Variations on life's first-times: Au revoir les enfants and Yi Yi turn blu

As rendered in Louis Malle’s autobiographical Au revoir les enfants (1987), the Petite-Collège d’Avon, which rested on the grounds of a Carmelite monastery and neighboured Fontainebleau, and which Malle attended during the Nazi occupation of France, seems austere and bone chilling, especially if you’re permanently garbed in short pants. Yet it’s also an oddly wondrous, comforting place, nestled in fecundity, where boys could get away with a little horseplay and develop a scrappy camaraderie. Under Malle and cinematographer Renato Berta’s earth-toned, always fluid gaze, the Petite-Collège feels like home, even its sleeping quarters, where too many bunks cram a single room and a it’s only a matter of time before a serial bed-wetter like Malle’s surrogate Julien (Gaspard Manesse) gets outed by his merciless peers.

The masterstroke in Au revoir, now available on gorgeous blu-ray from Criterion, lies in Malle’s respect for the past, his resistance to burdening it with the gravity of hindsight. In keeping with the experience as lived by Malle’s adolescent characters, much of what passes feels essentially ordinary, even if historical circumstances are extraordinary: reading by flashlight, playing on stilts in the courtyard, dodging the air raid drill to rattle off some boogie-woogie on the school piano, getting treated to a screening of Chaplin’s The Immigrant with live accompaniment. The film traces Julien’s friendship with Bonnet (Raphaël Fejtö), a story which stumbles along playfully and awkwardly the way childhood friendships do, until that day that forever changed Malle’s life, the day the Gestapo arrive to take Bonnet and three other boys away to their deaths, along with the school’s headmaster Père Jacques, who took them in and attempted to conceal their Jewishness. Before this final sequence Nazis remain in the background, spied outside the classroom window asking to confess, or, ironically, shooing away collaborators attempting to throw Jews out of a local restaurant. By largely eschewing overt, artificial portent, Malle’s finale becomes infinitely more moving, and every scene leading to it, however mirthful its tone, becomes pierced with unbearable loss.


The fleetingness of childhood (and adulthood) and ordinariness punctuated by sudden violence (which is ordinary enough) also dominate Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), also new to blu-ray from Criterion. It follows a middle-class Taipei family through a rough patch: grandmother slips into a coma, mother into a spiritual crisis, father into two parallel ethical crises. Sister undertakes her first brush with romance while little brother quietly absorbs everything, translating it into images. Eight year-old Yang-Yang’s nascent experiments with his father’s instamatic, collecting evidence of those aspects of ourselves that remain invisible to us (he takes pictures of the backs of people’s heads), arguably make him the world’s youngest conceptual artist. Not that he knows it.

Yang’s group portrait is also a portrait of urban life and its inherent merging of disparate experiences. Public scenes are observed entirely through windows, neighbours are heard fighting through walls, surveillance cameras track movements. Sounds, music or dialogue from one scene bleed into the next. Yang-Yang, whose name invokes the film’s writer/director, is Yi Yi’s richest source of discovery and amusement. He’s cute, of course, but also vividly alert to the world and all its contents he can’t understand. A scene where Yang-Yang beholds a pretty schoolmate standing before the projected image of a documentary on thunder is elegantly echoed in a later scene where he dives into a swimming pool during a thunderstorm.

Yet I find myself most drawn to scenes involving NJ, Yang-Yang’s father, who, like Yang-Yang, is unassuming and wears clothes three sizes too big for him. The scenes where NJ dines and hits a karaoke bar with a Japanese colleague, their exchanges limited by their broken English (the only language they share), constitute marvelous moments of adults connecting. “Why are we always afraid of the first time?” the Japanese asks. Yi Yi brims with so many resonate variations on life’s first-times, and even if Yang allows them to be harrowing, he nonetheless consoles us with the fact that we can at least share them, though conversation, physical contact, or the compressing force of art.

Defiance: saving lives, forest wives and reversing stereotypes in this untold tale of Holocaust survival

The title sounds like some vehicle for Stallone, or maybe the Rock, but Defiance in fact belongs to the new crop of revisionist WWII/Holocuast movies, an epic of resistance, survival and self-determination. It’s based on an astonishing and largely unknown true story, astonishing in part because its portrayal of the abysmal suffering of Europe’s Jews is given fresh dynamic in the shape of Belarusian brothers Tuvia, Zus and Asael Bielski, three handsome boys of durable Jewish peasant stock who lose everything in the German invasion save their lives and dignity. You have to marvel and just how rare it is in movies to find such a characterization of the Jews, not as a mass of helpless victims, but as tough motherfuckers.

Having fled their homes, the Bielskis original plan was, understandably, founded in self-interest. But their encounters with other Jews hiding in the Belarusian woods tugs at their sense of solidarity and purpose. Surrounded by trembling, dirt-smeared faces gnawing on scraps of petrified bread, Zus (Liev Schreiber) wonders: “So many dead. Why not us?” The movie is of course one long answer to this question. Where Zus believes the only viable moral option is to fight as partisans alongside the Russians, Tuvia (Daniel Craig) resolves to stay hidden and build a community where every last Jew, from the able-bodied to the infirm, has some chance at survival, however remote. This theme of aggression versus seclusion is given its boldest dramatization in a sequence that shifts back and forth between a Russian-Partisan ambush on a German convoy and a wedding ceremony held in the forest enclave, both effectively staged and given engaging visual arcs by director and co-scenarist Edward Zwick, who previously helmed such like fare as Glory (1989), Legends of the Fall (94), The Last Samurai (03) and Blood Diamond (06).

Other scenes in Defiance however, ones that require greater reflection, tend to be more ham-fisted. Some are entirely unnecessary, like the dumb-ass scene where Bella (Iben Hjejle) asks Zus why the women don’t get guns. Zus simply assures her that the men will protect her, and this chauvinist brush-off, rather than leading to further discussion, touches Bella so deeply that she lets Zus cop a feel. (Does that mean she's Zus' "forest wife?" Lots of the fellows take forest wives, like participants in some prototype for a Pacific Northwest commune. It might have been interesting to learn more about the postwar fates of these forest marriages.) 

With its overused and overly instructive James Newton Howard score, its declamatory, overstated dialogue—which awkwardly avoids contractions as a way of reminding us that the characters aren’t actually supposed to be speaking English—Defiance sort of plods along, very respectful and workmanlike for the most, yet at heart there remains this iconoclastic appendix to the Holocaust narrative that’s worth knowing, not to mention yet another superbly rich performance from Craig, who swings convincingly between that steely gaze that exudes Bond know-how and a sense of desperation and terrible doubt as to what to do with all these people shriveling up from hunger and despair.

More on Hot Docs 2008: stalags, robots, writers, killers and ample opportunity for revisiting both the past... and the future

My recent posting on Hot Docs 2008 was organized around the films I’d seen which specifically addressed the use of home movies, but there remain other films worth noting that don’t fall into this realm. In the absence of an equally useful organizing theme, I’m just going to offer some quick comments on these remaining titles in no particular order.

Ari Libsker’s outstanding Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel concerns a trash paperback genre that arose in Israel in the 1960s, garishly illustrated tales of American soldiers captured by the Germans and sent to P.O.W. camps to be tortured and raped by Nazi dominatrixes who they would later exact like revenge on. In exploring the nature of the genre’s enormous popularity, Libsker dissects the labyrinth of issues that created a sort of impenetrable shroud over the development of a Holocaust culture in Israel, as well as the intersection where fantasy and atrocity collide. How does pulp fiction operate as a barometer of a culture’s subconscious fears and desires? Why are these fantasies dictated so specifically by American masculinity and the urge to force sex upon figures of genocidal menace? Provocation of the highest order, Stalags is very worth tracking down should it not get the attention it deserves.

Phie Ambo’s Mechanical Love moves between Emersonian images of natural tranquility and portraits of rubbery robots in repose. Fascinating, troubling, and yet consistently playful in tone, it studies the slow progress of one Professor Ishiguro and his team as they develop his android double in preparation for an interview between it and Ishiguro’s wife and young daughter. Working a field described as bridging engineering and psychology, the focus of Ishiguro’s research is on identity, behaviour and self-knowledge. Confessing to not being much a husband, Ishiguro genuinely wonders whether his wife will even notice the difference between he and his geminoid, a running joke that alludes to some deeply serious questions. Less overtly addressing of the film’s themes but no less fascinating are the scenes Ambo captures in nursing homes in Europe where lonely elderly woman befriend robot seals. Ambo has caught a disquieting glimpse of the future in Mechanical Love, yet she resists facile qualification.

Someone else who should rightfully be acknowledged as having some special insight into the future is legendary SF writer Harlan Ellison, though you’d never really know this from watching Erik Nelson’s Dreams With Sharp Teeth, a biographical documentary that leaves zero doubt as to Ellison’s elevated place in the genre nor his awesome powers of inspired, cantankerous, hugely entertaining gab, while offering zero lowdown on his work. Ellison talks up a storm throughout Dreams, regaling with tales of humble beginnings, hard work and colorful anecdotes galore—the time he mailed a dead gopher to an editor, the time he wrote a short story in five hours while on full display in a bookstore window—and he’s never anything less than a hoot. Too bad anyone not already familiar with his stories and novels will find here precious little to prompt them to seek them out. Nelson gives us a rousing impression of the man’s charisma and an astounding dearth of insight into what the hell he’s been writing about for the last 50 years.

A more compelling, textured, and purposeful portrait of a writer—if hardly a laugh riot—is Killer Poet, Susan Gray’s chronicle of the strange fortunes of Norman Porter, a.k.a. JJ Jameson. Convicted of two homicides, Porter was handed two lifetime sentences back in 1960. A model prisoner, he served 25 years before escaping and starting a new life as Jameson in Chicago, where he’d help get a black mayor elected, renovate—or should we rather say rehabilitate—dilapidated homes, become a highly regarded poet, start up a day care in a church, and become a close, caring friend to many. This lasted 20 years before the fuzz finally caught up with him and returned him to the slammer. Gray makes a strong case for redemption while dutifully representing every significant angle in the story and ultimately exposing some of the more infuriating detours of justice.

During Gray’s Q&A following the screening I attended an audience member stood up and revealed herself to be the daughter of the woman who ran some of the inmate educational programs that Porter rose to the top of, giving testimony to the man’s kindness, noting how he helped her father when he was dying of cancer... What strikes me as the key difference between those willing to give Porter a chance and those who see only a pathetic creature who should never experience anything beyond his assigned punishment is simply the belief and understanding that identity is not so fixed, that any one individual is capable of actions both malicious and altruistic over the coarse of a lifetime, that destiny can be brutal or benign. The survivors of Porter’s victims (and it should be added that there appear to be considerable doubts surrounding Porter’s guilt in the crimes) themselves confess that his being back behind bars changes nothing with regards to their loss, but they feel better knowing that justice is served. Their faith in organized justice is obviously stronger than mine.

Emotional Arithmetic: Impressive figures that don't quite add up

There’s this scene in Emotional Arithmetic that, like a handful of others, feels as though it was shaken loose from the film’s tight weave of pervading solemnity. It features two old guys getting up in the dead of night to raid the icebox for the congealed leftovers of what was previously a lavish meal. With their grub and a couple of bottles of 50, they hunker over a table and get down to work. Each man represents a disparate chapter in the history of a beguiling younger woman, and this unexpected wee-hours companionship is thus laced with a certain, amusingly masculine tension. What happens in this scene neither dissolves the tension entirely, not does it exactly resolve anything. It lingers briefly between the ostensibly important scenes. Interestingly, this scene lingers in my memory more vividly than anything else in the movie.

Awkwardly adapted from Matt Cohen’s Holocaust-related novel by screenwriter Jefferson Lewis and director Paolo Barzman, Emotional Arithmetic, with its godawful title, was never going to have an easy time proving itself a dynamic cinematic experience. It comes burdened with themes of loss, sacrifice, memory, and the at times crippling responsibility to the past. I say burdened not because these themes aren’t potent—on the contrary, the ideas Cohen’s addressed are rich and resonant—but because rather than coming to us through action, these themes are announced, lobbed about, mulled over.

What eases this burden considerably is the tremendous cast, five actors from four different countries with such accumulated experience as to evoke networks of emotion the moment they appear on screen together. Susan Sarandon plays Melanie, Gabriel Byrne plays Christopher, a pair linked by their time spent in the Drancy transit camp in occupied France as kids, and their being rescued from deportation to Auschwitz by Jakob, played by Max Von Sydow. The bulk of Emotional Arithmetic takes place four decades later, at Melanie’s rural home in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, where Melanie is now a mentally unstable middle-aged woman, wife to David, a much older history professor played by Christopher Plummer, and mother to Benjamin, a handsome, talented chef played by Roy Dupuis. The story as such concerns an unexpected reunion between Melanie, Christopher and Jakob, an event fraught with opposing ideas about how to memorialize victims of catastrophe and how to manage life’s loose ends and enduring desires.

There are moments where something happens, risks are taken, pent-up feelings are given expression—but these moments are nearly crowded out by scenes of stasis or contemplation—and it is not an active, nor an especially contagious contemplation. The rather gaudy, overwrought flashbacks to Drancy constitute only a fraction of the Emotional Arithmetic’s duration, but they somehow exemplify the overall weakness here, a tendency to make a case for the film’s seriousness by merely directing our attention toward events that we all know are overwhelmingly serious. The end result I suppose is a somewhat muddled meditation, a movie that doesn’t entirely work as a movie, but arguably fucntions as some modest catalyst for thought, and a rare opportunity to see actors of this caliber sharing the screen.