G. W. Pabst | Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney) / 1927

confusions of history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ilja Ehrenburg (screenplay), G. W. Pabst (director) Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney (The Love of Jeanne Ney) / 1927

 

There’s something about G. W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney that is so inexplicable that, after watching it the other day, I wanted to break open the Netflix return folder, which I’d sealed after watching, to see it all over again.

 

    I didn’t, so my confusion and memory shall have to suffice—although I might argue that this is a film you might want to watch several times.

     That may be necessary, in part, because in this work Pabst combines so very many genres—an issue which those who have read several of my essays must know greatly attracts me. But Pabst, in the movie, attempts to blend a kind of Eisenstein sensibility to what will later be described as an Hitchcockian populist detective story, along with various sentimentalist dramatic tropes of the day.  

     Jeanne (Édith Jéhanne) is a kind of ur-feminist, determined to fall in love with the Bolshevik, possible murderer (Andreas, played by Uno Henning) of her father André Ney (Eugen Jensen), a French diplomat and political observer.

      With the death of her father both she and Andreas perceive that she must escape back to Paris to save her own life—and probably Andreas’ as well. But it is precisely here where this kind of dark Romeo and Juliet story gets confusing, as Jeanne is suddenly transposed back into a far less clear black-and-white reality of values into a world out of Hollywood melodramas, including situations that will be later played out in deaf-mute/blind girl films such as Johnny Belinda (1948), Peeping Tom (1960), A Patch of Blue (1965), and Wait Until Dark (1967). Without explanation, Jeanne’s detective uncle’s blind daughter, Gabrille (Brigitte Helm) falls in love with the Andreas’s evil colleague, Khalibiev, set upon marrying her so that he might kill her and inherit her fortune.

     Even further confusion sets in when Pabst and Russian writer Ilia Ehrenburg overlay their story with a truly Hitchcock-like tale of a stolen diamond that is swallowed by the family’s loving parrot—with shades, here, of the future James Bond entertainments.

     As much fun as this silent-film mulligan stew of stories is, it throws up too many barriers of logic for us to truly comprehend what is going on. Is this a love story, as its title suggests, a kind of muted horror film, a Soviet war story, a detective tale? We can never be certain—which is, obviously, also the film’s allure, and perhaps suggests Jeanne’s own confusion of what decision she ultimately needs to make.

     Pabst brilliantly contributes to this mix of emotional indetermination by offering us very few intertitles, forcing us to find the clues of his cinema in the images themselves. Two fish wrapped in newspaper, a handkerchief intended for murder revealing the missing diamond and the guilt of its owner, and the simple vestiges of these not so-likeable beings all help contribute to a vision of a world, so typical of the Weimer Republic era of Germany, which force us to question all our values, as well as those of the film characters and film-maker himself. Fassbinder must surely have relied on this film in conceiving his great Berlin Alexanderplatz.

     If, at moments, we love the feisty and independent-minded Jeanne in her determination of help and save her Bolshevik hero, we realize her naiveté, and her inability to perceive her own relationship with history. In her heart she remains a lover-secretary, without realizing the consequences of her political, or at least, social effects upon the society at large.

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

Jason Reitman | Up in the Air / 2009

traveler without a backpack

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner (screenplay, based on a novel by Walter Kirn) Jason Reitman (director) Up in the Air / 2009

 

One of the reasons that many people do not like to travel by air these days is the utter impersonality of the trip: the blandly imposing air terminals filled with rushing figures who are herded into lines where they are half undressed and released into the hands of mechanically-smiling stewardesses who hurry them into cramped little spaces where they are discouraged from moving until they reach their destination. Even assembly-line workers might experience more variance. Yet this anonymous world is just what the hero of the dark comedy Up in the Air desires. As Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is described by several women in this film, he is a "man-child" with a phobia for interpersonal relationships. Marriage is clearly not for him. His big goal in life is flying enough miles to receive American Airlines' Ten Million-miler Executive Titanium card. At occasional motivational speeches Ryan teaches people how to travel light, to unload their backpacks, not simply of personal belongings, including their houses and cars, but to free themselves of friends, family, even their husbands and wives:

 

                     The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving

                     is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live

                     symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans.

                     We are not swans. We are sharks.

 

      As a hollow man, Ryan has, perhaps, the perfect job: he and the company for which he works fire employees for "for bosses too cowardly to do it themselves." Day after day, he destroys people's lives without giving it a thought.

      Ryan's own home back in Omaha, a place he visits only a few days each year, is a dreary one-room apartment with nothing in it except a table, some chairs, and a bed. He lives for the most part in planes, hotel rooms, and bars.

 

     Into this perfectly empty world comes a fellow-shark, the beautiful, witty, and wise Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) who seemingly shares the same purposeless passions of Ryan. A minute or two after meeting in an airport bar, they are slapping down airline, hotel, and car rental cards, comparing brands and privileges. The size of Ryan's annual airline miles is quickly turned into a sexual pun, and two rush off to bed with, evidently, several successful rolls in the hay. They seem perfect for one another, clicking open their computer itineraries to determine where and when they can next meet.

     Back at the Omaha homebase Integrated Strategic Management has just hired a young Cornell graduate, Natalie Kenner (Anna Kendrick) who convinces her boss that a less costly and more effective way to lay-off the thousands of employees they process each year is to use the internet. For Ryan, of course, this is not only a major job change but a life change, one, we fear, he cannot manage. He convinces his boss and the inexperienced Natalie that before they transfer to the new system she needs to actually know what it is they do, in other words, how to manage people losing not only their livelihoods but their purposes in life.

     Suddenly the film transforms from a dark statement about a hollow man, to a comic road film, as Ryan takes to the air with his new trainee who not only has no clue of what she is about to encounter but cannot even pack lightly for the trip. The experienced Ryan empties her suitcase as easily as he has his motivational backpacks, but he has a harder time in convincing this eager, highly committed young girl that his life has meaning.

 

     The process of education is more than comic, however, as we gradually come to perceive that there is some kindness and even purpose in Ryan's man-on-man firings. At one point when an employee just fired painfully asks how will he be able to care for his children, Ryan answers  that he should seek a job doing what he truly wants to do, become a chef for which, according to his resume, he had originally trained. Others are encouraged to see their lay-offs as new opportunities. The dozens of firings we witness are even more difficult to watch when one knows that many of the people were actually real workers only recently laid-off because of our current economy.

     Natalie's attempt at firing is less successful, as an older black woman, upon the young girl's offer of the severance packet, responds that she knows what she'll be doing; "I'm planning on jumping off a bridge near my house."

      No matter how distressful their encounters are, however, it becomes clear that real human beings are better bearers of bad news than machines. When Natalie finds out that her boyfriend has left her it is through a text message, to which Ryan quips "It's like being fired over a computer." 

      In the midst of Natalie's sorrow Alex reappears, and Ryan and her calm things as Natalie intimately discusses her goals in life, the more seasoned pair assuring her that her goals will change. When the older duo announce they plan on crashing a tech convention party, the young girl joins them, and together the three, along with a young man Natalie meets, have a great time, with the audience now strongly rooting for the Ryan's and Alex's budding relationship.

     The next day, however, teacher and student are ordered to test out the screen method. A beefy Detroit worker breaks down into tears upon hearing the news, and Natalie is forced to firmly send him on his way. As we watch him leave a nearby room and walk down a hall beside them, we witness her turning away so as not to be seen. What was previously done openly and honestly is now something from which she must hide. Summoned to return to Omaha, the two fly off to continue their work via computer.

     The experience of working with someone and the growing pleasure of being with Alex has somehow changed Ryan while altering the audience's perception of him. He suddenly switches his plans, rushing off to his younger sister's wedding in Wisconsin, taking Alex along for the ride.

     When on the day of the wedding the young groom suddenly gets cold feet, Ryan is enlisted to talk him into continuing with the affair, a bit like asking an undertaker to help with a childbirth. Yet the brother who has steered clear of his sisters for most of his life, comes through, convincing the young man that life is only meaningful when it is shared with someone else. The wedding continues with a growing sense of romance developing between Alex and a now more vulnerable Ryan. This time when Alex leaves him on her way to Chicago, we can sense, for the first time, his utter loneliness.

     Back in Omaha the computers are up and running, workers using their peers to test the new system. Again Ryan bolts, this time hurrying off to Chicago. The formerly hollow man is nearly desperate, we sense, to fill up his life, to entangle himself with everything he has formerly rejected. The woman who comes to door is called from within by a child and a husband. Alex's backpack is already too full for her to share anything more than one night stands.

     A lawsuit has just been filed. The black woman who threatened suicide has jumped from the bridge and died. Nathalie herself is fired, the computer program cancelled. Ryan is ordered back into the air, a man free to continue his job moving from city to city without even having to come up for air. But the man sitting in first class—whom, it is suddenly announced, has just flown enough miles to receive the 7th American Airlines' Ten-Million Miles Card—is someone else, a man with a heavy heart. "The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over," muses Ryan in the closing monologue. For him moving has, at last, become living, while he has become one with his vehicle of motion. 

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2009

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (January 2009) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

Alfred Hitchcock | Shadow of a Doubt / 1943

a horrifying waltz

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Anna Reville (screenplay), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Shadow of a Doubt / 1943    

 

Over the past few years, I have come to realize that what interests me most about the films of Alfred Hitchcock is not simply that he is a brilliant director who produces some of the most dazzling images ever seen on film, but that he and his scriptwriters have a great interest in narrative structures—what we might describe in fiction or poetry as genre. This is nowhere more apparent than in his 1943 masterwork, Shadow of a Doubt.

     Hitchcock couldn’t have chosen more brilliant writers for this project. In addition to his wife, Anna Reville, who worked closely with him on many of his films, the film was scripted by one of the major American playwrights of the day, Thornton Wilder, writing just a few years after his classic Our Town, and by a figure who knew small-town America perhaps better than anyone, Sally Benson, whose Kensington Stories were the basis of Meet Me in St. Louis (a film which appeared the following year, and which she must have been working on during the shooting of or soon after Shadow of a Doubt); Benson later wrote film scripts such as The Farmer Takes a Wife and Anna and the King of Siam. The abilities of these three to present a near-perfect portrait of small-town USA matched Hitchcock’s evident belief that evil, revenge, and murder coexisted always with innocence, love, and kindness.

     The film demonstrates this theory in many ways, particularly in the comic episodes between Joseph Newton, father of the loving family at the center of the work, and his friend, Herbie Hawkins, who, at the very table where they will soon dine with a real murderer—Joseph’s brother-in-law Charlie—plot the imaginary murders of each other.

      But the important focus of this film is on Joseph’s daughter, also named Charlie, a young woman, who, like most awakening teenagers, is absolutely bored by and frustrated with the family life into which she has been born. She is desperate for adventure and, in a highly intuitive act of frustration, visits the telegraph office to send her uncle Charlie, after whom she was named, a plea to come for a visit.

     The audience already knows that this somewhat sinister figure is on his way at that very moment, and has just notified the family, through the same office, that he is soon to arrive. The coincidence is a haunting note in this otherwise normal-appearing world, for it becomes quickly clear that uncle and niece have more than their name in common, that indeed they are mysteriously intertwined with each other, the bond between them being much stronger than family blood and affection. We sense almost from the beginning that their relationship is a bit perverse, and Hitchcock and his writers take the story far deeper than any sexual attraction might allow, putting it on a level that is archetypal at the very least and almost mythic in its scope. As the young Charlie tells her uncle upon his arrival: “I know everything about you. You can’t hide anything from me.”

     In short, we quickly sense in this film that these two, in their intricate interconnectedness, stand apart from the world they inhabit. They are a sort of Yin and Yang, female and male, young and old, innocent and evil, light and dark (although, in this, reversed from the Chinese model), truthteller and liar, believer and skeptic, one living in the present, the other in the past.

     At the celebratory dinner for the uncle, young Charlie reveals that she cannot get a tune out of her head in connection with her uncle: The Merry Window Waltz. As in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, shown in theaters the year before, the authors and director of Shadow of a Doubt take that theme as an emblem, almost, of their structure. The music and the accompanying waltz (montaged over the family center of the kitchen as young Charlie and her mother are about to serve dinner) becomes a sinister prefiguring of character action: the two Charlies, locked in another’s arms, are doomed to dance until one or the other is dead!

     A gift of a ring from her uncle—again signifying the symbolic “marriage” between them—sends the intuitive young girl into a spin as she discovers a name engraved within and quickly connects it with the page her uncle has torn from the newspaper. A quick trip to the library teaches this apt pupil information one hopes no child should ever have to learn: that the man to whom she is bonded, so to speak, is a murderer—The Merry Widow Murderer!—a name taken from the fact that he preys on elderly widowed women.

    From that horrible moment of discovery to the end of the film, there is no turning back for this young, fresh, and believing girl, so touchingly portrayed by Teresa Wright; in her young dance of life and death she must endure and discover all the dark hate and evil of her uncle’s being, just as he will recover (or at least claim the recovery of) some of the values of youth he has lost.

     Until this moment, Uncle Charlie has been exhausted, unable to sleep; now suddenly his niece falls into a deep sleep from which she awakens only the next evening. What she must now face is the plotting of a real murder—her own—just as her father and friend mockingly playact murder and detection. Detectives indeed have already shown up at the Newton house, again masquerading as people who, like the uncle, are searching for the average American family. Once more, young Charlie sees through their deception, but as Uncle Charlie begins the attempts to murder her—a step of the back staircase of the house has been sawed through—and her uncle exposes her to his disgusting view of life, she is nearly desperate to keep the detectives near her.

     The ring her uncle has given her is stolen; the symbolic “marriage,” in short, is annulled. But the very fact that she now has no real evidence of his guilt, and her realization that accusations against her uncle would destroy her sentimentally inclined mother and forever change family life only force her to continue the appalling waltz. She too must now plot, recognize lies and greed in those around her. Nearly killed in her uncle’s second attempt to murder her, she is forced to steal, recapturing the ring to assure the older Charlie’s departure from their lives.

     As Uncle Charlie is seen retiring to the train for a voyage away from the family, some may feel relief, but the astute viewers perceive that the dance is not quite over. Forced to remain on the train after it has pulled away from the station, the young Charlie must accept her partner in one more galop as, arms around her in dance-like position, her uncle attempts to push her off the train. Youth has no choice but to struggle against age and destroy it. Her uncle leaning out from the car is decapitated. If not in actuality, at least within the myth of the film, she has now also committed murder. She has been forced, to ensure her survival, to experience all the evil that he so horribly insisted was the condition of life.

    In the awful last scene of this painful film, as the young Charlie stands outside the church wherein her family and the community piously mourn the loss of her uncle, reveals her new social and metaphysical position. She has had her adventure, but she can never truly return to the innocence, love, and protection of her childhood home again.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2005

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2005) and My Year 2005: Terrifying Times (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2006).

Luchino Visconti | Senso / 1954, USA 1968

details of the experience

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luchino Visconti and Suso Cecchi d'Amico (screenplay, based on the novella by Camillo Boito), Carlo Alianello, Giorgio Bassani, and Giorgio Prosperi (dialogue collaboration), Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles (English-language dialogue version), Luchino Visconti (director) Senso / 1954, USA 1968

 

     By an odd coincidence of Netflix timing, I saw this film, beautifully restored and recorded by Criterion, on the 145th anniversary, May 27, 2011, of the events that begin the film, a performance of Verdi's Il Travatore at La Fenice opera house in Venice. Wealthy and poor Venetians have gathered along with Austrian soldiers who control the city, as well as a few political provocateurs—relatives of the beautiful contessa Livia Serpieri—who shower leaflets demanding an end to Austrian rule and flowers in the color of the Italian flag upon the audience at the completion of Manrico's cry "To arms! To arms!" As soldiers attempt to suppress the agitators, words break out between an Austrian soldier, Franz Mahler (Farley Granger) and the countess' cousin, Robert Ussoni (Massimo Girotti), who challenges Mahler to a duel.

      Frightened for Ussoni's survival, the countess (Alida Valli) seeks a meeting with the Austrian in an attempt to dissuade him from the duel, and is assured by Mahler that the event will not occur. At the close of the meeting, she requests her husband to take her home, since she is not feeling well.

     The source of this ill feeling, we already suspect, are the sensations aroused by the appearance and bearing of Mahler, whom we have already been told is the talk of Venice women. And soon after the two meet again, with unexpected and truly shocking consequences, as the countess wanders the streets of the violent city with the soldier all night. Any respectable woman would not dare to be out after curfew and would not possibly allow herself to be seen, yet the countess even goes further a few days later, when she shows up at the soldier's barracks in search of Mahler.

     Despite her political affiliations, it is clear that countess Serpieri will abandon almost all of her values in search of love. Before long, the two spend days together in a small hotel, using her personal maid as an agent in her deceit.

     Mahler, a seasoned paramour, is clearly less than an avid soldier, and seduces the countess partly through his seeming passivity and joy in "the details of the experience of love-making," what he describes as “the quiet beat of the wings of a fly or a moth” and other small sensations. The countess, in her first true romance, abandons herself, instead, to the passion, almost losing consciousness in the act; and that is her continual dilemma: she has lost all sense of who and what she was. She no longer has a past.

 

    When Mahler fails to meet her the next day, she again appears at the barracks, and is ready to reveal all to her husband.  But the young man to whom she rushes, when told by the maid that someone has visited her, turns out to be her cousin, returned from exile, not Mahler. Her husband, who has followed, is accordingly relieved to discover someone he knows within rather than a stranger, a possible lover.

     Ussoni gives her a box containing all the partisans' funds for safe keeping, as war between the Austrians and the nationalists, led by Garibaldi, breaks out. Ussoni and others lead the fight in the north. The countess and her household, meanwhile, retire to their country manor for protection. But the war has reached that area as well, Franz Mahler showing up her bedroom late one night.

     At first, it appears that she has quelled her passion. "This is not Venice," she declares again and again, as if saying it were an incantation. Through trickery and deceit, however, Mahler wins her over, and before the end of the night has joined her in bed. The countess is now determined to hide Mahler in the granary, but when gunfire breaks out nearby, the men rush to see it better from the granary windows, the countess following in fear of her lover's discovery.

     Mahler turns up again in her bedroom, having been served breakfast by her maid. We know the inevitable: to release him from the army and his need to leave her, the countess is willing to give up the partisans' treasure as a bribe for a willing doctor to declare Mahler unfit. The loss of those funds, indeed, ends with the Italians' defeat and her beloved cousin being shot.

    Having now lost almost all self-worth, the Countess is utterly distressed when she hears, in a letter from Mahler, that she should not yet travel to Verona to see him. Determined to make the trip, nonetheless, she chances death, arriving in the city, exhausted and covered with dirt. At Mahler's apartment, she discovers a drunken sensualist in bed with a prostitute instead of her former hero. Mahler recognizes himself now as a liar, a traitor, a cheat, and spits out his hate by calling attention to her blind abandonment of all and, most particularly, her loss of beauty.

     Like a mad woman, she wanders the streets, finally reaching the Austrian army headquarters, where she reveals Mahler's deceit. The last images of Visconti's film show the former soldier, hands tied behind him, being shot by his comrades.

     As many critics have agreed, Senso does not just begin as an opera, but truly becomes one—sans singing and without major heroes. Visconti's characters are grand failures, the husband being a political opportunist, the handsome soldier a petty cad, the countess a deluded woman of the upper class. None are commendable. The heroes of this piece appear in the background, the Italian patriots, and fail in their efforts as well. Yet through his lush camera work, the layers of color revealing both the splendor and decay of this world, Visconti allows us to take in the details of the experience, immersing us in the sensations of sexual lust. It is probably that fact which kept this film from US shores for 14 years after its making, even that redone in English with dialogue by the ardent writers of decadence of the day, Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles.

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2011).

Michael Haneke | Code inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages (Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys) / 2000

ricochet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Haneke (screenwriter and director) Code inconnu: Récit incomplete de divers voyages (Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys) / 2000

 

Code Unknown begins with a sense of urgency and trauma which grows and grows throughout the film until the final scene, resulting in a disconnect with almost all the film’s figures.

     As she leaves a building, Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche) is hailed by her boyfriend’s young brother, Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), a disaffected boy who announces that he has just left his home on the farm. He’s come to Paris, evidently, to speak with his brother Georges, hoping for help in his escape from his hard and uneventful life.

    Georges (Thierry Neuvic), Anne reports, is in Kosovo where he has been sent to photograph the war. She, an actress, has an appointment; she has no choice but to share her building code with him so that Jean has someplace to stay the night. She quickly stops into a small store to buy a couple of pastries, knowing that the boy must be hungry, before they part.

      No sooner than she is out of sight, Jean, having finished his sweet, rolls up the wrapper and tosses it into the lap of an older woman begging on the street. The rude behavior is witnessed by a young teacher from Mali, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), who grabs the youth and demands he apologize to the beggar, a Romanian woman encamped in front of a posh store. A street scuffle ensues and a small crowd gathers around them, as Jean attempts to escape. Some have seen his actions, but when Amadou and others try to explain the situation to the arriving police, they release Jean and arrest both Amadou and the Romanian woman.

     Amadou’s arrest horrifies his parents, an over-worked taxi driving father and a caring mother who we witness telling her tale of woe, along with a torrent of tears, to a Malian aminate. This is, evidently, not the first time he has gotten into trouble. Maria, the Romanian woman is escorted to a plane and forced, as an illegal immigrant, to leave the country.

      In short, through a simple ball of paper tossed away in anger, an entire series of unfortunate events ricochet, affecting all those around them, setting the tone to a film in which each of the figures grow increasingly more isolated.

      Similarly, the director isolates these events through his presentation of the film’s scenes, as if he has dropped in to each household for a few minutes, scanning the figures briefly before moving on to others, signified with a black-out. Through this process, Haneke forces us to connect these dissociated fragments in order to evaluate his shadowy characters and to comprehend their problems in the context of the larger difficulties facing the society as a whole.

     Some, like Jean’s farmer father, to whom Jean temporarily returns, seem to have been already isolated before this primary event. With his wife dead, he sits basically in a brooding silence. Although it is clear that he loves his son, at one point bringing him home a motorcycle as a gift, with the heavy chores, early hours, and other taxing conditions of his life, he has no way to help his son adjust. By film's end, Jean has left the farm again, none of his family knowing where he has gone.

      Oddly, when Georges returns from his photographic assignment where he has clearly witnessed the terrors of the horrifying Balkan struggles, he seems relatively unaffected and is criticized both by another friend and Anne of lacking empathy and feeling for his fellow beings.

      Others such as Anne, Amadou, and Maria seem to have too much feeling, involving themselves in situations in which they are unable to significantly help, opening them to abuse. Anne plays just such a figure in the film on which she is currently at work, a thriller in which she portrays a woman touring an apartment where she is suddenly lured into a “music room” and threatened with her life. This terrible scene—in which the would-be murderer reports that he wants to watch her die—since we do not yet know that she is an actress, appears at first as if it might be a “real” event. The threat that gas will soon be filling the room, moreover, echoes with the deaths of thousands of such women in the Nazi concentration camps.

      Amadou, who desperately wants to be become assimilated into French culture, feels racially slighted and abused at nearly every turn. He works with deaf children, who have clearly their own problems with their own sense of being cut off from the world.   

       Maria, who was almost catatonic in Paris, comes alive as a grandmother and neighbor back in her native Romanian city. Yet the poverty and drabness of her life there clearly makes one comprehend why she may wish to escape her country again.

 

       The breaking point for Anne comes when she is accosted by a young Algerian boy on the subway, as he sexually toys with her, venting his own sense of anger and dissociation from the dominant and, in his mind, wealthy society in which he exists. The most frightening aspect of this assault is that the other riders look away, pretending as if the event were not occurring. Only one rider attempts to help.

      Accompanied in the soundtrack by the heavy drumming of a performance of Amadou’s deaf children, Anne returns home after her ordeal. Soon after, Georges is about to join her, but finds the code to her apartment no longer works. A telephone call from across the street clearly results in no answer. Anne, too, has apparently recognized the failure of their relationship and their lack of true kinship. But in refusing him, she also has removed herself from the active loving and caring she, along with Amadou and Maria, have formerly committed to. We cannot but be fearful that if things do not change—if the codes of society are not resolved—the young Malian teacher and the older Romanian woman may ultimately close themselves off from others as well.

      

Los Angeles, February 3, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2011).