Just a few films for early May.

Bassima’s Womb (2024), directed by Babek Aliassa. This French-Canadian film is escellent. It tells the story of a young Syrian woman, Bassima (Maxine Denis), who, along with her husband Fouad (Roudy Nakhle), are illegal immigrants eking out a living in Montreal. Fouad is deported back to Syria and Bassima finds herself alone. She finds work in a laundry, and before long is faced with a crucial decision. To make enough money to purchase false papers and bring her hysband back to Canada, Bassima must decide whether to become a surrogate mother for a Canadian couple who cannot have children. There is a farther twist in the story that just ups the emotional intensity. The film is about immigration, culture, relationships, and the position of the female in contemporary times. The characters are compelling, even the rat that tries to live in the basement of the laundry. I find little in the internet about this film, and this is unfortunate because it is timely, intense, well-acted, and also important. Recommended.

 

The Silent Partner (1978), directed by Daryl Duke. This Canadian film, scripted by Curtis Hanson, is edgy, bloody, and rather emotionless. It is also clever and surprising. The focus is on mild mannered bank teller, Miles Cullen (Elliott Gould), who susses out an impending bank robbery by observing the strange behaviour of a Santa Claus in the mall where the bank is located (the Eaton Mall in Toronto). Miles prepares for this robbery and when it takes place, he has managed to give the robber just a small amount of money while keeping the larger portion for himself. Once the robber, Reikle (Christopher Plummer, in an uncharacteristic role as a sadistic criminal) realizes that he has been cheated out of a lot of money, he sets out to get the money from Miles. A cat and mouse situation ensures. Meanwhile Miles is attempting to impress his boss’s mistress Julie (Susannah York), and Reikle’s girl, Elaine (Celine Lomez) is trying to seduce Miles. What a tangled web these people weave. The plot has its interest, but somehow the whole thing plays out without a lot of emotion, without drawing the viewer in. Miles spends his time collecting exotic fish and playing chess with himself. The chess board serves as a reminder of the “game” being played by Miles and Reikle. The fish are a reminder that Elliott is a cold fish. John Candy makes an appearance as one of Miles’s co-workers.

Endless Night (1972), directed by Sidney Gilliat. From a novel by Agatha Christie, Endless Night takes its time getting to the murder, but once it gets there, things move along quickly. As for plot, this has young dreamer Michael Rogers (Hywel Bennett) meeting wealthy young woman, Ellie Thomsen (Hayley Mills). Courtship is quick and the two build a fabulous home called Gypsy’s Acre. Soon Ellie’s friend Greta (Britt Ekland) comes for an extended visit and tensions rise. The fim is quite clever in its twists and turns, and the locations are impressive. The old gothic house nearby the new mansion is supposed to be cursed and we have the requisite elderly and sinister woman lurking about, often with two cats. Speaking of cats, we also have the large cat sculpture given as a house gift to Michael and Ellie from Greta. The acting is adequate, the musical score by Bernard Herrmann suitable, and the dubbed singing voice for Hayley Mills clearly dubbed. From what I can tell, the storyline is something of a departure for Christie, and the end does have a rather hasty and unusual twist. Not great, but watchable.

A Dry White Season (1989), directed by Euzhan Palcy. Made just a few years before the end of apartheid in South Africa, this film is a powerful indictment of that unjust system and an excruciating look at the consequences of seeking racial justice under such a system. Somehow the film strikes me as necessary for our moment in the mid 2020s. Palcy tries to convey just what separation means with scenes in a wasteland-like Soweto contrasted with the lush greenery and gardens of the white people, most obviously the home of Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland). Ben is a teacher and a former rugby star who lives a comfortable and shielded life. His gardener Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona) is a friend, but always deferential. Ben and Gordon’s sons, as we see in the opening scene, are good playmates who seem oblivious to their racial difference. Then Gordon’s son, Jonathan (Bekhithemba Mpofu), get into trouble with the authorities and is brutally caned. At first Ben brushes this off and assumes Jonathan must have done something wrong. But when the authorities murder Jonatan and bury him in an unmarked and unknown place, Ben sets out to help Gordon find the whereabuts of his son. This sets Ben against the system and soon he runs afoul of the secret police, and his fellow teachers turn away from him, and even his family think he is a traitor, except for his young son Johan (Rowen Elmes). Johan is crucial here. As the driver Stanley (Zakes Mokae) notes, Ben had to learn about injustice after years of turning a blind eye, whereas John as a young boy already understand injustice and its ugliness. This is a powerful film. Marlon Brando appears in a cameo role as a human rights lawyer, and he is both brilliant in the role and also a bit unsettling simply because he brings to the film a humour that is, perhaps, misguided. Or perhaps not. Susan Sarandon also appears in a small role as a newspaper reporter. Other familiar performers also appear, most prominently Jurgen Prochnow as the vicious Police Captain Stolz. The film has a grim ending, although a glimmer of hope exists in the person of Johan, a young boy who understands and resists the ugliness of a system that depends on the subservience of one group of people.

The Long Farewell (1971), directed by Kira Muratova. This is a film of experiments that gets up close and intimate with a mother Yevgeniya Ustinova (Zinaida Sharko) and her son Sasha Ustinov (Oleg Vladimirsky). She is domineering and in need of reassurance while he is growing more independent and expresses a wish to go and live with his father. We see them interact with quite a number of other people in a variety of situations. Muratova’s camera dwells on faces and the texture of things from a dog’s fur to china and cutlery to a target for a bow and arrow to a weed lifted from a river to plaster to a silk ribbon to a young girl’s long hair and so on. The narrative bumps along much as the lives of these people bump their way forward. The sound track too is ornery, sometimes silent, sometimes just accenting sounds of a nearby beach or kids playing, sometimes with familiar pop songs such as "Winchester Cathedral," and sometimes conventional film music. Things are bleak in this depiction of life in Soviet Russia. Yevgeniya is both sympathetic in her lack of confidence and unsympathetic in her desire to control her son. Sasha is brooding and also unsure of himself. The people around them are a mixture of arrogance and eagerness for some sort of satisfaction in a world that offers little. There are touches here of the French New Wave and also of earlier Soviet cinema, but Muratova has an unmistakable originality. The shadow mime we see at one point is perhaps as good an expression of life here as we could ask for.

Wittgenstein (1993), directed by Derek Jarman. I knew little about this philosopher before I watched this film, and I know little about hm after viewing it. This is not to say that I disliked the film. Far from it. The film is cinematically gorgeous. The costumes, the minimalist sets, the colours, the camera positions, the wit (love the Martian) are all splendid. Jarman manages to tell us something of the life of Wittgenstein, his eccentricities, his peripatetic desires, his intensity, his awkward sex life (read conflicted homosexuality), his wealthy family, his relationships with the likes of Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes, and his philosophical enquiries. Clearly, he was a complicated human being. Jarman films his story in a series of vignettes and in a very stage-like manner giving us the impression that the people here live a rarified life, a life somehow abstracted from the push and shove of the cold world, despite Ludwig’s desire to participate in that world by teaching or by manual labour or whatever. As a biography of Wittgenstein, this film is sketchy, but fascinating.