Paradise by the bomb blast lights

Continuing to skip ahead as I wait for Xiu Xiu, I watched Paradise Now.  Wow, what a film.  I think this one will stay with me longer than The Color of Paradise or Raise the Red Lantern, both of which I had seen prior to taking this course.  

Consider what Khaled says in that first taped statement. What is your reaction to the reasons he gives?

Khaled states that the Palestinians “have no other way to fight,” having exhausted “all possible means to end [Israel’s] occupation, with political and peaceful means.”  To remain in an occupied territory – a land he believes is his and is being illegally absorbed by Israel – is to “accept inferiority,” to “disappear.” 

Who owns what is a big question that I cannot answer.  Israel was there first, so perhaps they can claim squatters’ rights.  But they did leave, others settled there, and it became primarily the land of Palestinians.  Maybe they are the ones with squatters’ rights.  Israelis returned, demanded their land back, and attempted to regain control.  As Said says in the film, how can the occupier play the victim?  Israel cannot have it both ways, believe the Palestinians.

My first reaction, after reading the course materials and watching the film up until the point of Khaled’s statement, is that he has a point.  Israel does not want to share the land; they desire to purge it of any mark of Palestine.  Living in an occupied state must feel like prison, and in fact, the film’s characters repeatedly refer to their awful existence under such conditions.  Said left the West Bank only once in his twenty-some years.  He can’t even travel from town to town without going through checkpoints.  It is no way to live, yet it is living. 

On the other hand, Palestine has not, as Khaled would have us believe, tried “all possible means” to end the occupation.  They have tried some means, and most of those involved force.  Suha argues for peaceful resistance, claiming that dying for the cause does no good for those left behind.  They not only have to continue the fight, they are punished for the “sacrifices” of their loved ones.  Khaled appears to refuse to disagree with her, but later in the film, he tries to convince Said as Suha tried to convince him. 

I do think that Khaled raised some valid issues with Israeli occupation, but I don’t think that they justify his planned act of terrorism.

Respond to the second clip and the debate between Khaled and Suha, which in many ways mirrors the debate over violent and non-violent struggle against oppression.

I’m trying to think of an instance in history where peaceful resistance met with lasting success, and I am at a loss.  There may be one, and my limited knowledge of world history undoubtedly proves my weakness on this issue.  But Khaled asks a valid question:  how can you win a moral war if your opponent has no morals?  Regardless of whether he is correct about Israel’s amorality, his perception is that he speaks the truth.  If you believe that your adversary will fight dirty no matter how clean you are, will you win?  Maybe, as a high school English teacher, I’ve been around teenagers too long, but I’ve yet to see Suha’s plan prove successful.  On the other hand, suicide bombers do not further the cause they represent, either.  What good do they do, other than feed their own egos to be martyrs and heroes?  They believe they will go to heaven; but what about those left behind on earth?  Suha tries to explain this to Khaled, noting that his bombing ultimately destroys his fellow Palestinians. 

I am left with the consideration that neither of them is correct.  Peaceful resistance doesn’t work, but neither do suicide bombings.  Diplomacy should be the answer, as proven by the small successes such as Carter’s peace accords between Begin and Sadat.

Do you agree more with the petition to have the film removed as an award nominee or with the counter-petition?What are you reasons for favoring one side over the other?

I do not agree with the petition to remove Paradise Now from award consideration.  The arguments for this are that Palestine is not a true state and that the film offers a too-sympathetic view of suicide bombers.

Regarding the first argument:  I don’t really care, to be blunt.  A film is a film, and we should not deny Paradise Now its due simply because there is debate over whether or not Palestine is its own country.  That argument, to me, is presented by cowards and cry babies who are looking for the teeniest loophole.  To them, I say, put on your big girl pants and get over it.

As for the argument that Paradise Now humanizes suicide bombers and, as such, offers a dangerous example of sympathy, I concur with Professor Jones, who said in an audio clip on his blog that it’s okay to humanize Khaled and Said because they are, after all, humans.  What is more important, Jones states, is to understand the context within which suicide bombers exist, and I think that the film presented that very well and very fairly.  Did I sympathize?  Yes.  Does it make me cheer on suicide bombers?  No.  In fact, I applauded Khaled and was angry with Said.  Khaled took the stronger, more difficult path, whereas Said, even in an act of martyrdom, took the weaker, easier one.

Iran, Iran so far away ...

For Unit 6 - yes, I skipped ahead because my good friends at NetFlix sent the Iranian movies before I received the copy of Xiu-Xiu that I bought off of eBay - I chose to revisit a film that I loved the first time I saw it about seven years ago, The Color of Paradise.

Three scenes in The Color of Paradise stand out to me as particularly illuminating.

The first comes at the beginning of the film, when Mohammed waits for his father to pick him up from the school for the blind that he attends in Tehran. The other children’s parents show up on time because it is the last day before summer break, but Mohammed’s father is late. While he waits, Mohammed hears a baby bird fall out of a tree. He makes his way to the bird and carefully climbs up the tree, depositing the bird back in its nest. We see Mohammed’s immersion in nature; he hears a baby bird slip out of its nest and fall to the ground, a sound most of us could hear 100 times a day and not realize it. His tender care of the bird is a blatant contrast to his father’s seeming desertion of him. We learn a lot about Mohammed in this sequence, and we also learn about his father. Mohammed is alone and potentially abandoned, yet he cannot allow the same to happen to a tiny bird.

A second scene that revealed a lot about the film and writer/director Majid Majidi’s themes was when Mohammed went to work for the blind carpenter. Of all of the sadness we have seen Mohammed face – from being left at school until long after otherchildren’s parents picked them up, to his father requesting that the school keep him, to being yanked out of his sisters’ school after he experienced wonderful success because it exposed his existence, to being shipped off to a blind carpenter – the only time we see Mohammed cry is in this scene. Even then, it is not a maudlin self-pitying cry. It is far more raw and intimate. He wants someone to love him. His mother has been dead for five years, his grandmother and sisters adore him, but he has no love from his father. Iran is a patriarchal society wherein men hold most of the power. Yes, a mother’s love is vital, but a father’s love is equally so. Mohammed feels abandoned not only by his earthly father but by his God as well. He weeps because he wants to be loved, and he wants to see God. Majidi is very direct with this scene: we all want and need to be loved. And those of us who believe in God want to see Him. There should not be distance between us and the people – or God – who love us. We need love.

The final revealing scene is the final scene in the film. Mohammed’s father came to get him from the carpenter, but on their trip home, Mohammed tumbles through a rickety bridge and falls into the turbulent river below. Hashem, his father, jumps in after the boy, but Mohammed washes up on the banks of the river, dead. Finally realizing what he has loved and lost, Hashem cradles Mohammed in his lap. Majidi trains the camera on Mohammed’s tiny hand, the fingers of which seem to flinch and move faintly. Mohammed wanted to “see” God, and the blind see by touching. Having died, Mohammed now, finally, can see God. It is a heartbreaking scene, yet oddly uplifting. Hashem finally realizes the love he had for his son, and Mohammed finally is with God, who loves him, and whom Mohammed can see. Majidi’s themes of isolation, nature and love all come together in this scene. Mohammed died at the hand of nature, his father unable to save him, but his isolation ended. He now is in heaven, reunited with his mother and grandmother, and can see God, and surrounded by the love that was denied him on earth. Perhaps Majidi says here that Iran must kill off that which isolates it from the rest of the world in order to be accepted.

I would not rewrite the ending to this movie, although undoubtedly, if Hollywood were to remake The Color of Paradise, Hashem would come to love his son far sooner and the two would live happily ever after. It is terribly sad, but necessary. Life doesn’t offer neat endings, no matter how much Hollywood would have us believe otherwise. Part of the beauty of The Color of Paradise is the joy we feel for what we imagine Mohammed experiences when he gets to heaven.

I feel the Earth move ... or maybe not

Of the two reviews we read for this assignment, I found things in both with which I agree and disagree.

Zarminae Ansari gave the more positive review, believing that Deepa Mehta's Earth "effectively conveys the reality of the partition and will go a long way in explaining to the rest of the world the cause of the wounds that run deep even today between India and Pakistan."  I'm not sure I concur with this sentiment; Mehta shows only one "reality" of the partition - the violent one.  She does not tell us how India emerged from the partition or how it affected the country 40 or 50 years later.  I do agree, however, that Earth exposed the "wounds" inflicted by the partition.  I have a much better understanding of why India and Pakistan don't like each other.

C.J.S. Wallia, on the other hand, found Earth to be "simplistic," "poorly developed," and a "vicious" distortion of the facts behind the partition.  This may be true.  The film certainly casts a dark eye on the Sikhs, and several of the characters are weak and lack development.  I agree with Wallia especially on Mehta's choice of eight-year-old Lenny-baby as the narrator.  Wallia notes that using Lenny's viewpoint is "too limiting" and "fails to create dramatic situations that could bring out Lenny Baby's anguished bewilderment of the tragic events of the partition."  That, I believe, was the film's biggest weakness.

I do not dislike the film as strongly as Wallia does, but I do not think it provides as balanced or thorough presentation of the partition as Ansari does.  Another review I read, by Stephen Holden at The New York Times, summed up the film best:  "a ruddy twilit sensuality along with a sense of nocturnal foreboding."  

I wish I could write like that.  

Oh, the agony

First let me say that I love foreign films, so a great part of the appeal of this class for me was the opportunity to really get to know foreign films, their filmmakers, and their cultural and historical contexts.  

If, however, my first exposure to foreign films was Before the Rain, I might very well have gone no further and instead contented myself with such highbrow entertainment as High School Musical.

With all due respect to Janet Maslin and Roger Ebert, I did not find Before the Rain to be "sophisticated," "an art film about war," or "poetry."  My sentiments were more in line with Rita Kempley's:  impenetrable, narratively weak and occasionally akin to a "soap operetta."  

Director Milčo Mančevski, who wrote the script's first draft in a week (Richard Woodward, "Slav of New York"), purports to educate us ignorant Westerners on the ills, travails, oddities and atrocities occurring in Macedonia.  He achieves this, to some degree, albeit in a very ham-fisted, precious, art house kind of way.  We certainly learn that murder and evil are capricious, not hemmed in by family bloodlines, and not entirely unavoidable.  Mančevski even shows us photos from the Holocaust, just to ram home the message that we haven't learned anything after all.  The systematic destruction and murder of people based on their culture, religion or ethnicity still exist.  Too bad Darfur happened after this film was made; no doubt Mančevski would have thrown in some photos from that as well.  

A line uttered in the film on more than one occasion - just in case we miss the importance of it the first time around - says that "time never dies; the circle is never round."  This is exemplified in the three stories contained within Before the Rain in a couple of ways:  first, the three stories are tied to each other through common characters, and Mančevski employs a nonlinear storytelling device.  Try to make sense of the timeline of this film, because it is not there to make.

The sweetest, for lack of a better word, story of the three is the first one, "Words," an ironic title given that one of the characters, a young Macedonian monk, has taken a two-year vow of silence.  The monk shields - and quickly falls in love with - a young girl on the run, being chased by her family because she killed one of them.  The reason behind her crime is not explained, which Mančevski perhaps intends as a symbol of the unfeeling, boundary-less nature of war.  The monk and the girl run off together, and the ending to their tale is a harbinger of endings to come.  

The second story, called "Faces," is set in London, and features a photo editor torn between her cold, remote (Mančevski all but uses a tight shot of a stiff upper lip) British husband and swarthy, passionate Macedonian photographer lover.  The latter reunites with her briefly in the back of a taxi before heading toward home.  She then meets up with the estranged husband, confronts him regarding the state of their marriage and other issues, and then, echoing "Words," suffers a tragedy.  

The photographer's story makes up the third installment, "Pictures."  Aleks hasn't been home in 16 years, although his return hardly is heralded throughout the town.  The first resident he meets, a surly teen (Mančevski clearly enjoys his stereotypes), is holding an automatic rifle.  Aleks desperately wants to see Hana, his Albanian former lover, despite resistance from his family and hers.  We know from "Words" and "Faces" that this will not end well.  

Before the Rain strikes me as one of those Very Important Movies that I am supposed to embrace, but I just can't.  It is too precious; Mančevski tries too hard to be artistic in imparting his Message.

I struggled to connect to this film, but I am willing to accede the possibility that watching it on my laptop through YouTube may have played a part in that.