johnpetersca Reviews

Baby Doll (1956)

"First as tragedy, then as farce"

[7/10 · 1 May 2015]

This is what Karl Marx said about history repeating itself in his 1852 essay, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." "Brumaire" is the second month of the French Republican calendar and refers to fog. I think the same concept can be applied to Baby Doll in relation to the 1953 movie that Tennessee Williams also wrote and Elia Kazan also directed, A Streetcar Named Desire. In Streetcar, we grow to identify with and even love the characters played by Vivian Leigh and Marlon Brando. In Baby Doll we are more likely to hold the protagonists in contempt.

This does not mean that Baby Doll is badly written, directed, or acted. It is just too much. Everything is extreme and exaggerated. It's hard to take seriously and sometimes appears as grotesque comedy. Yet Williams was intimately familiar with the American South. Maybe farce was a valid way to see it in 1955.

Life of Crime (2013)

An excellent low-key thriller

[8/10 · 8 September 2014]

In Life of Crime, unlike many crime thrillers, the focus is on the characters rather than on achievement of maximum possible violence. All of the major characters have their stories and some of them seem to learn from their foolish and sometimes implausible actions. To me, it's refreshing to watch a crime movie in which things continually go wrong as the limitations of the characters are revealed. There's violence, a natural accompaniment to crime, but it's normal violence, not extreme and glamorous solutions to problems of psychotics. And people respond to it in ways that are sometimes smart and sometimes stupid. This is a genre movie that's far better than most.

Ida (2013)

A Well-made film with a Serious Limitation

[6/10 · 24 June 2014]

This is a film that's full of Middle-European angst. After decades of totalitarian Nazi, then Soviet, rule, the angst is fully justified. The film's big problem, as I see it, that Ida's role as a Soviet judge who sometimes imposed death sentences, is given no background. Was she a true believer or an ambitious cynic? Or did she go from one role or another? How did she rise to her position? More about her life and development is needed for a full understanding of what's happening.

Despite this big limitation, the acting, direction, and black-and-white cinematography are all excellent. The novice nun's returning to the convent at the end is sad but fully understandable. However, Ida's role as a Soviet judge is not.

The Little Drummer Girl (1984)

All about Acting

[8/10 · 3 May 2010]

I recently saw "The Little Drummer Girl" on DVD and liked it a lot. Diane Keaton is at the heights of her powers and Klaus Kinski is convincing as Martin Kurtz (a possible reference to Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"), a lead Israeli intelligence operative. All of the acting, direction, and cinematography are competent or better. Roger Ebert and others have downgraded the movie because of the complexity of its plot. To me, the plot is not the true focus, any more than it is in Raymond Chandler novels. What the movie is really about is the power of acting and the ways in which actors love and are consumed by their roles.

The one who loves and becomes consumed is Charlie, the Diane Keaton character. She is a star actress in a British repertory company who overwhelms colleagues and audiences by her ability to bring roles to life. She is also an enthusiastic partisan of the Palestinian cause who we see raising her voice with dramatic intensity at a public meeting. By doing this, she becomes a person of interest to an Israeli intelligence operative who recognizes her potential for his side. The Israelis kidnap her and promise to release her after they've told her what they want and what they can offer.

What they can offer is the acting opportunity of a lifetime, and one that will give her an opportunity to influence events in the real world to a far greater extent than by her flamboyant participation in demonstrations. She says that all she really wants is a just settlement and peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Kurtz agrees with her, and says that they want these things as well but that extremists on both sides are hurting the efforts of both reasonable Palestinians and reasonable Israelis. By using her talents to work for them, he says, she can help to make what she wants possible.

The role of a lifetime turns out to have a dual character at which she excels. She is able to adopt both Israeli and Palestinian causes and, after extensive training from both sides, to gain the confidence of a key Palestinian terrorist. Sex plays a significant part although we are spared shots of nude bodies in motion. There's bloody violence and the film's eventual ending can be seen as a comment on the limitations of great acting.

Cloud 9 (2008)

Something New and Wonderful

[10/10 · 24 September 2009]

The people in Cloud Nine are not motivated by middle class psychology, such factors as relationships with parents and emotional deprivations in childhood. Rather, their motivations emerge from their basic characters. To a surprising extent, their characters reflect elemental types. Inga, a sixty-seven year old woman, is a feeling type who works as a seamstress and is a member of a choir. She has been married for thirty years to Werner, a thinking type who likes railroads and timetables. Their daughter, Petra, is a sensate type. She has young children and favors practical solutions. Karl, Inga's lover, is an intuitive type who impulsively makes love to her when he tries on a pair of trousers that she has mended.

These types are not pure or absolute. As in everyday life, aspects of people's characters continually rub against themselves and against aspects of other people's characters. This rubbing is what the movie's about. Inga, a bright, shining, and moderately overweight woman, is delighted by her affair. Contrary to her daughter's advice, she tells her husband about it. He considers their marriage a happy one (we see nothing to contradict this) and finds it incomprehensible that she would want another lover. Inga and Werner separate. Inga moves in with Karl. Werner kills himself.

Cloud Nine's plot is the structure within which its characters interact. All dialog is improvised. The improvisation is by skilled actors who have a full understanding of the relationships among their characters. In terms of naturalness, this approach is highly successful. In a few instances, things that we expect to be there are left out. When Werner says to Inga that he assumes her affair is with a younger man, she does not tell him that Karl is nine years older than her. And no one states explicitly that Werner has killed himself. As would happen in real life, we assume it because of the way people act.

Many comments on this film, both by reviewers and by people I've talked to, involve its portrayal of nudity and sex among people in their sixties and seventies. The many close-up depictions are both graphic and discreet in ways that would be inconceivable in a Hollywood movie. The scenes stay with the viewer. Old and less than perfect bodies can be admired without cosmetic enhancement. Death's sting is unavoidable but can ultimately be accepted. The cloud nine on which Inga lives is not in outer space but is a beautiful part of nature.

The Ghost Ship (1943)

The Year that It Was Made Is Significant

[8/10 · 21 September 2009]

The Ghost Ship was made in 1943. That was in the middle of World War II. Hundreds of thousands of American men were aboard military ships and subject to the rule of their captains. The message of The Ghost Ship is that blind obedience to your captain can mean acceptance of murder. When your captain's crazy, you need to resist him. The ending is essentially happy. Resistance works, though there may be some dead people along the way.

Production values are tight and exceptional. The black-and-white cinematography is terrific. Acting is conventional, but not popular front. Only a mute seaman supports the new third mate who sees what's happening. The other sailors, a motley lot, play it safe and don't want to get involved.

The film, produced by Val Newton and directed by Mark Robson, is now available on DVD and is well worth seeing.

Revanche (2008)

Quiet and Powerful Brilliance

[9/10 · 6 June 2009]

For the first half hour of Revanche, I expected something quite different than how it turned out. Initially, the movie reminded me of a Fassbinder film with corrupt and unsavory characters scheming against each other. The scheming ends with a decision by Alex (Johannes Krisch), a middle-aged janitor and go-for at a Vienna brothel, to rob a bank in order to pay off the debts of his girlfriend Tamara (Irina Potapenko), a Ukrainian prostitute. The robbery goes bad in an unexpected way, with a policeman shooting at the escape vehicle and accidentally killing Tamara. Alex drives the car to the countryside and abandons it near his grandfather's old and dilapidated farm.

Alex moves in with his grandfather (Johannes Thanheiser) and spends his days cutting and chopping wood for fuel. Repeatedly, we see his powerful arms pushing logs against a large, circular power saw. His becomes obsessed with work in an effort to overcome the overwhelming anguish and guilt he feels as a result of his girlfriend's death. Alex tries to become an entirely physical person and is sullen and inarticulate in his dealings with others. Other people, however, refuse to go away. A married woman, who lives nearby, Susanne (Ursula Strauss), visits the grandfather, encourages him to play his accordion, and accompanies him to church.

Now things begin to fall into place, from the perspective of the viewer though not initially from that of the characters. To some extent, director Götz Spielman's approach is similar to that of Atom Egoyan's. Susanne's husband, Robert (Andreas Lust), is the policeman who accidentally shot and killed Tamara. He and Susanne want to have children but she is unable to get pregnant due to his limitations. He is as distraught as Alex over Tamara's death and does not understand how he could have shot through the car's rear window when he aimed at the tires.

Without wanting to be, Alex is brought into contact with both Susanne and Robert and gradually reveals his situation to them. Susanne invites him over for sex when her husband is at work, perhaps hoping that his physical vitality will enable her to conceive. There are explicit, though not pornographic, sex scenes, both between Alex and Susanne on a kitchen table and, earlier in the film and more sweetly, between Alex and Tamara in a shower. Alex also encounters Robert as he goes for his daily run and realizes that the policeman is as upset as he is about Tamara's death. Susanne gets pregnant from Alex and swears him to secrecy. Life goes on. "Revanche" assumes it meaning, in German, of second chance as well as revenge.

This summary does not do justice to the consistent excellence of the film's acting and direction. All of the roles are played in ways that are both believable and continuously revealing. Although there are superficial similarities between Revanche and noir films of the forties and fifties, their points of view are very different. In Revanche, we see and feel the devastating impact a killing has on essentially decent people.

Palermo Shooting (2008)

I liked it a lot

[9/10 · 23 January 2009]

I can't add much to hpark5's fine comments (though I'd encourage him or her to make use of paragraph breaks) so I won't attempt a full review of Palermo Shooting. I will mention, however, that when I saw the film at the Berlin and Beyond Film Festival in San Francisco, it was received enthusiastically by an audience of over a thousand people in a packed theater.

Wim Wenders was present and answered questions after the film. The things he said were exceptionally thoughtful and responsive. Although his work may be uneven because of his willingness to take risks, I thought Palermo Shooting a major success. Wender's integration of the death theme with Palermo's ancient and decaying physical environment was especially impressive.

To me, the crucial moment of the film occurs when Finn, the photographer, asks Death what he can do for him. Death says that no one has asked him this before and that the only thing that he can do is to live well for the rest of his life.

Elegy (I) (2008)

Fine Acting, Weak Direction, Not Philip Roth

[5/10 · 21 September 2008]

Maybe the difference in titles between that of Philip Roth's book, The Dying Animal, and the title of this movie says it all. The characters in the film are refined, superficially decent, and intelligent. If the professor and television critic David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) thinks of his student, Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz), as an object to be possessed, he does it in a respectful and appreciative manner. And her breasts (we see quite a bit of them) really are beautiful. But Roth's messy, animal intensity is missing. I left the theater feeling as if I'd seen a remake of Claude Lelouch's 1966 romance, A Man and a Woman.

Director Isabel Coixet's (pronounced "quo-set" in an Internet video) greatest talent may be in assembling an excellent crew of actors. In addition to Kingsley and Cruz, they include Patricia Clarkson as Carolyn, Kepesh's long-time lover who is closer to his age than Consuela, and Dennis Hopper as George O'Hearn, a friend with whom Kepesh talks about women. It's a fine ensemble and I long to see these actors face a tougher, more penetrating script. Coixet puts the pieces together but they still seem like pieces. Serious character motivations are weak or absent, as if they don't really matter. As the film stands, maybe they don't.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Woody Allen New and Fresh at 72

[8/10 · 17 August 2008]

Principled monogamists may not like this film. Not only does it show its primary characters in relationships with multiple partners but, with one exception, they are quite open with each other about it. Allen suggests both that romantic happiness is best achieved with more than one person and that it is necessarily ephemeral (I wonder what his young wife, Soon-Yi Previn, thinks). He says in a Los Angeles Times interview with Rachel Abramowitz that Vicky Cristina Barcelona is, ultimately, "a very sad film."

If so, it may be the brightest sad film ever made. All of the actors are at their best and make immediate connections with the audience. With the exception of an unnecessary voice-over narration (in which Gaudí is mispronounced with stress on the initial syllable), the self-conscious affectations that haunt some of Allen's films are absent. Fine actors are allowed to speak for themselves. According to the Abramowitz interview, Allen "never talked to the actors, other than to give them stage directions." The resulting feel is often one of brilliant improvisation.

The complex romantic relationships among its four primary characters are what the movie's mostly about and I won't spoil it by going into them. Patricia Clarkson, however, deserves mention for her role as Judy Nash, the middle-aged wife of an American couple who are friends of Vicky's parents and with whom solid Vicky and impetuous Cristina stay in Barcelona (though Cristina soon moves in with the charismatic artist, Juan Antonio). Judy is married to a dull but steady man, somewhat similar to the man that Vicky is about to wed. Vicky confides to Judy about her uncharacteristic fling with Juan Antonio. Judy advises Vicky to reap her passion while she can and arranges another meeting between the two. All of this is low-keyed and entirely believable.

As the movie's title suggests, it's about Barcelona as well as Vicky and Cristina. There are many outdoor shots of the city, especially of Gaudí's Park Güell. They amount to more than a minor travelogue because structures that are usually photographed in isolation appear with everyday crowds of people. Like Bruges in the movie In Bruges, the city is more than scenic background. Though never mentioned explicitly, Barcelona's anarchist past bubbles to the surface.

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Sometimes Flatulence and Violence Are Not Enough

[1/10 · 14 August 2008]

This movie is the worst possible Hollywood slime. It's supposed to be some kind of satire and is full of movie business in-jokes. But the punch-lines are delivered as farts or extreme violence. When I saw it, the sixteen-year-old boys in the audience were the only ones who ever laughed. In real life, machine guns and flame throwers result in extreme pain and mutilated bodies, as they did in Viet Nam. In the movie, nothing much happens.

What's most sickening about all of this is the talent and intelligence of many of the people involved. Some of the acting, especially by Tom Cruise, is quite good. That this despicable film would get good reviews (in the San Francisco Chronicle, the locally famous "little man" is jumping from his seat) not only shows the dark side of Hollywood but says something about what's wrong with America. The "retard" comments that disability support groups object to are only the tip of the iceberg. Tropic Thunder's basic totalitarian nihilism is what's most hateful.

Yaldey Hashemesh (2007)

A Simple Documentary about a Big Question

[8/10 · 11 May 2008]

The big question in Children of the Sun involves the radical departure from traditional child rearing practices taken, beginning in the 1930s, by socialist kibbutzim in the area of the Middle East that became Israel: Is it better for children to be raised communally rather than in nuclear families? The film combines home movie footage from kibbutzim with comments about it by elderly participants, some of them pictured as children in the films.

Director Ran Tal's approach is quite different from that of talking-head documentaries. In this context, it is brilliantly insightful. Rather than hearing a voice-over narrative explain socialist principles and the perceived need to create a new, socialist man, we see children playing in nurseries and, at an early age, working in orchards and fields. All activities, including showering and going to the bathroom, are performed collectively. Contact with parents, who live in small rooms apart from their children, is minimal. In the daytime, the children look vigorous and happy. At night, in their separate quarters, they cry frequently.

Comments by the former kibbutzniks, now in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, contain both nostalgia and bitterness. They look back to a more idealistic time, when they saw themselves as creators of a new society, for Jews and, ultimately, for all humanity. At the same time, there are many resentful personal memories, of demands for social conformity, loneliness, and an inability to develop close emotional relationships. Seeing the old movies brings back memories and the people being interviewed have a lot to say.

Kibbutzes are not the only institutions that have tried to implement collective child rearing practices. In the early Soviet Union, in China after the 1948 revolution, and, in its most extreme form, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, there were massive efforts to collectivize child rearing, along with other social activities. A major difference, however, is that adult kibbutzniks were there because they wanted to be, not because they were forced into collective arrangements by a totalitarian state. Due to this factor, the kibbutz experience can reveal, in a pure and non-poisoned way, what happens when children are raised in groups of other children of the same age rather than with parents.

At least one of the kibbutzim in the movie rejected collective child rearing and had children live with their parents. Several of the people interviewed in the film see the kibbutz movement as a failure, a view shared today by many Israelis, though some kibbutzim continue to exist. Whatever its failures and successes, the kibbutz experience addresses fundamental social issues and deserves continuing examination and analysis. Ran Tal and his associates have made an important contribution.

Hallam Foe (2007)

Silly, Well-Acted Stuff

[4/10 · 9 May 2008]

In its way, Mister Foe (originally, and more appropriately, titled Hallam Foe – I can't see addressing its title character as "mister"), is a tribute to good acting. Both Jamie Bell, as Hallam, a physically attractive voyeur/creep, and Sophia Myles, as Kate, his kinky partner in sex and fantasy romance, are convincing. The problem comes when you try to connect their roles to anything that happens in real life. A young man who spies on the intimate details of people's lives the way Hallam does would be deservedly beaten to a pulp. And a woman in Kate's situation would be repulsed and frightened - she would probably call the police.

These things are not, however, what happens in the movie. Poor Hallam's mother has died and his father married a woman with whom he's been having an affair. Hallam, of course, hates his stepmother and lets he know it. She has sex with him. Kate's some kind of an employment person who places Hallam in a dish washing job and plays sexual games. She looks like his birth mother. It all ends happily with Hallam "resolving" his "issues".

Forty some years ago, the play and brilliantly acted movie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, had a similarly optimistic ending, with characters becoming wiser and better after tearing each other apart. The trouble is, it doesn't always work that way, especially when nobody really cares. In Virginia Woolf, the ending's plausible because of the intensity of the emotional revelation. In Mister Foe, the emotional revelation never really happens.

Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans (2008)

A Great Documentary about a Little-Known Piece of American History

[9/10 · 9 May 2008]

The Faubourg Tremé District of New Orleans is usually called Tremé by its residents and, in newscasts describing levee failure and flooding by Hurricane Katrina, the Sixth Ward. Although adjacent to the French Quarter, is considered a dangerous place and is not frequented by tourists. A French-English dictionary (the Compact Oxford Hachette French Dictionary of 1995) defines faubourg as a "working class area (on the outskirts)", an accurate statement of the district's historical status. In Louisiana French, the final "g" in Faubourg is spoken and Tremé has two syllables – "trey-may". Tremé is the name of the man who originally owned and developed the swampy land as New Orleans expanded in the Eighteenth Century.

These details are of more than academic interest because they suggest Tremé's unique situation. It has always been a black neighborhood but its population, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, was made up primarily of free blacks, some of them slave owners. There are old houses that, though they may not be as grand as the mansions of the Garden District, are ornate enough to both display the elevated statuses of their owners and provide an architectural gift to passers-by. It was possible, in ante bellum New Orleans, for slaves to earn money and buy their freedom. According to the film, white Southerners from outside the city were sometimes shocked by the extent of social integration between blacks and "Latin" whites.

The film portrays New Orleans, after the Civil War, as a Reconstruction success (though historical websites document continual and violent conflicts between white Southerners and blacks and their white Republican allies). In 1868, the Reconstruction State Legislature passed a constitution that, according to the Louisiana State Museum Website (http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/cabildo/cab11.htm), "extended voting and other civil rights to black males, established an integrated, free public school system, and guaranteed blacks equal access to public accommodations." Among the artifacts shown in the film are integrated photographs of public school classes from 1868.

This relatively enlightened situation, which would probably have been impossible in most of the post bellum South, was not to last. Tremé residents, along with other Louisiana blacks who asserted their rights, were under continual attack Whites who opposed black equality used both legal mechanisms and terrorism to defeat it. With the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877, segregation of schools and public accommodations became the law in Louisiana and other southern states. Tremé, however, retained at least some of its character. Homer Plessy of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that established the head-in-the clouds doctrine of "separate but equal", was the plaintiff in the case and a Tremé resident. The district is considered, quite literally, to be the birthplace of jazz.

Toward the end, the film shows footage of heavily flooded Tremé after Katrina. To some extent, the images resemble the brutal pictures of Iraq that are avoided by American network television (though not in the Errol Morris movie, Standard Operating Procedure). Things look bad bad bad, worse than we like to think can happen in the USA. There is reason for hope, however, and the community, and its struggle, continues.

The excellence of Faubourg Tremé as a documentary should also be noted. Interviews, historical images, and current-day footage are carefully and effectively integrated. Viewers are privileged to have a vivid and stimulating introduction of a little-known, but important, piece of American history.

Irina Palm (2007)

It's All about Marianne Faithful – And She's Terrific

[7/10 · 23 April 2008]

When I first saw Marianne Faithful in Irena Palm, she was so much the frumpy housewife that I almost didn't recognize her. As the movie continued, however, I saw her bright eyes and intense expressions and realized that she's one of the few women who, like the far less likable Leni Riesenstahl, will be sexy in old age. She's had an odd career, going from ingénue groupie to seen-it-all chanteuse, seemingly without a middle period. In this film, she emerges as a greater actor than singer (though her Pirate Jenny from the Threepenny Opera may be the best version of the song in English). Her talent's in full bloom in Irena Palm. She appears in almost every frame and holds together a story that, on its own, is not always plausible.

Maggie, the frumpy housewife, has a beloved grandson who's dying of some disease. He can go to Australia for experimental treatment but no one in the family can afford the 6,000 pounds needed for travel expenses. Maggie, without marketable experience, roams the streets of London in search of work to raise the money, without success until she applies for a hostess job at a grubby Soho sex show. Miki (Miki Manojlovic), the show's manager, likes the look of Maggie's hands and is willing to try her out. Seems the work involves masturbating anonymous men who, having been excited by nude showgirls, feed coins to a meter and stick their cocks through holes in a wall. Maggie does a fine job, develops a following, and proves an accomplished earner.

But, of course, things get more complicated, and not only because Maggie develops "penis elbow" and must wear her arm in a sling. Her women friends wonder how she's spending her time and she refuses to tell them. When she gets the necessary money and gives it to her son, he follows her to her workplace and is outraged to discover that his mother's a whore. His wife understands better, however, and insists on accepting the money for the trip to Australia with their son. The film ends with Maggie returning to Miki's sex club and kissing her pimp/manager on the lips in what is clearly a developing romance.

Ms Faithful has displayed, throughout her career, a visceral hatred of capitalism (her version of Working Class Hero is clearer and more intense than John Lennon's). Irena Palm can be seen as a sophisticated exploration of capitalist contradictions. Maggie is both satisfied by her financial success and happy that she can do something well, but the sordidness of her occupation is not minimized. Miki's sex club is realistically crowded and dirty. When her co-worker, Luisa (Dorka Gryllus), is unable to line up the men like Maggie, she is unceremoniously fired. Beneath its somewhat silly plot, Irena Palm makes serious statements, and Marianne Faithful enables it to happen.

In Bruges (2008)

What Martin McDonagh's All About

[8/10 · 5 April 2008]

The three main characters in this film speak in torrents of obscenities, well known words for sexual intercourse and contempt and female genitalia and contempt. In real life, I think badly of people who talk this way and try to stay away from them. In the movie that Martin McDonagh wrote and directed, however, the repetitious obscenities take on an almost magical quality as they reveal layers within the characters who speak them. The effect is like that in some of Michael McClure's poems in which common words are continually repeated. The result is not to build metaphors or similes but to develop weight by simple presence.

At first, the beautiful old Belgian city of Bruges seems an entirely wrong place for the two Irish gangsters who are sent to it after one of them botches the killing of a priest by shooting and killing a child as well. Ken and Ray, both hired killers, are sent by Harry, their gangster boss. Harry has pleasant childhood memories of Burges and his subordinates speculate that he thinks it's a good place for them to cool out. Ken, an experienced assassin, likes Bruges and is ready to be a serious European tourist. Ray, young and petulant, can't say "Bruges" without a preliminary obscenity and says he hates being there.

As the men tour the city's well-preserved medieval structures, they visit the Groeninge Museum and view two paintings that capture even Ray's attention. One is Hieronymus Bosch's Last Judgment with its many images of torment. The lower portion of the middle panel of the triptych is what is shown in the film, representing Judgment Day. It is full of nude human figures, many of them pierced by swords and arrows. A large knife emerges from a plant held by an ape in the panel's lower right-hand corner. The other, more realistic, painting is of the Judgment of Cambyses by Gerard David. It is a portion of an 15th century Netherlandish diptych that depicts Sisammes, an ancient Greek judge mentioned by Herodotus, being flayed alive as punishment for allowing money to influence his judgments. Several men are cutting Sisammes's skin from his body. His teeth are clenched but he is not screaming. His torturers calmly go about their business and are viewed indifferently by a group of well-outfitted aristocrats.

The paintings are more than background to the film's action; they are physical representations of the turmoil within Ken's and Ray's souls, similar to the torments in Dante's Inferno. Ultimately, McDonagh is a Catholic moralist, though it is easy to miss this aspect of his work as it is so often overshadowed by his eccentric mixture of cleverness and repulsive violence.

Ken continues to visit old buildings and museums and Ray has adventures appropriate to his station in criminal life. He exchanges insults with a dwarf, arranges a liaison with a beautiful local woman drug dealer, and blinds a Russian in one eye with a blank bullet. Then Ken gets a call from Harry ordering him to kill Ray. It seems that Harry doesn't approve of Ray's having murdered a kid. Ken doesn't like it but he's a company man who follows his boss's orders. When he approaches Ray from the back with a drawn gun, he sees that Ray's about to shoot himself. Ken can't help himself from stopping Ray. He calls Harry. Harry cusses him out and takes a train to Burges. Thus begins a bloodbath that's probably the least interesting part of the film. Except for Ray, all of the major characters and some secondary ones end up dead, as in Hamlet on steroids.

The extreme violence of McDonagh's film has consequences, like the violence in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead and unlike the violence in The Departed. Still, the unreality of much of it and the total absence of any law enforcement response take suspension of disbelief further than many viewers may be willing to go. And the film has a stagy quality, both in the way in which characters appear at just the right moment for a bloody denouement and in McDonagh's inability to abandon the proscenium arch. Fundamentally though, I don't always like McDonagh's work but I can't deny its power.

Summer Palace (2006)

Not a Great Film but One that Says Something about China Today

[6/10 · 28 March 2008]

When I saw Summer Palace, I assumed initially that the title referred to a building near Tiananmen Square. A quick Internet search, however, showed that this is not the case. The Summer Palace (Yihe Yuan, literally The Garden of Good Health and Harmony) is an elaborate structure and garden in the hills near Beijing that was originally the emperor's summer residence. After more web searching, I discovered from a comment by Agora on the Flixster Website (http://www.flixster.com/movie/573373022) that the grounds of the Summer Palace are the location of an "intimate bonding moment" between the two university students who are the film's main characters. They are Yu Hong, a girl who has recently come from the country, and Zhou Wei, a more experienced member of the student intelligentsia.

All the same, I like the film's French title, Une Jeunesse Chinoise (A Young Chinese Girl) better. An esoteric but appropriate alternative would be La Française (The French Girl) in reference to Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 La Chinoise (The Chinese Girl). In Godard's film, a young French woman pretends to be a Chinese cultural revolutionary. In Summer Palace, a Chinese girl learns to pose as, among other things, a French intellectual.

The movie is indebted to the French New Wave in other ways as well, including use of real urban settings, choppy editing, and lots of sex. The sex is different from what we're used to. It's neither pornographic nor romantic. There are nude bodies, primarily those of the attractive Yu Hong and her sexual partners, and they perform with graphic intensity. There is, however, neither stimulation nor foreplay. The partners are undifferentiated and their positions conventional (though a shift, in later episodes, from the missionary position to sex with the woman on top may have some significance).

In other ways as well, I found it hard to relate to any of the movie's characters. Though they must all have worked very hard to be admitted to an elite Beijing university, there is no indication of their academic activities. A brief sequence of documentary footage shows the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and implies the subsequent massacre but there is nothing about planning or political intent. For the characters in the movie, political action seems no more than a momentary sensation as they go about their alienated lives.

Maybe this indifference is an inheritance of the Cultural Revolution. Mao went to great lengths to deprive his subjects of personal identities, including, at one point, an effort to replace names with numbers as a means of identification. It's also possible that there are things in the movie that I, as an American, just don't get. Still, I can think immediately of two memoirs, Jung Chang's Wild Swans and Anchee Min's Red Azalea, that portray individual Chinese characters in depth and with great effectiveness. These are things that director Ye Lou is not able to accomplish.

These comments should not be taken as excusing the Chinese government's banning Yihe Yuan from internal distribution and prohibiting Ye Lou from making films for five years. I asked the manager of the theater in which I saw the movie whether Lou had been imprisoned. "Not yet," he said. It should be kept in mind that the old men who still rule China have only been able to survive and prosper because they were once sycophants to the greatest mass murderer in human history.

The Unforeseen (2007)

A Good but Overblown Documentary

[7/10 · 25 March 2008]

For six months last year I worked in Austin, Texas. There were many things I didn't understand about the place. It has a vibrant live music scene and a semi-official slogan of "Keep Austin Weird" but I found it packed with freeways, office parks, and housing developments with no more than occasional patches of trees and grass. Many of the local people were very nice but, when you got to know them, defensive and depressed. Seeing The Unforeseen helps me to understand why.

The first part of the movie shows an initially successful community effort to stop a large upscale housing development that would destroy Barton Springs, an aquifer and natural pool. There are beautiful shots of it from the 1980s and 90s, combined with documentary footage of meetings and hearings about development permits. Unlike the villains in Michael Moore movies, developers and purchasers of the suburban homes are allowed to speak for themselves. They emerge as sympathetic people caught in a trap that makes a fetish of growth and home ownership regardless of their consequences.

Things change in Austin when George Bush becomes governor of Texas in 1995. His predecessor, Ann Richards, vetoed a pro-development measure that would have overridden environmental decisions made by the Austin City Council. Bush approves the bill with his now familiar smirk. The state legislature makes community action irrelevant and in a few years Barton Springs becomes a polluted ditch.

What's best about the film is its refusal to provide easy answers. Austin, like Dallas and Houston, has become a boom town, especially for makers of computer software. People come to Austin from all over the world and many of them make good money. They want to buy houses. Their employers want office space. It's inevitable that aggressive entrepreneurs will recognize opportunities and do everything they can to promote development. A question that the movie implicitly asks but does not directly answer is exactly what, under these circumstances, should be done.

Perhaps the answers remain unstated because they are hard for participants in a consumer society to accept. They may require a standard of living that places fewer conveniences at our fingertips, dwelling in apartment buildings rather than single-family homes, and riding municipal buses rather than cool cars. Most of all, social stability and preservation of the natural environment would need to be given higher priorities than economic opportunity and growth.

The biggest problem with The Unforeseen is its multiplicity of themes. First and foremost is the conflict between preservation of the natural environment and economic growth. Pictures of beautiful nature support this theme and are well executed. However, footage of a white-coated physician talking about blood capillaries and cancer cells results more in confusing similes than compelling metaphors. The recitation of a Wendell Berry poem about unforeseen consequences is nicely spoken but hardly relevant – what happened to Barton Springs was foreseen. A shorter, simpler film might have better made its points.

Paranoid Park (2007)

Lingering, Complex, Full of the Terror of Real Life

[9/10 · 20 March 2008]

One of the many fascinating things about Paranoid Park is its use of visual motifs rather than a strictly sequential narrative. For the most part, the sequential narrative is there (I had no difficulty following it) but there are also brief shots of past and future events. One of them occurs at the very beginning when we see Alex, the film's teen-aged protagonist, writing the title in an awkward backhand. The shot is repeated an hour later when Alex, at the suggestion of his friend Macy, writes about an initiation experience that involved hopping a freight train with an older acquaintance and accidentally killing a security guard.

The guard's death in the freight yard is far from clean and painless. There's a horrifying sequence in which the guard, still alive but with his legs severed from his body after falling under a freight train, gazes silently at Alex. When Alex runs away it's with the same helpless dread we feel when we see graphic pictures of what's happening in Iraq.

Although Paranoid Park's portrayal of American teen-aged life is very current, Alex, seated alone on a windswept beach, writes his story in longhand rather than on a laptop computer. This distinction emphasizes what may be the film's most unusual theme: the power of putting words to paper. It's on paper that he eventually burns that Alex says what he knows better than to tell a sympathetic police investigator, his parents, or his girlfriend.

Although the film's action is primarily among young men, there are also women. Alex's mother quizzes him about where he was on the morning after the freight yard incident but she's easily satisfied with his vague responses. She doesn't really want to know more. More significant are Alex's girlfriend, Jennifer, and his perceptive non-girlfriend, Macy. Jennifer is eager for sex with Alex and, after it happens in her bedroom, excitedly calls a friend to tell her how great it was. For Alex sex with Jennifer was more of a social obligation than anything else. In writer/director Gus Van Sant's only misstep, Jennifer seems more like a young woman who'd go out with popular jocks rather than with Alex the soulful slacker. When he's broken up with Jennifer and the movie ends, we hope he takes up with Macy.

I suppose Paranoid Park may become known as a skateboard movie. The title refers to an outlaw site that skateboarders have built below a Portland, Oregon freeway. Another repeated motif is a conversation between Alex and a male friend in which Alex doubts that he's skilled enough for Paranoid Park. "No one's ever ready for Paranoid Park," his friend says. Throughout the film are shots of buff young men skateboarding, sometimes dangerously. However, the images are not "perfect" as they usually are in surfing or skiing movies. Alex and other skateboarders frequently make mistakes and sometimes get hurt.

The Legend of Rita (2000)

A Masterful Peeling from the German Onion

[10/10 · 9 March 2008]

The Legend of Rita, this movie's English-language title, is not as hokey as it initially sounds. "Legend" was the term used by the East German Secret Police (the Stazi) for the cover stories created to disguise the identities of West German terrorists who had been secretly granted asylum in the East. The German title, Die Stille nach dem Schuss (literally The Stillness after Rapid Action), is a German phrase that sounds fine in its original language but is too abstract for colloquial translation of a film that is, among other things, an effective thriller.

"Schuss" in the original title refers to the bank robberies and killings shown at the beginning of the film and "Stille" to the subsequent life, east of the Berlin Wall, of Rita Vogt, a member of a terrorist cell determined to change the world by violent action. She is a fictitious character, a composite of several real people. Eleven such individuals from West Germany, did, in fact, find refuge in the East, but only on condition that they live peacefully as ordinary workers and have no contact with one another. Director Volker Schlöndorff says, in a lengthy audio commentary that accompanies silent images from the film on its Kino Video DVD, that "the episodes are authentic but the characters are somewhat fictitious." The "somewhat fictitious" Rita is assigned two identities during her years in East Germany. Initially, she works in a textile factory and develops a passionate friendship with an East German woman. Then, following her identification by another worker, she is given a new legend and becomes a child care worker for a state agency. In this identity, she falls in love with an engineer who has been assigned to work for five years in Moscow. They want to marry and have children but the Stazi doesn't want her going to Moscow out of fear of discovery by the Soviets. Rita violates her orders from the Stazi and reveals her identify to her lover. His astonishment and rejection make their separation easier.

Things change for Rita with the fall of the Berlin Wall and approaching German reunification. She finds herself, alone among her workplace associates, regretting the demise of a country that, however imperfectly, tried to make human relationships more important than economic success. Once again, she is a fugitive terrorist. Preferring tragedy to capture or a life in hiding, she steals a policeman's motorcycle, drives it through a border post, and is shot and killed by a guard.

The reason for East Germany's granting of asylum to West German terrorists is not entirely clear, either in the film or in real life. The closest the film comes to an explanation occurs when the members of the Red Army cell meet with their Stazi minder for a bratwurst barbecue at a pleasant rural villa. East Germany has signed the Helsinki Convention against harboring terrorists and has no interest in supporting what Lenin called "infantile Leftism." Cell members are given a choice of transportation to a third world country or remaining in East Germany. Individuals make different choices and kiss one another good bye. A Stazi executive at the barbecue suggests that a longing for lost revolutionary romanticism underlies the East Germany policy.

Another aspect of the film is its portrayal of everyday life in East Germany. It does this more completely than either Good Bye Lenin (2003) or The Lives of Others (2006) although these are, in many respects, excellent movies. To Western eyes, the results are surprising. Not everything is East Germany is drab and gray. The Stazi is ubiquitous but not omnipotent. Rita wears a sexy bikini when supervising children at a Baltic beach and no one thinks anything of it. People have a variety of opinions about many different subjects. According to Schlöndorff's commentary, West German viewers found the portrayal of East German life insufficiently harsh but former Easterners thought it exceptionally accurate.

I seldom give movies 10 ratings but, for The Legend of Rita, I can find nothing that should have been done differently. Both Schlöndorff and Wolfgang Kohlhaase are superb scriptwriters. Bibiana Beglau plays Rita and Martin Wuttke is Erwin Hull, Rita's sympathetic Stazi minder. All of the actors are excellent. The cinematography and editing are consistently tight and competent. From what I can see, the film has no weak links. I had not previously heard of it and got its DVD, almost by accident, from a public library. Wonderful discoveries are possible.

Manufactured Landscapes (2006)

A Stupid Documentary about How Everything Is Hopeless

[2/10 · 5 March 2008]

Beginning with its long opening shot of seemingly endless rows of assembly line workers in a Chinese factory, Manufactured Landscapes attempts to show the devastating impact of industrialization on the natural environment and traditional societies. Its droning narrative assumes that industrial development in China and elsewhere is entirely unprecedented, as if there had never been an industrial revolution in Europe and America and Karl Marx had never visited the British Museum. That there might be a connection between the present-day Asian drive for industrialization and wealth and earlier experiences of starvation and terror is never mentioned.

At the same time, there's an effort to present Edward Burtynsky's photographs of industrial waste as somehow "beautiful". Much of the film is a slide show of these images. They are well produced, of museum size, and have apparently appeared in several exhibitions. To me, however, they only demonstrate that almost any photograph can be made to appear beautiful if well presented. Industrial waste is still industrial waste. The relationship, if any, between the photographs and the film's spoken message remains unclear.

I don't mean to imply that there aren't real and sometimes desperate problems when countries rush to industrialize. Manufactured Landscapes, however, offers only strange and bitter hopelessness. It's like a two-hour lecture by Noam Chomsky. Maybe it has some value as a demonstration of what's wrong with the American (and Canadian) Left.

The Counterfeiters (2007)

But Is It True?

[8/10 · 3 March 2008]

Most Holocaust narratives involve cruel Nazis and virtuous, victimized Jews. The Counterfeiters is at least a partial exception. The Nazis in the film are certainly cruel, but their cruelty is based on the perverted ideals of their racist ideology and on their need to obey orders or be killed rather than on their being innately evil men. They are capable of decency when it's in their interest.

The Jews in the special unit of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp depicted in The Counterfeiters are assembled because of their abilities in such skills as etching, printing, and, in the case of Salomon Sorowitsch, the film's protagonist, counterfeiting. The triangles sewn into their uniforms are a mixture of green (criminal), red (socialist or communist) and, in all cases, yellow (Jewish).

Other reviewers have ably described the major theme of The Counterfeiters, the conflict between, as David Denby puts it in the March 3, 2008 New Yorker, the relative heroism of "the morally intransigent man who refuses all compromise with evil, or the trimmer who partly collaborates with an oppressor in the hope of keeping himself and others alive". It may be significant that the German title of the film, Die Fälscher, can refer to falsifiers as well as counterfeiters.

Because The Counterfeiters is repeatedly described, by its publicists and others, as a "true story", I want to focus on some of the variations between the post-war interrogation statement given by Salomon Smolianoff, the real-life master counterfeiter portrayed in the film, and the events depicted in the movie. A photocopy of Smolianoff's original interrogation statement can be found on www.lawrencemalkin.com, the website of Lawrence Malkin, the author of Kreuger's Men, an account of counterfeiting operations during World War II.

My purpose is not to expose fabrications. Rather, it is to explore variations between life and art and to determine whether, in a particular work, these variations have a pattern that supports a consistent explanation.

• The Physical Setting: In the interrogation statement, Smolianoff describes being taken to "a special barrack, which was located in absolute isolation and surrounded by heavy barb-wire." In the movie, there are several occasions on which the relatively privileged participants in the counterfeiting operation are exposed to the screams of regular inmates who are being beaten and killed. Such witnessing would not have been possible with the degree of physical separation described by Smolianoff.

• Pounds and Dollars: In Smolianoff's narrative, he is transferred to Sachsenhausen, after counterfeit British pound notes have been successfully produced, in order to work on the more difficult forgery of American dollars. In the movie, Sorowitsch is involved with counterfeiting both pounds and dollars.

• The Man in Charge: In real life, the German counterfeiting effort was called Operation Bernhard after Bernhard Krueger, the SS man who headed it. In the movie, a fictional Inspector Herzog arrests Sorowitsch in the mid thirties and, coincidentally, heads the counterfeiting project during the final months of World War II.

• Sabotage: In the interrogation statement, Smolianoff describes the decision to sabotage the counterfeiting operation as occurring when the lights go out during an American air raid:

We took this occasion to agree between us for the first time to sabotaze (sic) the whole work. We dealt our tasks and agreed that in the future every one of us should complain about the work of the other, in order to gain time, because the situation of the war, promised to us an eventually (sic) escape from everything and a liberation by the approaching Allied troops…we fought each other really hard, but they couldn't miss (sic) us, because all the work depended on what we were producing.

In the movie, the sabotage is the result of continual discussion between Sorowitsch, the partial collaborator who is concerned primarily with survival, and Adolf Burger, a printer and Communist activist who is willing to sacrifice his life, along with the lives of his fellow prisoners, in order to hamper the German war effort. This is the conflict that David Denby refers to and considers, correctly in my opinion, to be the film's central focus.

Like Smolianoff, Burger is a real person. He wrote memoirs about his experiences shortly after the war and revised and re-published them, under the title The Devil's Workshop, in the 1970s. The introduction to an interview with Stefan Ryzowitzky, the director of The Counterfeiters (www.cineaste.com/articles/the-counterfeiters.htm), states that "Burger played a small but significant part in both establishing and sabotaging the process, although in the film he is presented as the leader of the campaign to subvert the operation."

I believe that these examples show that there are consistent and coherent explanations for the ways in which Ryzowitzky adapted source material for his film: quite simply, to tell a better story and to emphasize the difference between the perspectives of Smolianoff/Sorowitsch and Burger. Throughout history, writers have adapted historical events to fit artistic purposes. Another, more extreme, cinematic example is in The Last King of Scotland where the Scottish doctor who befriends Idi Amin is entirely fictional.

These alterations are not on the level of the deceptions of Binjamin Wilkomirski in Fragments or Misha Defonsece in Misha: a Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Although these books are presented as factual, they have, beyond any reasonably doubt, been exposed as creatures of their writers' imaginations. They present both short-term problems in that they give aid and comfort to those who wish to deny or minimize the Holocaust and more fundamental difficulties in that they lead readers to question the existence of historical truths at any level.

In all of these situations, they are simple solutions. Dramatic renditions of historical events should include explicit statements of what is and is not historically accurate. Fictional narratives should be published as fiction even if such honesty reduces their status as potential best sellers. In these respects, filmmakers, publishers, and editors all share a responsibility with writers.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

A True Classic

[9/10 · 25 February 2008]

Like many great movies, There Will Be Blood continually brings to mind other works without losing any of its distinctive qualities. I thought first of Black Snake Moan, released in late 2006, because of the intensity of the acting. Where Samuel Jackson in Black Snake Moan is powerful and impressive, Daniel Day-Lewis is entirely overwhelming. His work is on a par with the best of Lawrence Olivier and Marlon Brando. In his role as an ambitious American oil man of the early twentieth century, the British theatrical acting tradition meets American method acting with breathtaking results.

Additional comparisons can be made with Erich Von Stroheim's Greed (as well as with McTeague, the Frank Norris novel on which Greed is based) and Citizen Kane. The nine-hour length of the original version of Greed may have been one reason why Paul Thomas Anderson, the screenwriter and director of There Will Be Blood, chose to use no more than the first hundred or so pages of Upton Sinclair's Oil! for his movie. The very literal interpretation that Von Stroheim applied to Norris's novel led to the movie's extreme length and was cut to a little over two hours for commercial distribution.

There Will be Blood resembles both Greed and Citizen Kane in its focus on the inescapable madness of self-made men. Ross Perot and Howard Hughes are real-life examples of men who fill the archetype. All three movie protagonists are extremely ambitious and become wealthy during the course of the films. In all cases, the results of their ambitions are disastrous. In terms of symbolic meanings, the films' final scenes are remarkably similar: the fight to the death in the desert in Greed, the decaying castle in Citizen Kane, and the murderous bowling alley rampage in There Will be Blood.

But the primary work with which There Will Be Blood requires comparison is Upton Sinclair's novel. There Will Be Blood adheres closely to the initial pages of Oil!. Some of oil man Daniel Plainview's (his name in the novel is J. Arnold Ross) ingratiating speeches to the small farmers from whom he wants to buy cheap land for oil exploration are taken directly from the novel. Throughout the book, the primary character is the oil man's son, Bunny. In the movie, he's called HW, even as an infant, and plays an important but not a leading role.

As the story develops, the book and movie take quite different paths. Oil! becomes a socialist Entwickungsroman, with the son deeply conflicted between his role as an up-and-coming oil magnate and his growing disillusionment with the governmental and corporate establishments. The father fades into the background as social and economic issues inspired by the World War I and the Russian Revolution come to the fore.

In the movie, HW is injured in a drilling accident and becomes deaf. Eventually, he learns sign language and weds Mary, the daughter of a preacher from whom Plainview has purchased land. The father disowns his son when HW wants to go to Mexico and look for oil on his own. There's also a continuing rivalry between Plainview and Eli, Mary's evangelist brother. The men have similar charismatic talents though Plainview has no use for religion except when he can use it to manipulate others. The struggle ends when the old and alcoholic Plainview, living alone in his mansion, forces Eli to renounce his God and bludgeons him to death with pins from his bowling alley.

Despite the murkiness of the film's last half hour and the incongruity of its final violence, it is a cinema masterpiece. Far more than Sinclair's educational and somewhat stilted narratives on history and economics, There Will Be Blood tells viscerally just what it is that unfettered capitalism does to people. But it's psychodrama rather than agitprop. Its spirit is more Norris than Sinclair.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)

A hard and honest film about an illegal abortion

[9/10 · 4 February 2008]

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is about both abortion and everyday Romanian totalitarianism in the 1980s. For Americans, it can serve as a warning of what's likely to happen if abortion is again criminalized in the United States. Despite the unfamiliar language and absence of outdoor advertising, Romania and Romanians are not as different from us as one might think.

The film is neither "pro choice" nor "pro life" but rather an unflinching look at what happens when a pregnant young student who is in no way ready to be a mother has an illegal abortion. At the time the film takes place, abortion was outlawed in Romania, not due to religious or moral objections but because the Ceausescu regime wanted to boost the country's population (birth control was unavailable as well). There is no discussion of moral issues and "choice" is never a consideration. Gabita, the pregnant girl, is distraught and overwhelmed by her situation. She is fortunate to be helped by her more practical roommate, Otilia.

Much of the film involves the logistics of the abortion. Initially, Gabita tells the brusque male doctor that she's two months pregnant. It turns out that the time since conception is actually the four plus months of the movie's title. The women have difficulties finding a hotel room where the procedure can take place. There's a continual need to show papers and answer questions.

The doctor wants more money than the women have. They tell him they will get the money but, quite realistically, he doesn't believe them. Both women agree to have sex with him instead. He inserts a device and tells Gabita not to move her legs until the fetus ejects itself. While Otilia anxiously attends a family gathering with her boyfriend, the abortion is successful. The camera focuses on the clearly human fetus for several of the longest seconds in the history of film. Following the doctor's instructions, Otilia wraps it in plastic bags and throws it down the garbage shaft of a tall building.

Part of the film's effectiveness is the result of cinematic techniques. Most of its shots are mid-range rather than close-up and show people in the context of their social and physical environments. At first, the effect is one of Brechtian detachment. Then we put the pieces together and realize the emotional implications. The result is not a call to action, however, (abortion is again legal in Romania and the country has, in fact, one of the world's highest abortion rates) but a hard-edged remembrance of times past.

Offside (2006)

What are we to make of this other country?

[21 April 2007]

After seeing Offside, I searched the Internet for a definition for of the term in soccer. Some entries were vague, referring to such things as "an invisible line past which it is forbidden to go." There was one definition that was more specific, however, in a Salon.com article by Andrew O'Hehir on soccer and the World Cup. O'Hehir defines the "Offside Rule" as a rule in soccer that "prohibits an offensive player from running past the last defensive player until the moment the ball is passed forward." The reason for the rule is to prevent an offensive team from breaking though the defense en mas and bringing the ball to the goal without interference. However, defensive and offensive players are usually in close proximity and the exact moment that a ball is passed, relative to the positions of players, can be hard for a referee to determine.

This is pretty sophisticated stuff, and points to the remarkable ability of Jafar Panahi, Offside's director, to use casual scenes with non-professional actors to establish large metaphors. He does this beautifully. In Offside, the metaphor is one that relates several young women who separately disguise themselves as boys to get into a male-only championship Iranian soccer game to the situation of a player caught offside.

Like an offensive player who advances too aggressively, these women violate traditional assumptions about their position in society. At the same time, they continue to be participants in the national drama. One of them paints her face with the colors or the Iranian flag. None of them is entirely convincing as a man. They flirt, like real women, with the male guards who capture them. Their shared enthusiasm for Iran's team and for their country appears quite genuine (although such sentiments are always in doubt in works of artists in regimes that censor them).

As they are recognized as female and taken into custody, they girls are kept (by guards who are primarily concerned with staying out of trouble so as not to increase the length of their military service requirements) in improvised pens, put together outside the stadium and from which they can hear the roar of the crowd but not see the action. At one point, a guard who can see the progress of the game reports it to them. The guards are more rural and far less sophisticated than the smart, mouthy, urban women. All the same, the two connect. And they connect with us as well. Finding equivalent American roles is not that difficult.

Things end happily as Iran's team is victorious. The girls are herded into a spiffy government van to be taken to the Vice Squad. They expect that they will be reprimanded and released to their parents but they cannot be entirely certain. Not explicitly stated but hovering in the background are rape, torture, and lengthy imprisonment as real possibilities (has happened, know someone it happened to). Then the van driver and the soldiers on the van are pulled into the victory celebration. They abandon the vehicle and the girls take off. End of story.

For Americans, the best thing about Offside may be the way that it brings us into the everyday life of a strange and foreign place. And we discover that the place is not what we expected. People are strange and unpredictable – like us.