Montreal Serai

 

The Soloist. Written by Steve Lopez and Susannah Grant. Directed by Joe Wright. Starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.

The Soloist could have been easily called The Duo since it is the true story of  how Los Angeles Times reporter Steve Lopez met and tried to “rescue” Nathaniel Ayers, a brilliant Julliard School of Music  drop-out and schizophrenic who also happens to be homeless. They develop a symbiotic relationship  which proves to be  problematic in the long run. The Soloist could also have been named The Multitudes because it is the story of 90,000 homeless persons  in the Greater Los Angeles area as incarnated by one lone man.

The story line is archetypical. A burnt-out  journalist meets a homeless man when he hears him play classical music with a two-string violin in front  of Beethoven’s statue.  The journalist is impressed and spins off a column. The column attracts media attention, more columns, a book and political largesse and interest by the public, including the gift of a cello by a retired  arthritic  music master. It also wins the journalist an award and there is  financial success for both of them at the end of the journey. But all’s not well that ends well because Ayers refuses to take medication and remains schizophrenic as well as homeless since he is loath to live in the confines of LAMP, the community home where he is allowed to play the cello.

The story is also a cautionary tale. The roots of homelessness, mental illness, poverty and alienation might be dark and deep but they are certainly intertwined. Treating homelessness as a mere blemish on the face of a city is like treating skin cancer as a cosmetic problem that can be erased  with a salve. By the way, the aerial shots of the City of Angels crisscrossed by endless freeways is worthy of a Beethoven symphony.

 There is nothing much to be said about the acting, because the actors  do not act at all. They just are.  Downey’s personal experience with drug abuse (one of the leading causes of homelessness) and Foxx’s musical training inform their work. They embody the characters they play so thoroughly that the audience forgets that  they are actors, and not protagonists in this drama. The same could be said for the 500 or so extras that the director hired from the underbelly of  Los Angeles. Being homeless and getting paid to depict their plight  lends authenticity to the film.

 The Soloist is a film to be experienced solo, in duo or in multitudes.

Fennario’s War (41 minutes) is a simple film. The Montreal playwright, David Fennario, reads a text in his Verdun apartment about World War One. He has based his drama on an interview he did with a Great War vet in the 1970s, and Fennario reads the three voices in his script: Gerry Nines, young reporter; Harry “Rosie”  Rollins, WWI infantryman; and his best friend, Rummie Robidoux.

On Feb 21, 2009, when Fennario’s War premiered in Montreal at Concordia University’s J.A. De Sève Cinema, the distinguished Quebec cinematographer, Martin Duckworth, spoke at the end of the showing. “I was with David this afternoon,” Duckworth said, ” and he spoke about Wordsworth, Nelligan, and Walt Whitman.” Then Duckworth added: “David is a poet.”

And indeed what David Fennario has been writing recently is deeply poetic, with the meditative character of Whitman’s long poems.

In Fennario’s War the viewer sees a writer at a desk - the face is intense, the eyes both sad and humourous, the fingers of this man reading are long and sensitive as they move in the air, probing and gesturing. The story that emerges speaks of horrible wartime experience seen in a way both real and hallucinatory. This voice evokes memory, its failures and its importance - and dismemberment. We see, in the words, parts of bodies moving through the air, landing wrongly, hopelessly broken: two left feet, a severed arm, features blown to bits. This tearing of the world is not the world as it should be, seen “whole” as Fennario thinks it must be, quoting a famous phrase of Hegel. And like Whitman, Fennario joins the parts together, brings the dead back to life, restores the past to the present, speaks sternly to his time and kindly to the future. Fennario succeeds in evoking what Whitman speaks of in a poem that Fennario likes to quote:

Is to-day nothing? Is the beginningless past nothing?

If the future is nothing they are just as surely nothing.

–”To Think of Time”

Fennario in this small, simple film makes the past something so that the future can be something and not nothing. For if we are to have a future, we must make something of the past, we must understand it. In Fennario’s War, Rosie Rollins says of the Battle of Vimy Ridge: “Birth of a Nation they call it. I didn’t see nothing being born.” That is the truth, speaking through the playwright.

Yes, David Fennario is something… a poet of the real.

DVDs of “Fennario’s War” are available for purchase through the site.

The Trailer:

The Pimento Report:

Persepolis, 2007. Animated drama.

Persepolis is an Oscar-nominated film that premiered last year and which I regret not having seen on the big screen. Based on a graphic autobiographical novel by Marjane Satrapi, the author and her studio mate Vincent Paronnaud  created a highly original film of unusual expressivity,  pathos and humour. The voice-overs by Chiara Mastroianni as Marjane, her mother Catherine Deneuve as Marjane’s mother and Danielle Darrieux as Marjane’s grandmother, further enrich the esthetic experience. Filmed entirely in black and white, with the exception of a few flashes of colour  thrown in for contrast, Persepolis is the  Bildungsroman of  a young girl growing up  in Iran during the war between Iran and Iraq. It is also the story of how and why she became a rebel. The young Marjane rebelled against her unimaginative teachers, against the morality police,  against the hypocrisy of Teheran middle-class society, against the execution of  her beloved uncle after a long exile in the Soviet Union,  against the violence she witnessed in the streets, against the bombs that lit up the cityscape,  against a humourless society.  And she did all this under the umbrella of a pampering father, a strict but sensible mother and the instigation of a feisty  and irreverent grandmother with a strong sense of right and wrong.

When her rebelliousness threatened to get her into serious trouble,  Marjane  was sent to high school in Vienna, where she fell in with a group of nihilists and punks who were attracted to her because of her close contact with war and death. Her wake-up call came when she discovered Markus, the “love of her life”,  in bed with another girl. That and near death by hypothermia in the streets after a drug overdose pushed her to phone her parents and ask for a ticket back home.  Her loving family received her with open arms, no questions asked.  There she married so that she could enjoy the “liberty”  of a married woman,  such as sex and greater social mobility. But that, too, proved to be a disaster, so she divorced her husband and then exiled herself to France, where she currently lives and exercises her artistic talents in full liberty.

What this film is all about is freedom of choice and expression, as a woman and as an artist. Marjane does a wonderful job of expressing herself in Persepolis. She does so with a dollop of self-criticism but without a hint of bitterness. Don’t feel bitter if you missed out on the big screen version of the movie, but you’ll regret it if you don’t rush out to rent the DVD.

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Maya Khankhoje is a Montreal-based short story writer, poet, essayist and reviewer. Her English translation of Paulina y la Golondrina Azul, (Paulina Wonders) by Carmen Cordero, was published last November in Madrid, Spain.

Once, Bob Dylan and John Lennon were looked at with the same adoring, hopeful gaze now bestowed upon Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs. Even ten years ago, there was a reverence for artistry that granted the rock star, novelist or filmmaker prominence in the public sphere now granted the venture capitalist or CEO. Cynicism has gotten the better of us-no decimal, no point. The place for the artistic statement has been sadly replaced by brass and taxes. This gloomy truth permeates almost every frame of the films of 2008. Social messages abound, there was no lack of flag waving and chest beating. Yet, it came at no cost: to call George Bush a would-be well-meaning buffoon (W.) is to fall in line with the slew of late night talk show hosts who made the joke eight years ago, for free.

Blockbuster smash The Dark Knight is the epitome of such a stance. Never before has the analogy of good/evil democracy/terrorism been pushed further. Superman Returns reeked of Mel Gibson religiosity though its cartoon-ish presentation pacified its detractors by passing it off as light fodder. But this installment of Batman does its utmost to situate Gotham in our world, our neighbourhood; unlike Nicholson’s mannered portrayal now two decades ago, we see the imperfections in Heath Ledger’s makeup, in his greasy, matted hair-he is a method actor’s villain, rife with empty back-stories. The Joker, now almost overshadowing the film itself, has come to stand for the ultimate evil, one that exists for its own sake; Michael Caine as Alfred informs Christian Bale’s Batman that ‘Some men just want to watch the world burn’. Though this point is laden with superhero dramatic potential, it claims to possess something larger, some overarching commentary on the world’s woes; this is where The Dark Knight falters.

Performances aside, the Joker is on par with all other mentally ill people with violent tendencies, albeit brighter than most. He is devoid of a moral compass like a dictator may be but his mania makes his acts and motives incomprehensible, not terrifying. People like the Joker prowl the streets at night-they don’t run for office. A character like the Joker simply changes the subject, though it claims to stand in for so much else like only a super villain can. He is not Bush, nor Cheney, not even Rumsfeld. Their evil is mannered, calculated, analyzed by a thousand monkeys, that is far more petrifying. The Dark Knight assumes legitimacy by extensive metaphor and in the process nullifies its strengths as an awesome superhero film.

This intrinsic need to break through genre conventions can be seen in countless films of 2008; indeed, one could say that this year popularized the meta-genre more than ever before. The meta-genre uses all of the tried and true formal tropes of a genre while commenting on them; stealing a kid’s lunch money but sharing your sandwich with him is still thievery of the highest order. Now, instead of a straightforward superhero movie, we get The Dark Knight and Hancock.

Hancock is like anyone else: depressed, lonely, an alcoholic… but he is also from another planet with super cool super powers. Gone are the days of the graceful Christopher Reeves or even the mysterious Michael Keaton, today Will Smith is our stand-in, all loud burps and goofy grins. Hancock is hated by the public, so, OF COURSE, he needs a good PR man. This is Reality TV on an inter-galactic level, budget included. Media moguls and conglomerates worship at the altar of Reality TV because it is so cost efficient; such is not the case with Hancock’s 150 million dollar budget, or Tropic Thunder’s budget of 92 million.

Tropic Thunder is the meta-genre incarnate, a parody of parodies (watch out for Not Another Not Another Movie out next year, it’ll be right before the Rapture). It satirizes the movie business but does so at no cost, everyone and their agents get out unscathed. Ben Stiller comments on the ruthless, capitalistic side of Hollywood but concludes by celebrating it. An allegedly unrecognizable Tom Cruise closes the film looking at the viewer while dancing to Gangster Rap-if there is a message here, it certainly is hard to find. This is certainly a far cry from a film of similar themes, Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network; that film ends with an on-air assassination of a news anchor/delusional prophet, a murder approved by the powers that be to combat sagging ratings. Despite its harsh tone, it somehow rings truer than a Scientologist in a fat suit.

Yet, like Charlie Kaufman’s meta-genre cubed directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, beneath Tropic Thunder’s explosions there is an implicit statement: we’re in on the joke with you, and they almost are. But to chastise your bread and butter morally while benefiting from it financially is not social realism, or political commentary. It’s capitalism. The narrowing divide between art and life, the meta-genre, being in on the joke, call it what you will, is a trope exploited in nearly all commercial movies today.

To recap at warped speed (in no particular order): in Quantum of Solace, Bond is no longer the strong and silent type but has become a brooding Macbeth, confused about the value of a human life and his nonchalance in their taking. M. Night Shamalan’s new outing The Happening manages to forgo a villain entirely, no small feat in a thriller, but does so at the expense of any narrative coherence. Sex and the City had the potential to build upon the gender struggles it explored on the show but instead chose to have a two-hour shopping spree at Tiffany’s. Bill Maher’s Religulous forgoes any cultural criticism (in a film critiquing culture) and instead meanders across the world with an American shrug. Michael Haneke’s remake of his German film Funny Games explores the fear of the Other in the form of two Aryan suburban kids.  And Burn After Reading explores a world it has no interest in; the political sphere is of no interest to the Coen Brothers who are far happier wielding hatchets and pushing people through wood chippers. All of these films employ a tone that invites the viewer to partake, to rejoice in conjoined judgment but does so at the expense of their own narratives: for example, Haneke is so busy playing with the fourth wall that he forgets about the other three. Which brings us to Judd Apatow and his cronies.

In Apatow land, every day is Saturday on the Happy Days set, The Fonz is dead, and Richie is an obese fool who beats bright, beautiful women off of him like he’s paid by the hour. Film is supposed to have a heightened sense of drama where television is allowed to embrace the quotidian but Apatow and Seth Rogen have taken it upon themselves to rewrite the rules of 20th century media (and Aristotle’s Poetics) and turn feature filmmaking into a boys club, two-hour episode of Three’s Company. Apatow is responsible for three abominations this year: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express, and Zack And Miri Make A Porno. In all of these films fat, hapless losers woo women they would not be allowed to stalk in real life. Now, although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this trend, it is nonetheless a witless ploy to attract these would-be, couch potato lotharios. What ever happened to the Fonz? At this point, I’d settle for Richie…

The Film Noir genre has not aged well over the decades, L.A. Confidential being a prime example of the repetition as opposed to the revolution. But In Bruges is a 21st century, post-modern Film Noir: multi-cultural, ironic, and sadistic. It does not try to include everything like The Dark Knight or Tropic Thunder yet, somehow in the process, manages to leave nothing out-by refusing to take a moral stance, it grants the audience the possibility of creating their own.

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Jesse Klein is a filmmaker and freelance writer. He is currently in development for his feature-length debut Shadowboxing. He lives and works in Montreal.