Showing posts with label Neil McGlone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Neil McGlone. Show all posts

Monday 21 April 2014

I want to go to the park

This is a review of Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


Easter Monday

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998)



It was shown as part of the series The Cinema of Childhood (please visit the web-site at cinemaofchildhood.com for more information), which is presented by Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) and Filmhouse (@Filmhouse), and is introduced by Mark Cousins' film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (with Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm)). At a special screening at The Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge (@CamPicturehouse), its director, Mohammad-Ali Talebi, was present to introduce the film and answer questions in a session hosted by Toby Miller (@tobytram) from FM 105’s Bums on Seats (@Bums_on_Seats)

In A Story of Children and Film (2013), Mark Cousins has held up director Mohammad-Ali Talebi’s film Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998) as an example of a child actor being allowed to be like a child, and, in Tweeting about the film, Cousins has called it ‘a tonic’ and ‘one of the best things that you could do with 80 mins’.



Rice establishes a mood that does not seem prone to abate, so we are genuinely uplifted when it does : a world of cynicism, complaint and grumbling, not just within the home, seems left behind. We had heard, in the words that Talebi (through his interpreter) gave by way of introduction, that the film was set just after the end of Iran’s war with Iraq (which ended in August 1988, after nearly eight years). Maybe, however, since Iran had become an Islamic Republic following the revolution (in 1979), and the deposition of the Shah, we expected that people might be less materialistic and not so quick to find fault.

Then again, these are people who have had to cope with years of war, and, apart from having the fact of continued rationing at its centre, the film has scenes that show us how fearful people are of losing a job or spending too much money. There is, to an extent, a sense of neighbourliness in queuing together for bread fresh from the oven, but tensions and frustrations quickly become apparent. However, criticizing or even obviously commenting on the extent to which the revolution had had an impact on everyday people’s lives does not seem to be part of Talebi’s purpose.

In the question-and-answer session, Talebi was asked whether, in a film that takes a good look at human nature, and seems to incorporate spiritual wisdom (such as sharing each other’s load), there had been a deliberate reference to Louis Malle’s Zazie. In fact, although Talebi says that he likes Malle’s films, he has not seen Zazie dans le métro (1960), and will seek it out when he gets home. Others, too, had said to him that they find a spiritual message in his films, and, although he is not saying that it is not there, it had not been his intention to put one there.

That said, he told us that one of the first things that he did on arriving in Cambridge had been to go into a Catholic church, and that watching people waiting to receive the sacrament had moved him to tears. Nonetheless, in a long and revealing answer to this question, he said that he relates more to the notion of humanity without a religious dimension. Once the observational part of the film gives way to adventure, a summary of what happens would not seem capable of filling the remaining minutes.

For the strength of the film is not in an elaborate plot, but in simplicity, and in the genuineness of the central performances from Jairan Abadzade (Jairan) and Masume Eskandari. We were told that, even so, some devices elicited Abadzade’s performance, such as giving her a toy for much of a day and then denying it to her, and that Eskandari’s polite assurances that she was happy with how the shooting was going were belied by being able to catch her, on a microphone, cursing how things were being handled. (In the screenplay, this insincerity is mirrored by her complaining to herself that Jairan talks so much, and attempting to hurry away to avoid being with her (the latter of which Jairan is aware, and remarks on it to her).)

The principal scene that first moves us is when another’s actions, after all that has been gone through to procure forty-five kilos of rice and get them onto the bus home, threaten to be fatal – until all on the bus play their part to save the day. A description in such broad terms does not permit for feeling either what happens or the scope for the film’s development, but the root lies in the interactions between child and adult, and in the former having the vision and faith for things to happen.

All of which ends in the richness of preparing a meal, and of involving those who live nearby – in a positive sense of community, sharing food with them, which makes the effort of getting the rice back redemptive and worthwhile.


Rice was screened with Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene I Verden) (1949) (which is reviewed here, and was shown first)




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Sunday 20 April 2014

Clash of the trams

This is a review of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


Easter Sunday

This is a review of Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949)


It was shown as part of the series The Cinema of Childhood (please visit the web-site at cinemaofchildhood.com for more information), which is presented by Mark Cousins (@markcousinsfilm) and Filmhouse (@Filmhouse) and introduced by Mark Cousins' film A Story of Children and Film (2013) (with Neil McGlone (@NeilMcGFilm))


* Contains spoilers *

Adapted from Jens Sigsgaard’s text* by director Astrid Henning-Jensen (whose young son Lars played Palle), Palle Alone in the World (Palle Alene i Verden) (1949) might have struggled to stretch to a feature, but perhaps it feels cramped in a run-time of twenty minutes. It is not that the conceits and concepts which the film handles are uninteresting, but they feel a little hurried, and therefore undigested : for example, Palle amusingly despises bank-notes as ‘bits of paper’ – which he throws to the wind – and favours the physicality of coins.

We recognize the childish preference for glistering things (although many a child will happily play post office, which is a good grounding in the bureaucracy of paperwork). However, it does not really ring true that, even at his age, Palle is unaware that the right denomination of note is worth many coins. (Perhaps we just excuse that as dream logic, just as it is dream logic that the choice between coins and notes exists at all, because they are conveniently to hand together on the counter.)

In any case, having liberated the coins from a bank that, as everywhere else, is deserted, he still thinks that he needs to pay for what he wants. However, no one comes to the counter to take his coin in the toy-shop – although it is all the same whether he leaves it on the counter or not, he takes the toy and it. It is only later that he realizes that carrying a literal load of heavy coins is pointless, and divests himself of them.

In the toy-shop, a huge Donald Duck had been dwarfing the figure that he takes, which again appeals to the notion that a child’s choice of what to play with may not be obvious (allegedly, often the box that it came in), and so a surprise to us. Not that we see Palle play with the toy, but instead we see him pass a ball to a footballing statue, and then be dismayed that it does not – as we half wonder if it might – take part in the game. Absent from their beds or anywhere else where Palle’s family lives, this is the closest that we come to any representation of mankind, other than Palle himself.

What we know is that, whether he crashes tram no. 8 into no. 2 or re-enacts Voyage dans la Lune (1902), no harm will befall him – as long as he stays away from his curious way of making what is translated as ‘porridge’. When he drives the tram, we of course allow that he somehow knows how to do so straight off (but his technical facility does not immediately translate to handling an aeroplane).

Most of the time, when he is speaking, Palle’s words are heard, but his mouth is not uttering them, which distances us even further from this delightfully deserted depiction of Copenhagen (?), which appears to have been caught that way by filming shortly after sunrise, and that quality of light intensifies our feeling of unreality (if also of the dread of the post-atomic age, with cities, to the extent that they had not been destroyed, rendered uninhabitable). Whether Palle is a real child, or already a stereotypical portrayal of childhood, remains to be considered, but he is the medium of addressing all sorts of issues about what it is to be alive, such as what makes for novelty, and what makes us miss what we know.

Some might want to say that the umbrella that features at the end of the adventure, by still being around**, but broken, shows that it was real. However, it is an element in the adventure that is not intrinsic to the world entered, but just a convenient device to return from it. Nothing precludes it from having been broken early, and brought into play by the guilty rumination of the dream.

Maybe one could see the Home Alone films as one successor to Palle, if not necessarily a worthy one, and with the likelihood that, in comics or other drawn media, the idea of one person exploring a desolate city has been fully explored…


Palle was screened with Bag of Rice (Kiseye Berendj) (1998) (which is reviewed here, and was shown second)


End-notes

* Which, in Estonia, was turned into an animated short, Peetrikese unenägu (1958).

** As with the blossoms in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine.



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)