Friday Night by Claire Denis 2002
I have seen two more movies of the director after the last entry; one was Beau Travail and the other was the entry's title.
Friday Night was rather dull even if the movie's subject was to deal with frustration itself: a subway strike in Paris. The theme and the way the movie's conveying the concept and the logic were corresponding to it. It still was slow and I often got frustrated during the watch. & nbsp;
The movie was about this sophisticated and independent woman, Laura's, seemingly the last night of her living alone in the urban set. She was moving into with her boyfriend and finishing up her final cleaning and sorting what was to be thrown out and what was not. She went out into the night in the city on a strike where a trasportation system was paralysed. Caused by the unusual situation, the traffic was extremely jammed and it was encouraged to offer among each other to share a car. A guy came to the protagonist's car looking for a ride so she offered him to share her car. And she ended up offering another ride later at the night; she stayed with the guy who remained unkown to her in a hotel room and had an intimate time together.
The point of the narrative is to tell how unusual it is for a woman to have a real good sex with no string attached nor any unecessary entanglement followed. The very final scene, where Laura's joyfully trotting as if to express how mush she benefitted the last night's sexual encounter and still intact physically, emotionally and morally in the morning light, seems to serve the subject matter.
Beau Travail was loosely based on Herman Melville's Billy Budd but moved the set to the deserted landscape in Dibourti. Sergent Galoup in French Legion finds his calm life begin to be disturbed when a new recruit Sentain joins his troop.
This intricate tale of a power struggle among an exclusively male environment and what a twist homoeroticism does to one's mind and the community.
geese...
Trouble Everyday by Clare Denis 2001
Wild. Unbearble sickness of being. Funnily sad and astonishingly beautiful even in the sucsession of sickening and brutal images. I have got to say how masterfully she captures every moment that flows from a motion to motion with the great empathy and the clear insight even in this movie on cannibalism derived from libido disorder. Vincent Gallo, your all time favorite American actor, transformed himself into the ultimate pervert, or did he just incorporate his potential finally.
Talk about the empathy, in a scene where he jerks off frantically after he tore himself away from his newly wed wife remained lost and alone, something came over to me and I got teary. Needless to say, it happened to me and the scene reminded me of the ultimate sadness that I was in the marriage with a perv; how helpless it feels to be with someone who cannot connect himself/herself sexually. I saw myself in Gallo and his wife in the scene, except this wife remained just dumbfounded.
diversity in the workplace...
What I found hilarious in the site was 'airline tickets'. I wonder if this site's theme is designed to meet desi consumers' sexual preferences or to help them to gratify themselves with the minimum guilt trip by the tailored services from the ethnic and religeous cuircuit. It is often believed among pious folks regardless their denominations that they would commint less sin when they use a service from a member of their own community regarding religeon and/or ethnicity.
Has anyone seen the fast runner?
I wonder if anybody saw the movie 'The Fast Runner'. I just saw it tonight and I am still incredibly mesmorized. As a matter of fact, I'm just looking for anyone who can share his/her impression of the movie.
I remember my then-boyfriend saw it when it was released in NY, and he did not seem to like it much. I absolutely was shocked and moved by the vast landscape that looked almost infinite and its description of people's very fundamental struggle of survival on top of what is unuversal about human life. The generousity of the movie to show the tribal uniqueness, Innuit in North America area (although the movie does not specifies it in the set), and ultimately how the story embodies archetype of human were some spectacular that a viewer like myself from the homogenized Western civilization just appreciates for a great deal.
Among all the practices of thier nomadic and isolated life style in the wilderness of the ice cold landscape, I found the description of the mysterious manner of thier shamanism worship and how they perform immensely precious in terms of its' offering the recovered memory that had been deeply beried in the collective psyche of human beings. Where could I have possibly found the ritual if not here?
the namesake and time
It was such an odd hour to wake up and I had woken up twice before. Yesterday I went to see movies without sleeping at all, so the sleeping disorder that I am suffering for right now is merely a consequence of not getting to dicipline. However, I woke up finally before six and I realized that I had to call off all things that I had planned to do.
I reluctantly got out to grab a cup of coffee before nine and I learned all stores that I would fulfill my daily needs were closed due to the Easter holiday. Geese. I turned around and headed to Dunking Donuts. You know how disappointed I was by then; America ruins by Dunkin as their catch copy goes.
The movies that I saw yesterday were the Namesake by Mira Nair and Time by Kim Gidok. Two of them were fine, but the Namesake made me somehow fall into a kind of homesick state which I had least anticipated. I found this quite novel given I had currently no place to 'go back'.
When I was in the bathroom of the theater during an interval of those two movies, I caught two middle aged women casually chatting over the namesake that had just been played; I did not quite follow it in detail but heard one of those say 'did not do justice' so I wonder where she directed the complaint to. It is highly possible that it is directed to a movie when it is based on a pre-produced material such as a novel, just as this movie was. But other comments, this time affirmative, followed.
"Wasn't it very different? I found it very moving."
"Yeah, it seems the movie was focused on the mother."
I could have cut in, after confessing that I had eavesdropped their conversation, and joined their quiet but certain rating of their own with conviction, just as I usually would do. But I did not this time. I was content to discover what they were talking about and why I was feeling homesick because of watching the movie set in India. I saw these people derooted but somehow remained together because of the presence of the mother figure there. And somewhere in myself was missing my own mother as the root of all, evil or good or both, that I have got.
I suspect the woman had been complaining about the press coverage and its underrating this film, or lacking the info of how differently and wonderfully this movie version would unfold.
I remember the novel the namesake was more about the protagonist's struggle to find his male identity as a minority, especially a descent of the traditional colony, in the racist society such as US and a succession of his failures in finding the right kind of mate for his own good. Of course it looked different in the movie rendition.
Lila dit ca (sans accents) and Kebab Connection: minority male's sexual politics
The titles above are movies that I saw recently. The former Lila dit ca (sans accents as said in the title) is French one. I am not sure if it was officially distributed in English speaking countries or will it be soon. There are a couple of points that I found noteworthy in it.
The movie is set in Marseille, the southern sea town in France where Chimo, a struggling Muslim French boy, lives with his mom whose husband has abondoned them for running away with a white French woman. Chimo's life changes when a new girl in town, Lila, a Polish girl, forcefully moves into his otherwise prosaic life and stirs it around by her provocative acts and almost violent flirting.
The funny thing that I found as soon as the movie unfolded was Lila's thick and black eye brows while she proudly and triumpahntly convinced Chimo how people had adored her for her being blonde and blue eyes. To me, this just struck me as a huge joke; this girl might look better in her natural color scheme, supposedly brown hair, so that her obviously latin, probably Italian, facial feature and eye brows fall into place.
Chimo is a typical minority teenage boy in every city in Euro where a ton of immigrants flock together and their second generation come of age; the instructor from school recognizes his talent as a writer and encourages him to go to Paris to attend a creative writing program in University with scholarship. The offer rather confuses him than gets him keep his hope up for future. He finds it easier to drift away in routine life of a series of trifle crimes and trouble with his fellow Muslim local kids. To be short, he is afraid of a change in his life, and tries to talking himself into sinking into the misery of being minority and abondoned than rising above all of them. Still, he starts writing a story that was inspired by Lila at the same time.
The rest of the story is about how she is tantalizing every boy in town by her being 'exotic minority' in the Arabic dominant neighbourhood; she is unusually white, Catholic and seemingly sexually liberated, which translates that she is sexually available and that makes her even more attractive and desireable in their sexually repressed collective psyche. Lila is living with her notorious aunt for fanatic behavior rooted in her Catholic faith and Virgin worship. This seems to involve some sexual abuse for Lila especially because of her fixation on Lila's vagina. This part is unfortunately inadequate in its description. She takes advantage of her being an official guardien of Lila and coerces her to cooperate to gratify her sexual needs, which is justified as religeous one, unless Lila does not mind being sent back to an orphanage. This intimates where Lila's handle of her own sexuality was coming from; she holds onto it as the wild card for her survial. She became&nbs p;immune to be treated as nothing but vagina, a virgin's or a slut's, does not matter, she knew she would be valued just for IT. In the same manner, Lila confuses Chimo by her compulisve lying habit mostly on her imaginary sexual acts committed with other men.
The trouble occurs due to her showy and extraordinary lie about sex that was Catholic driven. This is enogh to drive her pervert aunt cr azy partly for her jealousy.
Meanwhile, Chimo's buddy, the petty gang leader, who was also after Lila with no luck finds her worth punishing for her not paying any attention back to him.
It is a night in a brothel when he and Chimo finally confronts each other because of the competition over Lila. Chimo refuses to take part in getting a service from a prostitute when everone else was happily taken care of by her. This fuels a little bickering among all. The prostitute suspects Chimo to be homosexual and The Leader gets upsets for Chimo's refual for his hospitality, and he thinks the way Chimo is heppy without getting off might be attributed to his involvement with Lila. He feels that Chimo outsmarted or outsexed him while he is resorting to the commercial sex service. He feels as if he was insulted and he turns it to the prostitute. His verbal abuse, which is mostly focused on racial slur, starts, and ironically that is when what the cast was meant there becomes clear; his slander goes on even when they are back in the car on the way home. He goes on 'that spring role whore etc.' which indicates the prostite's ethnicity that was not obvious in visual infos when the scene offered was Asian;
she was thin and had her hair done in the Princess Lear style in Star Wars. She could pass as white, or something barely white and something else a bit for the rest. It seems that we should naturally assume that she was an Asian hooker, but the way it was coveyed was heavily depended on the public image and cultural vocabulary on Asian women as the group that contributed the influx in the sex industry all over the world rather than represented so only by visual element. In other words, this was only possible when the audience exercises a lot of imagination and his/her streotyped image on Asian women.
The Leader guy feels humiliated that he was content by the prostitute's hand (or her vagina) as opposed to any help from the blond and blue eyes' just as Chimo seems to. This is what the whole bickering was all about.
In a way, the whole movie accentuates how Lila is special and how meaningful it is to be infatuated by her along with the achievement of interracial relationship.
Wait up. There is nothing challenging about minority male's longing for sexual liaison with the majority female given that is the long recognized goal, physically and psycologically, overt or covert, minority's accomplishment, to compensate the undermined mentality caused by colonialism. Therefore, I feel perplexed to see this sort of minority mentality parading and justifying his desire to be unified with a white girl especially for her unexpected innocence and virginity even though it was presented twisted. Isn't is just same as his saying "yeah I just wanted to colonize her back in the manner they did us so that I can write the story backward as in Arabic ?"
There seems to be a novel this movie was based upon. The same title, the author Chimo. You decide how much autobiographical or not as the rule in the publishing industry goes recently. I do not feel like picking this up and bother to read.
Another movie that reminded me of the same theme was Kebab Connection. This is set in Hamberg, Germany. A turkish decsent kung fu film maker wannabe enpregnated his German girl friend. This slapstick with a twist of multiethnic society representati on is basically sustained by the plot of Kung Fu stereotype as if that is at least a free zone of political charge. In other words, I just wonder why people never question Asia as another area people live instead of the area that is the remotest, so they can get away with murder. This movie was about another minority male who wanted to mate with a majority girl at the cost of his prejudice and/or ignorance against Asia. So you watch and decide.