“Planet of the Humans” - Jeff Gibbs (2019)

Planet of the Humans (2019) is an environmental documentary film that takes an aggressively contrarian stance towards “green energy”, and for this reason it is likely to generate considerable controversy.  And since the film was recently (for Earth Day, 2020) made temporarily freely available on YouTube [1], it will probably draw a large viewing audience.  

Many viewers might find the film’s negative stance towards green energy to be surprising, since its executive producer was well-known and customarily progressive/leftist documentary filmmaker Michael Moore.  But we should probably keep in mind that this is not solely Moore’s film – it was written, directed, and edited by Jeff Gibbs and co-produced by Gibbs and Ozzie Zehner.  Indeed, based on a subsequent YouTube-available self-serving discussion on the part of the filmmakers [2], I get the feeling that this movie is mostly a product of Gibbs and Zehner.

In general, I felt that the film was relatively disorganized, but it did feature three main themes:

• Criticism of green energy in general.  This is mostly in opposition to Wind, Water, and Solar (WWS) power (where the water power is primarily via hydroelectricity generation).
    
• Criticism of biofuels (produced from biomass).  These are mostly plant-based products that are used to produce fuels in the form of woodchips, pellets, etc.
   
• Criticism of technology in general. 

1.  Criticism of Green Energy
The film begins with its scathing criticisms of renewable energy practices, particularly with respect to two of the most popular forms of renewable energy – wind and solar power.  The arguments seem to follow those of producer Ozzie Zehner, who some time ago published a book Green Illusions (2012) that denounced the practices and prospects of green energy [3].  Zehner and this film complain that green energy is (a) inefficient, (b) requires the pollution-inducing mining of rare materials, and (c) is inextricably dependent on fossil fuels anyway. 

However, Zehner’s and this film’s arguments on this score are largely outdated and false.  I won’t go into the details here, but I refer you to these references for more specific information [4,5,6,7].  I think the critical responses in these references should be convincing enough for you to reject the main arguments on this subject made by Gibbs and Zehner in this film.  There is a further issue in this regard, which I will discuss below.

2.  Criticism of biofuels
The second half of the film constitutes an attack on biofuels and on some environmentalists who have endorsed the development of biofuels.  Biofuels, such as woodchips, wood pellets, and palm oil, are carbon-burning fuels that are harvested from plants that have been specifically sequestered and harvested for fuel purposes.  Biofuel proponents have argued that they are a form of renewable energy, because the carbon in the CO2 that is created when they are burned can later be reabsorbed from the atmosphere by new growing plants.  This reabsorption process could take decades, even centuries, and so this is hardly a pathway for sustainable energy resourcing.  And of course there are other concerns, too: 

• the production of biofuels uses up land that could be devoted to food production, and 
• the burning of biofuels contributes to air pollution and global-warming processes.

Most environmentalists therefore renounce the use of biofuels as a suitable option for future energy development, and I am in general agreement with this film’s critical stance towards biofuels.  But I still have two issues with the way thing are presented concerning biofuels in Planet of the Humans.  For one thing, the filmmakers spend a lot of muckracking effort criticizing environmentalist figures like Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and the Sierra Club for endorsing and profiting from biofuel production organizations.  To me the venomous tone in this connection just distracts one from the larger issues, and anyway, I don’t believe these targeted environmentalist figures now endorse biofuels [4].  Another problem here is that Planet of the Humans conflates biofuels with WWS in order to condemn all renewable energy.  The reality is that indeed biofuels are harmful, while WWS energy sources are hugely beneficial.  The film misleads the viewer here.

3.  Criticism of technology in general
The third theme, which underlies much of the film’s presentation, concerns the anti-technology stance on the part of the filmmakers.  There is a wide spectrum of views concerning the ultimate effects of technology on humanity.  At one end of the spectrum are those who see technology as the ultimate benefactor and savior of mankind.  People at this end, when asked how to address our future energy needs, advocate a massive effort to construct and install a fleet of huge solar-power-collecting satellites that would orbit the earth [8].  But we need to be aware that caution is needed in connection with technology’s sometimes blind interference with complex natural processes, which some scientists speculate has brought about problems like the coronavirus pandemic [9].  So there are people at the other end of the technology-supporting spectrum, i.e. the anti-technology end, who are fearful of all forms of technology.  Some of them even want to reduce the world’s population to a tenth of its current size and have people live locally off the land.  Gibbs and Zehner seem to be near that extreme anti-technology end of the spectrum, and this colors their very pessimistic expectations about human prospects and the predations of modern capitalism.  For them, current efforts in renewable and green energy are inevitably doomed, and our future is dim. 

So all three of these themes in the film contain elements that can mislead the viewer.  But there is another matter in connection with the first theme (criticism of green energy) that deserves further mention.  If one is going to discuss the feasibility of widespread green energy, then he or she must address the work of Professor Mark Jacobson and his research team at Stanford University.  Jacobson and his coworkers have made studies detailing how WWS green energy can be used to economically and safely satisfy 100% of our energy needs [10,11,12,13,14].  These studies take account of electric grid stability, pollution, and safety, and they have detailed how each of the 50 states in the United States as well as more than 140 countries can individually and profitably adopt WWS energy to supply all their energy needs.  Although, of course, there would be initial construction costs, Jacobson’s schemes, if implemented, would lead to vast savings of resources, money, and human lives.  And I believe Jacobson’s plans to deploy WWS green energy would even entail less land usage than is currently used by the fossil fuel industry.

Professor Jacobson has supplied detailed responses to questions concerning his proposed schemes for 100% green energy, and I am sure he would have responded to questions that Gibbs and Zehner may have had, too.  In fact any film that discusses green energy in the context of Jacobson’s work would be interesting to see.  But Planet of the Humans makes no mention of Jacobson’s work, and for this reason alone, it disqualifies the film from serious consideration.  Although Planet of the Humans has managed tp receive some positive reviews in the mainstream media [15], I don’t recommend the film to you, and, for me, the film will not do anything for Michael Moore’s reputation.

★½

Notes:

1.  “Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs”, YouTube, (21 April 2020).   
2. “‘Planet of the Humans’ Earth Day Live Stream w/ Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs & Ozzie Zehner”, YouTube, (22 April 2020). 
3. Ozzie Zehner, Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism, (ISBN 978-0-8032-3775-9), The University of Nebraska Press, (2012).
4. Timothy Wallis, "Skepticism Is Healthy, but Planet of the Humans Is Toxic - A Critical Review", Films For Action, (23 April 2020).     (see also: https://votetosurvive.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-planet-of-the-humans-is-toxic/)
5. Tom Zeller Jr., “Ozzie Zehner’s ‘Green Illusions’ Ruffles Feathers”, HuffPost, (27 July 2012, 6 December 2017).  
6. Josh Fox, “Meet the New Flack for Oil and Gas: Michael Moore”, The Nation, (30 April 2020).  
7. Oliver Milman, “Climate experts call for 'dangerous' Michael Moore film to be taken down”, The Guardian, (28 April 2020).   
8. “Space-based solar power”, Wikipedia, (24 April 2020).   
9. Damian Carrington, “Halt destruction of nature or suffer even worse pandemics, say world’s top scientists”, The Guardian, (27 Apr 2020).  
10. Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Mary A. Cameron, Indu Priya Manogaran, Yanbo Shu, and Anna-Katharina von Krauland, “Impacts of Green New Deal Energy Plans on Grid Stability, Costs, Jobs, Health, and Climate in 143 Countries”, One Earth, (2019).   
11. Kashyap Vyas, “Is Mark Jacobson’s Plan to Use 100% Renewable Energy Feasible?”, Interesting Engineering, (22 January 2019).   
12. Michael Barnard, “100% WWS Part 1: Jacobson’s New Study Displaces 99.7% Fossil Energy With Massive Savings”, CleanTechnica, (20 December 2019).   
13. Mark Z. Jacobson, Mark A. Delucchi, Zack A.F. Bauer, Savannah C. Goodman, William E. Chapman, Mary A. Cameron, Cedric Bozonnat, Liat Chobadi, Hailey A. Clonts, Peter Enevoldsen, Jenny R. Erwin, Simone N. Fobi, Owen K. Goldstrom, Eleanor M. Hennessy, Jingyi Liu, Jonathan Lo, Clayton B. Meyer, Sean B. Morris, Kevin R. Moy, Patrick L. O’Neill, Ivalin Petkov, Stephanie Redfern, Robin Schucker, Michael A. Sontag, Jingfan Wang, Eric Weiner, and Alexander S. Yachanin, “100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water, and Sunlight All-Sector Energy Roadmaps for 139 Countries of the World”, Joule 1, Elsevier Inc., pp. 108–121, (6 September 2017).   
14. Mark Ruffalo, Marco Krapels, and Mark Jacobson, “Our 100% Clean Energy Vision”, The Solutions Project, (2020).   
15. Peter Bradshaw, “Planet of the Humans review – contrarian eco-doc from the Michael Moore stable”, The Guardian, (22 April 2020).   

“Return of Verge Likens”, TAHH, Season 3: Ep. 1 - Arnold Laven (1964)

“Return of Verge Likens”, the first episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Season 3 (1964), is an extended dramatic exercise in revenge and self-glorification.  Based on a story by Davis Grubb and scripted by James Bridges, this episode is directed by Arnold Laven.  It starred Peter Fonda, who gained later fame with his roles in The Wild Angels (1966) and Easy Rider (1969).

The basic story is straightforward. Stoney Likens owns a small southern farm that is threatened by a corrupt eminent-domain legal takeover on the part of slimy businessman Riley McGrath. When Stoney angrily confronts McGrath with a bottle in his hand at a local roadside bar, McGrath draws his gun and shoots Stoney dead.  Witnesses and the police testify that the murder was in self defense (it wasn’t), and McGrath isn’t even arrested.

Stoney Likens had two sons, the meek Wilfred and the more staunch Verge.  Verge vows to his brother that he intends to take his revenge on McGrath by killing him.  But he doesn’t just want to put an end to McGrath; he wants to see the man slowly suffer and know who it is that kills him.

So Verge shadows McGrath for weeks and learns how the man spends every hour of the day.  One of the things he learns is that McGrath visits his doctor every week because of his weak heart.  Thanks to the timidity of brother Wilfred, McGrath gets wind of Verge’s intentions and attempts to buy the brothers off by giving Wilfred $500.  This gift doesn’t mollify Verge in the slightest, however, and he takes the money and heads off to Charlotte for unknown reasons.

After six months, Verge returns to their small town with a new skill: that of a trained barber. He immediately gets a job at the barbershop where Riley McGrath routinely visits to get shaved with a straight razor.  It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what happens now.  Verge gets McGrath (who had never previously met Verge and so doesn’t recognize who his new barber is) as his next customer and proceeds with his grisly plan. 

The rest gets to be excruciating, and there is no subtlety here. It just becomes an orgy of vengeful psychological torture, reminiscent of the Iranian movie Tangsir (1974).  To me there are no satisfying characters – both Verge and McGrath are equally repulsive.  The only character with some humanity is timid brother Wilfred, but the script scornfully portrays him as essentially a spineless and unmanly figure.

The production values for this episode were generally good, with a characteristic southern redneck performance by Robert Emhardt, as Riley McGrath, and a sensitive portrayal by Sammy Reese, as Wilford Likens.  However, I always find Peter Fonda’s stilted and phony screen persona unconvincing.  And given the weakness of the narrative, the episode as a whole is a disappointment.

Nevertheless, the iMDB rating for this episode is high, and the user reviews celebrate the supposedly satisfying delivery of “justice” to the villainous McGrath.  It seems that what should appeal only to the old drive-in movie crowd, always has a much larger following than that.  In fact current events reflect the reality that a substantial proportion of the public relishes stories based on hatred and revenge.  They want attention given to their resentment and are willing to vote for demagogic autocrats (e.g. in Russia, Turkey, and the US) who ignore the common welfare and instead devote their energies to hatred, revenge, and punishment.  This apparently makes their backers feel strong and proud.

But films can be used effectively to express and evoke all possible emotions, and we need more films that make us feel love and compassion – ones that can evoke the fact that, as Leo Tolstoy eloquently stated long ago, The Kingdom of God is Within You [1].

★½

Notes:

1. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, (Constance Garnett, trans.), Kshetra Books, (1894).

“Fight Club” - David Fincher (1999)

Fight Club (1999) is a bipolar film that has elicited a bimodal response.  Some people (exclusively men, as far as I can see) love it; others dismiss it as drivel. Though the film was panned by a number of reviewers [1,2,3] and the film was not initially a big box office success, it has a phenomenally high rating at the IMDB Web site. And for some people today, the film remains a coming-of-age testament for an entire generation of thirty-somethings.

The film, directed by David Fincher, starts out with an explosive scene showing a man with a cocked pistol pushed into his mouth, and then the story unwinds into a two-hour flashback describing how this man, who narrates the rest of the tale, got to this extreme life-threatening point. 

Our Narrator (Edward Norton), we learn, is something of a wimpy, middle-class guy working in a soulless corporate environment.  His work at an automotive corporation involves determining, whenever a safety defect is found, whether a mass product recall that would save lives is worth the expense.  With his professional life based on heartless numbers and with no apparent social life, his main personal interest seems to be acquiring the next IKEA furnishing to add to his upscale condo.  It is clear that his life is a bore, and it’s no wonder that he suffers from severe insomnia, where day drifts seamlessly and uneventfully into night.

To treat the insomnia his doctor advises him to see what real suffering is like by attending support groups for those diagnosed with terminal illnesses.  He enthusiastically starts doing this on a daily basis, masquerading as a fellow sufferer at gatherings of people more victimized by life than he is; and these visits do seem to help with the insomnia for awhile.  Though he gets a false sense that he is engaging with people, actually these meetings are basically just joint sessions to express impotence and self-pity.  And soon the hypocrisy of this “therapy” dawns on him, and his insomnia returns.

But later our Narrator hooks up with a guy, Tyler Burden (Brad Pitt), he met on a plane during a business trip, and after some convivial drinks at a bar this odd new friend takes our Narrator outside and asks him to give him a punch. The narrator has to be coaxed to fulfill this weird request, but he goes ahead.  Soon the two of them are engaged in boisterous fisticuffs and loving it.  So commences the “fight club”. 

From here on the film shifts into a male fantasist’s wet dream of masculinity and violence.  The fight club under the charismatic leadership of Tyler Durden (the Narrator is nominally a co-leader, but Durden is in control) grows in popularity as more and more disaffected men are attracted to participate in the bloody one-on-one fights held in the bar’s basement.  Like the Narrator, these men are also captivated by the nervy confidence of the nonconformist Durden, who goes his own way in all things.  Gradually the fight club evolves into a destructive revolutionary organization devoted to “Project Mayhem”, a mission bent on sabotaging the conformist society that has emasculated so many men. 

Eventually things go too far, even for the Narrator, and the action reaches a climax as the long flashback returns to the present and the narrator facing his assailant.  There is a quirky plot twist at the end of the film that appeals to some viewers; but to me this psychological twist is implausible even within the weird logic of this implausible story, and it raises more questions than it answers. 

Rather than going over further details of the story, though, it is best to jump to a consideration of what is the film’s main idea and why it is so popular with some sectors of society. First off, the film is clearly a comedy, but it is a very black comedy, since there is so much savage physical violence going on.  This puts some people off, but other people – mostly young men – revel in the wanton destructiveness of it all. 

The main point here is that men these days are more and more emasculated by our consumption-obsessed advertising-dominated society that has made people into conformist copycats.  In the midst of this materialist frenzy for more and more stuff that we have to buy (e.g. the IKEA furnishings), men have lost their manliness and sense of autonomy.  So without clearly knowing why, many frustrated men are moved to drop out of the rat race.  This has led some reviewers to compare Fight Club with Rebel Without a Cause (1955), which also traced inarticulate young people who were looking for something they couldn’t name but which society couldn’t offer.  But Fight Club is much more abstract than Rebel Without a Cause – it comes equipped with its own theoretical backdrop. 

The fundamental notion behind it all is autonomy – the basic issue of being able to have some effect on the world around you and thereby expressing your own identity.  This urge to express our autonomy is elemental. If you were lucky enough to have grown up in a climate with cold winters, you may remember seeing a thin layer or ice frozen over a puddle on the street when you were very young and feeling the urge to crack the ice with your foot.  This was your harmless expression of (destructively) impacting the world in front of you without there being negative consequences.  You could wreak some minor havoc and get away with it.

When you fight with your fists, it is even more central to your identity.  You are getting down to (and going back to) man’s most primitive and primordial engagement with the world – a violent interaction that engages your most basic instincts and thereby gives you a most elemental sense of autonomy.  Under the circumstances of a fight, you are not passive and impotent you are taking action. In those moments you are fundamentally autonomous, relying on your own body, and therefore you are fully alive. 

Now you might say, hey, isn’t this what action sports are all about?  What about boxing?  In fact, to be more precise, what about bare-knuckle boxing?  Those activities have been done for a long time and do not represent anything novel.  Yes, but there is a difference here, because the goal in Fight Club is not to win, but simply to engage in some desperate acts of violence.  In sports, you try to win, to achieve a goal, but in Fight Club, you just want to punch.  This is the clarion call of the “I Don’t Care” generation. Men who feel powerless and subservient in the external world (as the Narrator does) can go to the fight club and interact in this primitive way that makes them feel more fundamentally engaged – more alive.

And this is where the homoerotic subtext comes in.  Tyler Durden is everything that the somewhat effeminate Narrator (and the other impotent men drawn to the fight club) are not.  He is spontaneous, wild, and super-confident.  He doesn’t reflect, he acts on impulse.  He wears wild clothes and does weird things whenever he feels like it.  He is the ultimate masculine role model for the Narrator, because he doesn’t care about the things that people in mainstream society are supposed to care about. The Narrator doesn’t want a women, he really wants to be one with Tyler Durden so that he can achieve his masculine fulfillment. In fact it is revealing that there are almost no women characters in this film besides Marla Singer (played nicely by Helena Bonham Carter).  She is the only feminine presence, but she is like an inscrutable Goth phantasm that only haunts the Narrator’s life. 

So thematically, Fight Club does have some kind of tale to tell.  And director David Fincher pulls out all the cinematic stops to present the story at a breakneck speed.  But the problem is that the film tries to bite off more than it can chew and doesn’t deliver.  I will list some of the shortcomings here, which fall in several thematic areas.

1. A first problem is the fighting, itself, which is unrealistic. If you watch a Tom and Jerry cartoon, the animation is sufficiently unrealistic, that the viewer is comfortably distanced from the physicality of broken flesh. But here in Fight Club the fight scenes are relentlessly bloody and filmed to convey maximal in-your-face brutality. Although in real life these kinds of fights would result in broken bones, permanent injuries, and often death, the guys in the story get up after being bloodied and clobbered in these ferocious fights with smiles on their faces.  So we have unrealistic fighting, but with lots of blood thrown in for . . . what, to make it more realistic?  Anyway, this bloody brawling is still unrealistic, because the "Fight Club" fights don’t present the pain and hostility that are intrinsic to all physical fights.  All it gives us is the blood, and that is apparently supposed to be funny.
2. When the “Fight Club” evolves into “Project Mayhem”, its zombie-like personnel have become so dominated by Tyler Durden that they evince no autonomy whatsoever.  But the very point of joining “Fight Club” is to express one’s autonomy, so the depiction of their subservience doesn’t make sense in the context of the main storyline.
3. The plot twist that comes late in the film seems to have been inspired by The Usual Suspects (1995) [4], but it is not nearly as good as the plot twist that occurs in that film, and it doesn’t make sense here.
4. There was an opportunity with this material to represent and express paranoia (think Shutter Island (2010), for example), but it wasn’t taken up.  Instead, the confessional narrator is more whimsical in the fashion of Hi Fidelity (2000), only without the redeeming treatment of that latter film.
5. There are odd scenes in the film that make their appearance, leading the viewer to expect some further consequences, and then just vanish and are forgotten.  For example at one point some mafioso figure dramatically interrupts the “Fight Club” operation in the basement and ups the level of savagery.  We expect him to show up later, but he doesn’t.  On another occasion the Narrator and Tyler beat up a Chinese man at a convenience store.  But there doesn’t seem to be any point to this scene, and the humor was lost on me.

Ultimately, the idea of celebrating, or making fun of (take your pick) the “I Don’t Care” attitude of many people in today’s world is the wrong story to tell. The problem is that the malaise afflicting these people is an inability to engage authentically – they continually hold back and look on the scene vicariously. So if this film is going to attack our increasingly vicarious culture, dominated as it is by spectators watching Youtube on their computer tablets, then it needs to attack vicariousness at its core. But Fight Club is, itself, just a vicarious joke.  It simply creates even more of a sense of “I Don’t Care”, rather than addressing the problem of disengagement, the social malady from which these people in the film suffer.  Such a treatment leaves the film as only a nihilistic expression of destructiveness that masks a miserable feeling of impotence.  It’s an insincere comedy that can only amuse the “I Don’t Care” sector.

★½

Notes:

1. David Edelstein, “Boys Do Bleed”, Slate, 15 Oct. 1999, http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/1999/10/boys_do_bleed.single.html.
2. Roger Ebert, “Fight Club”, RogerEbert.com, 15 Oct. 1999, http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/fight-club-1999.
3. Peter Rainer, “Pulling Punches”, New York, 25 Oct. 1999, http://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/reviews/1248/.
4. The producers of Fight Club originally considered hiring The Usual Suspects’s director, Bryan Singer, to direct their film, before settling on David Fincher.

"Low Heights" - Ebrahim Hatamikia (2002)

Low Heights (Ertefae Past, alternate English title: Low Altitude, 2002), is an Iranian film directed by Ebrahim Hatamikia that takes on the daunting task of combining bald humor with the terror-filled anxiety of an airplane hijacking.  Released shortly after the 911 terrorist hijacking in the US, the film recounts the story of an Iranian domestic flight from Abadan to Bandar-Abbas that is hijacked by one of the passengers, and most of the film takes place inside the cramped quarters of the plane in flight.

The script by Hatamikia and Asghar Farhadi has some unusual aspects, even for the wide scope of the action-adventure genre.  First of all, the focalization is not from the perspective of an innocent passenger caught up in unexpected circumstances, but from the point of view of the hijackers, Ghasem and Narges, played by Hamid Farokhnezhad, who would later star in Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday (2006), and Leila Hatami (Leila, 1996).  Second, domestic and social issues are a significant subtheme of the story. In fact the determination of some people to get out of Iran was a theme continued in Farhadi’s later, A Separation (2011). 

The movie begins in the Abadan airport, where Narges is anxiously awaiting her husband, who is late for the scheduled takeoff.  At first her anxiety appears to be due to her attempts to conceal her pregnant condition – evidently pregnant women are not allowed to fly.  But after Ghasem arrives, it ultimately becomes clear that he intends to hijack the plane to a foreign destination (Iranians ordinarily need to get exit permission to leave the country, and apparently Ghasem cannot obtain this).  In order to carry out this scheme, Ghasem had sold all his possessions and bought airplane tickets for his entire extended family, promising them all jobs that he had secured for them at the Total petroleum company in Bandar-Abas.  Ghasem’s plan was to populate the plane, a two-engine propeller aircraft that can hold maybe fifty, with people from his own extended family, who would then be expected to support him in the event of chaos on the plane, even though they are not in on his plot. 

Of course, nothing can be expected to go according to plan, especially in a caper film.  Leila is afraid of the violence and hides the gun to be smuggled onto the plane from Ghasem, thereby foiling his plan at the outset.  But Ghasem goes ahead anyway and violently jumps the onboard security officer, brutally beating him half to death and stealing his gun.  The passengers are terrified by the vicious assault and watch in horror as Ghasem tells them, at gunpoint, that he is hijacking the plane to Dubai.  Hoping to quell their resistance, Ghasem explains to them that his plan is to escape from Iran to a better life in a country free from drug-addiction, dusty poverty, and corruption, and he says anyone else can join him.  Ghasem was only trying  to calm them down, and even he is shocked to learn that most of the passengers almost immediately appear ready to sign on with him and be partners to the caper.  This is perhaps a biting social comment about despair in Iran, perhaps especially relating to the Abadan area, which suffered so much devastation during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.  A further revelation of the passengers' eagerness to get away from the oppressive conditions in their home country is demonstrated when one female passenger removes her head covering in preparation for her new life abroad.  Ghasem admonishes her and tells her to remember that she is, after all, a Muslim and must continue to behave like one.  But it turns out that the woman’s supposedly bared head was actually covered by a blonde wig – this is presumably a further sardonic gesture by the filmmakers to steer their way around, and ultimately comment on, the restrictive gender-based censorship in Iranian films and society as a whole.

Of course, most of the passengers in the plane are from Ghasem’s and Narges’s extended family.  In fact many of the able-bodied male passengers, who might be presumed to be capable of taking some action, are brothers of Narges.  But these brothers all appear to be somewhat dimwitted buffoons, whose clownish presence goes well beyond mere comic relief.  This is the major problem with the film, and they turn the film into something of a farce.

As I said, nothing is expected to proceed simply in a story like this.  There are violent shifts in dominance, as Ghasem loses control to the beaten-up security guard, who immediately orders the pilots to leave Dubai, where they are about to land, and head back to Bandar-Abas.  A rather mysterious and opportunistic passenger, Ali-Reza, asserts himself and is at various times an accomplice of both Ghasem and the security guard.  Then Narges, customarily nonviolent but loyal to her husband,  grabs a gun and engages in a shootout to reassert control of the plane for Ghasem.  From this account you won’t be surprised to learn that much of the story seems unrealistic.  The motivations of the characters are lacking.  The back-and-forth swings of control are outlandish.  In such circumstance it’s not even unexpected when Narges’s pregnancy comes strikingly back to the viewer’s attention later on.  As a result, the film careens back and forth between gut-wrenching terror and the absurd antics of the nitwit family members onboard.  It would have been more effective either to make the entire film an action-packed thriller or to make it a ridiculous joke, but the hybrid structure shown in Low Heights is a mid-level compromise that doesn’t work.

Perhaps most detrimentally, though, the passengers appear to be far too relaxed and jocular for such an anxiety-filled situation.  In fact many of the acting performances are downright farcical and over-the-top.  Even Leila Hatami, an accomplished film actress, seems much too calm for these circumstances, with only a slightly worried expression to furrow her brow when things get out of control.  Only Hamid Farokhnezhad (Ghasem) and Gohar Kheirandish (Ghasem’s stepmother) give convincing performances to keep things going.

The cinematography in Low Heights, however, is quite good.  Veteran director Hatamikia manages to maintain a dynamic visual continuity and flow within the confined space the aircraft interior.  He also employs a creative solution to the problem of realistically depicting violent action scenes by showing distorted, slow-motion images of visual fragments – effectively evoking the kinds of images that one retains in one’s memory after a personally violent experience.  This corresponds to my own recollections of violence – they play out in slow motion in my mind, with twisted, exaggerated images of particular moments extending over the mental landscape.

The enigmatic ending of Low Heights shows the passengers with a perhaps absurd sense of hope, although their various dreams and assessments of their circumstances are all a jumble.   But even with that vaguely hopeful closing, combined with the other comic moments in the film, the viewer is hardly likely to come out of this viewing experience with anything other than disappointment and a sense of despair.
★½

"The King’s Speech" - Tom Hooper (2010)

The King’s Speech (2010) tells the story of Prince Albert, the Duke of York and the future King George VI of England, and how he struggled to overcome his lifelong speech impediment during the period leading up to and just after his assumption of the crown. The film, directed by Tom Hooper, has been one of the most lauded productions of the year, having been nominated for fourteen BAFTA awards, twelve Academy Awards (Oscars), and having received widespread acclaim from the critics and the public. In the face of such overwhelming approval, I could perhaps remain silent, but there may be some people out there who are sympathetic to some of the misgivings I have about the film.

The story concentrates on Albert’s continuing distress concerning his pronounced stammer and the lengthy working relationship he had with an eccentric speech therapist, Lionel Logue, who was engaged to help him with his disorder. The film concludes in a triumphant, feel-good manner in 1939 when Albert, now King George VI, manages successfully to deliver a radio speech to the country when war was declared with Germany. Although the film begins in 1925 with Albert delivering a brief, but disturbingly stuttering, address at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Stadium, most of the film’s action concentrates on the five-year period between 1934 and 1939.

What makes the film interesting as a narrative are the three parallel and interwoven narrative threads that run through the film.

1. The Speech Therapy. The main thread is the Albert’s personal struggle to overcome his stammer and the mortification that it induced. In a sense this thread is a metaphor for Albert’s development into a person fit to rule an empire.
2. Historical Developments. There were interesting developments during this five-year period, including the death of Albert’s father (King George V), the ascension to the throne and then abdication of Albert’s older brother (King Edward VIII and after abdication, the Duke of Windsor), and the threatening rise of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany.
3. Relationship with Logue. A third narrative thread is the developing relationship between Albert and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue. Logue was a commoner from Australia, and the evident contrast between the down-to-earth Aussie bloke and his royal patron and their ensuing gradual rapport elevates the Logue character to a lead role.

This adds up to interesting material, and the three narrative threads have considerable potential to reflect upon and amplify each other. But the film falls short of greatness due to a number of drawbacks. I will briefly list them by category.

1. Film Narrative. Outstanding films are those that tell a compelling story using the visual dynamics of cinema. There is considerable potential with this material, but the realization here comes up short. As the narrative threads #2 (Historical Developments) and #3 (Relationship with Logue) meander along, they don’t have the dramatic arcs or developments that make them interesting stories on their own. Of course the Historical Developments thread culminates in a declaration of War, but Albert’s role in those events is on the sideline, and the film counts on the viewer’s external knowledge to carry that thread along. The Relationship with Logue thread is vague throughout. We never really get a feeling for what each thinks of the other, or how that thinking evolves – although they eventually come to some sort of unspoken accommodation. This leaves only thread #1, the Speech Therapy thread, as the driving narrative. This one also doesn’t work well, because whenever the film returns to it, there is a session in which significant progress concerning Albert’s stuttering appears to have been made. Yet on each successive return to this thread, we are back to square one, with Albert stammering worse than ever. Although the dramatists may have felt compelled to evince some progress with each session, these repetitive sequences are delusive and ultimately frustrating. In addition, this thread carries the suggestion that the cause of Albert’s problems was due to psychological traumas he experienced as a child, but this idea is neither developed nor resolved. At the end the film winds up with its triumphant radio speech, which presumptively concludes and resolves all three threads in some sort of victorious mood, but the narrative buildup to that finale has been ineffective.

2. Character Development.

• The characterisations of most of the people around Albert are all wooden stereotypes of upperclass manners. Although this may appeal to some audiences fascinated with the Upstairs, Downstairs contrasts in British society, the exaggerated postures in this film, particularly that of Derek Jacobi as the Archbishop of Canterbury, are severe. One might argue that, in real life, members of the British upperclass are playing stereotypical roles, so such dramas are only reflecting reality. But the characterisations here are not even that true to life. In addition the Aussie-English contrast between Logue and Albert appears to be forced to the point that the film is sometimes described as a comedy. Lionel Logue’s son, for example, has stated that his father never swore in front of Albert and never called him , “Bertie”.
• The role of Lionel Logue, though, is an important one with considerable screen time devoted to it, but it is never really developed into a meaningful character. It is difficult to develop a mental picture of what is going on in his mind.
• The portrayal of Wallis Simpson (later, the Duchess of Windsor), whose affair with Edward VIII led to his abdication, is that of a manipulative, poisonous viper. In fact there are two conflicting narratives about Ms. Simpson’s affair in popular culture: either it is a story of romantic love that sacrifices all, or it is a story of a Jezebel-like she-devil who threatened the British crown. American portrayals of her often follow the former narrative outline, while British portrayals usually choose the latter, as did The King’s Speech.

3. Historical Accuracy. Taking liberties with some historical details is often necessitated to simplify and condense a story into a coherent two-hour vehicle. But such liberties need to be around the edges. In this case, it seems, compromises with historical veracity may have been made in connection with core issues of the story.

• The film celebrates the British war effort and resolute British opposition to the Nazis, with the presumption that George VI (Albert) embodied this attitude. But commentators have argued that Albert was pro-appeasement.
• Albert apparently hired Logue in 1926 and demonstrated progress in his speech within months, whereas the film depicts Logue being hired around 1934, with speaking progress taking a much longer period. In addition, some people have argued that Albert’s stammer is greatly exaggerated in the film and that Albert’s stuttering in real life was much milder.
• The film suggests that Winston Churchill was in favour of Edward’s abdication, but commentators have maintained that Churchill urged Edward not to abdicate.

4. Cinematography.

• The extreme wide-angle, almost fish-eye lens, photography used in connection with Albert’s sessions is disconcerting and renders these scenes unrealistic. This was probably done to make the figures around Albert imposing and threatening (suggesting the psychological cause of Albert’s problem, which is never really developed), but instead the technique merely makes the scenes more like slapstick comedy.
• The many full-face, backward-moving tracking shots are laborious and not visually motivated – and only contribute to further claustrophobia.

5. Music.
The musical background score is far too intrusive for this sort of story. In particular, the use of the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony during the final radio speech is ponderous and heavy-handed. Its use is also a bit curious for a speech aimed at marshalling British resolve to fight Germany.

On the positive side, I would have to say that Colin Firth does a good job under the circumstances in his role as Albert. I find it hard to believe that Albert was such a conflicted, anguished personality, but Firth does appear convincing. In addition, Helena Bonham Carter, as Albert’s wife, Elizabeth, has little to do in the story, but she adds a convincing and sympathetic element to the domestic surroundings. Her mere presence makes Albert a more sympathetic character.

Overall and from my perspective, though, The King’s Speech is a misleading, confused, and disappointing work. It has a few good moments, but not enough of them.
★½

“The White Ribbon” - Michael Haneke (2009)

The White Ribbon (Das Weisse Band, 2009), by Austrian write-director Michael Haneke, has drawn extraordinarily favorable responses from the critical community, including the Cannes Film Festival Palme D’Or, an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and Best Picture awards from the Golden Globes, FIPRESCI (International Federation of Film Critics), and the European Film Awards. In fact the film seems almost to be targeted at the critical, art-house community: it is an austere and dour account of obscure goings on in a German village during 1913-14 that ends without any apparent resolution. But my view on the film is that despite its critical popularity, the film has significant weaknesses – so much so that I wonder if it wouldn't almost serve as something of a litmus test for real cinematic sensibility.

The story of the The White Ribbon begins with a voiceover narrator stating that he will be recounting some mysterious and still not-fully-explained events that took place many years ago in Eichwald, a small, rural village in the northern part of Germany. The first such event occurs when the village doctor returns home on horseback and is thrown from his horse and seriously injured by a trip wire that has been strung between trees hear his house. The doctor suffers a broken arm and is hospitalized for several months, but noone can identify the perpetrator of this vicious act. Later the wife of a peasant farm worker is killed in an accident at the local sawmill. Soon thereafter the baron’s local cabbage garden is vandalized, apparently in retaliation for the negligence that led to the woman’s death. Again, the perpetrator is not immediately found.

Without clear, upfront exposition, the viewer only gradually learns about the town. Eichwald is a farm village, with most of the population working on the agricultural estate of the local baron. The narrator is the village schoolteacher. Since there are suspicions that delinquent children may have been behind the delinquent act, the viewer will naturally look closely at the numerous children that are shown in the village, and it is initially difficult to distinguish to what families they all belong. After awhile, though, the viewer can begin to identify many of the children with a few principal families headed by prominent male figures in the community:

• The baron, who has a young boy, Sigi, of about ten years of age
• The steward at the estate, who has some teenage sons.
• The local pastor of the Protestant church, who has a number of children, the two oldest of whom, Klara and Martin, he severely disciplines.
• The doctor, who is widowed. He has several children, who are looked after by a housekeeper/midwife who has a couple of children of her own.
• The farmer whose wife dies in the accident. He has a number of children, some of whom are almost grown up and work with him on the plantation.

In due course more ghastly events occur. A baby almost dies of pneumonia after its bedroom window was opened by someone during an icy winter’s night. The baron’s son, Siqi, is found in a forest, hanging upside down from a tree and having been tortured. The retarded son of the doctor’s midwife is found in the forest, also tortured and possibly blinded. The riddle as to who is behind these abuses is unsolved. Although the older son of the newly widowed farmer is found to have vandalized the baron’s cabbage garden, that boy is provably innocent of the other charges. The schoolteacher begins to have suspicions about the pastor’s children, Klara and Martin, but his investigations are angrily blocked by threats from the pastor and come to nothing. At the end of the film, all these concerns are disrupted by the advent of World War I. The schoolteacher goes off to serve in the war, moves away from the village, and never again knows anything further about the town or its people.

The presumption that is left with the viewer at the end of the film is that the identities of the specific criminals in the village do not really matter. There was something poisonous in the town of Eichwald that was endemic to the entire society. That degenerate social culture was responsible for producing the criminals of those specific crimes in Eichwald, and, by implication, supposedly responsible for the rise of German fascism in the coming years. Thus Haneke’s film has been hailed by critics as a profound indictment of the German mores and social customs that are supposedly responsible for the Nazis. Does this thesis hold water, and does the film provide convincing evidence for it? I would say, emphatically no on both counts.

For a film of this nature, we might consider three categories for critical judgment: its narrative structure, its cinematic production values, and its overriding themes. The White Ribbon has been extravagantly praised by critics along all three lines, but in my view the film clearly fails in all three areas. Consider the three, admittedly overlapping, categories, in their turn.

Narrative Structure.
The film is initially presented as a mystery: what is behind the disturbing events in Eichwald? Since various fragmented episodes about the village are presented, the viewer is set the task of resolving the puzzle. One obvious puzzle concerns the original motivation for this storytelling. But given the aged timbre of the narrator’s voice and the revealed age of the schoolteacher in the film (31), one can guess that the narrator is reflecting on events that have happened at least thirty years earlier. When the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Sarajevo is mentioned in the story, one can pinpoint the year, 1914. So the narrator is apparently telling the story in order to reflect on how events more than thirty years earlier may give some clue to the “present” circumstances of German society, which would be in the immediate aftermath of World War II. However, the story is not presented as a true critical reflection, but as a set of fragmented data items, facts, if you will, which the viewer must piece together in order to understand what really happened and why. This can keep the viewer guesssing and busy figuring out what is going on – for example, identifying which children belong to which family. But this is a “bottom-up” approach. The viewer is engaged in an analytic enterprise, assembling supposedly objective information in order to ascertain the truth.

Unfortunately, though, the director, Haneke, does not play fair with the audience. Instead of restricting the focalization of the narrative to that of the schoolteacher narrator, there are numerous distinc focalizations depicted in the story to which the schoolteacher could not have been privy. The things that Hanake does present are obscured and partially occluded, not because of the limited perspective of some particular focalized observer, but simply because Hanake is playing games and doesn’t want the viewer, even from the “omniscient” perspective, to know more and have things too easy.

The mysterious crimes are never resolved in the film. The personal characters of the principal children are never really revealed, and we never have a clue to their motivations. The film has six major male characters (baron, doctor, steward, pastor, farmer, schoolteacher), but there is no real character development in any of these roles, except for the schoolteacher in the background, with his slight suspicions towards the end.

All in all, the narrative is presented as a scrapbook that has been artificially fragmented in order to make things more challenging for the viewer. But this scrapbook is certainly not, and could not possibly be, the narrative focus of the schoolteacher. Instead, it is an artificial mystery assembled by the director for the viewer to solve. And then at the end of the story, the puzzle is dropped as an issue, thereby undercutting the principal metaphor that had driven the film throughout.

Cinematic production values.
The film is shot in black-and-white and evidently photographed to have a distancing, historical feel to it, with high-key lighting in the exteriors and low-key lighting in the interiors. The camera work, itself, is well executed, technically, but there is no consistency to it. I remember a film director whose previous background was in writing relating to me about his first experience as a director with a professional film crew. He was dumbfounded on the day of his first shoot when the cinematographer approached him for the first scene and asked, “where shall I put the camera?” It hadn’t occurred to the debuting director that it is normally the director who decides where to station the camera to film a scene. That was the lesson: the director had better have an idea where to put the camera. In this film there is no indication that Haneke has any real idea of where to station it.

The film has many camera framings in long shot, which do collectively support the distancing effect. But then the camera framings randomly switch to intense closeups of some of the characters for no apparent reason. It is not as though those particular shots of intense closeups have any apparent motivation or narrative significance to the story. On top of that, various camera stunts are tried that have an pointlessly disruptive effect, such as

• 360-degree camera movements around the schoolteacher while he is dancing with his lady friend, Eva;
• the face-up camera shot of the teacher and Eva sitting in the carriage as it careens around the countryside;
• the jostling, moving camera shot as it tracks closely behind the vandal who ravages the barons cabbage garden. That close, intense tracking shot is completely inconsistent with the visual tone of the rest of the film.

At other times there are meaningless framings, as mentioned above, in interior hallways, with long-held static compositions that are pointless. When Hou Hsaio-Hsien uses such static compositions in his films, he achieves by means of them a somewhat haunting narrative consistency. This is not the case with Haneke here, where the framings appear merely to be arranged in order to disadvantage the viewer and keep things in concealment. But keeping the viewer in the dark is merely artificial inscrutability – not narrative doubt and expectation that is achieved through plot developments.

The acting in the film, which has also been highly praised, is theatrically deliberate, but lacking in subtlety. There are no real interactive moments among the characters that have meaningful impact. The principal characters are all wooden stereotypes who are locked inside their own schemas. The lone exception to these performances is confined to the halting and bashful first encounter and then courtship between the schoolteacher and Eva, the baron’s sometime governess. Although there is little progression or narrative significance to these meetings, they are the only encounters in the film that bear some humanity, and so the viewer finds them a welcome relief from all the other dreary goings-on.

Themes.
The theme of the film is evidently that the traditional German society of that period was degenerate and gave rise to Nazism, but there is no real depth to this characterization. Aside from the schoolteacher, the principal men of the village are little more than monsters: selfish, proud, dogmatic, brutal, and even cruel.

• the baron is proud, insensitive, and demanding.
• the steward is explosively bad-tempered when irritated.
• the doctor is basically a sexual deviant and is inhumanly cruel to his mistress, the housekeeper.
• the pastor is a pompous and fanatic distributor of Biblical justice to his children.
• the farmer is an honest man, but has been brutalized by his impoverished circumstances, and so brutalizes his sons, in turn.

The only real human being who gets much camera time is the schoolteacher (the baroness would be another one if she had been given a greater role). The others are all authoritarian cardboard characters.

With such simplistic characterizations how is it possible to provide a meaningful view of German society? No wonder some film critics imbue the thematic content of the film with some of their own intuitions. Betsy Sharkey of the Los Angeles Times feels that the film propounds the notion that Nazis were created by child neglect, brutality, and denial. The children were, according to Sharkey, neglected by their pompous, simple-minded parents and consequently grew up to be thugs who launched German fascism. Meanwhile Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times felt that the film demonstrates how societies like Germany overreact to minor incidents (recall that the village was in panic over the crimes) and consequently develop a police-state mentality. One critics sees apathetic neglect, and another sees overreacting authoritarianism. This is what happens when the characterizations are so simplistic that one has to read into the film one’s own presumptions about German history.

There are indeed many effective films, such as Fellini’s I Vitelloni, that describe brutish, narrow-mindedness of small towns and rural areas, and the narrative journey on the part of the protagonist to move beyond those parochial environs. There are other stories that have a compelling vision of the depths of human depravity in backward areas, such as Jerzy Kosin'ski’s The Painted Bird. But The White Ribbon has no such narrative journey for the protagonist nor a compelling or revelatory vision of the society. The circumstances it describes are simply cold, repugnant, and oppressive. There is no conflicting counterforce that can provide narrative movement in The White Ribbon – merely a bunch unmotivated, half-comatose children living in oppressive social surroundings and possibly engaged in delinquent activities. The viewer is kept at a distance apparently in order to make the story more mysterious. Those who see profundity in a film like this are, to me, not probably responding aesthetically to great cinematic storytelling, but have simply used its empty spaces to invest the film with their own intellectual fantasies.
★½

"Taste of Cherry" - Abbas Kiarostami (1997)

Taste of Cherry (Ta'am-e-Gīlās, 1997), a film produced, directed, written, and edited by Abbas Kiarostami, won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and has been hailed as a masterpiece by major critics and media outlets. In addition it has drawn fulsome praise from iconic film auteurs, Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Luc Godard. But it may not be to everyone’s taste.

The structure and story of the film follow Kiarostami’s stylized and minimalist aesthetics. Shot in his usual quasi-neorealist style and with nonprofessional actors, the film follows a middle-class man, Badii, as he drives around the outskirts of Tehran in his expensive SUV, looking to hire a working-class labourer for a job he wants to have done. Note that although Homayoun Ershadi, who plays the role of Badii, had no professional acting experience, his restrained but intense performance was sufficiently effective that he went on to appear in a number of other films, including Mehrjui’s Derakhte Golabi (1998) and Forster’s The Kite Runner (2007). Given the contemporary social environment of Iran, there are practical reasons why shooting movie film of people inside motor vehicles is convenient, but Kiarostami has become the specialist, par excellence, of this mode of visual expression. His film, “10” (Ten, 2002), for example, was shot entirely inside an automobile. In Taste of Cherry most of the footage comprises lengthy medium close-up shots of the driver or his given passenger as they engage in rather drawn-out discussions. These claustrophobic close-up shots inside the car are intercut with extreme long-shots, showing wide open spaces, of the same vehicle as it meanders through the back roads and sometimes desolate landscape outside the big city. Another characteristic Kiarostami technique is the use of slow-disclosure: it takes a long time for the viewer to figure out what Badii is up to, because, as usual, no real backstory is provided. In fact, in common with the subsequent Silence of the Sea (2004), by the apparently Kiarostami-influenced Vahid Mousaian, the key motivational information for the principle quest in the film is never provided.

As the film begins, Badii is seen driving around urban areas where unskilled workers gather looking for jobs. It soon becomes clear that he wants to hire someone, but he appears uncertain as to what kind of person he wants. Ultimately Badii will approach five different people to do the job, and with each successive encounter, he will have a deeper and more significant interaction. He is willing to pay 200,000 tomans for a day’s work (this would amount to a several hundred dollars, which would be very substantial for a lower-class labourer), but he is evasive concerning exactly what the job entails. The first person he talks to is suspicious of Badii’s evasive behaviour and dismisses him as a weirdo or a deviant. Following that brushoff, Badii looks for less-suspicious, more provincial types. He next approaches a young man from provincial Lorestan that he finds picking over rubbish heaps, but the man shies away and won’t get into his car. Only at this point, ten minutes into the film, does the film title sequence appear on screen, and the audience still doesn’t know what Badii wants to have done. The remaining three encounters with candidates for his job constitute most of the rest of the film.

Badii’s third encounter is with a young soldier from Kurdistan whom he picks up along the road and offers a ride. The soldier is reserved and polite, so Badii does most of the talking and leads the halting conversation as he finally outlines what he really wants done, now fully twenty minutes into the film. His intention is to commit suicide. He will take an overdose of sleeping of pills and then lie down to sleep in a deep hole in the countryside and have someone shovel twenty spadefuls of dirt into the grave the next morning. But he explicitly leaves a curious alternative in this specification: if by chance he is still conscious in the morning, his hireling is instructed to help him out of the grave.

The Kurdish soldier, who had gradually been growing more friendly with his driver, is naturally horrified to be involved in such a macabre operation, and he flees the scene at the first opportunity. Badii next offers a ride to an Afghani seminarian, to whom he also presents his bizarre proposition. This conversation is more engaged and involved than the one with the Kurdish soldier, but it is also more psychologically distant and analytical: the discussion with the Afghani seminarian turns to the Islamic strictures opposed to suicide. The Afghani refuses to abet such a sinful activity and offers his polite reasons for refusing to cooperate.

Finally Badii propositions an elderly and loquacious man of Turkish descent, Mr. Bagheri, who agrees to do the job requested, because he needs the money to assist his ill son. Mr. Bagheri is a thoroughgoing pragmatist; he will do the job for the money, but he urges Badii not to throw away his life. In an eloquent passage that represents the high point of the film, Bagheri recounts in his rustic fashion how he almost committed suicide thirty-seven years earlier. Due to his troubles at that time, he had intended to hang himself from a mulberry tree, but when he climbed the tree to secure the rope, he happened onto some mulberries and ate a few. Then he began noticing the sunrise and the abundance of the natural world around him, including young schoolchildren who asked him to give them some mulberries. With his mood thoroughly changed, he abandoned his morose plans and returned to life.

Badii listens to Bagheri’s testimony attentively, but remains on his suicidal mission, although he urgently reiterates the instructions about waking him up in the morning in the event that he is still alive. After leaving Bagheri at the natural history museum (where he works in support of the laboratory instruction), Badii returns to his apartment and prepares himself. Then he watches his final sunset before going out to his grave hole in the mountainside outside of town, where he smokes his last cigarette and then settles himself into his grave to await his end. The camera holds for a long time on Badii lying in his grave, illuminated only by moonlight or occasional lightning flashes. Finally the screen falls into complete blackness for a full minute, and only the sound of light rainfall is heard. With such a long hold on stillness and darkness, the viewer may become thoughtful or restless at this point. Then there is a fade-in to the same hillside, but with an entirely different and jarring perspective. The scene shows Kiarostami’s film crew actively working on a shot showing soldiers marching and chanting along the hillside road (associated with the Kurdish soldier sequence). The hillside is now the scene of bustle and activity. It is shot with a handheld camcorder with a smudged lens protector, giving the scene an amateurish, on-the-spot feel to it, and it is further jarred by the background jazz trumpet music of “Saint James Infirmary”. This goes on for a couple of minutes, before the film closes, not with a fadeout, but with a cut to black.

Although Taste of Cherry examines the always-present option of suicide and the countervailing reasons why one might turn away from suicide and live life again, the film, itself, is afflicted with the very same disorder that troubles its protagonist – the intellectual distancing from genuine human involvement. In fact the film appears to appeal primarily to those viewers whose experience and appreciation of film is not direct and intuitive, but must always be mediated by intellectual reflection. Indeed to a certain extent the film illustrates the difference between the aesthetic qualities of film and text.

The film experience, I contend, is something more than a textual reading (although many critics have artificially tried to expand the definition of ‘text’ and ‘reading’ to encompass almost all of mindful experience, thereby skirting the issue). By way of comparison, consider a great text, such as Dostoyevski’s The Idiot, which has sometimes been characterized as a sequence of extended and interesting conversations. Because it is a text, the reader reflects on the richness of those conversations in the context of the story. Taste of Cherry, too, features a sequence of extended conversations, but its conversations, as such, are not so interesting or bipartisan. The only interesting ‘text’ is Mr. Bagheri’s monologue to Badii towards the end of the film. But the rich, interactive, dynamic nature of cinema is not utilized in this film. Instead we have a schematic, artificial situation that engenders a sequence of artificial, non-interactive encounters that are presented for the viewer’s intellectual contemplation. All of this is then followed by an even more artificial coda.

That coda, incidentally, is a further illustration of my overall point. The narrative scheme to the film came to an end with the ending of the character Badii. Within the logic of the narrative, there is a possibility that Badii might survive, but that was apparently incidental to Kiarostami’s purpose, and so he had no use for the character anymore. He has built up the possibility that Badii might survive, but then abandons that thread and pulls the rug out from under the viewer. Instead, Kiarostami wanted to continue his intellectual themes, and so included the artificial and viewer-distancing coda. The shot of the hillside in that final coda scene shows the landscape relatively green, with grass and new foliage, suggesting we are now in a rainy season, which of course displays a vibrant contrast to the somber, gloomy scenery that dominated everything that came before. In fact, given the fateful clock times explicitly mentioned in the film (6 pm and 6 am), which are subsequently depicted to occur in darkness, we can assume that the seasonal period of Badii’s excursion was roughly in the winter time. The final coda, on the other hand, seems paradoxically to be in springtime. Why? It may have been useful for Kiarostami’s intellectual theme to show Badii’s excursion in a dry, dusty, lifeless environment and the coda in a green environment, but this lacks narrative motivation. Similarly, the intrusive, nondiegetic score of “Saint James Infirmary” is more for ironic reflection than for narrative enhancement. It appears that this entirely unnatural final scene is simply put forward to the audience in order to state, “life goes on”. In other words, the whole coda is a stunt put forward only to make a trivial point. Such things are not what constitute either great texts or great cinema.

Admittedly there are elements of the mise-en-scène that buttress the prevailing theme of depressive isolation in the film:

• The feeling of isolation is enhanced by the many sounds that are dissociated from their images, i.e. the source of the sound is off-camera. This includes the background sounds of nature, particularly the sounds of birds. All of this suggests the richness of nature, of which Badii seems oblivious.
• The stark contrast between shots showing the confinement inside Badii’s car and the concurrent shots showing the sweeping landscape as his car wheels along mountainous roads is an effective visual metaphor.
• The numerous shots of heavy earthmoving equipment in the industrial area outside Tehran might suggest both (a) the futility of man’s attempt to alter the course of nature and (b) the religious acceptance of human fate inevitably traversing the course of “earth-to-earth, ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust”.

But as a narrative, what do we really have in Taste of Cherry? It is odd that the initial meeting with Mr. Bagheri is not presented in the film. With all the incidental and trifling activities in the film that are fully played out in every detail, why omit the most important meeting in the narrative? In addition the viewer is never informed of the original circumstances behind Badii’s death-wish. There is no backstory, no motivation, that might help engage the viewer to empathise with Badii’s life context. Perhaps this absence of specific motivation for suicide is undertaken in order to disengage the notion of suicide from any individual circumstances and make it available for abstraction contemplation. But this represents a flight from film and a movement towards text. And in this case, the text isn’t very compelling.

Taste of Cherry has sometimes been compared to Antonioni’s Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964), but there is a world of difference. Antonioni’s film uses the film medium to convey a more direct sense of alienation and isolation. Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry only presents a schematic outline for intellectual contemplation. Fortunately, Kiarostami would go on to do much better (but with fewer accolades) with his subsequent offering, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).
★½