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Reviews
Keshtzar haye sepid (2009)
A powerful early Rasoulof composition
As with Rasoulof's "Iron Island" (2005) and "There is No Evil" (2020), this film features intense, rarely seen backgrounds, and like those films it is heavy with criticism of Iran's government.
Here Rasoulof allegorizes his government as an infirm old man who is sustained by the bitter and needless suffering of his people. The people collectively are suffering because the sea has become increasingly salty, and that leads them to brutal acts of superstition against various weak members of society. Several of the tokens of those brutal acts are drawn together in the second-to-last scene - dark red sandals (recalling an intentional drowning of a man unable to stand up for himself), a virgin sacrificed as a bride to the sea (to appease it and persuade it to be less salty), a stubborn vision of the sea as red rather than blue (for which an artist is blinded by having monkey urine poured into his eyes, and then banished to pointless labor on a barren rock in the midst of the sea). The most important symbol of suffering: the actual tears of the people, collected by the gruff main character and finally used as a kind of libation to the infirm old man.
The film was made on and near Lake Urmia, a saltwater lake in northern Iran that has greatly shrunk (and become harshly saline) due to drought.
One day, Iran will regard Rasoulof as an artistic master-hand of the nation. But not yet, alas.
L'amica geniale (2018)
Serviceable, but fails utterly to convey the novel's content
You may enjoy this carefully and expensively made series. Much labor has gone into it.
The trouble is, it seems to miss virtually everything of prime importance in Ferrante's original Neapolitan Novels. The novels focus on the inner life - reflections and aspirations - of a woman as she narrates her long, rather competitive friendship with her alter ego, the "amica geniale" of the title. It seems to me the TV series narrates the events of the story adequately, but not the narrator's inner life - almost not at all.
So I would call the series failure as an adaptation. But, as I say, you may enjoy it for itself.
Tui (2020)
Slightly dark romantic comedy bearing insightful allegory
This is an allegory about "completing" a marriage that has been cut off before it had time to resolve its problems through the passage of time.
The acting is good and the story combines mostly low-key humor with characteristically Taiwanese displays of personal reserve. The story itself is unusual and drew my interest effectively.
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006)
Slow but strong portrayal of a native people acquiescing to assimilation
This film deals with Inuktitut assimilation and the abandonment of shamanism for Christianity. The lead character, Avva or Aua, is based on one of the last traditional Inuktitut shamans, who was interviewed at length by the Greenland anthropologist Knud Rasmussen shortly after World War I. I suspect two of the character's uninterrupted narratives in the film originate in the Rasmussen documents.
There were a number of cinematic tokens of the departure of shamanistic presence. One was a drop in the quality of song during the movie, which was particularly striking because of the intrusion of von Flotow's "M'appari" early in the film. Christian hymns in the Inuktitut language sounded considerably feebler than either the original native song or the Western opera aria. I take it there is a message there about assimilation.
There was also some thought-provoking contrast to the Inuktitut people in the form of Scandinavian actors, playing (apparently) Inuktitut-speaking Greenlanders - they're portrayed shallowly, but one point made clearly is that they are more prone to brooding than the Inuktitut, of whom the shaman says, "We believe happy people should not worry about hidden things. Our spirits are offended if we think too much." Also: "Our helping spirits don't like it when people remain sad too long."
There are visual subtleties in the story that I didn't grasp at first - one of them is an unexplained character visible only in a couple of scenes but whose meaning becomes clear late in the film, and on a second viewing it made the film all the more compelling. Frankly, I felt shocked when I understood that character's function, but it was a shock of deeper understanding.
This movie was slow going, and some of its message is conveyed symbolically. I can imagine a casual viewer being bored by it. It took me a second viewing to feel I had noticed most of the authors' messages about the theme. The purposeful tedium of long, dark scenes inside igloos was eased by other scenes of sled-dogs or of harsh outdoor weather. But in general, you can hardly hope to avoid slowness when shamans are involved - they're going to give you only as much information as they choose to, and only in the forms they choose to. So get ready to wait and pay attention - the portrayal of the end of shamanism is quite powerful.
I was sorry not to find this 2006 film on DVD when I looked for it in 2019 - I finally found it for sale via iTunes.