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More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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19 December

* Contains a goodly number of spoilers *

As planned, I watched The Hunter last night, but this time on DVD - how some of those scenes cried out for a cinema screen! That apart, however well people receive it (the trailer is intriguing, but I assume that it was made for cinema release, but I never saw the film announced after last year's festival, or I would have watched it again), they cannot escape the fact that it is well lit and photographed.

How they receive it depends, I think, on how much they are content with the film's pace (I think that it needs to unfold as it does, but I have read that others differ and are quite irritated with what they get for the time spent), and with being left with an abiding enigma, rather an unwinding and, maybe, some sort of resolution.

What partly goes with this, I think, is that there is very little heard dialogue, and its absence is apparent: we are the other side of the glass, for example, witnessing the transaction, when Ali Alavi (Rafi Pitts), takes a hotel room, and only come inside when he is going to the room, with what turns out to be a spectacular view. (Not to divert too much, we are only too aware, in the same way, of the limitations of what we are being shown, because we could not have known, from the scene at the hotel, what it gives onto, just as, when Ali first goes to his flat, we could not have known in front of what he was parking, or what its living area gives onto at the front.)

All in all, this means that we have to make inferences (because we will never know what Ali hunts in the woods, or whether it is just the difficulty of the shot that makes him stand down from it, before we see him, at a later point entirely, going for a kill and shooting), and that there are very few facts. These are those facts:

* Ali has been in prison, but we will never know why (some sort of crime, or for political reasons - he is always listening to the political debate going on, but never appears to react to it), where, or for how long

* The term of his sentence is only consistent with having believed (as he may still believe) that Saba is his daughter, and thus with Sara's having being impregnated by him before his imprisonment and found to be with child during it - but that may not be a fact, as he somehow sees her as she pleads with an unseen official (or officials), presumably if not for AI, then for adoption, because of what she says that she said to Ali to give him hope

* The police contact him to report Sara's death

* He learns that there was a conflict between protesters and police (and later goes to the scene, where we see the positions of fallen bodies drawn on the ground), and that fire from one side or the other seems to have hit her accidentally

* Ali seems to have no notion of what the protest was or why (as he is told, alone, without Saba) Sara would have been there

* He finds the officer's questioning about his working nights and when he sees Sara and Saba intrusive - they appear to be interested in the strength of the relationship, as if he might have had a motive himself, perhaps because, as we know, they have not yet identified the gun that fired the shot

* He appears to identify the body - it is a long shot, from another room (maybe even the doorway of that far room), and he says nothing in words, but the police take Sara to have been identified from how he reacts (when he is asked to identify a body that may be Saba, it is the same scene and camera angle, but his reaction is even more ambiguous) - the police, of course, would know what he was later signing about identifying the bodies, but we do not, and that is part of the fog in which Rafi Pitts deliberately leaves us

* He visits and lies to Sara's mother (who is unaware of her own daughter's death) about why his daughter is not with him to see her on her (Saba's) birthday, leaves the family cat with her (supposedly at Saba's request), and takes off - he has made preparations to leave, by taking care of the remainng thing in the flat, the cat

* Having driven around and chosen a vantage-point (after a helicopter has been flying over), and taken out his hunting-rifle, he takes a bead on a car through his telescopic-sights until it passes

* When a police-car shortly after comes along the same stretch of road, he does the same, and he shoots - it seems as though it may have been a mistake, but he shoots again in what we realize is confirmation of his intent, and then kills the passenger, when he gets out (on the side facing us)

* After staying the night in the hotel, a helicopter is again in evidence, and, seemingly acting on its presence, Ali goes to a scrap dealer and changes his car

* The only other fact, important or not, is that when the two officers chase and catch him, the one who does not want to shoot him as a cop-killer (and who claims to be a fellow human being) says that the other officer has killed other prisoners whom he didn't like, and is going to try to frame him, if he kills Ali, too


Time, now, to see the interview from the DVD with director / Ali, Rafi Pitts...


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