Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 05/28/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, May 28, 2020

The Insult (Ziad Doueiri, 2017)

Adel Karam in The Insult

Kamel El Basha in The Insult

Cast: Adel Karam, Kamel El Basha, Camille Salameh, Diamand Bou Abboud, Rita Hayek, Talal Jurdi, Christine Choueiri, Julia Kassar, Rifaat Torbey, Carlos Chahine, Walid Abboud, Georges Daoud. Screenplay: Ziad Doueiri, Joelle Touma. Cinematography: Tommaso Fiorilli. Production design: Hussein Baydoun. Film editing: Dominique Marcombe. Music: Éric Neveux.

The pictures at the top of the post give away much of what The Insult is about: the twinned lives of the film's Lebanese and Palestinian antagonists. There's not one insult in the film, there are many, and they are flung back and forth across the gulf between Tony Hanna (Adel Karam) and Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha) throughout the film. It's a courtroom drama that seems intended to bring the entire Middle East into judgment, if only to show how intractable the tensions are, how difficult if not impossible to bring to justice. A small dispute over a drainage pipe explodes into a cause célèbre, spilling out of the courtroom into the streets. Ziad Doueiri and his co-scenarist Joelle Trouma have made a well-crafted film that won't solve the world's problems as readily as it might like to, but at least will remind us how petty at base some of them are -- and how much alike sworn enemies tend to be. There's a small moment in the film that brought this home to me the way those two photographs at the top do. In his testimony in court, Yasser, who is a construction foreman, is asked why he chose to use a more expensive crane than his contractor specified -- something the contractor earlier mentioned as a reason for taking Yasser off the project. The specified crane, Yasser explains, was made in China and was much less reliable than the one he chose, which was made in Germany. The camera at this point picks up the listening Tony, a garage mechanic who earlier in the film had complained about using shoddy Chinese auto parts instead of the superior German ones. It's moment that flickers across the screen but one that, if you've been paying attention to details, reinforces the men's similarities without hammering on them. The Insult was nominated as best foreign language feature by the Academy, and it's the kind of solid humanist filmmaking that the award frequently honors.

Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades (Kenji Misumi, 1972)

Cast: Tomisaburo Wakayama, Go Kato, Yuko Hama, Isao Yamagata, Michitaro Mizushima, Ichiro Nakatana, Akihiro Tomikawa. Screenplay: Kazuo Koike, Goseki Kojima. Cinematography: Chikashi Makiura. Art direction: Yoshinobu Nishioka. Film editing: Toshio Taniguchi. Music: Hiroshi Kamayatsu, Hideaki Sakurai.

There's no let-up to the bloodshed in the third installment of the Lone Wolf and Cub series: At the end, Ogami Itto (Tomisabuo Wakayama) stands alone in the middle of a corpse-strewn field, having vanquished an army of a couple of hundred men single-handedly -- or rather, with the help of little Daigoro and the baby cart, which is revealed to be a formidable fighting vehicle. But the most disturbing violence in the film is the rape of two women near the beginning of the film -- disturbing because it is treated realistically, rather than with the tricks of style that characterize the film's swordplay. The women are set upon by a gang of idlers, men waiting to be hired as fighters by whoever needs them. One member of the gang, however, holds himself aloof from the raping and pillaging that the others typically indulge in. He's Kanbei (Go Kato), a former samurai turned ronin, who is conscience-stricken, we learn, having been dishonored for an earlier failure to follow the orders of his lord to the letter, even though his actions saved the lord's life. This time, Kanbei remains loyal to the gang he has taken up with, and having come late to the scene of the rape, kills the two women and their servant, then has the three rapists draw straws to choose the one among them who will be killed as punishment for the rape. But just as Kanbei is killing the one who drew the short straw, Ogami comes upon the scene and kills the other two men. Kanbei challenges Ogami to a duel, but Ogami sheathes his sword and calls it a draw. What's going on here is a complex working out of the samurai code, which will resolve itself poignantly if bloodily at the end of the film when Ogami and Kanbei meet again. Which is to say that beneath the flash and dazzle of the multifarious violence of Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart to Hades, which includes an extended sequence in which Ogami is tortured to save a woman being sold into prostitution, lies a moral vision that's both alien and comprehensible.