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Review: In 1974 I
intended to make the trip to Peru,
but got a job with NBC and moved into New York City
instead. In fact, I did celebrate that event with a Labor Day weelend jaunt to Mexico City
and the surrounding museums. I have never made it down there. A friend did in
2001 (hiking the trial to Machu
Picchu while I was being
laid off!)
This film shows stunning scenery of much of South
America, from Buenos Aires
to the Argentine pampas, to the Chilean
Coast, the lifeless and bone-dry Atacama Desert, to Machu Picchu
itself, Lima, and the Amazon
wilderness. I would have liked to seen Lake
Titicacca
and the pre-Inca Tiahuanoco ruins.
But the story is important, too. Biochemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), about to become 30, and
23-year-old medical student Ernesto Che Guevara
(Gael Garcia Bernal) make the 8000-mile journey over South America
in 1952 on a breaking-down motorcycle, traveling almost like a male
couple. Guevara is asthmatic, and
there is a chilling scene near the end of the film where he has an attack,
and then at the end when he swims the Amazon it seems that he may have one
but does not. Other than that, he is strong and vigorous, and kind—an almost
perfect person, at first far removed from politics. The object of their
journey is a leper colony in the Amazon (and the movie makes a geographical
error in getting them from Lima
to the Amazon without going over the mountains). The politics creeps in
gradually, and out of necessity. At one point, Che
is pulled out of a labor pool to work in an Andean copper mine, to throw a
fit. Soon he comments about how Incan civilization has been sundered, and
begins to notice the abuse of the peasants, often with many kids, by
landowners. It seems as if “class warfare” is inevitable. Of course, Che’s subsequent record may not conform to such simplistic
ideology, There
is an interesting interchange with the nuns who run the leper hospital, when
they won’t let the young men eat unless they attend services—those be the
rules with self-righteous religion and “faith based” charity. A few of the
scenes of the leprosy victims are quite graphic, with missing fingers and
disfigurements.
There is also a 1999 video “Che
Guevara: A Guerilla to the End” (54 min).
Yes (2005, Sony Pictures Classics, dir.
Sally Potter—the screenplay by her is available at e-commerce sites from Newmarket Press, R, 99 min) is another movie that mixes
various political dissidences (both Communism and radical Islam) and goes to
their sanctums but never lingers much. First, let me be facetious about a
movie named this. (It is not “Yeth!”) The movie is in the style of an Elizabethean play (it does not have to be Shakespeare),
with the dialogue in iambic pentameter, starting with the housekeeper’s
soliloquy over a clean toilet bowl. That device gives the movie the effect of
a modern Shakespeare movie, all right, without being overly stilted. “She” (Joan Allen) was born in the Middle
East, and works in London as a biologist, apparently trying to justify the
idea that life begins at conception. (The movie does not linger at the
opportunity to delve into abortion as a political issue.) She is married to a
rich British politician Anthony (Sam Neill)—there is one dinner scene with
the two of them that is deliciously framed with furniture and white Christmas
lights in the background in a way that reminds one of La Dolce Vita. She
develops an affair with a Lebanese cook and waiter, He (Simon Abkarian). Yes, there is that one scene where she
undresses him gently, though the intensity of the scene seems to diminish
quickly. This leads to a bit of a road movie, with excursions to Beirut
and particularly Cuba,
with some fascinating visuals (some of it in digital video). There are lots
of pseudo-political discussions in verse, such as one in a garage where He
tells her poetically that there are no innocent victims, that Islam is tough
but that it is just and fair. They trade tirades about being terrorists and
imperialists, and about living off of forbidden fruits. Potter started
filming this right after 9/11.
The Edukators
(“Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei”) (2004, IFC/Y3,
dir. Hans Weingartner, Germany,
R, 127 min) is
a sensational crime comedy with obvious political overtones. The film is long
(movies directly from Germany
usually are) and wants us to learn our lesson and perhaps eat our vegetables,
but the three characters are so appealing that we are tantalized by the
lecture and posturing. Jan (Daniel Bruhl – who
actually is from Spain)
and Peter (Stipe Erceg
(from Croatia)
play two roommates who burglarize rich people’s houses and arrange the
furniture and belongings to make political “educational” statements. When
Peter’s girl friend Jule (Julia Jentsch)
is evicted from an apartment after being saddle with a 100000 euro debt for
totaling a rich man’s Mercedes in a rear-end accident when she was uninsured,
they decide to burgle the man Hardenberg (Burghart Klaussner). Jan and
Julia go back and Julia gets caught when Hardenberg
returns home. The trio kidnaps Hardenberg
and take him to a cabin in the Bavarian Alps.
Perhaps there is a bit of Stockholm Syndrome here, but the captors start to
bond with Hardenberg as he softens to their
political motives. Hardbenberg had been an SDS
activist once himself. But when he turned 30, he needed security and
stability. Then came the career. It seems that
getting rich is OK if it is justified by wife and family. “I didn’t make the
rules, I just play by them,” he says. At one point, he admits to a certain
belief in Darwinian style meritocracy.
Now here I can relate to my own experience with the
indignation of the far Left early in my adulthood, as I was “coming out” for
the second time. I had dabbled in 1972 a bit with the “People’s Party of New
Jersey” (Benjamin Spock was to be their
presidential candidate), which started with lettuce boycotts and started to
talk more aggressive. “Why do we have to have capitalism?” Well, not to take political indoctrination
too far here, one reason is that it takes self-interest to produce goods and
services that make people’s lives better and in the long run raise the
standard of living. Inevitably, some people will be “better,” but of course
there is a problem that unearned wealth feeds on itself unless its owners put
it back into the world for productive use. It’s always seemed to me that the
morality of this comes back not to redistribution of wealth among classes,
but on allocating responsibility for the disadvantaged and the vulnerable to
each individual person as a prerequisite for having “merit.”
The characters at the end will have a strange epiphany. It
is a bit confusing, perhaps, but it seems that the two men may at least be
bisexual (especially Jan, who at one point looks ready to be taken apart by
Peter after he has already had Julia). Hardenberg
gives a handwritten letter for forgive the debt, but then it seems he will not
keep his word. But the two boys, nice and attractive as they are, have one
more ace up their sleeves, to go to some Island like Elbe
and destroy some satellite dishes upon which European Union
telecommunications depend. So even this film has a hint of real warning about
what could happen.
Lord of War (2005, Lions
Gate/Ascendant/Saturn, dir. Andrew Niccol, 122 min,
R) is another one of those “large” and ambitious indie
films about big moral ideas. The opening wide screen shot is filled with
brass shell casings, and with the narrator/protagonist Ukranian
Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) doing math, calculating
that 11 out of 12 people in the world remain to be armed. At the end, he says
he doesn’t kill people, he just helps others do what
they want. Would this be the Second Amendment in our country? His arms career spans twenty years,
although none of the major characters seem to age on camera over the two
decades from 1982 to 2001. The film delivers his payoff in late spring 2001,
and denies the opportunity to move on to 9/11. Orlov
enlists his kid brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) and is chased by Interpol cop Jack Valentine (Ethan
Hawke). He marries Ava (Bridget Moynahan). The film is a docudrama, covering various
periods of history, including the early activities of Osama bin Laden, and
then the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day
1991. Of course, then, arms dealers have the great opportunities with those
left driftless by the end of the Cold War. At one
point, Jack claims that small arms are the greatest weapon of mass
destruction, and the film seems to miss the opportunity to explore the danger
in trafficking radiological materials or bio-weapons, but the money, after
all, was in selling to warlords. The film is supposedly a true story. Near
the end, the film uses Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” as a kind of requiem and
epiphany, as had Edukators.
Machuca
(2004, Menemsha/Studio Canal Madrid,
dir. Andres Wood, 121 Min, sug PG-13, Chile/Spain)
is an epic film about the political turmoil in Chile when right wing Augusto Pinochet Ugarte stages
a violent coup to replace far left socialist/Marxist Salvador Allende. The upheaval is seen through the eyes of two
schoolboys, one rich and one poor. Pedro Machuca is
the name of a 12-year-old barrio boy (played by Ariel Mateluna)
allowed to attend a rich-class Catholic school when the headmaster priest
Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbran) admits poor kids
for free from the Santiago shantytowns as part of Catholic good works and
charity (probably also to win converts for the Church). One morning a boy in
front of him Gonzalo Infante (Matias
Quer) helps him cheat on an English grammar test.
They quickly become close friends, to the chagrin of other boys, who
sometimes are suspicious. There are some intimate sports scenes and a shower
scene that shows life as more intimate than would be appropriate in a modern
American school. Pedro’s older sister (Manuella Martelli) teases the boys with some kissing and intimacy,
but in time the boys get wind of political storm to come. A big foreshadowing
occurs as a “PTA meeting” at the school
where some white parents complain about opening of the schools to latinos and “Commie” motives; the political relevance
today is that education is a major equalizer, as evidenced by today’s USA
policy of “no child left behind.” In
one of Gonzalo’s visits to his friend, he gags when he sees an outdoor privy
(I once did), and then later is told that he will grow up to own his dad’s
company while his friend Pedro will always be a janitor cleaning out turds. The
political coup, starting on TV, is violent, and soldiers take the school over
from the church. The barrios boys are expelled, and this includes Pedro (the
teacher addresses him as “Darling”). Gonzalo tries to visit his friend in the
shantytown and runs from the soldiers back to his own privileged background.
Despite Hispanic-sounding names, the upper class people (of European descent,
sometimes from Spain
itself) are pure white, often blond. This common in South
America, Mexico,
and in the
American southwest. The film winds up being a strong political commentary
about privilege and family values, and how moral balance at the individual
level can only follow some kind of basic social justice among different
classes of people. The photography often uses muted colors and tends to make Santiago
look like a drab place, even in the wealth sections, despite the Andes
nearby. One historical irony is that the Pinochet coup took place on September 11, 1973 (28 years before
the more notorious 9/11), which was late winter in Chile.
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