The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)

By the time Issach de Bankole's character (the film's credits call him the "Lone Man") orders two separate cups of espresso, extracts a note written in code from a Le Boxer matchbox and washes it down with a gulp of coffee for the third time, it becomes obvious The Limits of Control is an exercise in repetition. There's always the same greeting exchanged between the Lone Man and the enigmatic strangers he encounters (in Spanish "you don't speak Spanish, do you?"). Conversations always follow the same basic template with the main theme varied each time (sometimes it's art, sometimes it's science or bohemians). The Lone Man is always stoic, never smiles, never has sex while he is on the job and never uses a cell phone, and (for no apparent reason at all) always eats the note after he reads it. We wait in earnest for something else to happen, for the pattern to change up, but what's ironic is that even when it finally does--when the Lone Man reaches his destination, carries out his mission, and returns home extracting this time a blank note from a Le Boxer matchbox--it feels strangely predictable too. Recall Down by Law and we wonder if Jarmusch has lost his sense of the outlandish, the outrageous, the witty.

Nothing childlike, nothing childish

Not everything that features children is childish. For those dissatisfied with High School Musical, look no further than two must-see movies that deal with childhood in a way that is intelligent, playful, always engaging, and definitely adult.

The Class (Entre les murs) stormed the movie world last year with its Palme d'Or victory at Cannes--France's first win in 21 years--and continues to exhilarate and inspire audiences across the globe. Based on ex-teacher Francois Begaudeau's memoir of his experiences in a multi-cultural Parisian school, this well-acted, improvisatory, documentary-styled drama reveals a year of intense teacher-pupil interaction. Teacher Francois Marin (Francois Begaudeau) is beset by problems almost every day at school. Either the 15 year-olds (intentionally) forget to bring their school material to class, or they quarrel among one another, throw dirty jokes around, and taunt him. They are unimpressed with his friendly approach and dismiss him for knowing nothing about their multi-cultural background. To their minds, The Diary of Anne Frank is obsolete and the ability to speak perfect French irrelevant. They believe there are more important things in life, and they might be right.

The movie aims precisely to give these adolescents a voice, to remind audiences that despite their age and inexperience, they may actually know what they want--perhaps more than we do. Director Laurent Cantet also tackles France's controversial race-related issues, featuring in one sequence a lesson on the French language and capturing, with an observant camera, how most pupils cannot care less about French grammar. The implicit question Cantet raises here is, do these adolescents, mostly of non-French background but likely born in France, become less French as a result? It's a bold move that provokes audiences to rethink the concept of French identity.

Cantet also takes great care in developing a nuanced plot and depicting a complex moral reality where the teacher is de-sanctified and makes just as many mistakes as the adolescents. Once Marin loses control and impulsively calls two girls "whores" for having disturbed a teachers' meeting the evening before. This remark causes something of a riot in the classroom and the damage to the teacher-pupil relationship is far-reaching.

Iranian master of cinema Abbas Kiarostami's simultaneously humorous and serious Ten (2002) is less gloomy than the outstanding, gripping Taste of Cherry (1997) and more upbeat. It provides insight into the lives of Iranian women today and features an outrageously feisty but strangely fascinating young boy, Amin Mahernot. Never have I seen a kid argue like a man before, and never have I witnessed a battle of the sexes that is as slippery and intriguing.

In three juicy episodes (out of the total of ten), we see Amin accusing his mother, Mania Akbari (who sits behind the wheel throughout the film) for divorcing his father and neglecting his need for a wholesome family. When his mother raises her voice and defends the happiness she finds with her present boyfriend, Amin raises his too, complaining that her voice is too loud, flailing his hands wildly and preventing his mother from getting a word in. He is angry and for the most part reproaches her for not fulfilling the responsibilities of the "ideal woman". What does an 8-year old know about gender responsibilities? The level of precociousness is baffling, the hint of chauvinism anything but funny.

As accusations continue to sputter out of Amins' mouth, one may be tempted to write off his behaviour as disrespectful. But before doing so, note that the movie takes place in a foreign culture after all. Maybe in Iran, parents and children interact in a manner different to ours? Maybe perceptions of male-female dynamics are so deep-rooted and innate that even children know how men and women should behave?

This is where Kiarostami's movie comes in as an introductory but instructive eye-opener. The director places the camera on the car's dashboard and allows his actors/actresses to develop the drama on their own in the microcosm of the vehicle. As Mania drives around and interacts with the string of characters-- Amin, a female friend whom Mania scolds for having subordinated herself to an unreliable man, a prostitute who gets into the car thinking Mania was male, and other female characters--we also become her passengers, taken along for the ride. We partake in the female's thoughts, which appear at once Iranian and universal, and appreciate how male-female relations function in that culture, as exemplified by Amin and Mania's argument or hinted at obliquely in other episodes. But the list of revelations doesn't end here. There is an infinite number of ways to read the movie and understand its social and political implications for both sides of the Atlantic, and that's one reason why I enjoyed it so thoroughly--besides being completely overwhelmed by Amin's uncanny and anything-but-childlike ferocity.

Araya (Margot Benacerrai, 1959)

The booming voice of the narrator, the pentatonic scale-dominated movie score, the Sun, the Wind and the Sea that fill the movie screen…these are examples of the haunting aspects to the black-and-white Araya, an unforgettable journey into a Venezuelan peninsula inhabited by the Araya people and a persistent, uncannily awe-inspiring look at a community unfamiliar to most but worthy of attention, especially since threats to destroy their traditional livelihood are mounting.

At its heart, Araya is a dense documentary, a drone-like meditation on and solemn observation of nature and man with breathtaking images and evocative sounds. The opening credits--waves crashing against the shore, a minimalist score and panning shots of this vast peninsula--evoke something exotic and distant. A thick male voice narrates dramatically, calling out to each individual viewer and pulling him into the heart of the peninsula. Long takes establish an appropriately patient pace, and overhead, sweeping shots magnify the region's natural beauty.

The Araya people are a subsistent community. Their daily life revolves around one main concern--nutrition--and their movements, gestures and the sparse words that are being exchanged all reflect their down-to-earth nature. Men are born to be fishermen or salt-miners, and women help with the salt mines, make pottery, sell fish, and care for their families. The camera eagerly captures their daily routines: repetitive and rhythmically edited mid-shots of men thrashing salt and propping baskets of crystal on their heads and shoulders, climbing up a salt hill to deposit salt and returning to get more salt, call to mind images of farming from Soviet constructivist Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930).

Whereas man's power over nature and the exertion of this power to control production and to provide for a means of life lie at the heart of Soviet cinema, in the case of Araya the human being is both a master of his environment as well as its servant. The narration highlights the predominance of the Sea as the provider for life, the omnipresence of the Sun and the Wind. Man is but a small part of this vast piece of nature. Diligently, the Araya people work with and harvest from nature for their needs but never damage it. No matter its number, the community exudes a sense of humility. Man and nature co-exist in harmony: there are no factories, no iPods, no SUVs to pollute the natural environment.

What are the Araya people really like? What do they do other than work, and what do they think about their lives? In their stoic way, they do not express with words what they think. Instead, the impassioned narrator describes them, uses his imagination, even tries to step into their shoes and to visualise what they may be thinking. His staccato and dramatic delivery is full of vivid emotions, and like a poet he conjures up a very subjective image of the people and the place.

Given this piece of narration, it becomes clear that Araya is more than just a documentary: it is both documentary and narrative cinema. On the one hand, it documents the livelihood of this community by showing how they live and what the landscape is like; on the other, it subjectifies what it sees by having a narrator voice his personal response that may or may not reflect what the Araya people think. His commentary becomes the storyline. As men move about on the salt mine, he ponders what it may be like working so hard in the sun and raises the question, "When will this fatigue ever be over?" Seeing father and son get up before day break every day to prepare their fishing boat, and imagining that this must be a rather monotonous task, he wonders aloud whether these people ever wish to change the way things are in their lives, as if he would do so were he in their place. The commentary not only provides information, it enthralls viewers at the same time with an added layer of subjective poetry that interprets and gives meaning to every single grain of salt, every single bead of sweat.

Given the rich imagery, it is shocking to realise in the movie's finale that this poetry may soon cease to exist. When the machinery arrives--it is never quite clear from where or from whom-- to mechanise part of the salt-mines operation, the incongruity of the tractors with the previously pristine desert landscape is as jarring as the movie's abrupt change of mood punctuated by a now thrill and urgent score. The narrator expresses consternation: will the people's hands stop making their movement, will they stop labouring for the precious salts? What will become of their lives? Like the narrator, a viewer cannot help but feel pessimistic about what the camera sees: machines, like pests on a field, crawling on the same paths on which generation after generation has toiled. By now a viewer feels so moved by the sounds and the images that he even starts to care for a community that previously seems so distant and irrelevant but whose imminent destruction now leaves him feeling dark, disturbed. The movie has not only offered a glimpse into a far-away land but, without the viewer knowing it, enraptured him with its humanism and affected him with its sympathy for the Araya people. A magnificent work full of poetry and passion for life and a valuable lesson on how fragile life actually is in our modern times dominated by progress and technology.

Permanent Vacation (Jim Jarmusch, 1980)

Like the aimless, "drifting" slacker protagonist it portrays, Jim Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation is itself a nomad of sorts: it follows Allie Christopher Parker around as he wanders around the gritty, largely depilated nondescript New York neighbourhood, listens to the lone saxophone corner blow his horn around the corner, and dances whenever the music pleases him. Despite being a loner who is estranged from his institutionalised mother and not interested in a communal way of living with his roommate (or girlfriend), Leila, Allie is an insightful youth rather mature for his age. He understands he is not cut out for ambitions or goals after which people normally go after in life. He knows all too well about loneliness--"everyone is lonely"--and resorts to drifting around the neighbourhood so that he will not be constantly reminded of his lonesome state.

As a film that blends fiction and documentary, Permanent Vacation places great emphasis on the cityscape in which Allie lives. It plays like a landlocked contemplation on a strange environment that lacks a sense of community. Just like Allie, the other individuals he meets--a veteran who hallucinates that a new war is impending; the withdrawn girl who works at the cinema; a black person in the cinema's lobby sharing a joke; the saxophone player who solos in the depths of night--seem to embody an equal degree of aloneness. It seems that in a city, meeting is always temporary, inter-personal interaction transient: Allie would stop to chat and to listen to these individuals, but then he will be on his way again.

While Allie does not want to become tied down with other people or with New York, and finally decides to leave to Europe by boat, he never seems to be in a rush with how he lives, or with life itself. His naturalistic acting and charming boyish looks endear him to curious viewers. The movie appears to be equally patient and relishes the sights, sounds and smells of the city, with extended takes and non-kinetic editing being key to its moderate pacing. Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie's unadorned yet evocative score that features the latter on saxophone creates a static, near-surreal vacuum in which the streets as well as people are enveloped, a space where time feels stagnant. When the harbour is seen at last, and the boat gets under way, a sense of movement takes over. What will happen to Allie remains a mystery that Jarmusch was contented to leave unsolved. Life is like a permanent vacation, after all.

L'Appat (The Bait, Bertrand Tavernier 1995)

Horrifying events take on an irreverent, cheeky look as three adolescents rummage through their victim's house and commit murder one second and fight over the remote control the next.

While based on true events that took place in Paris in 1984, Bertrand Tavernier's L'Appat is not meant to be a documentary. Rather, it feels like a small-scale noir infused with disorder and accidents. As much as the three adolescents are bent on breaking into their victims' homes, people with power and money whose contact Nathalie systematically organises in her address book, they are never able to device a more-than-makeshift plan. Often Nathalie, the bait, forgets to leave the door to the victim's apartment open for her accomplices; they cannot cope with more advanced security systems and Nathalie's usual way of abandoning a break-in plan at the last minute is by making an excuse to buy Cools cigarettes. Twice they come close to accomplishing their goal, only to discover that their victims' wealth falls far below their estimation. The adolescents grab what they can, and struggle to kill the victims off--hitting one with a heavy object on the skull, stabbing one with a letter opener.

One of the earliest sequences shows Nathalie complaining that Eric and Bruno have been watching Scarface for the "twentieth time". Whether this establishes the fact that Eric and Bruno have violent inclinations is irrelevant, but their immersion in thriller material complements to a certain extent their lack of remorse over their crime. Nathalie does show a trace of uncertainty and confides in her friend Patricia her knowledge (albeit not seeing it directly) that the two have taken lives in their last outings.

The police interrogates Nathalie, who up to the final second makes up stories along the way to hide her involvement. She finally gives up the truth, implicating however Eric and Bruno and rejecting having played a part in the murders. Her coy question at the police officer, "Will I be released before Christmas? Because I need to visit my father" ends the film on an unsettling note especially because Nathalie seems so uncannily innocent. Here Tavernier maximises the sense of teenage abandon and disregard, which he previously highlights by juxtaposing the murders (which take place behind closed doors) with Nathalie blocking out the victims' screams by listening to rock music on her walkman. As the camera focuses on Nathalie and her waiting for her companions to complete the job, it effectively turns its head away from the murder, reflecting Nathalie's attitude of disaffection. While L'Appat goes the full length capturing the adolescents' daily life as well as their crimes, it does not directly condemn them; yet its apparent lack of moral lesson and even giddy, slightly romanticising depiction of the threesome is exactly key to the compelling portrayal of dangerously carefree adolescent attitude and the darkness that actually lies in their yet immature souls.

Sam Mendes speaks to Ali Jafar

Playing with fire--gladly

He never said, "too bad they didn't get it in the United States". For Sam Mendes, the British expatriate in Hollywood with already two widely-circulated American movies in his bag, his affair with Uncle Sam is strictly business. There is no whining, no blaming. Mendes came to the United States with a "European objectivity" to fashion movies that mirror the American experience, and he knew, from the outset, that not all Americans will be comfortable with what they see--not least because in some ways, they regard him as an outsider.

"Over there they think, 'we've put up with him talking about American suburbia, we've put up with him doing a gangster movie, do we really have to put up with him doing a war movie about the Middle East, as well?'" Mendes, in his humorous, casual and confident manner, eased into his chair as we met in London to talk about his latest work. A rueful smile found its way into his face. "In Europe they understood Jarhead. They understand it comes from the tradition of absurdist movies that deal with the futility of war, and has more in common with Beckett, Sartre and Buñuel. In the United States, it's like talking about a different movie." Some American viewers criticise Jarhead for failing to be like an Oliver Stone movie. Mendes' spasms of chuckles, not in the least condescending, showed however that this is a man who knows what he is up against, especially when he makes an adventurous foray into war movie territory, teases the genre and unnerves his audience.

Jarhead is a no-combat movie that does not glorify war or applaud the men who go to war. Drawing on the memoir of the same name by U.S. Marine Anthony Swofford, Mendes disobeys all the laws of American movies and produces a matter-of-fact First Gulf War testimony shorn of explosions but rife with endless waiting, uncertainty and disappointment, all true aspects of war that have frequently eluded the public's imagination. The sense of unease culminates in the final realisation that fundamentally, preparation for war amounts to nothing and justifies nothing. In the face of the current Second Gulf War, this is something the highly-strung Americans do not want to hear.

"I was very aware I was playing with fire." Mendes' self-assurance and clarity of purpose emphasised that Jarhead's message has always been provocative from the outset. "Here, men are being trained and pumped up for the ultimate state-of-the-art war, but are eventually denied it. When war does emerge, it runs ahead of them and they become its witnesses, its victims." The troopers "walked in and didn't have any of those things"--the mythic figure of Saddam Hussein, his stock of biochemical weaponry and immense army, and the huge casualties that the troops thought would await them. The irony remains pronounced, up to the very end--where troopers are convinced they will never have to return--and is multiplied by what the country is to do fifteen years later.

Jarhead shows a bleak situation and sends a grim message to audiences, who now need to confront war's futility and reassess the image of the "heroes" who become involved in an enterprise that eventually adds up to so little. "This is not a movie that can be used to pump up marines," Mendes declared plainly. With the lack of gunfire and explosions, audiences will be hard-pressed to revel in an adrenaline-charged experience. Instead they are to realise it is horrendous to want to become involved the first place. "There's a much more frightening question than asking why politicians want to go to war at a particular time. It's, what can you possibly get out of becoming a soldier and fighting in a war?"

Mendes takes the topic of war seriously. Jarhead makes allusions to other war movies and, in particular, shows the Marines watching clips from Apocalypse Now, whose original editor Walter Murch is also editor here. Mendes knows comparisons to the movies he draws on, like Full Metal Jacket among others, are inevitable, and points to how movie images contribute to the public's imagination of history in general. "Vietnam, for us, is not really Vietnam or documentaries about Vietnam. It's Coppala's Vietnam, Kubrick's Vietnam, Oliver Stones' Vietnam, Cimino's Vietnam. All you really have is movies. Even more so with World War II. Saving Private Ryan is World War II for a generation of young men." What Jarhead also has in common with the war movies it is compared with, is its function in raising questions, in provoking controversy.

Mendes' earlier American Beauty and Road to Perdition are constructed around predetermined storyboards, but with Jarhead, abandoning storyboard control and working with a new cinematographer, Roger Deakins (Conrad Hall was cinematographer for his previous movies), Mendes has taken a step in the improvisatory direction to fashion something more "organic and fluid". His mise-en-scène is however still down to earth. "It's like working with a play here. I told Roger, don't worry about the CGI." To a certain extent, this explains the sober, serious undertone of Jarhead, and its self-defined "not-a-crowd-pleaser" character.

Like the directors he admires--Roman Polanski, Milos Forman, Ang Lee--Mendes has come to terms with his relationship with the United States and deals confidently with American subject matters. Musing about his previous experience working in theatre and learning to adapt to the public eye, Mendes' expression revealed he is up for more: not only to match the public's demands, but to surprise and to challenge the public. Just like American Beauty bares the dark sides of American suburbia, Jarhead, possibly the first postmodern war movie, is an unsettling, unequivocal testimony to the present-day anxiety and even fatuity that characterise the 21st century American experience. I am convinced that Mendes' future output will continue to be, in significant ways, self-consciously reflective of the truth--regardless whether the very subjects of its critique will get it.

The Drummer (Kenneth Bi, Hong Kong/Taiwan/Germany, 2008)

The somewhat different Hong Kong-Taiwanese gangster film

In terms of festival circuit performance, The Drummer has done quite well: it has been nominated for prizes at the Golden Horse Film Festival and Hong Kong Film Awards, and is even the first film from Hong Kong and Taiwan to be selected for competition at Sundance.

And in terms of substance, The Drummer does an equally good job. Director Kenneth Bi starts off by using Hong Kong gangster genre film elements. Sid (Jaycee Chan), the reckless drummer son of Kwan (award-winning Tony Leung), a local gang leader, gets into trouble after sleeping with the wife of rival gang boss Ma (Kenneth Tsang). Ma demands compensation; Kwan covers for Sid and sends him into exile in Taiwan. With quick-paced editing, facial close-ups and a fiery performance from Tony Leung as the loving but strict and rather overbearing gangster father, an underlying violence comparable to that which characterises gangster pieces by Bi's contemporary, Johnny To (like Mad Detective, Exiled), is created.

But Kenneth Bi innovatively interjects the gangster backdrop with a surprising, peaceful middle section that borrows from musicals (minus the glib songs and dance) and stage performances, like Riverdance. Here, the actual Zen drummers of Taiwan's renowned U-Theatre drum group play themselves living and practicing in seclusion on a mountain in Taiwan. Sid encounters them on his exile, and after completing some prerequisite chores, he becomes a member and later a transformed person. Sam Koa on camera carefully captures the impressive drum numbers, and Kenneth Bi even gets philosophical about the relationship between man and music.

The film does end like a gangster film: Sid returns to Hong Kong with U-Theatre to tour, but is confronted with the sudden murder of his father, plotted by his own right-hand man, Ah Chiu (Roy Cheung). But because the director injects the formula with a creative twist, maintains a humorous touch and uses a band of able actors and actresses, he has created something that is different--and constantly entertaining.