Drama

(გადასვლა)

dir: Levan Akin

2024

At the moment, at this very moment, I don’t want to think about, talk about, watch or write about Americans. I am so thoroughly fucking sick of them. I don’t want to have to think about them or their appalling politics, at least for the next, I dunno, four years or so. The way they pervade everything, and force us to have to watch them, like a dog licking its anus and maintaining eye contact with us the whole while, against our will or our own priorities; it is really is quite terrible, honestly.

So instead of thinking or talking about them, let us look at the lives, the troubles, the daily lived realities of a bunch of Georgians and at least one Turkish woman. No, not appalling people from that southern state of the Americas: I mean the former Soviet republic and now currently Russian occupied / vassal state with its own wacky language and alphabet. I mean look at how cool it looks “საქართველო”.
Now that’s wacky. Solely from what I’ve seen in this movie, which I think is my first exposure to movies from this country, I’m guessing it’s a pretty impoverished place. One person’s squalor is another person’s luxury, I guess, but it’s hard to see these lives as occurring in anything other than precarious circumstances.

But that’s how it looks to me. To people from there or around there maybe these people are living the high life, I dunno. When the film starts at some coastal town, there are a bunch of adults in a shack mostly yelling at each other. The main guy is yelling at his wife, who is trying to breastfeed, his younger brother is just waking up, who he seems to routinely violently attack, and he probably also starts yelling at some random cloud floating by. Making matters worse it looks like it’s a one room shack, at best two. Constructed maybe out of cigarette packets, or other shack-like materials.

And then a woman walks past, clearly not from around there but also looking for something or someone.

dir: Annie Baker

2024

The hint, to me, was how loud the sounds of nature are, at all times, around the Janet of the film’s title and her daughter, throughout the film. No matter where they are, the sounds of insects and birds, and other creatures, permeate every scene.

There is some music in the flick, but it’s all diegetic (as in, playing within the movie, not as a soundtrack that the characters aren’t hearing).

It’s one long summer, an endless summer, in someone’s life. That someone is not the someone referred to in the title of the film, but maybe it is?

Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) calls her mother from summer camp, telling her she’s going to kill herself if she’s not picked up.

She’s about eleven years old, I think. By the time the mother comes to collect her, Lacy has changed her mind and wants to stay, but tis too late.

And thus ensues the depiction of their enmeshed, co-dependent relationship over the course of that summer. I don’t think it’s unintended, or a lot of a stretch, or too unfair to say that Lacy seems really fucking annoying.

I’m sure deep down she’s a good kid, who maybe grew up to be less of a pill. But at that age, she was a clingy pill who made her mother’s life hell, based on this flick. And maybe I’m assuming too much, but I get the feeling the character is probably an extreme, extrapolated version of herself that the writer / director remembers or imagines about herself. Maybe. In which case what she remembers, or artistically renders about her mother also has meaning for her, and hopefully us.

dir: Lee Tamahori

2024

The Convert is set in 1830, and in that place what many (coloniser) people call New Zealand, but the Māori call Aotearoa, so it’s a sad, sorry time before internets and Lynx body spray. It’s also a time of lots of killings and stuff, with the locals slaughtering each other for shits and giggles, and snacks as well, apparently.

And it’s a time when the Brits think all they need to acquire a place from whoever might be there is plant a flag, start building shit, and shoot a defined percentage of the locals at regular intervals.

It’s the only way to keep the rest of ‘em in line. This is also, despite the grimness of the times, well before the so-called Māori Wars that would pit the Brits and certain tribes against other tribes in order to steal all the land, just like God intended. This is the time when they pretend to be polite, but avoid making eye contact with them, in the hopes they’ll just go away or die from chickenpox.

Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce) has been contracted to sail out from England and come to this godforsaken outpost of the Empire in order to minister to the (white) townsfolk of Epworth. Epworth (I think?) would be where present day Canterbury would be, on the east coast of the South Island. Even though most of this flick is filmed on the North Island, but anyway.

It’s really hard to fault wherever they chose to point the camera and film stuff. Aotearoa is that place, so stunning, so daunting in scale that it looks like a fantastical place even though it already exists. It serves as the backdrop for epics like The Lord of the Rings movies, but in this context it establishes that this is a forbidding place, where maybe even humans themselves, let alone the Māori or the Pākehā, as they call them, are not really welcome.

dir: Baloji

2023

The actual title for this in English is Omen, but I went with the French-Walloon title because I didn’t want it to be confused with one of the multitude of Omen horror flicks that are out there in the wild.

At first, as Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his wife Alice (Lucie Debay) travel back to Koffi’s hometown of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I wondered if this was going to be one of those many films that’s about someone introducing someone to their family, only for everyone to have a heart attack, and endure hours of culturally or linguistically-based misunderstandings before eventually coming to accept things, and come to terms with things, and everyone hugs in the end.

Even though the form predates the movies entirely, I do selfishly think of it as the My Big Fat *insert ethnicity as required* Wedding format. This film… does not follow that path, to say the least.

The Democratic Republic of Congo seems like… a complicated place. Koffi hasn’t been back home for 18 years, which I’m guessing means he’s in his mid thirties, and has been happily living in Belgium all this time. His pregnant wife Alice, is pretty clearly not Congolese, but she is Belgian, so at least they have that in common. As I alluded to before, they are nervous to meet with Koffi’s family, especially his mum Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) and his dad Abel (some guy always out of shot, existing only offscreen), and they have good reason to.

The celebration they get to is surprisingly unwelcoming, so I guess it’s not in their honour. Look, I’m a fairly sensitive and paranoid kind of chap, always assuming that I’m the one at fault when misunderstandings happen or when things go wrong – I don’t think people are out to get me: I assume I’m out to get myself. Watching Koffi go through what he goes through with his family, be rebuffed, and then have things go even worse (though thankfully not in a violent sense, though it’s very close to the line) is like every paranoid person’s nightmare. It goes about as bad as one could imagine, and it’s not because of anything Koffi deliberately does.

Yes, a lot of it has to do with the superstitiousness of these people and this place. Rural Lubumbashi doesn’t seem like a place overflowing with appreciation for science or rational arguments. Koffi is doomed before he ever crossed the threshold: for stuff completely out of his control. His mother’s meanness and coldness isn’t explained until late in the film, and yet mostly all of his problems seem to stem from the fact that he has a birthmark on his cheek which these superstitious yokels think means he’s marked by the devil, which is why he had to leave in the first place.

A birthmark? A facial difference? How dumb are the superstitions of these tribal folks?