12:08 East of Bucharest

"Accounting," says a character in this film, "is a respectable profession regardless of the political system."  That may well be true.  But when the political system is an impassive fifty-year-old oak and you are a leaf on that oak, distant from the trunk yet still subject to the same wind and weather, you may at times find it easier to be a little less than respectable.  So often has the infantryman or flunky excused his complicity by claiming he was just following orders that we wondered how all those unruly classmates we had known over the years could have turned out to be such dutiful adults.  Now we have the answer: they were simply waiting for the masses to speak. 

The Romanian title, as clarified in just about every review, literally means "Was there or wasn't there," and the subject of that pair of verbs is revolution. Revolution, mind you, in the humble hamlet of Vaslui which, I was disappointed to learn, actually exists. Not surprisingly, my research tells me that Vaslui (now home to roughly 70,000 inhabitants) is also the birthplace of the film's director. Demographic studies have the population peaking shortly after the December 1989 putsch that saw the overthrow and public shooting of this reviled autocrat, then contracting in the last fifteen years to its current size. Not that you would be able to obtain an accurate head count from watching the film, since some municipal code apparently prohibits more than fifty people from leaving their homes at any given time. In fact, four people assembled in front of a public statue would constitute, on a Vasluian scale, not only a crowd but a threat to governmental stability. The only question remaining is whether those four people arrived at the scene of democratic liberation before or after Ceauşescu's escape by helicopter had been announced. 

Tiberiu Mănescu (Ion Sapdaru), the only living member of this heroic quartet, is a teacher and a raging alcoholic, not necessarily in that order.  He is also, for one special day, a guest on the very low-budget television news program of a textile engineer-turned-journalist by the name of Virgil Jderescu (Teodor Corban).  The original Vergil did a bang-up job leading Dante through a possible variant of hell, and this Virgil has similar expository ambitions: he will prove once and for all whether a town east of Bucharest was indeed the site of revolution before the 12:08 helicopter lift-off.   To this end, he has invited Mănescu, who cannot remember the orgiastic events of the previous evening but allegedly has total recall of his movements on that fateful day sixteen years ago, and a retiree, Emanoil Pişcoci (Mirea Andreescu), to get to the bottom of the mystery.  A harmless vulgarian (and, at Christmas, a Santa impersonator) who detests the whole investigative charade, Pişcoci admits from the very beginning that he did not have the testicular wherewithal to challenge a healthy Ceauşescu regime.  He is a coward, but so is everyone else who waited it out and flooded the square once the news broke.  A whole country of cowards, he says.  On the other hand, Mănescu maintains that he and his cohorts drank themselves brave then proceeded to march on town hall with Robespierrian fervor.  Yet the select few who call in to the miserable show (including a former state security officer who assures viewers he was just an accountant at the time) refute this claim.   Mănescu is a drunk, and could there be a less reliable eyewitness than a drunk?  And who would believe this sad sack anyway given that a sentry, a neighbor, and a silver-tongued accountant-turned-entrepreneur (who apparently punched him in the face then shoved him into a sentry booth) all vividly recollect that there was not a soul in front of town hall before at least 12:30 pm?  Then, the disembodied voices concur, a crowd certainly appeared and it "only took ten minutes for the entire square to fill up."  Most revolutions, they imply, are bandwagon affairs.

Apart from some nice banter among the panelists and callers, there is also the recurring character of Chen, the town's most conspicuous (and perhaps lone) Chinese citizen.  The immigrant shopkeeper is the only one of the six callers to defend Mănescu, even though Mănescu abused him verbally in a drunken stupor and owes him a large sum of money.  With appropriate philosophical distance, Chen confesses that he does "not like the way Romanians treat each other."  After a predictable xenophobic barrage from Virgil, Chen adds, almost with a sigh: "I just say what I see."  If only Virgil, who quotes (but hasn't a clue about) Plato and Heraclitus, could follow this advice himself.  But, he argues, his line of work limits him to echoing what others say, and as a journalist he cannot possibly be held responsible for the opinions of the general public.  Vox populi, vox dei, Vaslui.  Or something like that.

Frailty

What you believe and what you know: some envision these two sources in confluence like the twin mouths of a river.  Amidst the thankless difficulties incumbent upon those of us who do believe to prove that our beliefs are justified (belief by definition cannot be proven, but no one seems to listen to that argument), we are confronted by moments of terror and, I daresay, hallucinatory images.  For brief interstices in time we sense what is in others, what makes them tick, what they see as right and wrong; in short, we see their dreams, wishes, fears, and hopes.  These glimpses into our fellow men and women are necessarily rapid, almost flash-like.  Are they the truth about that person? 

This device is old hat in fiction, especially in short stories where characters are often defined by a single gesture, a repeated word, a facial expression when no one else is supposed to be looking.  And what do we think we see, deluded beasts that we are?  That will depend on a number of factors, most of which can be easily dispelled by modern science as irrational or unreal.  Perhaps that nice middle-aged neighbor who always sports a crooked smile in the window of her nice middle-aged house has a different agenda when handling her children, or talking to her sister, or dealing with the much younger and prettier woman who just pinched her husband.  And that high school dropout, a young man who listens to violent music and wears violent clothes, perhaps he is just a lonely soul in search of acceptance, even if acceptance means leaping into the bottomless cesspool of nonconformity.  Which of these two would law enforcement authorities have an easier time picturing as a criminal?  Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men?  Using a most original format, this film attempts to answer that strange question.

There are four characters of note, two brothers, Fenton and Adam Meiks, their widower Father (Bill Paxton), and the FBI agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe), who one warm night is approached in his office by a grownup Fenton (Matthew McConaughey).  Fenton has a rather nasty confession to make: he knows the identity of the serial murderer known as the God’s Hand Killer because that person is none other than his own brother.  The film alternates between flashbacks, as recounted by Fenton to Doyle, of the boys’ childhood with their Father and the present day, where the two men sit gaming details out of one another that could only be known by the police, the killer, or someone who, like Fenton, abetted his brother by not stopping him.  Doyle asks and receives pertinent information, but never considers the possibility that the person sitting in front of him might be much smarter than he is.  But the thought crosses our mind, as do other thoughts.  And knowing that we may be missing something, we turn our attention to the flashbacks.

This is where Frailty distinguishes itself from all other films of its genre, if it can fairly stuffed into just one pigeonhole.  Fenton tells Doyle about his Father, a man of great faith who was informed by God that he had a mission: to seek out those who have grossly violated divine law and to mete out punishment with an axe.  When their Father touches someone, he can see within their conscience and determine what if any crimes lie hidden.  The kicker is that Father Meiks also enlists his two young boys, who could not possibly wield as tempered a sense of right and wrong, to help him in his vigilante pursuits.  At this point, the viewer has a choice.  Either the Father is mad and we must look on this production as thinly-veiled satire or misled manipulation, or the director, writer, and protagonist (all of whom happen to be Paxton) are obsessed with showing us a side of man that is so primal as to be forgotten in our modern day of hedging, relativity, and cultural sensitivity: that of moral justice.  There is no trick dialogue or occultism.  What we witness is theurgy in its extreme form, as the film proposes a storyline ingrained in an impossible belief and then follows that trail into darkness from which there cannot be any return.  One image, an image above all other images, is seen towards the end that justifies the actions of one of the characters, and I have never been able to remove that image from my head.  Nor have I tried.

Roman de Gare

Perhaps the most identifiable difference between an artistic film and one made with primarily commercial ends in mind is character development.  After all, life is short and we really cannot afford to get to know too many people in great depth, lest we pass up other opportunities and other people.  This silly paradigm has plagued all forms of artistic expression since their inceptions, a parallel and quick-fix alternative to a true masterpiece.  Whereas the latter takes its time to talk about a few things, most commercial outings superficially touch on everything and everyone under the glorious and beneficent star we call the sun.  In this regard, French cinema, to use a casual generalization, tends to be particularly offensive.  French film is all about doing little and saying even less, of blustering about petty details in an urban sprawl that has already jaded every personage to varying degrees.  Indeed, for that sweltering mass among us (I happily have never been a joiner) who needs action, explosions, preposterous plots and characters that could not, on this planet or any other, possibly exist without collapsing under the weight of their own disingenuity, the French noir, neo-noir, and B-noir are to be avoided like the misanthropic types who compose these works.  Which brings us to this recently released film.

Some reviewers have translated the title as "airport fiction," or what you would buy in an airport before a long trip, a cultural equivalent albeit liberated from the play on words.  As it were, the best translation of “train station novel” or "train station fiction" (as in a pack of lies) is suggested in the dialogues; why its own subtitles refer to the book and film which contains it as “Tracks” is not ours to know (the American name “Crossed Tracks” is a bit more implicational if equally inaccurate).  Unlike most films of its kind, Roman de gare introduces us to a large slew of characters before focusing on three: Pierre Laclos (Dominique Pinon), Huguette (Audrey Dana), and the epicenter herself, Judith Ralitzer (the ageless Fanny Ardent).  Who these people really are becomes the true mystery of the film, and each one of them has at least two identities to hide behind.  Identities, mind you, not in the secret agent sense, but as distinct slices of the same personality. Being the (somewhat diminutive) man in this threesome, Laclos also appears to be the most enigmatic, and he may very well have the wherewithal to prove it.  If you believe what he has to say, he has been ghosting for Ralitzer, a novelist of millions and millions of accolades, for the past seven years.  One note to the politically correct: the unfortunate French term for “ghost writer” (also present in other European languages) is used in a pun for the period of, ahem, indentured servitude that Laclos apparently took upon himself before deciding his talents had been concealed for far too long.  The term crops up a good three dozen times in the film, so however often you sneer, it’s not going away.

That is, of course, if you buy Laclos’s story (and if that is his real name).  There are other possible façades.  These include Huguette’s actual line of work and strange obsession with celebrity hair, as well as her bucolic family living in the true middle of the middle of nowhere, where trout fishing and pig slaughtering are major events.  Alas and alack, we are also supposed to revel in the lurking presence of an escaped serial killer, which has quietly become the biggest cliché in thriller fiction.  I will generously impute this ranking to our age-old need to find and combat evil in its purest form.  Once upon a time we had Old Nick; now we have salivating monsters who take days to murder their victims by the most macabre and revolting methods ever devised.  As it were, our killer, whose name is George, likes magic tricks.  He uses them to enthrall his adolescent victims and has even been dubbed “The Magician” by the ever-imaginative press.  And Pierre − small, inefficacious, sexually ambiguous Pierre − just so happens to carry a pack of trick cards around.

What is particularly good about films like these is precisely what is lacking in more action-based variants.  The twists do not make the characters; instead, the characters remain in the personas that have been developed for them and make decisions based on what we know of these personas.  If we are really surprised by what happens, it is generally owing to our own inattention.  Watch all the puppets and their strings and you will not be surprised: each occurrence is perfectly logical, if at times bordering ever so slightly on the overwrought.  But we are dealing here with writers and their monolithic egos, so don’t expect a modest variation on a familiar theme.

The English Patient

This succulent film, winner of a considerable number of awards, is probably one of those few cinematic adaptations which rise above their literary sources.  An unsurprising assessment given that the whole premise is standard modern novel fare: shortly after the Second World War, a severely burned patient (Ralph Fiennes), English only in manner and mastery of the language, lies in a hospital bed in an Italian villa and tells a tale of love lost.  His nurse (Juliette Binoche) indulges him knowing all the while that even in these pacific surroundings he will not last more than a month. The narrative unfolds in pieces, flashbacks of moments that mattered to the Patient, points of emotions and thoughts that seem now, in death’s proximity, essential to understanding his personality and soul.  There is nothing original nor offensive about such a premise, which is ultimately a diary composed by a mystery writer with aesthetic pretensions. The payoff will not nearly be as scintillating as the telling, but that we already know as well.

Over time we come to see that the so-called English Patient is really a Hungarian, Count László de Almásy, and that the love of his short life was a married woman called Katherine Clifton (Kristen Scott Thomas).  Katherine’s fate can only have been tragic in light of the apathy with which the Count faces his final days, but this again is no surprise.  Something so designed for disaster can only be redeemed by art, beautiful prose and ideas woven into lush scenery that spread like nymphaeaceae across a lake.  Speaking at length pains the Count, a devoted student of this Greek historian; so in good literary fashion he shrouds his desires and thoughts in paradigms lifted from books more real to him than the life he is about to relinquish.  In this type of situation even poems, the most touching that his mind could retain, would not be out of place.  But we do not get poems.  The film’s late director smartly substitutes pictures for scenes, especially between Katherine and her lover, and allows his talented cast to improvise on the standard forbidden wartime love theme that in lesser hands could easily have succumbed to some of cinema’s most tedious clichés.  Fiennes and Thomas are not only superb, they are convincing both as a couple (which is easy given their chemistry) and as individuals who will themselves towards doom all the while persuaded that what they have cannot be anything less than right.  The scenes in North Africa, where the real Almásy spent years researching ethnographic obscurities, are gorgeous and filled with just enough chiaroscuro to reinvent the patterns they loosely follow.  Predictably, Katherine’s husband (Colin Firth) is a pitiable creature who is the Hungarian’s inferior in every way; but Almásy is not without his faults.  For all his talent and culture he cannot see how destructive love can be when it becomes a matter of concealment and adventure.  You have nothing when you are not ready to or simply cannot show the world in whose arms you truly wish to die.  And he and Katherine, so in love yet so aware of how unfair life has been, have barely more than that.

Without huddling another work under this review’s shade, I should add that the strength of the film, Katherine and Almásy, is watered down in the book to an affair parallel to another love story, as if mimicking the quartet format made popular by this famous man of letters.  The nurse, whose name is Hana, spends a great deal of the novel intertwined with the sapper Kip (Naveen Andrews), an Anglo-Indian who provides a convenient postcolonial touchstone for the novel’s themes.  Kip is a wise and thoughtful figure, often brooding so that his mood matches the color of his skin – a horrific cliché which should tell you exactly how little effort was put into making him original.  Moreover, as a sapper, it is his task to remove the mines placed beneath the good earth by the barbarian Europeans whose languages he speaks and whose women he has loved.  I should and will leave the matter at that.  There is also another character of considerable force bearing the name of an Italian painter (Willem Defoe).  If the film were an engine, he would certainly be the wrench that derails the whole exercise and makes a few decisions that can only be described as cowardly.  The agenda of this Caravaggio, like that of art itself, is gain.  But while an artist wants to gain in talent and experience to achieve self-perfection, this Caravaggio has no qualms about selling people off for a handful of silver.  And maybe he keeps his hands stretched out towards the sky just a bit too long.

Cautiva

Watching a rather mediocre Argentinean film recently (which I will not bother to name) reminded me of a far superior production from the same southern land.  And the fact that the subject matter is sensitive material cannot be understated: a childhood classmate of mine was a refugee from the regime in question, and that was the sole repeated answer as to why he arrived here with only one parent.  You may have also heard of other popularizations of the Disappeared in song and film, and maybe felt a bit indifferent when you discovered the actual number of missing persons.  To the families of those made to vanish from God’s green earth, however, the number one is sufficient to elicit irreparable emotional and psychic harm, as well as a dire need for coming to terms with the past and its wickedness.  This film — one of, one supposes, many more revelations to come — becomes a cathartic necessity. 

The title translates as “captive,” feminine singular.  That prisoner is Cristina Quadri (Bárbara Lombardo), the sixteen−year−old daughter of a police officer (Osvaldo Santoro) and his wife, who leads the normal life of a privileged teenager in one of Buenos Aires’s residential areas.  Her dreary but prestigious Catholic school promotes piety and the uniformity of faith in a concerted effort to make all its children feel that they are sheltered by the Lord himself.  Or something to that effect.  Unlike her classmates, Cristina feels perfectly fine in her skin.  She is attractive and smart (otherwise, we fear she would have not made the cut as movie heroine), and compels us in that coy manner that seems to be uniquely a talent of certain younger women.  Such girls tend to drift through the first fifteen or twenty minutes of their starring roles distinguishing themselves from their peers, and Cautiva proves to be no exception.  Her friend Angélica uses up a few precious moments of the perfunctory introduction trying to make Cristina more like everyone else, which of course in terms of her inexperience and naïveté she is in many ways.  The stage is set for a very determined man (Hugo Arana), a judge no less, who whisks Cristina out of her classroom and life hitherto and informs her of something that may scare each of us some dark nights: her precise family origin.

What follows can only be expected, an expurgation of one existence in favor of a life stolen before consciousness kept notes of the events in its vicinity.  As a child, says Judge Barrenechea, Cristina belonged to someone else.  Her parents had the sensational opportunity of doing what so many around the world long to do, but few dare: standing in defiance of an oppressive and inhumane government.  And like the majority of these brave millions they targeted an enemy infinitely more adept at inflicting punishment and shame than they were.  So Cristina’s parents, activists in the latter half of the 1970s when a whole generation of open−minded Argentines was erased by organized and covert evil, were subjected to brutality.  As a result, Cristina was orphaned while still incapable of speech or independent movement; in fact her birth mother had given her another name, Sofia.  We know and are reminded of the persistence of so many children of the disappeared among the survivors of the purges that even a righteous crusader like Barrenechea, who hoots and pontificates unabashedly as the angel of vengeance, could never hope to find much less prosecute those responsible.  At least, he says to himself, I can tell the truth and set these children free.

And what of the “adoptive” parents?  How complicit must you have been (you were, after all, a law enforcement official in the heyday of the secret police) to receive the kickback of an entire human being left to be molded and educated only by you and your wife, who cannot have your own children?  That last question is not only mine, it is the angry query directed at the Quadris by the daughter they raised as their own child.  The question is addressed from a different viewpoint in an earlier and much more famous film, but here things evolve from the perspective of the child herself.  Cristina does not need to stand for such nonsense. Being of age, she can choose to forsake the only parents she has ever known, reclaim the name on her long−since−destroyed birth certificate and represent a symbolic denial of the theft of both identity and life that occurred only thirty years ago.  Yet how many children do you know that would willingly assume this thankless burden of responsibility?  What child is mature enough in spiritual strength to act as an example of redemption that has only signs and symbols to play with?  What would you or I have done in a similar situation and at a similar age? Perhaps exactly what Cristina ends up doing, which I cannot reveal. Whatever her choice, the one thing she will retain is the title of a captive forever beholden to the truth, as will the generations this truth continues to affect. That is not much, but sometimes the truth is small and cruel and completely unbearable.