco dearly loves and dotes on Diego, his nephew, and is set into a crazed state by this news. The story moves toward a tragic sacrificial climax. The plot does serve to convey the essential truth that grounds the passion of these people: that suffering and death itself are inevitable counterpoints to love and family loyalty. This backdrop gives embodiment to the deep emotions expressed in the music. There is also a single very humorous scene featuring cells phones, perhaps the funniest bit about these obnoxious instruments in all of filmdom. The turn contributed by Rodriguez (as Diego) is impressive; it is welcome indeed to see a person with cerebral palsy act a major role, especially when the performance is built much more on humanity than on handicap. (In Spanish)

Missing Young Woman (2001)

Somber story of 300 unsolved murders of women in Juarez, Mexico

[25 September 2003]

One of the films featured in the most recent Human Rights Watch annual film festival, this is a somber, understated, yet relentlessly compelling documentary about the hundreds of unsolved murders of women that have occurred over the past 10 years in Cuidad Juarez, the Mexican border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Portillo, a veteran documentarist from Mexico who focuses her work on women, interviews surviving relatives and a woman who was raped by police and later shown photos of their apparent involvement in ritual sadistic sexual group rape-killings of women. Portillo also presents the chronology of the wave of murders, beginning in 1993, including televised comments by several government officials, an account of various suspects arrested and detained, and segments of an interview with a federally appointed criminal justice official heading a task force to seek suspects. She mixes this material effectively with footage of the streets of Juarez and still photos of a number of the deceased victims. It is known that many of the victims were young poor women who came to Juarez to work in the maquilladora factories. Detention of multiple suspects has not stopped the killings. Since the film was completed these crimes have continued and apparently no new arrests have been made. Several confessions have occurred but some of these are strongly rumored to have been made under torture. For the first time, just this year, an official federal count of the number of killings has been announced: 258, including 20 or more since 2001. What Portillo does not make clear is that roughly 90 of the killing fit the profile of young dark skinned girls who were raped and then killed. The rest -a majority - did not involve rape and the victims, all women, were of more varied characteristics. Suggested links of the crimes have been made to drug traffickers, human organ smugglers and sadistic cultists. Portillo strongly implies that high level government officials are duplicitous in the problem. This certainly seems likely in view of the fact that sites where bodies were found and other evidence was contaminated or discarded in virtually all cases, making reasonable forensic analysis impossible (you think they'd get it right after the first hundred or so); there has been no serious, sustained effort at any level to upgrade the sophistication of investigations; and local police implicated in some of the crimes have not been indicted to date. Although an American sexual criminal profiler suggested several years ago that someone from the U.S. could be a perpetrator of at least some of these crimes, there has been no followup on that idea. What about a motive? Border towns thrive on illicit activities that make money. The sheer volume of these cases, their steady occurrence over 10 years, the macabre nature of some of the killings - i.e., peculiar mutilations of the bodies, the implied connections to organized crime, and the confinement of the murders to a border city, makes one wonder about the possibility that some of these cases might represent an extreme form of "sex tourism": a business in which wealthy sexual sadists from the U.S. or elsewhere might be entering Juarez and paying high fees to witness or take part in group rape/murders. In Los Angeles, later this autumn, Amnesty International and the UCLA Mexican Studies Program will co-host an international conference on this unending wave of unsolved murders of women in Juarez. This film will be shown.

Félix et Lola (2001)

Leconte hits a rare sour note in this aimless film.

[19 September 2003]

An American interviewing Patrice Leconte remarked that, since he had never seen a film by the French director that wasn't good, perhaps Leconte was incapable of making a bad film. To which Leconte quipped back that obviously this man had not seen all of his films. After witnessing "Felix and Lola" at a Leconte retrospective, I see what he meant. It's a real clunker, the first of Leconte's films I haven't liked. Once again exploring an offbeat relationship of an eccentric couple (as in "Monsieur Hire," "The Hairdresser's Husband," and "The Girl on the Bridge"), Leconte sets this story in a traveling carnival, where Felix (Phillippe Torreton), the man who runs the bumper car concession, falls for Lola (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a mysterious woman who obviously has sought him out. We learn little about her except that she looks scrawny and sad, smokes and lies a lot, and is stalked by an old lover. Felix is a decent chap but in fact is a lonely sad sack himself, pushing forty with few prospects. Since neither Felix nor Lola has more than a thimble full of brio, it is unsurprising that their encounters don't produce sparks or any real joy. The story goes round and round, like one of the carnival rides, but gets nowhere. Our glimpses of the hovering ex-lover are confused by the presence of yet another, somewhat older man who bears a facial resemblance to the other. Lola can be seen as a `borderline personality,' someone characteristically depressed and dependent who feels so insubstantial that she makes up stories about herself to enhance her sense of personal identity. Lola may not even be her name. The tests of love that she arranges for Felix would make any fellow with half a brain drop her like a hot potato. The precipitous ending does not ring true. The best things about this film are its amusement park visuals and the caring family of carneys who watch Felix's new love unfold, cheering him on even as they fret about whether things can work out for him with this odd and unpredictable woman. Neither romance nor any other sort of dramatic tension is conjured in this film; small wonder it never found a U.S. distributor.