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.

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum

For those who like your etymologies straight and simple, consider an interpretation of the heroine's name from this famous novella.  Katharina is a Teutonic form of a Greek name widely understood to mean pure (catharsis is often cited as a related term), while Blum is almost a German flower, just like virág is a Hungarian flower and the original surname of this great epic's protagonist.  And our heroine is indeed a pure flower, a lonely bead of buds lying in a corner of a small, semi–urbanized apartment whose market value she could not possibly afford.  She works as a housekeeper for two well–off  couples, has her own car, and generally leads the plain but unencumbered life of the average or slightly above–average German.  She is young and lean, shy and sexually prudish, sensitive and attractive, educated and cultured if skeptically religious, and, most of all, hard–working and lonely.  She also has two "life–endangering qualities": loyalty and pride.  In other words, she is a perfect metaphor for postwar Germany itself.  

 

Now one may ask oneself, as so many Germans did in the 1970s when even the closest adviser to the West German Chancellor turned out to be a spy, how did someone like Katharina Blum ever come into such plebeian ease?  Consider her demographic: "those pretty young brown–haired things, thin, between 5'4" and 5'6" in height and 24 and 27 in age; here at the Carnival you'll see hundreds of thousands of them walking about. "  She is at once beautiful and common, but in the way a solitary rose is beautiful and common.  That is because we cannot have a heroine to embody Germany that looks or acts or talks like no one else.  She must be representative, typical, forgettable; otherwise she would not be a nation but an artist.  However you choose to examine the matter, Katharina is so symbolic that she acquires her own personality.  Now and then, she is portrayed by our omniscient narrator as fickle and moody; she looks after her gravely ill mother with an indifferent air, but waits to weep in private upon her death; she does not allow some of the older men in her life, usually patrons of a club where she tends bar and serves drinks, to do more to her than drive her home, although they certainly try to do more; and we are informed early on that she was once married.   To a parasitical drunk no less, who was one of the first persons to libel her once news of her crime is made public.

 

That crime of hers.  What Katharina is ultimately accused of having done is hardly surprising given the circumstances.  But the bitter irony is that her reputation is already tarnished even before she decides to act.  And here, I must say, the reader more familiar with the political events of 1970s Germany will grasp nuances that elude those who think that the RAF only stands for Britain's air squadrons.  That Katharina is vilified for cavorting with and bedding a known criminal, a whim made even more reprehensible by the fact that her nickname is "the nun," should tell you a great deal about what Böll thought of the establishment in his homeland.  A curious notion, that.  Having been born in the mid–1970s I have always cultivated an image of 1960s and 1970s Germany, a period of remarkable economic and cultural resurgence known in German as "The Miracle," as one of the paradises I can only visit in dreams and magnificent works of art.  Böll, however, doesn't quite see things that way.  His vision of Germany is strewn with remarks about its hypocrisy and yellow journalistic tendencies sprung from an overattentiveness to scandal that is both typically German and a reaction to the unending international scrutiny of German ethics in the twentieth century.  Katharina, like Germany, is isolated and assailed on all sides.  Her family is retconned into a band of profligate leftists and every trace of humanity and decency is erased from her record.   In the end, we are duly aware of whose honor has been violated and we smile.  We smile because we know that Katharina, despite her flaws, will flourish and rise to the heights she deserves.          

Gone Are the Days of Plenty

The title of this film is a little misleading, since the lessons that the protagonists wish to impart to the bloated segments of society are secondary to their own lives and choices.  You may wonder what disempowered college–age idealists can possibly do apart from protesting, dope smoking and ratcheting up petty crime statistics.  The German title, however, gives us more information: it may be translated, like when it appears in the opening scene on a sort of dunning letter, as “your days of plenty are numbered.”  Literally, it could be "the years of plenty are gone,” or, as fett (akin to American use of "phat") means both "luxurious" and "cool" or "awesome," "the cool years are gone.”  This adage applies both to the young, weak and resentful students and the middle–aged moneyed elite they seek to overthrow.  And if you are familiar with tales of juvenile discontent, you may correctly assume that our film will begin with a crime.     

 

A crime, it should be said, that is more overshow than throw.  A luxurious villa full of the finest  technology and kitschy objets d’art (much more of a rarity in Germany than in the United States) is subjected to chaotic justice.  Jan (Daniel Brühl), one of the perpetrators, outlines the scheme he carries out in greater Berlin with his undernourished roommate Peter (Stipe Erceg): nothing is stolen, furniture and possessions are rearranged, and a note is left in plain view for the returning nabobs. The note is often signed, “The Educators” (spelled with a radicalizing “k” in the English release), with the aim of having these posh Philistines “feel less safe in their high security neighborhoods.”  Peter’s girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch) then asks Jan, with whom she has been spending an inordinate amount of time of late, why he and Peter don’t simply steal everything and give it to the poor.  Jan astutely counters that while these rich folk (a list of yacht club members is used as a basis for attack) expect burglars, since they themselves rob society’s coffers to meet their own exorbitant whims, they do not expect righteousness.  Few things could be more frightening than having someone come into your house, play with your possessions, then inform you in writing that you simply have too much money.  Will they come around and put an end to their excessive habits, or will they resent society even more?  But our Educators are not concerned with that type of result; they want to instill the fear of a higher authority in the hearts of their victims, and with that fear a realization that the world, and the people who run this world, are unfair.        

Jule has her own problems.  A year ago she rammed her uninsured Golf into a high–end Mercedes driven by an equally high–end business executive.  Yes, the accident was both her fault and not subject to payment by her insurance company, so she legally had no claim to make when ordered to pay back the full ticket price of the totaled car.  After one year, we are informed, she has worked off almost one–eighteenth of the sum, and her job as a waitress will neither improve that percentage nor allow her to pay her rent on time.  Facing eviction, she turns to Jan for inspiration.  He tells her quite politely that although the accident was her fault, there is nothing worse than destroying the life of a young woman so that one privileged German can drive a car worth the average annual income of thirty Serbs.  She nods her head and sees his point, but what are they to do, disenfranchised and disaffected as they are?  One solution presents itself immediately, and things move quickly towards Jule’s integration.

Exactly halfway through the film, there is a predictable change of perspective.  Up to this point we have been able to side with the 'truth of youth,' of the fundamental principles of equality and fairness which all young people should espouse and with which the majority of older citizens should try to reacquaint themselves.  While broadly drawn, the characters are likeable and their cause tenable.  But those darling Educators become hostages to the plan of another party when they attempt to retrieve a conspicuous item they left behind at the house of one of those yacht club members.  This shift is necessary dramatically, for otherwise our parable of moral damnation would get a wee bit tedious.  Consequences for these actions, however harmless in essence, are as inevitable as the taxes that Jan, a consummate anti–institutionalist, laments.  The nature of man, we are told, is to be better than others.  We are also told that it’s not he who invented the gun who is guilty, but he who pulls the trigger.  The war of truisms begins, but for some magical reason it seems real.  It seems real because both sides are right and wrong, both sides are looking out for their interests and understand a part of human nature that cannot be denied.  Yet only one side is moral.  And moral doesn’t only mean saying and doing the right things, it means grasping the basic principles of human interaction and seeking fairness and equality of opportunity.  When one of their victims laughs off his guilt by saying he was not born in southeast Asia and is therefore not responsible for those who were, the rebuttals he receives make him think.  He thinks of another time.  His own youth, especially the wildness of 1968, flashes before his beady little eyes and, with that youth, the sweetness of invincibility and righteousness.  Back then he was not a top executive but a teacher, poor but happy, and totally in love with his young wife.  And those fabulous days, his best days, are all gone.     

The Song of the Flying Fish

If you are familiar with my eating habits, you will forgive my repulsion at this story's most distasteful title.  As it were my disgust has no basis in fact, as the gilded gills in question are actually "eccentric and expensive toys" made of that most precious of metals.  They are also, for the time being, the property of Mr. Peregine Smart.  The elderly Smart is an indiscreet and wealthy collector of objects that might only interest similarly wealthy collectors.  No fewer than ten characters are sprinkled in the story's first three pages, one of whom is the humble priest and detective of the crime we assume will involve the titular species.  Almost all of these personalities, who cannot be explained in a short story without the thin film of stereotype, find themselves residing in close vicinity to one another in a provincial English town and, being men of some stature and financial freedom, begin to interact and share their theories of success. 

 

The most eccentric of these men is a certain Count de Lara, a French nobleman of Tartar countenance, who spares no effort to explain the 'mysteries of the Orient' to the more scientifically–minded of his colleagues.  Chesterton adores these types of debates, which are not really debates but opposing pamphlets, and to his credit always makes them shine with the gleam of novelty.  Of interest to the happenings in our story, De Lara includes several instances of thievery of a most baffling nature.  One particularly magnificent example takes place "outside an English barrack in the most modernized part of Cairo":

A sentinel was standing outside the grating of an iron gateway looking out between the bars on to the street.  There appeared outside the gate a beggar, barefoot and in native rags, who asked him, in English that was startlingly distinct and refined, for a certain official document kept in the building for safety.  The soldier told the man, of course, that he could not come inside; and the man answered, smiling: 'What is inside and what is outside?'  The soldier was still staring scornfully through the iron grating when he gradually realized that, though neither he nor the gate had moved, he was actually standing in the street and looking in at the barrack yard, where the beggar stood still and smiling and equally motionless.  Then, when the beggar turned towards the building, the sentry awoke to such sense as he had left, and shouted a warning to all the soldiers within the gated enclosure to hold the prisoner fast.  'You won't get out of here anyhow,' he said vindictively.  Then the beggar said in his silvery voice: 'What is outside and what is inside?'  And the soldier, still glaring through the same bars, saw that they were once more between him and the street, where the beggar stood free and smiling with a paper in his hand.

The superiority of the spiritual over the material needs no parable, nor is Chesterton's didacticism the least bit coy; but as he elaborates in this other book, a confession of his faith that has few parallels in English literature,  miracles only seem to count when something actually occurs or when some weirdness is perpetrated.  As his mouthpiece Father Brown quips, "all the supernatural acts we have yet heard of seem to be crimes."  

 

It is then of no surprise when we behold Mr. Smart "carrying the great glass bowl as reverently as if it had been the relic of a saint," because that is precisely the type of idolatrous appurtenance that Mr. Smart would worship.  In fact, one short paragraph brings together all the images necessary for Chesterton's symbolism:

Outside, the last edges of the sunset still clung to the corners of the green square; but inside, a lamp had already been kindled; and in the mingling of the two lights the coloured globe glowed like some monstrous jewel, and the fantastic outlines of the fiery fishes seemed to give it, indeed, something of the mystery of a talisman, like strange shapes seen by a seer in the crystal of doom.  Over the old man's shoulder the olive face of Imlack Smith stared like a sphinx. 

Imlack Smith, it should be noted, is a banker of a most bankerish disposition; what I mean by that I will leave to you to determine.  What happens subsequently is far beyond the reach of his tepid imagination, and yet well within the bounds of rational guesswork.  And while featuring one of the best short sentences ever written in English ("But the cold breath of business had sufficed to disperse the fumes of transcendental talk, and the guests began one after another to say farewell"), this is probably also the only story to contain both the phrases "spiritual burglary," and "a burst of taciturnity."  It is also, from start to finish, one of Father Brown's most exquisite adventures, and the competition Chesterton provides him makes that assessment all the more impressive.  There is far too much for me to praise in this square space, so I will leave to you to find a copy of this tale and relish every sentence, every analogy, every conclusion.  Pity that my aversion to seafood initially made me shun this gem in favor of more palatable options such as "The Doom of the Darnaways," and "The Three Tools of Death."  Those are, by the way, great stories.  Yet this special tale has something so powerful and yet so clear that our attention is seized and twisted into odd unfamiliar shapes.  Soothing, anodyne logic is provided in a race against an unbelievable crime; but sometimes "there are things even the police cars and wires won't outstrip."

The New World

In the opening scene of this visionary film, John Smith (Colin Farrell), the hero of American history textbooks, is spared.  I should rephrase that, he is not killed.  But he is left to die by his captain (Christopher Plummer) who quickly decides that he would be better served returning to England for supplies.  As the only professional soldier among the men who founded this colony that just celebrated its quadricentennial, Smith is given tacit approval to poke around the local forests and see whether he can’t find some trading partners among the autochthonous peoples.  There is even El Doradoan talk about a rich king up the river, a dangerous journey for which Smith is appointed.  But of course Smith, played with hungover hesitation by Farrell, finds something much more precious than a city of gold.    He finds love.

Love in the form of the native Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher), a young daughter of a menacing Algonquian chief.  This plot thread as well as the inevitable battle scene (which, to its credit, is wholly bereft of gore), are the only clichés of an amazingly refreshing interpretation of an old chestnut: the conflict between the colonists, who were not really colonists but refugees, and the natives, who didn’t regard themselves as landowners but as nomads and tribesmen.  The land of America, they would have argued, belonged neither to them nor to the Jamestown settlers.  It belonged to whatever animist deities guided their thoughts and provoked their cries.  Theirs is a culture of vigilance and mistrust, because they could be ambushed by any other tribe or any rogue animals.   There are numerous instances of the wildness of the Algonquians, and the film smartly permits conversation in misunderstood terms, exactly as it must have happened, with each side utterly flummoxed by the existence much less the words of the other.  In time, the parties acknowledge that a certain degree of cooperation will be necessary.  All that remains is determining who will give up more in order to secure mutual survival.  

History aside for the moment, we must understand the harshness of the interaction as grueling and repugnant, with gunpowder ultimately triumphing over war hatchets.  We know the outcome of this confrontation, of the absurd arrogance of the colonists who themselves were in great number victims of persecution in their birthlands.  As the captain declares to a lovelorn Smith:

This is Eden.  We have escaped the Old World and its bondage .... This is the place where a man may rise to his true stature.

But, as we also know, there is more to this story than colonial exploitation.  Director Terrence Malick, one of the most unheralded geniuses of modern cinema (owing in no small part to his sporadic activity) parallels the pointless gesturing and miscommunication of the armies with the inner thoughts of Smith and his love.  They speak in voiceovers that embrace the melodrama of Elizabethan soliloquies, and their hearts dive and spin around each other in shared yearning for escape.  Old Europe falling for New America, one would think.  But again Malick diverts our attention from these easy equations and sets it back on the simple intercourse of different humans with different perspectives.  The Captain and his cohorts have many Biblical verses to offer as justification for their actions, and Smith has little but the solace of the boundless nature of which he has just become part.  He notices and begins to worship the beauty of the earth, but he returns time and again to his Pocahontas, who in the film’s final third also catches the eye of a new character, the widower John Rolfe (Christian Bale).   

There is so much to commend, from the style and exquisite artistic restraint to the colors, the sounds, the freshness of every encounter and every word, translated, or, more often, left to buzz in our ear like the chirps of an unfamiliar bird.  The score alternates between Wagner and Mozart, an anachronism so perfectly sewn into a film that seeks artistic authenticity that one cannot help admiring its boldness.  Heavenly pieces of music do seem to drift in from another, higher plane, an Eden or a “place where man may rise to his true stature,” and they are fitting selections and repeated as leitmotivs.  Gradually, Malick informs us that we are watching neither a true love story nor a historical epic, but what a transcendent memory might retain of these first steps.  The way Rolfe looks at Pocahontas, whom he baptizes into his faith as Rebecca; the way she asks him simply, “Are you kind?”; the lyricism of each inner thought; the short and pensive shots of a world that seems microscopic because the colonists know so little about it; the promises exchanged and broken.  Even christened, married, and a mother, Rebecca cannot shed her gods, and for her family she thanks the sun.  “Give me a humble heart,” she mutters in the face of all these events.  In the end, we have the finest a film that eschews conventional plot can offer: a collection of memories strung together by purpose and desire.  And what memories!