Mirella Bontempo is a Montreal Film reviewer and a regular at Serai...

This past year, morbidly depressing films came to the screen as a sign of the times of introspection. From pondering the biggest taboo: how or if a pedophile can be rehabilitated into society in The Woodsman to Pedro Almodovar's new film noir with drag queens in Mala Educacìon which also questions the duplicitous nature in human beings or institutions like the Spanish Catholic Church in sexual abuse (old territory since he questioned the Opus Dei sect's cushy relations with Franco's Fascism in Matador ). To the right to die in the true story of a Galician quadriplegic in The Sea Inside where the useless illiterate senile abuelo and the brilliant right-to-die lawyer who suffers from a degenerative illness become just as heroic by simply living.

The following review films with sexual politics in 9 Songs and quotidian moral choices governing bodies or individuals make or don't make. In bridging all the themes of these films, the choices humans are faced with, whether to take life or shelter it. Or live it.

Not a Love Story : Lisa does London
Micheal Winterbottom 9 Songs

When not filming political stuff on refugees ( In This World , Welcome to Sarajevo ), Michael Winterbottom explores relationships ( Jude , Wonderland where Gina McKee meets cads, sci-fi flop Code 46 ) and pop culture ( 24 Hour Party People ).

In the explicitly raw ‘erotic' 9 Songs , inspired from Michel Houellebecq's Platform , he doesn't follow some romantic formula, she ain't a skank and he ain't a cad.

The story is tagged a modern love story with such banal realism in the depiction of sex, in the age where a Pet Shop Boys' line “I love you because you pay my rent” details current mercantile relations. Matt (Kieran O'Brien) is some kind of a scientist or geologist dating sheets of ice in Antarctica . As an overland explorer he beds a 21-year-old empty-headed waif Lisa (model and first time actor Margot Stilley) from America . You know the types, young North American living abroad in London or Paris for a year for seminal cultural exchange hi-jinx. She's reminiscent of the Jean Seberg character, Belmondo's sidekick, in Godard's À bout de souffle . Like the characters in first-season of Friends , we don't know what kind of student job she has in spite of the high cost of leisurely living in London . She speaks to co-worker Natasha on the phone with Valley Girl intonations and a high-pitch register. She subsists on snorted coke, prescription pills and tea alone. Basically, living out the Sex, Drugs and Rock n'Roll cliché. Here is a verbal gem, the wide-eyed pedant utters, “Unhappy people aren't good dancers.” Her fantasy about a beach in Thailand she concocts, has her describing an imaginary nearby woman's breasts are “Aaa-mazing” in a drawn-out blasé way. It's worse when she reads Erotica.

Lisa is offensive to women everywhere. Clearly, Matt isn't fulfilled by the intellectual banter. He who has such a high-octane, ‘nerdy' job of some significance must be fulfilled someway. What does he see in her? Her youthful beauty and vibrancy. After all, we are seeing the story through an unbiased subjective lens or are we?

The allusion between the mysteries of the glacial continent and explorations of the human body must mean something. The metaphors for barren desolation and emptiness or frigid intimacy I don't know. In the Japanese film by Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes (1964), the landscape is also introspected. The dunes convey the curves of a woman and the prying photographer's eye is of an entomologist who meets an illiterate woman.

He canvases Lisa's body as does she his. But I come away from the film with the oft-cited and dated Male Gaze theory from Laura Mulvey. Yes, it seems Matt is judging the boney waif he's bonking, though we are not subjected to his P.O.V. shots; we are, through his narration. We can't blame the filmmaker's eye. He did not write the script since the actors improvised the dialogue. Rehearsals were also edited into the finished product. We identify with Matt, visually, whether it is his disdain or desire; transference is not quite automatic. From protracted shots of her pleasure-afflicted face, sloppy sound FX, the usual positions: she's slaphappy and enacts the costume-donning spike heeled dominatrix fantasy, he just lays there like that bad joke. She also gets hers: tied up like the Perils of Pauline, silent-era Pearl White on railways…Yes, he gets to be fetishicized too: views of his long schlong. I suppose if I wanted a Female Gaze I ought to have seen an Yvonne Rainer film. It seemed there was a Hard-Core sub-theme at last year's New Cinema Film Festival including Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell , Annie Sparkle's World of the Orgasm and documentaries on The History of Sex and Sylvie Kristel of Emanuelle fame.

When does art become pornographic? I don't know. When it takes up the porn world's non-use of prosthesis (now a criterion changed due to Aids-scare)? Art films always believe in al fresco depictions of sex. Which stole the conventions first? There is a bare thread of storyline in 9 Songs - alienation from hooking up even in a monogamous relationship that looks like a series of hook-ups. Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses had even less narrative petering around the same coital thin line between pornography and scopophilia - the film is considered art. The pro-filmic staging is frontal and theatrical where the aggressive woman is possessed by the pleasure principle. If only the method exploited in every scene in In the Realm of the Senses , autoerotic fixation, would be worked in this storyline since I wanted my tiny hands all around l'il Lisa's neck. Her moans and groans were surpassed by audience members' own lamentation-- though some must have repressed theirs for fear of being likened to prudes. Am I supposed to feel this misogyny and hatred for the character? Some blamed the actress. The only other time I felt this way at a female make-belief female was the Liv Tyler character, who also had lip biting pouts, in Bernardo Bertolucci's coming of age Stealing Beauty . And that was penned by a woman! Wayne Wang's Centre of the World has the most narrative content of all the sexy art films in the alienating affects of technology, modern love and prostitution in a phony Las Vegas .

The tenderness comes during pillow talk when Lisa is being coy, high and entertains Matt in her knickers explaining her theory behind technical variations in Latin American dances. In a seedy Soho lap dancing gent's club, Matt gets neither jealous nor aroused when Lisa is enjoying the lap dance too much and he leaves her alone. No jealousy or recrimination even when her male American friend is visiting. He is indifferent or ego hurt while watching a- layin' Lisa lain on bed strung-out and left to her own device. He aseptically stands in the doorway watching the mechanical spectacle and returns to chopping vegs. He finds her egoism distasteful and chastises her when she takes pills first thing in the morning to which we tortured viewers have to witness her nonsensical whine and drivel. Yes, honest dialogue intended to be realistic in films are trite because people aren't articulate in the real world but her grating dialogue tests the virtues of realism. He's quiet and passive but a voyeur no less. She's not passive at all which put feminist models upside down. This would mean passively identifying with her in all her cerebral vacant glory.

After the break-up sex (she's off for America ), Matt offers to bring her to the airport so politely, this gent. She refuses and says her quick adieus in her newspaper boy cap (harkening to Patricia in À bout de Souffle ) not wanting it to be a dramatic farewell spectacle. Not a tear is shed. She is in full control of her destiny. He'll be another story of her boinks/blokes from around the world. He tells us in the narration after she's gone for good that he has never been to her apartment during their long courtship, just like in Mike Nichols' Closer where lovers don't know much about each other, not even their names. He is starting to assess the damage and we are saved from the emotional mess. They're just too damn cool. Engaging in intimacy to avoid intimacy off bedside. They don't care; so, why should we? Off to the concert again for me-time catharsis replaces the dull sensation of a snort and a blow.

The only relief from the claustrophobic and agoraphobic relationship, which Matt alludes as sex as being “two people in a bed – claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place”, are concert footages of every Hipsters' song list ( Franz Ferdinand , The Dandy Warhols , Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Von Bondies and not so fresh Primal Scream, Super Furry Animals, Elbow and Michael Nyman ). Counting down for long-awaited songs for a welcomed reprieve becomes a game just like in David Cronenberg's Crash where the counting corpses strategy aided to diffuse the stifling nature of the film, “And then there were four”.

What makes an art film different from pornography is its use of porn codes which this films toys with: lack of storyline and shaved muffs familiar in the sleaze biz to convey very different outcomes like detachment, uneasiness stemming from the images and the underlying mood of the themes broached. No one left the theatre during 9 Songs . Maybe they were there solely for the songs.

Mike Leigh's Vera Drake

 
This stark film is deceptively simple, as we'd expect with a Mike Leigh film, (the rape/adoption story in Secret & Lies , friendships gone awry and The Cure-loving weirdoes with a scab condition in Career Girls ). This dire postwar Britain makes the Kitchen Sink films sparkle with glamour in comparison. Chabrol's Story of Women (1988) where Isabelle Huppert, is another working class abortionist in Vichy France ; Vera is a simpleton and a mild-mannered sweet lady tried for performing abortions in 1950. She calls it “helping girls out” and does it for free with the graces of a midwife. The a-word is hardly uttered; the use of the euphemism suggests the gravity of the times. She cannot pronounce it or recall how long she's done it for shame. Imelda Staunton probably won her Golden Lion best actor's prize for portraying Shame onscreen. The issue is bigger than herself and her world. Reasons for this unusual suspect's unlawful ways is slightly explained: This old lady never knew the name of her father and takes cares of a “nephew” who we never get to understand, anyway. The film's leitmotifs included boiled water for tea and sterilization. Her real purpose is wiping other people's messes as housemaid to wealthy families. The real indictment here is Leigh showcasing how the wealthy could work around the law for a sum, receiving and providing extra-legal abortions by the same establishment which quashed Vera's grated lye/soapy water ‘syringe' enema method operation citing sanitary, public health concerns. The other institution, the courts, upheld her as example. She didn't become a constitutional champion. She was one of many jailed. Abortion isn't really the issue at all because it has sprouted out from these issues. Leigh dedicates the film to his parents – a practicing doctor and midwife.

Palindromes
Todd Solondz

Abortion is also treated in a peripheral way in button/envelope pusher Todd Solondz's new undistributed controversy. The film begins with the funeral of cousin Dawn Weiner, the protagonist/anti-heroine of Solondz' Welcome to the Dollhouse . Aviva, a palindrome spelt the same the other way around, is played by many actresses - two black girls - one ‘morbidly' overweight, two Jewish teens and scrawny Jennifer Jason Leigh. Solondz is toying where our sympathies lie with each actor. This film, pegged in the press kit as an Alice in Wonderland fable, is about a girl looking for love and motherhood in all the wrong places. Like in the arms of a teen friend (and not even for teenage kicks where she just lies there as that joke) and in that of an older predatory man Joe who abandons her; making it statutory rape except she's the initiator and feels sorry for him.

After her first sexual experience with a teen friend results in a pregnancy, her urban New Jersey mom coerces her daughter to abort the only thing she ever wanted all her life. In a typically Solondz absurdist line, Aviva's mother (Ellen Barkin) mentions she had to abort Aviva's little brother or else her family unit's material lifestyle would be affected by the birth of another child, “You know, we had to pay the mortage. Lawyers. Who would pay for those NSYNC tickets?” Aviva runs away to Kansas “ Middle America ”, home of Dorothy and Toto, into some Christian sect where Mama Sunshine takes in marginalized disabled kids and forms a Christian dance troupe called The Sunshine Singers complete with headgear and Britney-like choreography. At this point people feel uneasy laughing and accuse Solondz of being exploitationist after seeing a motley group of blind albino synthesizer players and dancers with Canadian crutches at their elbows singing tunes like, “Nobody loves Jesus but You” and “Fight for the Children”. He actually compares the moral relativism of both urbane Jewish East Coast Pro-Choicers and Christian fundamentalist Pro-Lifers where family values are either in name only or in deed respectively, yet both are morally fuzzy.

Solondz was charged for being anti-Christian in the storyline where the father of the Sunshine household-cum-sect conspires murdering ‘baby-murderers' - abortion doctors. They figure out Aviva is a Sinner who messed around in a gynecological test undertaken while she's asleep. She not only awkwardly learns to kneel to Christian prayers, same with Ali, the Muslim kid at the table where freedom fries are served.

Aviva does feel wronged having the abortion against her will. She hooks up with the predator guy who is in the conspiratorial sect, manipulates him in murdering Dr. Fleisher, who performed her abortion, amidst his family setting and gets off scot-free. In ways, she's the ultimate Innocent in a world of well-intentioned adult liars.

Hotel Rwanda

Genocide doesn't make for a favourite film subject except during the Oscars when any documentary on the Shoah usually wins the hearts and minds of the industry. The task of extras in feature making makes for mammoth production costs, notwithstanding 175 Hollywood films on the subject according to controversial Norman Finkelstein. Six million victims equals six million stories which doesn't include survivors' aftermaths. The ethical rendering of something that unimaginably difficult on the scale of tragedies is what Atom Egoyan had to contend with in Ararat where the retelling of the story and the story itself of the Armenian genocide needed to be in check, in order to keep the dignity of memory; yet, not mythologize it. But what about contemporary genocides and when it happens to non-Europeans, is there an interest for it? Images of complex “Heart of Darkness”, the Dark Continent , as they once referred Africa as, schematizes civility from the ‘savagery'.

After the Hotel Rwanda screening, an audience member uttered, “It's just like the Holocaust”, referring to media manipulation and calculated mass murders which made me wonder--- why didn't they hear about this then? Maybe they were reminded by Oskar Shindler's factory pretense to shelter the refugees and dealings with the murdering side, since he was ethnically on the right team just like our protagonist. Surely, they must have heard of Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil: the Failure of Humanity in Rwanda was a best seller this past year. The re-enacted scenes were reminiscent of the media images we did see back in 1994 (the dead on the roads though the maiming was not shown, floating bloated bodies in water, the refugee flows as far as the horizon) when this genocide was vying for spotlight along with Bosnia. The film begins with soundtrack that has snippets of a French radio news reportage concerning Sarajevo. Even in this film Sarajevo competes with Rwanda and remind us where our thoughts were back then, continuing to haunt us. The West (NATO) chose to intervene in that war, after all, it was in the European theatre. Immediately after viewing the film, I overheard in the movie theatre's bathroom stall, the lyrics of the hit song, “Everybody was Kung Fu fighting” which conjured imageries of graceful choreographed Ninja violence with their sword and ‘star' weaponry and even superficially harkened to the universal themes of revenge and tribal hatred. A cathartic release even if inappropriate and tacky.

The film is a co-production between Canada, U.K., South Africa and Italy and is based on Paul Rusesabagina's autobiography and who remained consultant on this film to keep it real. Some worried how the Canadian peacekeeper Col. Oliver, played by Nick Nolte, the fictional name for Lt. Gen. Dallaire, might be portrayed as a drunkard who only took up alcoholism after the ordeal. This is not true since the film has Col. Oliver only drank in one scene after a harrowing event which gets a lot of replay in trailers. Disillusioned of his peacekeeping role when the U.N, which won't do anything constructive like send in reinforcements, Col. Oliver, tells him, as it is, “Everything you believe in. The West. They let you down. You're not even a Nigger. It's worse. You're African.” He reminds Paul of his limited mandate like not using his gun, “We're here as peacekeepers. Not peacemakers.”

Paul finally gets it, when 2500 Belgian, French and Italian soldiers bail out, after 10 Belgian soldiers were killed, taking with them white foreign nationals tearing devastated European nuns away from their Tutsi orphans and local religious colleagues. The tourists taking their last snapshot of their sejourn villageture, they know something historic is a-happening. The irony isn't lost on them. Whites, the first rescued, who aren't in the plan, but the attacking soldiers would repel more U.N. intervention, knew they were taking away seats on the bus, that ought to belong to the most vulnerable prey. The gun-ho American camera guy (Joaquim Phoenix) gets it, by snubbing the British journalist's precautions in order to shoot the raw footage of bodies strewn in streets and in lakes. He beds a local Tutsi, who pleads to take her with him when the soldiers remove all foreign nationals from the Hotel.

While Cohibas is the local rapist, hotel supplier and warlord's poison of choice, Glenfiddich is the mode of currency for bartering favours for extension of human life from a Hutu General who romanticizes about Scotland, “You ought to go there after this.” This bon vivant didn't foresee his trial at the war crimes tribunal in Tanzania where the real Paul did testify.

This is Africa where the “parasitic bureaucracy” reigns in every facet of life as my African Studies professor called it. Feeding it is how things get done. Paul Rusesabagina calls it “Style” in happier times, before the war, when showering gifts to Sabena pilots meant prestige and respect would potentially flow. Sabena airlines (bankrupted after ‘911') run Hotel Des Milles Collines that isn't a top priority for the chain. Jean Reno portrays the president of Sabena. His face somehow reminds me of the actor who played a French Sgt. Marchand (Georges Siaditis) in No Man's Land (Danis Tanovic, 2001), another movie about navigating tribal warfare with a tragicomic twist. Like an Abbott and Costello routine on who started the war:

Bosnian Muslim soldier: No, You started the war.

Serb soldier: No, You started the war.

Bosnian Muslim soldier picks up rifle and points it at the Serb: Now, tell me who started the war?

Serb soldier: We did.

An intertextual moment occurs in Hotel Rwanda (similar long distance bureaucratic relations from safe European NATO and media Headquarters we saw in No Man's Land ) when the Sabena CEO representing European economic interests returns with a frustrated face. While Pat Archer, a benevolent Red Cross relief worker in Rwanda evacuating orphanages, shows the other disinterested face of European humanism. She tells them about Hutu plan for wiping out the next generation of Tutsis and where orphans plea “I promise I won't be a Tutsi anymore.”

Here there are no historical mistakes. Hutus are vilified (like Germans and Serbs as history's bad guys exemplified in Hollywood films) though the film mentions in short the impetus for Hutu's vindication. They, the majority, were at the bottom of economic paradigms. Prior to colonialism, Tutsis were pastoralists and Hutus were agricultural/cattle serfs and there was a tiny pygmy population Twa who were craftspeople. German Count von Goetzen, Rwanda's first colonizer in 1894, preferred te Tutsi minority (15% then and 10% of the population at the time of the genocide in 1994) for their elegance in speech, fine noses and tall features – better genes which colonialist adhered to. The hierarchical placement of Tutsi over the Hutus, create a schism between tribes: Tutsi as monarchical masters through their Mwami (King) and Hutus as servants. Colonial rule changed after World War One, Belgians continued the policy of semer la zizanie between locals; playing them and their loyalties against each other to prevent any sense of nationalism in lands where colonizers drew haphazard artificial borders along rivers that did not reflect tribal kingdoms. In the 1950s, Hutus were finally allowed access to Catholic European-style institutional schooling and raised their numbers in the Church's ranks. As example of historic rivalry in the film, Paul's Tutsi brother-in-law has a media job and was forewarned of the impending massacre. Paul, a Hutu, dismisses it as ‘they're after your good job'.

Moments before Rwanda did rid itself of the Belgian occupiers, Hutus did have their own Maître chez nous corrective measures (Bahutu Manifesto in 1957) resulting in the first ethnic scrimmages. In 1961, Belgians sided with Hutu parties to removed the Tutsi King and the chiefdoms switched hands resulting in 10,000 Tutsi dead and mass emigration ensued. In 1964, the Vatican Radio announced, “The killings in Rwanda are the most terrible and systematic genocide since genocide of the Jews by Hitler.” This was the first genocide and a prelude of what was to come: Tutsi rebels from abroad attacked from Burundi and reprisals cost the lives of 14,000 Tutsis which probably served as a strategic idea of déjà vu to Hutu generals in 1993. We aren't reminded of these complicated historical tit for tat massacres in Hotel Rwanda . Paul, knowing his country's history cannot fathom that wiping a population is humanly possible. “Why not?” says Gregoire, hotel staff and Hutu militiaman, “We're half-way there already.”

The film features media clips of the Arusha Accord (designed in August but signed on April1993) when the Prime Minster returned from signing peace accords with exiled Tutsi rebels in Tanzania, his helicopter was suspiciously shot down murdering both leaders of Rwanda and Burundi. The Hutu militia, the Interahamwe, used this ‘accident' to blame the Tutsi, to nullify the accord and begin the slaughter. The goal was to remove successive generations of Tutsi. ITLM Hutu Power Radio incited the slaughter of the ‘cockroaches': “We will crush the infestation.” Machetes were purchased at 50 cents from China. The result was quick and messy.

Hotel Rwanda follows a protracted day-by-day account of this Hutu hotel manager who married a Tutsi who incidentally ended up sheltering over 1,200 Tutsis at his hotel incurring the wrath among ex-friends and employees who've gobbled up resentful Hutu nationalism. This genocide is like the famous one of the 20 th century in its parts - with its agitprop, dehumanization, coloured shirts, mass rapes, where neighbours turn on neighbours, many lost family members…. Echoing that genocide, some weren't silent bystanders since many Hutus sheltered Tutsis.

What the film doesn't tell us just in two months 500,000 dead (or catchier 800,000 in 100 days) but its credits give a final toll of one million. We have a glimpse of Hutus, fearing reprisals from the Tutsi rebels who've entered Kigali, head for Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) a hotspot since six years where the protagonists are the displaced Hutus. What Congo, the original setting for Heart of Darkness , and Rwanda have in common besides being King Leopold's Belgian fiefdoms, are easily forgettable but Congo's war has been waging for years. Never again! They say. If Kosovo was unfinished business from Bosnia and a lesson untaught, what's our next failure? Where's the next Darfur?

The camera indicts Clinton, imprisoned in a magazine rack, on the cover of Time magazine's Man of the Year. We hear the reason from American cameraman, playing a narrative device, who enquires about the history behind the tensions, tells us why: after the Somalia humanitarian intervention experiment, the U.S. won't step in. Boutros Boutros Ghali gave the fence sitters on U.N. Security Council an ultimatum: double UN Troops or reduce it, U.S. used its veto and Russia rejected sending troops leaving the U.N. with 300 soldiers stationed in Rwanda. Hotel Rwanda also slyly slips in how the French (according to Amnesty International) trained an unit, supplied the Hutus and even interrogated the RPF prisoners but we do not get more. France was a historic supporter of Hutus along with the then Zaire. Officially, France was on U.N Security Council demanding more intervention by sending 680 men.

The Tutsi rebels (Rwanda Patriotic Front) were exiles coming from then-Zaire, Tanzania and Uganda – we have an inkling when Paul advises hotel ‘guests' to call their contacts (i.e. relatives abroad) for getting them out after Sabena came through for the refugees this time. The Tutsi exiles were calling for ‘the right of return of refugees'. Tutsi were also scapegoats in Burundi and in Uganda, as Idi Amin collaborators. There was no sense of the spilling of conflict into Burundi in the film.

The refugee camps are not glamorous. The well-educated and well-heeled Tutsi have nothing like the underprivileged Tutsis acquiring equality in face of death. The film isn't without humour since Paul is very sharp. After planning a suicide pact with his wife fearing the worse of deaths and after many attacks to the hotel, he pulls a shower curtain revealing his women kin in a bath fearing the Hutu militia. He asks his wife (Sophie Okonedo from Dirty Pretty Things ) who is holding to a showerhead, “What would you do? Wash them to death?”

Brilliant Don Cheadle is well utilized since he is used to portraying accents; most African-American actors got first dibs for UK roles since the ‘80s. The film is filmed in English so a French-inflected accent wouldn't do. I wouldn't know how a francophone African would sound speaking English but if everything else has been taken great care to ensure accuracy in this film; it's probably insignificant in the scheme of things to the drama. The film marks director Terry George's directorial debut though he seems well-seasoned in the political genre being imprisoned for alleged IRA ties as well as a screenwriter for Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father (1993) and The Boxer (1997) and an awful patriotic pap Hart's War (2002). Wyclef Jean of the 'Fugees (short for Haitian refugees) sings the film's main song.

Another film on the Rwandan genocide will be screened on HBO (French-HBO co-production) this spring entitled Sometimes in April (2005) directed by Raoul Peck ( Lumumba , 2000) and starring Debra Winger. Gil Courtemanche's novel A Sunday at a Pool in Kigali (2000/2004 English translation) also set at Des Milles Collines Hotel was scrutinized for fictionalizing and demonizing an unnamed Romeo Dallaire stand-in, will be turned into a film by Lyla Productions. Peter Raymont's documentary Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire (2005) on Dallaire's return to Rwanda just won an award at Sundance. For a forgotten genocide, movies and cultural products about Rwanda are coming out in buckets at this ten-year anniversary threshold. Will it ever come to the point that commemorating the lessons of Rwanda will ever be accused as ‘an industry' as well? Lessons are easily forgettable.