Of Beauty Queens and Narco Kings

             

 When I write about film for this blog, I try to find some angle of approach. Whether from a cultural perspective, or with an eye to some element of the filmmaking, it is nice to have an entrance point when discussing a film. Sometimes however, the entrance point is provided by the quality of the film itself. Some films have such an effect that one feels the desire to do nothing more than extol their virtues at length, to heap praise on them for as many words as one possibly can. That is the effect produce by Gerardo Naranjo’s perfectly pitched narco-drama Miss Bala, an opening salvo for the possibilities of film in 2012

            A tale of the ordinary people caught up in the seemingly unending and endlessly escalating drug war that has turned Mexico into some sort of existential psychodrama, Miss Bala opens with an act of independence. Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman), ignores the cautions of her father, and runs off with a friend to earn a spot in the Baja California equivalent to whatever beauty pageant The Donald has trumped up this year. This independence is short lived however, as Laura quickly finds herself caught up in the dealings of local kingpin Lino (Noe Hernandez) where she discovers that passivity is more often than not the only alternative to drowning in the fast moving currents that now swirl around her. While Sigman oftentimes wears the face of someone who sees inscrutability as her best defense, she’s hardly ever a cipher. Rather than blankness, her expression represents the slow draining from her life of, well, life. The vivacity and joy that one would expect from a pageant contestant is instead replaced with a cold despair. Even once the film arrives at the spectacle of the pageant itself, the bright lights and gaudy costumes are overwhelmed by Sigman’s sadness, her inner turmoil so powerful she can’t even answer the questions of the pageant’s hosts. She remains a portrait of the actual state of Mexico, a contrast to the false regality and ebullient nature that the pageant seeks to represent. In an early scene in the film, the pageant director chides Laura not to laugh as she practices her walk down the runway, and it serves as an ironic bit of foreshadowing. The director wants Laura to treat the pageant with the seriousness it deserves, and while Laura might not be laughing any more, by the end of the film it is hard to see the pageant as anything more than a mere side show in a society that is irrevocably compromised.

            Despite its bleak pretense, the film is also about those small moments of rebellion that the powerless rely on to give themselves even the smallest possibility of hope. The film opens with one of these moments, and the ending comes about as a result of another one. While these two moments are far from the only ones where Laura rebels, they are two of the only ones which bring forth results. It would be easy to consider Laura a passive figure, and in many respects she is, but as previously mentioned this passivity is a defense mechanism, in the same way that someone curls up into a ball once they know they are unable to escape whatever emotional or physical attack lies ahead. Laura makes several half-hearted attempts to escape throughout the film, reacting to her release and subsequent recapture with the same fading expression. She seems to expect that her plans will fail, and acts nonplussed at the eternal return of Lino, never questioning her seeming importance to him or role in some larger political game. Rather than see her passivity as cowardice, the film seems to instead imbue it with a sort of bravery. Here is someone that tries again and again to fight her way out of her nightmare, despite lacking that quality that provided sustenance to even the most selfless of history’s heralded heroes: hope.

            The complications of Laura’s troubles are helped along by the film’s whirling pace, its rapid developments counterbalanced by the languid camerawork. As bullets fly and people escape, the camera moves slowly, gradually zooming in and out of an area, or sanguinely panning across a neighborhood. This gives the film an effect comparable to real time, as the audience takes in events as they are, rather than chopped up by editing into more digestible bites. The content is hardly more upsetting than other films of the genre, but the effect is one that wears heavily on you, potentially grueling in its unrelenting movement forward. In one of the film’s early scenes, Laura escapes from a party that has been attacked by a cartel, and the camera slowly pans from her hiding place to the people she is hiding from, before panning back again, only this time Laura is absent, having made her escape over a wall. This sort of take, which shows everything but not all at once, is emblematic of the film’s style, as it attempts to show the complexities of life amongst the cartels, but not in the fractured style that seems all too common today.

            Miss Bala succeeds in one of the best ways that any visual medium can. The style of the film merges so well with its content that the two become almost impossible to separate. Of course one can, but with something this powerful why would you?  I have seen this film labeled as exploitation by some, but to me that seems like something of a misinterpretation. Even if Miss Bala doesn’t necessarily propose an explanation for the violence therein, the intention hardly seems to be to titillate. The film wants us to be sucked into its hopeless, cyclical world, where we meet our fate less with excitement and more with a grim acceptance that we might never escape. The film’s mastery of style is a welcome moment in the wake of a disappointing 2011 and hopefully the film’s success is a sign of things to come.

Photo courtesy of: http://www.filmlinc.com/film-comment/article/nightmare-state

Of Political Trends

"It Will"

It will arrive openly, its supporters gleefully inviting it in.

It will claim to be above politics, yet politicize everything.

It will come draped in a flag and cross, but not our flag and not our cross.

It will claim to be against militarism, yet glorify the warrior everywhere.

It will claim to be against the “-isms” of society, but do nothing to remedy them.

It will claim to respect minorities, but only the ones that don’t make noise.

It will claim to represent everyone, but its open disdain of women will be hard to contain.

It will mock the Victorian sensibilities of its parent’s generation, while failing to hide its disgust at anything different from itself.

It will preach community, but only amongst heterosexual males.

It will be contemptuous of culture that it feels is beneath it, while also criticizing those that might aspire towards something higher.

It will be doomed to repeat history, all the while gloating about its superior knowledge of it.

It will call for a return to the past, not ignorant of the past’s failures, but with the belief that those failures are the right way to live.

It will believe that companies always do what’s right, and if they don’t, they’ll be easy to stop.

It will be quick to see conspiracies everywhere, while at the same time infiltrating organizations in order to get its way.

It will warn against the tyranny of government, while itself attempting to force a tyranny of culture.

It will call for a return to American values, but only those that favor itself.

It will be based on certain invisible laws, but reject any scientific discoveries that might contradict it.

It will attack those it considers “stupid,” having no sympathy for those that do not share its opinions. 

It will preach Social Darwinism, while warning of fascism from those it opposes

It will say that might makes right, and that there should be no recourse for the weak.

It will believe that the truth lies halfway between right and wrong.

It will believe that the meek only inherit defeat.

It will believe that good guys finish last because they’re not as good as bad ones.

It will believe that the only path is freedom, a freedom to force your world on everyone else.

Of Humanity Admist Theocracy

         It is hard for me to not view Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation through a prism it does not invite. As one of the few cultural objects to emerge from a society that appears so willingly closed off from the West, it would be easy to see it as an ambassador of sorts for Iranian culture. When an American such as I views a film from France or Italy one does so with the understanding that it was produced within a separate culture, but one that still retains many of the same principles and constructs as my traditionally Western upbringing. It is the same basic life, but through a different filter. When I view a film from Iran however, a country whose rebirth in 1979 seemed almost reliant on a break from and rejection of Western values, there is a sense of near anthropological curiosity which piques my interest in the film, especially if it is one which seeks to tell a more contemporary and domestic story. How does living in such a heavily structured theocracy affect the everyday lives of the Iranian people? Is there something intrinsically different about the way that they live or the stories that they tell? How are they different from the Western world? These are not questions that Asghar Farhadi seeks to tell in his film, and I find it unlikely that the Iranian government would allow a film along these lines to even be made, at least one that tells things honestly, but in the end these are the questions which I bring with me to Farhadi’s film, and they are questions which, despite a lack of trying, the film does an adequate, and at times effective job of answering.

            What the film seems to reveal about life in Iran however, is the very ordinariness of it. There is not some overarching cultural and social theocratic apparatus that predetermines these characters’ lives, or if there is it is not present in the film. While one character calls a presumably government-sponsored help line to determine if bathing and changing the clothes of an elderly man is a sin, this appears to be driven more by her personal sense of religion than any conscriptions sent down from above. The film does not intend to criticize her religiosity, but her decisions in this respect are certainly positioned as her choice to make. There is not a uniform religion that all characters must follow, and the family at the film’s center is able to be positioned as a secular one without any manner of judgment being passed on that way of life. There is a diversity of characters in Farhadi’s film, and one can see that despite the pressures that undoubtedly come down from above on a regular basis, a person’s true character, the good and the bad, is the defining aspect of one’s self in contemporary Iran.

            I was struck by how easily the basic narrative of the film could have been transported to a different locale and a different time. I could see its basic structure transposed to a Hollywood melodrama of the 1940’s or 50’s, with its themes and ramifications easily playing out on any number of global stages. The characters all inhabit a personal realm, not a political one. It would be relatively easy to judge the characters for their actions, with the many lies, half-truths, recriminations, and otherwise untoward behavior that they engage in, but the film is sure to never give the audience an easy way out, skillfully weaving in layers of motivation and guilt. As soon as one character’s version of the truth is vindicated, that vindication’s resting ground is revealed to be another lie. If a character confesses to some unsavory action, their motivation is revealed to be, if not pleasant, at least understandable. The central event at the center of the film’s court case relies on a motivation not entirely explained or understood, leaving the viewer to determine Nader’s (Peyman Maadi) thought process at the time of this crucial event. It is reminiscent of Dreiser in novels such as Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy where a safe closes or a boat tips over and the author plays coy as to how mentally culpable the main character actually was. Despite the deep personalization of the film, many events and actions remain a mystery, and while some are revealed by film’s end, others are left to the audience to solve.

            It is this deep personalization which ultimately frees the film from any sort of politics that one might be tempted to bring to it. The audience becomes so enmeshed with the characters and their domestic dramas that a larger political backdrop remains at a distance. There are obviously social issues at play here. Simin (Leila Hatami) wants a better life for her daughter Razieh (Sareh Bayat), and class issues between the principal characters remain unsaid but palpable throughout much of the film’s conflict. However, these social issues are personalized in a way that one would not expect in an autocratic regime. The larger issues of Iran the nation are absent, instead replaced by the day to day issues of the Iranian people themselves.        

In a way this ends up both telling us a lot, and telling us very little about the state of contemporary society within Iran. We are shown much to make us realize how we are all similar but not much in the most crucial ways that Iran and the West are different. While a film should not feel obligated to provide an ethnographic, cultural study of its subjects there is also something to be said for situating the particulars of a film’s events within a larger social apparatus. Is it even possible for a film produced under the current regime to accomplish this goal? Possibly not. But that is not the goal of A Separation. What Farhadi’s film tells us about Iranian society is how similar it is to a Western or an American one, and in a way that is simply a manifestation of the film’s own complex themes. People might do good things or bad things, but they are more than anything else motivated by their own personal humanity. Much as the world’s conflicts arise from nation states pushing for the same thing in a different way, the characters of A Separation come into conflict as the same basic motivations manifest themselves through a different action by each character. Often cynical, but sentimental at times as well, the film projects a view of people that can easily have echoes on a universal level. We are all more similar than we would like to realize and if one could only understand this, the power of conflict to divide us could begin to disappear.

Picture from: http://www.soundonsight.org/a-separation-a-rarity-that-succeeds-on-many-levels/