Quinn de Matta | Into Temptation / 2021

nothing about love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Quinn de Matta (screenwriter and director) Into Temptation / 2021 [20 minutes]

 

Into Temptation begins with what seems to be an older man, Michael (Juan Manuel Salcito), perhaps a father, playing hide and seek with whom he might assume is his son, calling out the numbers from 10 down to 1 before he goes on the search presumably for the running and hiding child.

      But almost immediately we recognize something here is terribly amiss, as the older man looks into a couple of places before entering the bedroom where, in fact, an even older man lays tied up, gasping through a mouth gag for help.

      Michael asks if he’s ready to talk, pulling out his cell phone presumably to record whatever the older man says. The gag, we realize is a jock strap. Pulling it out of the man’s mouth, the elder asks him to “stop.” He asks “Who else is here,” presumably having heard Michael speaking to another, but we almost immediately recognize that the other is his own childhood version of himself, a young Michael (Jaxon Ballenger) which we presumed was the child on the run.

      Michael straddles the man, erotically touching his body, explaining that he has thought about this so many times, what each of them would say, how they would behave. All the other can say is that people will soon be looking for him. “I don’t want you to get trouble,” he lies, attempting to project the protectiveness of an elder man to a younger.

      Michael smiles, fondly stroking the man’s face: “No one’s coming.”

      He bends to kiss the man, who screams and pleads for help.

      “Isn’t this what you want? You and me?”

      The child goes racing through the room again, Michael in chase of him, following the image of his own younger self, imaginatively capturing the boy as he, himself, has become the elder. “Now the last one back has to hold the vestments.”

      This film, we suddenly perceive, is a revenge tragedy, a work in which a now very disturbed adult is playing out the sexual tortures of his own childhood by the man, a priest, Father Graham (Tom McLaren) whom he now has captured and controls, just as the other had been in control of the young boy.

      This psychodrama plays out in alternating scenes of the young priest and the boy and the interchanges, such as that which we just observed, of Michael and the now much older priest.

    In the re-imagined past, we see the priest presenting the boy with a special present he has bought him, a cross he puts carefully around the boy’s neck. Conflating God with his own personal attentions, he tells the boy that “He and I will always be with you all the time. And you’ll always know how special you will be to us both,” his devilish clever linking of himself to God making it almost impossible for the child Michael to separate the physically loving attentions of the priest with his spiritual values supported by his parents and the community.

      The priest tells the child that he has one more for him, a special gift, demanding that he not move.

     The adult Michael brings his captured priest a bottle of wine, declaring “Only special boys get to have some,” as he pours wine down his victim’s throat, obviously just as the priest did to the boy to get him drunk or put him into semi-consciousness to facilitate his sexual actions. He strokes the older man’s face, reporting “I didn’t like it either, but you get used to it.”

    As he strokes and kisses him, the elder Michael plays the role of the young priest, “The feeling inside, it feels good, doesn’t it. Some say it feels like butterflies, but I think it feels like angels—hundreds of them.”

     Michael again straddles him: “They never understood what we had.”

     But now the priest responds: “They call me a monster. But what was I supposed to do? They put me in the garden. And then they punished me for taking a bite. That’s all it was. A little bite.”

     “No, no, no,” shouts Michael, now caught up in his own version of their past sexual interludes, again revealing just how manipulated the boy was, momentarily reliving another past moment: “Do you feel that? That’s you! And that’s me. He wants us to be together. But you have to promise. If they find out, they’ll send me away.” One can easily visualize what is happening, and how the priest turns even the special adolescent feeling of an erection into emotional quagmire of guilt if he dare to share the experience in language.

     Observing the childhood memory, the priest now begs that he will never tell anyone if only Michael will let him go.

     But the boy become the man cannot let him go. And we’re not quite sure of the full reasons. Is it just revenge, the full expression of what it meant to live under the total control of an older man, or is it his own now perverse deep feelings for the priest who has been forced to abandon him for his sinful behavior?

     Playing the priest again, he demands the old man stop crying. He didn’t hurt him. But clearly the boy Mickey did feel hurt, had reason to cry out, just as now the older priest does.

     The adult Michael admits, “I’m not letting you go again.”

     But the now cynical old priest clearly cannot comprehend anything, has not learned anything, asking “How much to you want?”

   Michael, shocked by the suggestion, makes it clear the kidnapping has nothing at all to do with money. When the priest asks him to call people to and tell them want it wants, the formerly abused adult says something that is hard to comprehend: “You are what I want. We made a promise.”

    The priest mocks him, did he keep his promises to Santa, to the Easter Bunny. “Go ahead, tell them about the mean old priest who touched you.”

     “No, no I won’t” shouts the adult Michael, still committed to the love he believed he and the priest had long ago committed to. The horrible truth is almost unbearable. He won’t tell anyone, he insists, “Because I love you.”

     How does a man who manipulated a young boy into touching his penis and allowing him to touch the boy’s erect young cock explain to himself the horrifying results of his endless series of lies, of the deep intertwinement of his relationship with the boy and the boy’s own very belief system. If love is godly, if Christ preaches love, and the priest argues for the child to engage to that love, how can a boy, even later as an adult, ever be able to separate the spiritual from the profane? How can the man whose job it was to truly educate young men in spiritual matters, now undo his twisted and perverted teachings?

     Even the priest finally admits it, makes it clear what this film argues, sexual abuse of an elder man with a boy has nothing at to do with gay love: “Nothing about then, and nothing about now is love.” As we have witnessed, pedophilia is about control, not about love.

     But Michael is now forever deluded, answering in tears, “When they came for you, no one believed me, no one listened. And I waited. And I prayed. I prayed. He brought us back together.”

     Misunderstanding everything, the old priest responds, “Then, why am I being punished?”

   Michael doesn’t comprehend his control of the priest as punishment, however, any more than the priest would have accepted the fact that he was controlling the boy Mickey.

   There is a strange element of such relationships that is very much akin to sadomasochism, of capturing and controlling the other in order to make certain the lover will remain, keep silent, and return their love. If there is any love involved in such situations, it is accompanied by a deep fear that the love is not truly available, that it will not be returned, that it will be utterly resisted and ignored. And given that fact, any love that may have been involved is converted to control, fear, self-doubt, the fear of discovery of its existence by others. The forbidden remains forbidden even after the rules, the sin of breaking those rules, and the disdain of the law—whether social, cultural, or personal—has been fully expressed. It is the very forbiddenness of the act which helps to render to even more irresistible.

     “You’re not being punished,” Michael cries out again and again: “I love you.”

     Michael again strokes the priest’s face and finally kisses him fully on the lips.

     As he begins to attempt to masturbate the older man, the priest argues “None of the others behaved this way.”

     Michael points out it was the others who sent him away. He kept their secret. “I am, I am special,” he insists.

     As he momentarily backs off, we see the scars on Michael arms that clearly represent a suicide attempt, he arguing that “He brought me back to so that I could keep my promise. We made a promise to God. And I’m going to keep that promise.”       

    Who is now is the monster, the Frankenstein who created the other or his creation? The issue is unanswerable. And it no longer matters. Both have destroyed any possibility of real love for a strange and perverse notion of love that wasn’t/isn’t what it pretended/pretends to be.

      As Michael undoes his belt to strip himself of his clothing, we suddenly move into the past again as the priest reads pontifically from “The Song of Solomon”:

 

                            Close your heart to every love but mine.

                            Hold no one in your arms but me.

                            Love is a powerful as death.

                            Passion is as strong as death itself.

                            It burst into flame and burns like a raging fire.

                            Water cannot put it out. No flood can drown it.

                            That is the word of the Lord.

 

    Amen, says Mickey, the child, as Michael lays down with his elderly priest lover, having just turned on the gas burners of his kitchen stove.

     I have encountered only a couple of other films as powerful as this 20-minute exegesis of cultural and scriptural texts, complemented with Paul Spaeth’s almost queasy-feeling musical score (featuring the unlikely combination of timpani and flutes). If there was ever a film I might point to in order to explain the horrors of male child abuse, I’d name this movie.

     But it is dangerous matter, as I have pointed out time and again, in our current society terrified of discussing just such complex issues. Just this week, Google brought down years of blog writing for my sites about poetry, theater, opera, art, fiction, and film because of a meaningless accusation—without mention of any specific text—concerning my comments on this very subject. While we in the US like to complain about the censorship in other countries, it’s also become quite apparent that we do not have free expression in this country on the internet, that although the internet sites allow numerous examples of false political statements, it monitors and cuts away free speech on numerous subjects which frighten the general populace just by their existence.

 

Los Angeles, November 24, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

 

 

Victor Sjöstrom | The Scarlet Letter / 1926

undoing the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frances Marion (screenwriter and titles, based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne), Victor Sjöstrom (director) The Scarlet Letter / 1926

Swedish director Victor Sjöstrom’s film adaptation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, during the director’s short “Hollywood” period, is surely one of his best films, and perhaps the most powerful performance ever of its central actor, Lillian Gish. By comparison to this silent work, Gish’s work in the 1930 talkie I watched immediately after viewing this film on TCM, One Romantic Night, seemed somewhat bland and unexpressive.

     Not so in The Scarlet Letter in which Gish, quite literally, lets her beautiful hair down several times, particularly early in the film when she goes rushing into the woods after her escaped bird. This series of events, beautiful filmed by Sjöstrom and his cinematographer Hendrik Sartov, as his camera fluidly tracks the beautiful young woman dressed all in white—as opposed to the church-going Puritans, clad mostly in black—says almost everything that needs to be said about this oppressive culture, where even allowing a bird to sing on the Sabbath, let alone running and chasing after it, is deeply forbidden, as if joy and beauty were an anathema to God.

      In the closed and claustrophobic world of Sjöstrom’s Boston, nothing can be hidden from the sight of nosy and viciously gossiping neighbors such as Mistress Hibbins (Marcelle Corday); and punishment for the young steamstress’ transgressions immediately follows, ordered by the elders. It is not enough that she be brought before the kinder church minister, The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (played by the striking Swedish actor Lars Hanson) to be scolded before the entire community, but the now seemingly innocent act puts Hester Prynne in the pillories for her “crime.” As Dimmesdale tenderly releases her from her bodily imprisonment, he is struck by her beauty, which follows, soon after, with a quite steamy embracement, again in the woods.

    Unlike Hawthorne’s tale, accordingly, where we only gradually discover the intense sexual relationship between the minister and Hester, here everything is established from the beginning. And the director makes clear from the very first scenes that the hugs and touches between these two beautiful beings is against not only community norms but law, as soon after, we observe the comical wooing of the work’s dunce-like Master Giles and a young woman, wherein they are forced to speak to one another over a table through a long tube-like device that keeps them worlds apart. A quick, stolen goodbye kiss, ends in his being ousted not only from the house but from his would-be lover’s life.

     In Hawthorne the gradual discovery of the relationship between Dimmesdale and Hester only reiterates his and the community’s hypocrisy. But here (Hanson speaking in Swedish, Gish in English) we are presented with the background events of Dimmesdale’s later “treason,” which create a far deeper sense of sympathy for both the minister and Hester. Here we see both her own flirtations and demurrals as well as the powerful forces of love emanating from the Reverend. As Hester states the obvious, they live in a world that is “afraid of love,” a community terrorized by even the vision of women’s undergarments.

     If that leads us to more fully sympathize equally with Dimmesdale, the director further allows us feel the extreme tensions that the two feel even before Hester’s adultery is revealed through the birth of young daughter, Pearl. Dimmesdale desperately desires to marry this woman—which would have saved their lives—but it is Hester who is most responsible for the situation, not through her sexual responses, but through her lies, through the fact that she has not revealed her marriage to Roger Chillingworth until Dimmesdale is about to leave the country on a mission to the English King. Hester’s crime and punishment, accordingly, is not correctly perceived by the vengeful and cruel community: hers is not a crime passion or wonton sexuality, as much as it is that she is, just like most in this community, unable to face the truth, fearful of losing what she has attained—in her case, the love of Dimmesdale. In short, although she is publicly humiliated for her aberrant behavior, she is, in fact, one of them, and like them, desperate to hide the truth.

     This is particularly obvious in this film when Dimmesdale, returning from his voyage, discovers her plight. While he is determined to tell the truth, she insists that he continue to keep it secret, to serve the community rather than reveal to that society they he and they are all equally sinners. It is this internalization of reality that ultimately dooms both lovers, Dimmesdale and Hester, but also the community at large. Even Master Giles’ determined revenge on Mistress Hibbins for her insufferable gossip, is based on a lie, as he, pretending to be her, play-acts in a scene of imaginary gossip against town leaders who accidently (purposely to him) overhear her words. The result is dreadful series of dunkings into a nearby pond.

     The lies indeed insinuate themselves into the lives of all, but particularly into the heart of this more appealing Dimmesdale, who, after saving Pearl from being taken from Hester by baptizing his daughter (itself, in this society, surely a sacrilegious act) spends much of the rest of the film with hand over heart, as he wastes away, daily retreating from living.

     Sjöstrom doubles the couple’s torture by bringing back Hester’s missing husband, Chillingworth, who, as a doctor saves Pearl’s life, but as a husband determines to revenge his wife (and, more indirectly than in Hawthorne’s work, Dimmesdale) by simply reappearing at auspicious moments. If the letter A she is forced to wear to the end of her life might remind her of her supposed sin, the more frightening punishment is Chillingworth’s constant reminder of his knowledge about the truth of the events.

     For a brief moment, these two tortured beings attempt to imagine some way out of their assigned fate through an escape to Spain where they may begin again and escape their tortured past—brilliantly symbolized in the film by Hester’s removal of her A from her dress. But we have already perceived that the A signifying their past actions will be forever emblazoned upon their memories as we watch the young Pearl draw the same figure, as if beginning her studies of the alphabet, in the sand. Chillingworth’s presence simply reasserts that fact.

    And it is Chillingworth’s presence once again that finally forces Dimmesdale to make a public confession about his involvement, revealing, in his personal anguish, that the same letter attached to Hester’s dress has been branded by iron upon his chest. Whereas Hawthorne may wonder if this was miraculous event wrought by the hand of God, in Sjöstrom’s far more corporeal rendering of the tale we have no question that the A upon the minister’s chest is a self-inflicted punishment for his own lack of moral daring. Yet again the Swedish director fully redeems Dimmesdale through the man’s confession, which itself, temporarily at least, saves his community by revealing the truth, that all men are sinners, that the mud they sling upon Hester and Pearl is that in which they themselves also walk.

    If the film version differs, quite radically at times, from the beloved fiction, it works as an adaptation that raises most of Hawthorne’s themes while presenting the work’s heroes in more humane terms. And upon Dimmesdale’s death, in our empathy, we are quite ready to forgive his long silence. This silent film, after all, has audibly asserted what was in his heart.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2013).

Henry Hathaway | Peter Ibbetson / 1935

i’ll see you in your dreams

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Meehan, Edwin Justus Mayer, Waldemar Young, Constance Collier, and Vincent Lawrence (screenplay, based on a story by George du Maurier), Henry Hathaway (director) Peter Ibbetson / 1935

 

The French Surrealists, helped along by the work’s rediscovery by Paul Eluard, adored Henry Hathaway’s 1935 film, Peter Ibbetson, based on the tale of 1891 by George Du Maurier. For them it not only encapsulated the concept of a love that survives all obstacles expressed in the term l’amour fou, but, through its shadowy, slightly blurred sequences created by cinematographer Charles Lang, was perceived as a sensual justification for the primacy of dreams. If this fact might help to elevate the film’s status for English and American viewers, it also simply reconfirms the retrograde Romantic tendencies of that movement and its questionable idealization of childhood, as well as their often patriarchal genuflection before what they saw as the “feminine principle.” And even if one finds plenty to enjoy in this fairy-tale like fantasia, one has to wade through the film’s excessive sentimentality and rigid religiosity to get there.

     Child actors Dickie Moore (as the Peter, nicknamed Gogo) and Virginia Weidler (as the six year-old Mary) are, for a few minutes at least, quite charming and sweet. Just to look into young Gogo’s picture-perfect face is enough to melt hearts. But these child actors, forced to engage their adult audience in a struggle between the sexes for the first third of the film, quickly shift from the sweet and sickly sentiments expressed through their acting out of friendly boy-girl squabbles to the requirement that they, simultaneously, tear up on queue, before crying their little eyes out. Audience manipulation has seldom been so obvious.

     Their early arguments concern not only who is in control (the young Mimsey has all the building blocks—the planks of wood they both desire—in her back yard), but whose creative vision is superior. Little Mary simply wants to build a simulacrum of life, a doll house, while Gogo desires to create something functional, a “real” wagon which can move them forward into time and space. The male’s vision is obviously superior—at least if one values the real world in motion. But, of course, as we know reality is a terribly flawed thing, likely to change at a moment’s notice, stealing away everything we know and love. As a being of that world, poor Gogo, in a blink of an eye, not only loses his mother to the disease with which she has been suffering from the film’s very first frame, but is forced, by the sudden appearance of an unknown uncle, to leave his beloved’s “secret garden” hidden away in a Paris suburb to join the horse-and-hound set of a English county estate. No wonder the terrified boy, girlfriend in hand, attempts to run off; and the moment we next encounter him as a young architectural assistant working for a kind—and, significantly, blind—British employer (Donald Meek) he is in a blue funk. Forced to give up everything that truly matters—a potentially functioning machine in an enchanted garden of a long ago past—who wouldn’t be depressed. Little Gogo, all grown up, has become the ill-at-ease dandy, Peter Ibbetson, a strikingly handsome, mustached gentleman (a slightly effeminate Gary Cooper) without anyone to dandle and fondle.

     His superior may be blind, but he sees right through his favorite worker, suggesting he take a break in gay Paris. There, our diffident hero encounters, at a local museum, a worker who might be more at home in a dance hall, with whom, without hesitation, he immediately takes up. Indeed, we realize it’s a perfect combination because it will never lead him into evil; she is so every day and course that she cannot possibly lead such a distracted young man astray. Peter is so dreamy that he hardly knows she is there, particularly when they wander out to the old estate he inhabited as a boy. Like an adult child, his new-found paramour runs straight to the swing, expecting him to push her up into sexual ecstasy, while Peter stumbles around the now decaying grounds, rummaging like a sleepwalker, through the memories of his distant past.

     Returning to London, he is immediately bundled off to York, where he has been asked to design an addition to a stable on the wealthy Duke of Powers’ (John Halliday) estate. The man’s beautiful wife, the Duchess (Ann Harding) wants the new stables to match precisely the ancient, straw-thatched creation of decades before. Sound familiar? If this lovely lady does not precisely seek a simulacrum, she is certainly expressing her preference for an imitation of life, while our hero is determined to “make it new,” to tear down the old stables in order to construct a useful, more modern structure to house her husband’s beloved horses. Briefly, the two wittily duke it out, the young architect winning over the equally stubborn Duchess, particularly since she immediately perceives there are greater things at stake.

     If the movie up to this time has appeared almost as wooden in its structures as the buildings Peter designs, for a few moments—as the couple gradually comes to discover that each is inexplicably attracted to the other—seemingly everyday events momentarily dissociate from reality, and the movie reminds one a bit of Cocteau. A rain storm quickly descends upon Peter and his workers with the swiftness and ferocity of a cyclone, as he and his associates are forced to take refuge beneath a tent-like canopy wherein he quickly drags his small architectural model—reminding us of the would-be doll-house to which the young boy chaffed in the first scene of the film.

     At another moment, the Duchess begins to relate her dream to the architect, while he finishes her sentences, relating the same events from his own point of view. Both are abashed at what seems like a remarkable coincidence, before the Duchess (whom we now realize is the adult Mary) denies any mystical implications in the strange occurrence. But by dinner, after the Duke astutely recognizes the silences behind his table-mates, they recognize that, between them, they have just experienced an astounding empathy. In Peter’s denial of their love, claiming he loves only one woman fixed in his mind as a six year old all dressed in white, they both are struck by the truth: they are the lovers trapped in the past of their own minds.

     While they recognize they now have no choice but to break off any further intercourse—if for no reason than to keep that pure and innocent relationship from becoming tainted by the carnality they now both desire—we recognize that they have no longer have any choice in the matter. They are doomed by the very fact that they have been expelled from that childhood Eden. Embracement and kisses symbolically replace what is a virtual rape, as they enter a world where the Duke’s attempt to end their retreat from time through murder can result only in the end of his own present life. Peter kills the Duke in self-defense, but destroys himself and his lover in the same act.

     The rest of the story unfurls—or we might better say, rewinds—itself as if the two were simultaneously staring into a mirror. Once more, Peter is pulled away from his loved one, this time to endure an even more horrific imprisonment, because it is real, than the one which he suffered as a young lad. There, like Christ, he is mocked, beaten, and, finally, crucified on the frame of his own bed. Both, through intense suffering and near-death, find themselves now able to transcend life, particularly since they have, in fact, long ago given up the present. Mary visits her lover in his sleep, returning to him through the emblem of a ring, the next morning. And once they realize the powers they now have to escape the world in which they are only slightly still contained, they meet nightly in each other’s dreams.

    If this “transcendent” experience might have been presented, by a more imaginative group of writers and a more brilliant director, as a true world apart from the one we know, by, let us imagine, an eerie surrealist landscape or, better yet, a slightly askew Expressionist world that could transport us visually into another time and place, Hathaway and his five scribes instead present us with what later might be described as a Hallmark Card vision of paradise. There’s a wonderful moment, when Peter (like Christ’s Peter, a rock), after temporarily losing his faith, encounters a monstrous landslide that nearly does him and his dream-love in; but they quickly rediscover those heavenly pastures where they lay down in bucolic pleasure throughout the long night, the music swelling up into Wagnerian proportions in case we missed the point. Even a rock eventually crumbles.

    More banally, when our worn-out heroine finally dies, she meets her lover one last time to invite him into a Christian-like paradise, all spirit and no fun. “I’m waiting for you,” she breathes out the last words she is permitted to speak. God is such a kill-joy! But then, I guess he is willing to allow this couple through the pearly gates, despite the red letters (or perhaps purple passages) this clichéd piece of cinema has blazoned across their chests.

       The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, without so much prudery and propriety, and ending in a far-less ethereal after-life—these ghosts do fortunately materialize—did this all so much better.

 

Los Angeles, December 14, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2014).

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun | Grigris / 2013 || Bye Bye Africa / 1999

escape to the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (screenwriter and director) Grigris / 2013

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (screenwriter and director) Bye Bye Africa / 1999

 

The likeable young dancer of Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 2013 feature, Grigris, simply radiates innocence in his gap-toothed smiles and the placidity with which he accepts what comes his way. By night, Grigris (Souleymane Démé, despite a paralyzed leg, dances up a storm in the local nightclub, entertaining the denizens with his graceful moves. Each night they pass the hat so that Grigris will return and might survive his difficult life.

    By day, shuffling across the Chad landscape, Grigris works as a part-time handyman and photographer for his step-father and his wealthy uncle nearby, seemingly happy in his simple life. A visit from a local prostitute, Mimi (Anaïs Monory) who wants photographs so that she might become a model, changes his life.

       For the shorter and crippled Grigris the mountain of beautiful flesh that Mimi represents transforms him, as also does the sudden emphysema plaguing his pipe-smoking step-father. It hardly seems to matter to him that Mimi, nightly bedded by all the local criminal entrepreneurs, is unavailable and out of his league. He becomes determined to win her over with his daring dancing, rolling flames across his body, lifting up his paralyzed leg to spin and dangle it in front of him almost like a sexual member.

      Similarly, it seems to hardly bother him to approach one of the underground criminals for a job. Lying about his ability to swim, Grigris joins in a late-night raid of petrol drums, almost drowning himself on the long police chase back to shore. He is threatened with being fired, but begs to remain in the criminal’s employ as a driver so that he might help in paying his step-father’s hospital bills.

      After a highly successful collection of canisters of gas, wherein Grigris outwits the chasing police, he is welcomed into the criminal coven, but soon after betrays his boss by absconding with a shipment and selling it to his uncle, who showers him with much-needed money. Although he has claimed he has been stopped and beaten by the police, the criminal sends out his henchman to beat and torture Grigris, demanding that he return the missing gas within three days. In blood-spattered attire, Grigris hides out at Mimi’s, staying the night while she is out servicing her clients.

     She too is slugged for her complicity with Grigris, and both are threatened with death. Amazingly, however, these two lost souls—nearly destroyed by the city society in which they live—seek to escape to the country, a small native village where a close friend of Mimi’s has previously taken refuge.    

     Pregnant and repentant about her past Mimi arrives with Grigris in the village, where all the men are away on a long hunt. Grigris claims Mimi is his wife, and convinces her he will care for her and her child, despite her lurid past.

     The native women of the clearly matriarchal society, moreover, immediately takes a liking to this scarecrow of a man, who is clearly entranced by Mimi and who deals well with their children. They bring platters of basic food stuffs—beans, fruits, vegetables, and nuts—celebrating the couple for having selected their small village as a new home, a place to renew their lives.

      As one might expect, however, the past is slowly catching up as the criminal henchman drives by the village, finally stopping with intent of killing Grigris. Mimi, witnessing the attack shouts for the woman of the village, who miraculously come running, with homemade whips and clubs, surrounding the henchman and, when he refuses to release Grigris, kill him, burning his body up in his car, and pledging to one another complete silence about the event.

     Although it may be a bit difficult to imagine that this former dancer and whore will be able to spend the rest of their lives in this rustic world, director Haroun suggests it is a necessary choice, and way to escape the infamy of contemporary Chadian life by returning to the past. And in that sense this film is a kind of romantic fantasy which allows for the greatness of Chadian past.

 

A similar relationship between past and present was apparent already in Haroun’s first film of 1999, Bye Bye Africa, the second of two movies I saw last night in LAMA’s film series, “Caméras d’Afrique: The Films of West Africa.

     Presented as a kind autobiographical documentary (although Haroun admitted that, unlike his central character, his mother still lives), the work begins with the death of his mother, the director returning to N’Djamena with the intent of making a film he will dedicate to her. Having lived for years now in France, the director is shocked to see just how derelict the city, its film houses, and the whole industry has become. Not only do his ready aphorisms, based on statements by Jean-Luc Goddard, no longer seem plausible in his homeland, but he meets, in many cases, with absolute hostility for “capturing the image of his would-be actors.” In this financially savaged society, reality is confused with imaginative writing. A former actress with whom he has worked, Stéphane Legoux, is presumed to have AIDS because she has played a character who did in his movie. Her life, he discovers, has been destroyed by his film-making, and even his former film-making friends, are convinced that there is no longer any way to develop a film industry in a country where films are only shown in small rooms for members of the film clubs to get funding for their projects.

      Despite these impossibilities, however, Haroun does motorcycle across the city catching the faces of its people and the pace of their daily activities. Despite its dereliction, it is obviously still a world which the director loves. But, as the film suggests, you can’t go home again. In this world, at least, as Ghana writer Chinua Achebe put it, “things fall apart.” Haroun is forced to return to the European continent to create his art.

     But there may be hope, nonetheless, for the future, as a young boy whom Haroun has taken on as a kind of assistant, is delighted with the camera Haroun has left behind, the boy running after the fleeing director to catch the final images of this touching film.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2013).