I managed to make it to two movies this weekend, and I was fortunate in that both of them were of exceptionally high calibre.
The first, Three Needles, was part of the Outtakes Film Festival, and one of the only films in the flier I decided was probably not an excuse for screening porn. And the female cast totally sold it for me: Lucy Liu (featuring in the first story, set in Southern China); Stockard Channing (always incredible, even with a dubious French Canadian accent); and Chloe Sivigny, Sandra Oh and Olympia Dukakis (the lead actresses in the third story set in Africa).
The stories were all about today’s take on AIDS, whether passed through lazy sterilisation practices by those capitalising on the blood of poor farm villagers (South China story), passed through wantonly careless professionals (Canada), or passed through a combination of fear, ignorance, poverty and malice (Africa). So really, the whole movie was fairly depressing. But there were scenes of humour and wonder, and the scenery of rural China, Africa and (I presume) Montreal were stunningly shot. And the stories themselves, illustrating how wide spread the disease is, how it is having a devastating effect on the poor and how it continues to affect people in the more affluent countries, was a sharp reminder of how widespread and, apparently, hopeless the situation seems.
The second film for the week was the Oscar winning German film, The Lives of Others, set in Stasi-ruled East Berlin. While I am not sure if should have won the Oscar over the superb Pan’s Labyrinth, it is definitely an incredible story, made more so because the people involved actually seemed to believe in the German Democratic Republic’s brand of socialism, but found the corruption of senior officials and the state of constant fear produced by the Stasi Secret Police and their hundreds of thousands of informants too much to bear. The story follows one Stasi man who is asked to spy on a leading playwright so that incriminating evidence can be found so that he can be discredited – and thus force his gorgeous girlfriend into the arms of a prominent politician. The performances are incredible, the grey East Berlin architecture austere and imposing, and the characters chilling, sympathetic and all too human. I found the final few “flash forwards” that attempted to bring closure to the main events of the film didn’t mesh well with the rest of the story, though the scenes were a lot more realistic and well done than the typical Hollywood “everyone gets their just desserts and ends up happily ever after” endings.
Both of these films are definitely not top of my list of cheerful movies to see. Both of them highlight man’s inhumanity to man, both intentional (e.g., torture) and a result of misguided good intentions (e.g., as a “cure” to AIDs). But both films also highlight the idealism and hope that drive people onward. Both I highly recommend.
Verdict: Two good ones.
1 comment:
If you haven't read it, I'd also recommend 'Stasiland' by Anna Funder, which features many interviews with people who lived in East Germany during its existence, including former Stasi as well as victims of the Stasi.
It's worth noting that there was a sincere belief among some of them that the system was necessary to prevent the return of Nazism and the possibility of another Holocaust (irony noted). I thought The Lives of Others tapped into a lot of the mindset of belief in [their brand of] socialism, but never quite got the same sense of the stakes involved.
One thing in that ending which didn't quite come across either was the extent to which the Stasi destroyed their own paper trail on the fall of the East German state. The playwright just wanders into an archive and everything is on hand. I was under the impression that most of what survives has been reassembled from shredded documents (the burnt documents are beyond reconstruction). Part of the reason for this destruction, and in another light for the fall of the state, is that the Stasi had reached such a fervour of paranoia by the 80s that it's speculated even Honecker was under surveillance...
One other thing, and in opposition to an idealistic interpretation of that anti-Nazi principle, is that East Germany fobbed off the responsibility for Nazism onto West Germany. And almost as a "you'll get yours" reaction to the Prussian dominance of the original federation of Germany, East German government was dominated by Saxons (as in people from Saxony, not England...) Either way, anything bad in East Germany's pre-division past was always someone else's fault.
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