Gran Torino

This film depicts a Clint Eastwood vision about a man, Walter Kowalski, that only Clint Eastwood the aged actor could portray.

The work is framed by two funerals, that of his wife at the opening, his own at the close. Kowalski’s has been the straight-shooting, no-nonsense life of the soldier, factory worker, husband and farther. He dominates the moment by force of will, does not know fear and is unfazed by the ravages of old age, which are gradually consuming his tobacco-filled alcoholic body. He embodies the ramrod straightness of the dutiful, self-reliant Midwestern psyche.

Playing against this basic character description is an underside dating back to military service in Korea. Walt is haunted by the memories of take no prisoner combat; specifically, he cannot expunge or depotentiate the image of killing a terrified teenager trying desperately to surrender. Pulling the trigger at that moment, though inevitable, was a kind of act against nature; it was simply wrong in a fundamental sense that admits neither of forgetting nor of atonement.

A kind of minor league antagonist to Walt is the earnest young cleric who pursues him with the justification that Walt’s wife, in her final days, asked the priest to give him some attention, presumably in the hope that his loss would direct him back to the Church. Walt’s hostility to and contempt for this unseasoned, cliché-spouting emissary of God has every justification. The one who dons the vestments as mediator to eternal life without even a passing acquaintance with darkness on this plane is a ridiculous figure. Come the end of the story, though, Walt will need him as a witness to his confession, in the service of completion, not the seeking of forgiveness.

In the changing Michigan neighborhood, Walt’s house has become surrounded by those of Hmong immigrants, a group that had been friendly to the American side during the Viet Nam War. Full of racial prejudice, he resents the impingement these people represent. At the core of the story is the relationship that develops between him and the teenage Asian boy Thao next door, who had been given as an initiatory task by the neighborhood thugs—his cousins—the job of stealing Walt’s vintage Gran Torino.

From their view of indebtedness, this family owes Walt doubly: for the disgrace of the boy’s intended theft and for the rescue of his older sister from a black street gang. As the boy becomes his protégé and as Sue will not let Walt’s gruff exterior impinge on her perception of his loneliness, a new familial configuration emerges.

Thao has three lessons to learn from Walt. The first is that for a man to make his place in the world he has to know how to sell his labor and develop his skills. Second, as imaged by Walt’s tool-rich workshop, he has to learn to discriminate the right tool for a particular challenge. Third, in the transition from boy to man, he must develop the patience to pick his battles, to choose those that inescapably belong to him, and to think through in each case what winning or losing would look like.

Opening the door to Thao’s entry into the work world and outfitting him with what he needs to have a proper toolbox come relatively easily; they pass via instruction. By contrast, the ability to stand back, weigh one’s options, and pick the right moment to act can only be taught by example.

Because of the urgency of a dying man’s desire (Walt has learned that he is terminally ill) to get this message across, the film in its later segments touches an unanticipated, yet thoroughly integrated, level of depth.

As a bridge to the conclusion, Walt seeks out the priest for confession. In doing so, his aim is not the absolution which confession promises but the being witnessed in an act of self-disclosure that defines who he is to himself. His confession has three parts; two are personal, while one is generational. Once at a party he kissed another woman in a room adjacent to where his wife was, an unforgivable gesture sullying an otherwise pure love. On a separate occasion, he made $900.00 in a transaction without ever reporting it as income on his taxes, which to him means nothing less than the rupture of the social contract between the individual and the government. Also, he knows by observing the men his two sons became that his unapproachable male ego left them profoundly deficient as adults. Though he was merely being the kind of man his world venerated, that excuse does not satisfy him.

He knows that his is not the path of passive dying from ravaging disease. Only by choosing the form and circumstances of his own death can he offer a final mentoring to Thao, his spiritual heir, and, of course, the heir to the Gran Torino. He must confront the gang that was on the brink of swallowing up the young man and that brutally raped his sister, Sue, in an assertion of territoriality and authority. Having undergone the transformation mediated throughout his life by the memory of Korea, Walt sees that he must offer himself as undefended soldier, surrendering in a public forum to the power of being witnessed.

To achieve that, Walt takes himself unarmed into the territory of the Asian thugs, cigarette in hand, lighter in pocket. Reaching in his ultimate gesture for that light, Walt is riddled by the gang’s bullets. As defenseless as the youth who had tried to surrender to him all those decades earlier, he is anointed with the aura of willing sacrifice.

The fearful neighbors have witnessed the slaughter as the gang reached beyond the limits of its power; its members will face long prison terms for murder. Tao has been given the exact gift he needs as the prelude to riding off in his new vehicle. As a man who has never strayed from the ethic of accountability, Walt is able to communicate that the choices made at each life moment are serious, lasting, and either right or wrong. His is the voice of a now vanished time in which what a man was to himself trumped what he could get away with in the world. Tao will have to drive on his own road, but without losing the gift of how to process experience.

The Changeling

Using as its base the true story of a 1928 kidnapping in California, Clint Eastwood directs a complex morality tale. The film is so unconvincingly and one-dimensionally acted that it often becomes tortuous to watch. There is a rigorous mono-dimensionality to the acting that at first appears distracting, perhaps even unintentional, and then gives way to the emergence of the story on a level that is beyond "realism." By keeping representation witnin the boundary of surface, the film is freed to journey into depth that is both psychological and emotional.

A nine year old boy, Walter, is abducted during his mother’s workday (no father in the picture). Perhaps loved, he is clearly not adequately cared for. The plot is set in motion when—after a nation-wide police search—the boy has supposedly been found in the Midwest and returned home, except that he’s a very different same age child. The highly staged sentimental reunion receives wide press coverage as an instance of shining police work, a stellar triumph for an L.A. Police department known to be wildly corrupt and desperate for the slightest public relations boon. Clearly they know the boy is not her son and yet are confounded by her unwillingness to participate in the illusion.

Thus begins the mother’s quest to prove this boy is a changeling, delivered to her for an unknown reason. The maternal love she claims toward her own child now manifests as hate for this stranger; the hate, in turn, renders her an enemy to the police who—with the cooperation of the equally corrupt psychiatric establishment—have her committed to a mental hospital to silence her voice of protest.

Against this background appears the first detail calling her motives into question. All she need do is sign a statement confirming that her upset was a stress-related reaction to her anguish and she will be released from custodial detention to care for the boy. She refuses to tell this lie. What has happened is that her quest to find her biological child is trumped by the need to be truthful, not to her purpose but to literal reality. Her pseudo-heroic energy has shifted from the demand that her son be found to the defiance of authority. She has, in fact, gotten in her own way.

This moment in the film when who she is becomes suspect is the first clear signal that a parallel story is unfolding to that of a mother’s anguished search for her lost son. Will it be seen that her investment in the way she comes across is not that dissimilar to the police force’s focus on their role as public protectors?

Meanwhile, the diverse pieces related to the kidnapping begin to come clearly into view. Walter is one in a series of young boys picked up by a psychopathic, psychotic man and his terrorized young cousin. Perhaps some of the boys are sexually abused; certainly all are ultimately brutally murdered as the killer seeks momentary release from the inner voices of his own fear. The young cousin reveals what has transpired to an at first incredulous police lieutenant, substantiating his tale as he leads them to where he was forced to bury the dismembered body parts. We understand that Christina’s Walter is among the victims, learning later that his participation in a desperate escape attempt allowed another of the captive children to break free.

Fatherless Walter somehow had instinctive access to the heroic masculine, returning, after breaking free himself, to the aid of a fleeing comrade caught on a fence. In remarkable contrast to the stubborn pride of his mother, he acts fearlessly, decisively, self-sacrificially. Is the man he might have grown into someone his mother could have valued or would she have needed to devalue him as he matured?

When the moment comes for the identified and obviously guilty perpetrator of these grisly murders to come to trial (even as in an adjacent courtroom there is a disciplinary hearing about the attempted police cover-up), it is suddenly apparent that Gordon Northcott, the sadistic killer, and Christine Collins, the bereaved mother, are destined to meet and interact. Gordon, with the gram of accurate perception that often accompanies psychosis, grasps that Christine is the one person among the spectators who has experienced being cast aside, dehumanized as crazy—in her dealings with the police and her hospitalization. He intuitively grasps that the dark underbelly of daily reality always focuses on finding scapegoats so that the ordinary ‘righteous’ world can congratulate itself on the return of order.

Christine has no awareness of the piece of shared destiny Gordon describes. Two years later, on the eve of his execution, she is the one person he wants to see. But her decision to comply with the request is not in order to interact with him—to actually meet—but to get a definitive chapter-closing answer about her son’s death. As she fails to be present in good faith, he turns away and will give her nothing.

One is pulled back to the day of the kidnapping, when mother had promised her son a trip to the movies, only to go to work instead and schedule the outing for the next day. Had she looked in her son’s eyes, seen his disappointment and his dawning recognition that she would never perceive his hunger in the moment, the tragic sequence need not have occurred. Clint Eastwood, we marvel, has ever so subtly planted the seed of her inability to see the other, foreshadowing the film’s thrust.

Three years after Gordon is hanged, there is a coda. The boy who escaped that night with Walter’s help surfaces to complete the tale; he wants to be able to return to his mother. A final opportunity presents itself for Christine to see that in the life of this boy the survival of her son continues. Yet, as with the changeling child seven years before, she cannot transcend the limitations about what is or is not hers. A sad truth concerns her inability to love; at the end she is reduced to a false and unfeeling sense of hope, unable to stay with the present emotion.

In the film’s final shot, she crosses a heavily-trafficked street, oblivious to what is around her and to her own danger. Hers is a version of the plugged-in contemporary psyche, hearing only the music it has chosen and shutting out the outside. Eastwood has found a vehicle for displaying the contemporary psyche closed in on itself. By contrast to Kowalski in Eastwood’s Gran Torino who is transformed by experience, Christine is impenetrable to experience, as un-alive as the scorchingly 2-dimensional depiction Angelina Jolie embodies.

Moving from hopelessness to hope, she manages to convey that there is no difference between them. Both are mere fantasy substitutes for her unlived life.

A Christmas Tale

Arnaud Desplechin’s “A Christmas Tale” (Un conte de Noel) is a three ring circus, triple-strand story woven around the holiday reunion of a bourgeois family in a smallish town in northern France. No Twilight of the Gods, even in all lower-case, it is more Danse Macabre, as the Vuillard clan acts out their long-ago agreed roles with the predictable familiarity of a Commedia dell’Arte troupe.

Junon, the beautiful and aging matriarch, has been recently diagnosed with a degenerative disease. A transplant may save her life or at least give her more time, but practically no one is compatible with her rare blood type. This plight mimics the family’s chosen myth that revolves around the death at six of the firstborn child, Joseph.

At that time, neither parent, nor Joseph’s younger sister Elizabeth, was compatible for the possible transplant that might have saved the boy’s life, so Abel and Junon conceived a third child, Henri, in the hope that he would be able to save Joseph’s life by providing the necessary genetic material for the desperate medical procedure. An early placental biopsy confirmed that Henri would be useless in the effort to save Joseph, a sorrowful fact for which the not yet born child would never be forgiven by his mother.

Joseph dies and Elizabeth becomes the elder sibling. Her gaze inalterably fixated on her dead brother and the past, she barely tolerates Henri and eventually will blame him for everything wrong in her life. A last, late child, Ivan, is born into this brood. Innocent of the tragedy that has shaped the reality of the rest of his family, he is not so much free of their drama as untethered in general, a lightweight outsider of a different sort, about whom no one need bother too much.

Decades pass, each family member plays her/his part. Everyone has done their homework: an elaborate ornamental framework references the Bible, of course, but also Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Proust, Emerson, Wagner, Charlie Byrd, Charlton Heston, Ingmar Bergman and Greek and Roman mythology-- much of the structure of the three siblings relationships and identities is perhaps too neatly contained in the story of Juno, queen of the gods of Olympus, and her three children: Juventas, Mars and Vulcan.

The film culminates in the family’s unhappy Yuletide reunion, brought about and followed by Junon’s fateful operation which is not a success. Her body develops a violent rash in the process of rejecting Henri’s bone marrow-- a fitting end; she may die in a blaze of illumination like Medea’s princess victim, once again able to blame Henri for failure; the family myth comes full cycle. Ever practical, Junon has dressed in black for the transfusion, not to be caught unprepared.

Another story exists within the images of the film that describes how each character turns away from the face of life and the experience of the moment. What they seek to avoid is the humiliation—in this sense the “humanizing” element—of flawed, humble, unattractive, and precarious human existence. Siblings, father and mother all have their moments of acting out bad behavior, as if proof against the visible testimony that each has long ago given up on life itself and now only marks time and place in repetitive acts and minor divertissements that are comfortable from familiarity and the absence of challenge.

Elizabeth is a picture of obstinate juvenile spite and pride. Her father would have her believe that her constant sorrow is for the lost brother she cannot recall. She wants to believe that Henri is to blame for everything. Henri complies by endlessly providing the discordant note upon which all the others depend for focusing their contempt. Henri and Elizabeth are two sides of the same coin, locked in battle: she, underhanded and mopey, he, over-the-top and blustering.

Elizabeth’s true error is in being false to herself and one scene tells us that she knows herself more than she likes, not that it has had, will have, or, perhaps, can have any effect. Happily ensconced in misery, sorrow and spiteful retribution, her normal stance is momentarily interrupted when a gift arrives from Spatafora- a minor character and childhood friend and her siblings’ local drug dealer. She takes the pure and plain gold heart out of its box and dangles it gently as she smiles and is transported briefly out of her self-absorption.

Henri is forever blamed for the death of the brother he never knew. Junon claims to dislike Henri and the feelings are mutual, but nothing so severe that anyone need really be troubled by it. Henri is a pint-sized changeling of aggression, constant agitation and physical immediacy, unable to resist the temptation to fight and brawl.

His real crime is to be gauche, and invincible; he never wins, but he never gives up. His is the awkward irrepressibility of life, but put to no use. Henri can barely remember his wife who died early in their marriage in a car accident, her way, perhaps, of getting at least a tiny bit of his attention all to herself, and then freedom from the endless thorny enclosure of his self-regard.

Abel has conveniently--perhaps necessarily-- simplified the complexities of Nietzsche to enable himself to transform the mortal anguish of the loss of his son Joseph, turning it instead into the radiant glow of heavenly enlightenment: the little grave becomes an immense foundation of spiritual joy. He would have everyone believe, as he tells Elizabeth, that, simply, “one cannot know oneself,” and must therefore await the fullness of time for the mysteries to be revealed. This attitude allows him ample free time for music and quiet chores.

Junon decides to go ahead with the transplant, reversing her previous statement against the operation. Abel is seated in his study listening to a jazz recording and following along with the score in hand. Junon must bang on the door to get his attention. He turns down the volume and awaits her latest announcement. Ostensibly pleased with her choice, he asks if she wants him to inform Henri, the compatible donor for the operation. Yes. She hesitates a moment at the door and then leaves, as Abel, seated still, turns back to readjust up the volume on the stereo. Outside she slumps momentarily on the stairs, knowing something is amiss, but then catches her breath and moves on.

Every opportunity that life awards for an encounter with authenticity into the unexpected is finessed into a known form and thus sophisticated, neutered into convention, a minor-key cause célèbre of amusement or irritation. The Midnight Mass is little more than a quaint neighborhood fair or charity bake sale entertainment, pleasant overall. Ivan tells his two young sons that Jesus never existed, and certainly won’t appear after midnight in the grandchildren’s little toy crèche-- nothing “new” is coming into the world that night or any night chez Vuillard.

Every gesture and action is the enemy of lived life, of possibility; nothing leads anywhere too complicated or too unknown. At the film’s end Henri is alone with his mother in the cold, bright hospital room, a sterile plastic sheet divides them. He proffers up a gold coin to Junon—a chance for a toss of luck or payment to Charon? Either way, Henri shakes his head: you don’t want to know.

In another telling-- the third ring of this circus cycle, the real tension of the film is not within the family’s predictable antics, but whether any of it matters at all in light of the coming storm: the massive monoliths of anonymous housing projects and office buildings that encroach further and further into the Vuillard’s world. Far more dangerous than the degenerative disease that will kill Junon or the cancer that took little Joseph is this overwhelming, silent tide. It will not be satisfied with mere individuals, but hungers to consume an entire way of life.

In fact, life at the Vuillard’s is already a dream past its prime, past life itself; it is a testament to the old. The stylish and capacious family manse can no longer contain itself let alone all its members and the light of day reveals what the fireworks of Christmas Eve did not: that the house is a wounded and crumbling ghost, part of a faultline of forgotten old structures, surrounded, descending into an ever darker oblivion as the new and huge blocky towers of granite, glass and steel press in from all sides.

I've Loved You So Long

It would be an act of critical generosity to describe this film as flawed. More accurately, “I’ve Loved You So Long” is a work in which the writer/director, Philippe Claudel, has avoided the tasks he set himself, choosing instead to engage the viewer at the lowest level of sentimentality, counting on the audience’s love affair with Kristin Scott Thomas to breathe oxygen into an airless piece. A slow and intentionally misleading storyline asks the viewer first to try to understand Scott Thomas’ character, Juliette, and then slaps the audience with a volte face that nonetheless could have been compelling if Claudel had used it as something more than a tear-jerker ending.

From the film’s opening image of Juliette—just out of prison after 15 years—waiting at the airport to be picked up by her sister, Lea, it is evident that a secret will ultimately be revealed. If this woman served a long jail sentence, it was obviously her choice. Why and for what would she have been wrongly condemned? Near the story’s end, a circumstantial occurrence reveals that Juliette’s murder of her terminally ill young son was a mercy killing done by her as a doctor to spare the boy the anguished final days of dying. Conveniently, the trial brought none of this to light—no autopsy, no mitigating circumstances, so that Juliette’s right to her martyrdom remained absolute and unchallenged, allowing her to return to society carrying the ultimate stigma of filicide.

This might have been a movie about a woman having found through the darkest secret her only way to cope with her child’s death. The work would then have had its life in the tension between an unrevealed truth and an unbearable agony. Her interactions with the world she has rejoined would offer her the redemptive opportunity to let go of the specialness of secrecy and face openly that even the greatest loss does not equal the end of life.

The time in prison which she engineered, however improbable as credible plot, would then have been a confinement for her unwarranted hubris in allowing a false narrative to dictate a conclusion. When and how would she see her untold tale as a running away from the challenges of life? That sequence might have been compelling.

Unfortunately, the film ignores the impossibility that no one else noticed the child’s disease and disfiguration. As a doctor Juliette processed her son’s blood tests herself and did not feel the need to verify the results or seek other opinions about treatment, nor did she feel the need or obligation to confide in her ex-husband, the boy’s father. No one was to have a hand in this but she.

A very different character could have emerged of a selfish woman struggling with her own inability to allow her child a separate existence, unwilling to grant him his place in the complexity of a mysterious larger world. In her act of mercy, Juliette retains the starring role. There are many ways besides the literal act of murder in which narcissistic and unfulfilled parents can burden, thwart and cripple their children as if they were merely props in a claustrophobic play and not beings with lives of their own.

The parole officer to whom Juliette must report weekly wants only to tell her about his own life and his yearning to go to the Orinoco river, a kind of image for him of journeying to the source, into expansiveness, away from the prosaic routine and disappointment about things not having worked out on a personal level—his divorce and separation from his young daughter. The ’trip to the Orinoco’ ends in his suicide by gunshot; he can find no actual way to enlarge his existence, to incorporate the painful facts of his life into the continuing journey. His is the active version of the symbolic passive suicide which has been Juliette’s fate in failing to confront her unfinished life.

For Juliette, the director conflates discovery with self-discovery; the vignettes of the film seem calculated only for their emotional effect on the audience, not as testament to the complexity of evolving from or evoking depth experience in response to the difficult and tragic realities of life. Since complexity has been absent from her return to society, Juliette’s voyage has had no thrust and the viewer feels tricked and patronized. If it is really only that she needed to tell someone else—or have someone else “know”, what is the point of all she has done and been through? How, after all this, can that make any difference to her? We are left knowing Juliette as little at the end as at the beginning, but with good reason not to trust her or the director.

Samson

In Andrzej Wajda’s 1961 film, “Samson”, the story begins as Jakub goes off to his first day at the University in Warsaw. His skin, hair color and facial features mark him as unquestionably Jewish; within moments of his arrival in a lecture hall filled with rabidly anti-Semitic young Poles, there is evidence that his life is in danger. They hound and taunt the Jew, pushing him down to the ground as they menacingly toss a huge brick just barely above his head. In deflecting the attack, Jakub thrusts the brick away and it strikes and kills another student.

What was unmistakably self-defense brings him a long prison sentence for murder. Making no attempt to plead his innocence (futile though that may have been), his acceptance of guilt sets the stage for the story that follows. Given the chance to place blame elsewhere, only the one willing to pay the price for what he has done can mature into full adulthood as a complete human being.

Serving his sentence in prison, Jakub has two significant human encounters. One is with Pankrat, a political prisoner and dedicated communist in the adjacent cell who sees life as a constant battle to overthrow the tyranny of oppressive regimes. Pankrat’s secure male energy points to a life that does not recognize compromise in pursuit of its goal.

The other encounter is with his cellmate Malina whose decisions all exemplify adaptation. He embezzled funds to pay for his son’s medical care, knowing he was committing a crime and gladly accepting the punishment. He has no quarrel with society nor is he unhappy in prison. His message to the young Jakub is about paying your dues in the world, living without resentment, surviving to meet the tasks of the day.

Where Pankrat’s is the standpoint of the individual versus society, Malina’s embodies that of engagement with the world on terms that are never set but evolve moment to moment. “Samson” demonstrates that both these aspects live in Jakub; the tension that propels the story keeps returning to the question of which will be stronger, when and how.

When the Nazis bomb Warsaw the wardens unlock all the cells and the prisoners stream out into the streets already overcrowded with desperate evacuees. For Jakub this will not eventuate in any freedom- all Poland is now a prison and with the German invasion, Jakub’s new cell is the Ghetto.

As part of the work detail that collects dead bodies from the streets for burial, Jakub finally finds his beloved mother, just moments after she has died. Jakub is overwhelmed with grief and the inner realization of his now total alone-ness.

A man who hopes to escape the Ghetto joins into the burial procession. Unable to scale the high brick wall by himself, he begs for Jakub’s help and encourages him to escape too. Jakub has no desire to try and escape, but now separated from the burial group he is in danger as the armed guards close in with their growling dogs and he too climbs over the wall.

Moving cautiously in the darkening shadows, Jakub is trapped inside a large apartment building when the porter locks the doors for curfew. Jakub goes up to the roof to hide and through a skylight sees a party in progress. Discovered, he is unexpectedly invited to join in the drinking and card games; exhausted, he falls asleep in a chair.

After all the others have gone, Lucyna, the hostess, informs Jakub that unbeknownst to her Aryan guests she, too, is a Jew. She dispels his illusion that everything outside the ghetto is light and reveals the constant anxiety in which she lives, ever fearful that her dissembling will be found out. She rejects his desire to return to the ghetto, insisting valiantly for a vision of freedom and life that their moment in time cannot support.

Lucyna is determined to make Jakub her lover and to find a way to save them both; already at the end of her own resolve, she finds new energy and inspiration through her fantasy of the young man and their imagined life. She cuts and bleaches her hair, creating an even more perfect persona emblem of non-Jewishness. Dressed in white, she goes out to secure the means and arrange for their escape to a friend’s country estate, where she believes they can wait out the war, safe from harm.

This brief experience with a woman questing to survive the war is his first major post-prison test, the initial opportunity to outrun his own race. Lucyna pits the temptation of warm flesh against the pull of solidarity with his branded fellows. For Jakub personal freedom carries no transfiguring image. In prison for murder, he knew he was innocent and how little that actually mattered. He knows that he cannot be free while the ghetto exists. Jakub does not wait for Lucyna’s return.

Down in the street his life is saved again by a band of Yuletide performers who cover Jakub’s face with one of their masks as a German patrol rounds the corner. He says he wants to return to the ghetto, and they explain he cannot do it there like that: they will all suffer. They lead him to a house on the boundary of the ghetto’s wall. There the man who cautiously and, no doubt, profitably helps a few of the ghetto’s captives to escape and smuggles in food and contraband convinces Jakub of the futility of returning. Life itself, so apparently absent, will not let Jakub meet the fate he is willing to face.

Now he has nowhere to go but to Malina’s, accepting a long-ago offer of shelter and hospitality meant for circumstances less dire. Somehow, he manages to get to the apartment undetected, where he is welcomed warmly and without hesitation by the old man and his adolescent niece, Kazia, who instantly develops a crush on the young stranger. It is Christmas Eve and Kazia imagines that Jakub is her gift, solace against the loneliness of the entrapping apartment she is not allowed to leave. The next day Jakub is seen when Kazia opens the door while Malina is out. Jakub insists he must leave but Malina convinces him to hide in cellar, an underground prison where he will hopefully be secure. Trapped in the basement, through long days and nights equally dark, outside time, awake and asleep at once, jakub gathers resolve for some as yet unknown purpose

Both Lucyna and Kazia seek to enclose Jakub in the confines of personal emotion; they want to build a life of coupled fulfillment, separated from the incalculable disaster of what is going on outside. Lucyna finds her way to Malina’s where Kazia denies any knowledge of Jakub or his whereabouts. Kazia’s sorrow at separation from Jakub is instantly transformed into blind happiness when she realizes that Lucyna believes her and departs. Kazia is still too young to understand the limits of personal story.

Lucyna has the revelation that in this atmosphere flight cannot lead anywhere and gives herself up to the Gestapo, reveling her identity as a Jew, meaning, of course, certain death. Meanwhile, Kazia, scheming ever more to keep Jakub with her (while concealing from him the news of Malina’s accidental death) trims his hair, thinking she can tidy him up and bring him into the lonely apartment, but is finally herself locked in the basement as Jakub flees to witness the last embers of the ghetto that has been burned to the ground after the uprising.

Wandering the streets with now no literal ghetto to return to, Jakub makes his way to the railroad tracks but cannot bring himself to jump into the path of the oncoming train. He is not afraid to die, but does not want to die just for having the face of a Jew.

Hounded by a gang of children, Jakub is recognized by a former fellow prisoner and taken to the hideout of the communists, headed by Pankrat. There he is brought face to face with what Pankrat had adumbrated in their brief prison dialog. These are men prepared at any moment to give their lives in the service of a cause. Wanting above all to live while being unqualifiedly willing to die is what endows these committed ideologues with strength.

Before leaving to distribute their illegal pamphlets, Pankrat, unrecognized by Jakub, shows him the grenades that are to be detonated should the Nazis discover this hiding place; no one is to come out alive. When the Nazis do appear and discover the banned presses, Jakub realizes that this is the moment all his imprisonment has readied him for, his instant to incarnate as the Samson bringing the godless down. He detonates the grenades, killing all the Nazis while he is crushed under a falling beam as the entire building caves in.

In no way does Wajda diminish the genuineness of personal life and private encounter. However, his vision supports the understanding that- when there is a battle to the death under way- preserving one’s individual earthly existence is not the primary value. Yes, Jakub was a Jew during the Holocaust, meaning that he was condemned to perish in a ghetto or concentration camp. Intended to die a passive, victimized death, his journey has taught him that, with sufficient boldness and alertness, he can choose the circumstances of his death. He will die because of the Nazis, but not without exacting his revenge.

Thus, he purposefully concludes his journey by accomplishing through deliberate action what in killing the student at the University was a mere extension of self-protection. He has learned that being a man has little to do with winning under untenable circumstances, but everything to do with finding the right moment to act. He has become the mythic figure that gives the film its name.

Japon

In Carlos Reygadas’ magical 2002 film, Japon, a crippled man lurches awkwardly on his walking stick across an arid plateau randomly studded with huge agave plants, each succulent a cluster of pointy fingers, each finger laced in rows of sharp threatening thorns.

From nowhere, a young boy scuttles from plant to plant, yelling at the man to duck down. Guns fire. A bird falls to the ground mortally wounded but not yet dead. The boy runs to retrieve the small trophy. Frustrated and ashamed that his young hands cannot wring the animal’s neck- as hunters do to end the now pointless and painful struggle for life- the boy hands the bird to the unknown man admitting his weakness. The man tears off the bird’s head and tosses it, still blinking, onto the ground.

The boy’s father, the hunter, arrives with his group and offers a ride, asking where the stranger is going and why- family? No family; to kill myself, he replies. The noisy carload of mostly younger men takes him half way to his goal. He must walk the last leg of this journey down into the valley through baking sun to a remote village where, once he has centered himself, his final act can be accomplished. The intention is to achieve disappearance without a trace.

There is ample evidence as the tale unfolds that he has been led to this particular spot to encounter a specific woman, Ascen, who provides him a makeshift room. She wonders what has brought him here, but quickly accepts his presence, for whatever reason. Her willingness to house him gradually widens into those rituals of shared daily life as of an old married couple: his tea awaits him after the daily walk; his clothes are handed over to be laundered; a dish of fruit is simply present, as if it were manna.

The man has brought farewell tokens of culture: an illustrated history of modern art, a portrait, music and a gun. Purpose and focus seem present enough. Will he jump from a precipice, shoot himself or both? Though he has talked himself into believing that living on holds no interest for him, this is pure rationalization. As he familiarizes himself with this strange environment, he cannot deny that life continues and he remains a willing participant.

From the moment that he takes out his gun maneuvering it to point at his heart and then putting it away, it grows apparent that he is still wedded to this plane of existence. He comes face to face with the difference between the desire to be dead and the ability to act. The word ’cowardice’ partly describes his dilemma but, more importantly, he continues to recognize an inner pull toward new experience and an inexorable attraction to the mysteries of life and the living.

Ascen, because she wants nothing for self beyond her utterly humble life, reveals in her character a form of action that contrasts with, and is clearly superior to, his imagined resolve. She meets the moment with whatever decision corresponds to an appropriate human response. The culminating example of her potency comes to fruition when she accepts his proposal (old and long widowed as she is) that they once have sexual intercourse before he proceeds on his way somewhere, never to return.

The intercourse scene is a moment of pure poetry, totally not about lust, passion, or anything ordinarily thought of as relationship. She accepts him because of an expressed need that she has no reason to reject. Like all her little actions, this most personal one remains, in essence, impersonal. Her power is as incontrovertible as it is quiet, fully selfless, awesomely present.

Ascen’s nephew, released from jail, wants to claim his supposed patrimony by dismantling stone by stone the one solid structure in her physical world. She knows that her shambling shack cannot survive the fierce April winds without the shelter of the stone barn. Her only reaction to this aggressive demand is to see it as proof that he must need them more than she does. Ascen assents.

After the men have destroyed the entire structure, extracting the huge chiseled stones and placing them onto the double beds attached to a tractor, the nephew’s young son tells his father that the driver says they must make two trips; the stones are too heavy. All the men, and Ascen too, have been drinking, celebrating the event and the end of their intense labor. “I pay, I command- one trip only” the father roars and the tractor starts the slow downhill progress on the narrow winding dirt road. The men are lounging on top of the stones as if on a hayride, singing and shouting.

The film ends by showing the inter-connected resolution of these stories. Ascen knows her future cannot exist in the humble home that will be torn to shreds in the spring storms and she moves toward the only open place there is. Cloaked in the much too large jacket of the man she has sheltered, Ascen joins the merry group, climbing onto the already over-loaded vehicle transporting the stones to their new home. Predictably, it overturns. The stones tumble every which way and the passengers are strewn all over, crushed and dead.

For Ascen, it is totally natural to allow her life to find an appropriate ending. She has not chosen suicide; rather, she accepts impartially that her earthly story has been completed. Meanwhile, the man who ostensibly came to end his life stands in the doorway of her hovel, which has been as though willed to him as a home. Ascen has shown him the way into death, by giving herself fully into life. As never before, he has gained the strength and viewpoint to stand exactly where he is, ready to respond to the diurnal tasks without judgment or fear. He is the new Ascen.

The Pool

“The Pool” is a magical and wry cinematic meditation by director Chris Smith on the differences between the Western notion of transformation and the Eastern idea of destiny. Based on a story by his long-time collaborator Randy Russell, “The Pool” was relocated by Smith to Goa, in southern India, from its original setting in the American Midwest. The transposition not only ornaments this tale externally with the imagery and customs of a fabled place half a world away, but also reshapes the story’s internal dimensions by juxtaposing and interweaving Western and Eastern cultural sensibilities.

In the overgrown garden of a seemingly uninhabited house, the pool is the potent center of the film to which each character relates in his or her own way.

Venkatesh seeks out the pool in the moments when he is not on duty cleaning rooms at a small hotel. Every day he climbs a tree outside the property wall that overlooks the tranquil water of the pool, wondering if anyone ever swims in it and what it would be like to go in. He knows what he is looking at, but not what he is looking for.

Jhangir is an 11 year old orphan street urchin who does menial work in a café near the hotel where Venkatesh works. Though Venkatesh necessarily functions as an older brother figure to Jhangir, theirs is a bond of circumstance more than love. The two have become sidekicks and share a side-business reselling plastic bags at the local market.

Jhangir’s aim in the world is being constantly aware of how each moment might yield him an advantage. Sentiment and sentimentality are luxuries he cannot afford. To him, the pool is just one other place in the world, whatever stories or imaginings may accompany it offer no help with the needs of the moment; he is amused by his friend’s wasted time spent staring at the pool.

Eventually a man appears in the garden. Pretending to work, he mostly wanders, moving chairs and picking at dead leaves, always circling back to sit for long hours gazing into the pool. His sullen and bristling late-teenage daughter, Ayesha, spends long hours poolside, reading.

For the father, owner and occasional resident of the property, the pool is an accusatory center for self-recrimination, the constant reminder of a moment a decade earlier when his young son drowned. Frozen at this window into the past, he has neglected and abused his living family.

Ayesha has dutifully, if resentfully, accompanied her father to this property. However improbable, she was, as a 7 year old, briefly responsible for her 4 year old brother in the water the day he died. Unable to prevent the tragedy, the girl’s fault was to survive. Her father has nothing to offer her beside financial support; they barely tolerate each others’ existence.

For her, the pool is a place to while away the boring hours. Once she is interrupted there, she goes off to the anonymity of a small public park. The pool offers her neither magic nor memory, only the certainty that she can never matter enough to her father to be loved or even to be seen apart from the obliterating specter of her dead sibling. She exists but cannot live.

Venkatesh is as fascinated by the new arrivals as he is by the pool itself and soon insinuates himself into the garden, gradually becoming a de-facto assistant to the father in his labors to rejuvenate the long-abandoned garden.

Meanwhile, impervious to the girl’s rebuffs and always with Jhangir in tow, Venkatesh goes to great effort to befriend Ayesha. Any idea that the young man is operating from a sly scheme toward worldly gain is finally and utterly dashed when he tells Ayesha that he is betrothed to a girl now only 10 years old in a marriage arranged by his mother. Ayesha coyly suggests that he may not like her once she is old enough to marry and he eclipses her suggestion and viewpoint by explaining that their romance will begin after the marriage.

In realizing that she is of no interest to Venkatesh as an imagined or potential mate or conquest, Ayesha slowly warms to the odd pair, basking in, if not truly understanding, the glow of being seen for herself, neither as a means to an end, a blank screen or the insignificant part of a bad memory.

In the course of their work together in the garden, the father tests Venkatesh in various ways and gradually comes to see him as a potential replacement son. One day the father tells a parable about generosity as prelude to his offer for the young man to accompany him back to Bombay where he will receive an education. Suddenly, Venkatesh has a completely unanticipated opportunity: choice- he can stay where he is, return to his village, or go to Bombay. In confronting the question of what he actually wants for himself, he discovers his true relationship to the pool, that of gaining perspective.

At first he decides to accept the unexpected offer of Bombay, but later alters his choice into an amalgam that is both all and none of the above; he will stay behind, go to a local school and continue as caretaker of the garden, house and pool. The father regrets but accepts his final decision, asking what made him change his mind? It was the story about generosity. Then I should not have told it, the father laments, thinking his lesson had gone misunderstood.

The difference between West and East is beautifully described in a simple scene between Ayesha and Venkatesh in the small park where he first befriended the lonely girl. He offers her the parting gift of a kitten. Surprised and dismayed, Ayesha rejects the offer, seeing only the unwanted burden of a needy, vulnerable creature. Alright; he casually pushes the animal aside. You can’t just leave it here, she accuses, though she has no intention of changing her mind. He disagrees; it is life. He found the kitten alone in a dark and filthy alley- at least here it is better off than before.

She does not understand that his friendship to her was a free, generous and genuine response to her neediness- nothing she deserved or was owed- and that in offering her the kitten, he offers her herself. In rejecting the cat she rejects life, unable to feel or see that first she needs someplace to begin the slow movement toward connection. Life, like the kitten, is always the opportunity at hand, not necessarily the one imagined or desired, and it must always be paid for in some kind of coin. Here, now, is the only place to live; how she responds to the moment is her choice.

Father and daughter depart and, surprisingly, Venkatesh returns to working at the hotel. He takes the father’s offer to subsidize his education and passes it on to Jhangir, whom he sends to the local school in his own place, even with his own name. Jhangir, who carries no familial identity, can go on with the ruse of the name change to ultimately enter society as someone. The trick has every chance of working in the world. Even the father, once he finds out, will not only be amused, but will come to see that he was the one who did not fully understand his own parable and that Venkatesh has rightly chosen the better vessel in which to plant the father’s generosity.

Venkatesh never approaches the moment from a place of desire. He knows that he will go through with his long-ago arranged marriage. He takes for granted his performance of all traditional duties toward his mother. He has seen from what has just transpired that, simply by being alive, experiences occur and that following them where they lead is his task. When he extends himself outward, as with the father, Ayesha and Jhangir, it is neither for reward nor gratification of desire, but entirely in the service of being on the ground which he is overlooking. For him, every encounter in the world is a way of deepening the feeling of being alive. It is thus no surprise that the end of the film finds him sitting alone beside the pool, looking deep into its depth, searching the mirror of its surface. He is on a spiritual journey and carries on his slender frame the ancient wisdom that life is about understanding, the soul’s journey, not the ego’s.

Before I Forget (Avant que j'oublie)

Jacques Nolot’s “Before I Forget” begins with an arresting and compelling visual prologue: upon a brilliant, stark white screen a small black dot suddenly appears and slowly begins to enlarge.

Is the black dot an oculus into an infinite star-less future on the other side of all this whiteness- the round opening increasing in size as we approach and the view beyond the portal broadens? Or is it, rather, a small hard-edged dark planet aimed and headed straight toward us, gaining girth as it hurtles smoothly, effortlessly through an utterly empty atmosphere?

The absolute lack of articulation within each extreme- white and black- becomes entirely unnerving as the speed and size suddenly increase out of proportion, until the entire screen is filled with blackness.

The prologue imitates and is a 2-dimensional diagram of the experience of life. The initial uniformly smooth and slow pacing of the increase in size of the black dot is easily comprehended and magically- though logically- creates an assumption that this rate and ratio will naturally continue until darkness prevails and the light is entirely gone- nothing shocking, almost a pre-nostalgic response to the inevitable. The sudden change in tempo alters the point of view, destroying the complacency of presumed understanding, creating an anxiety that reverses the previous perception of outcome: what was inevitable in its time now comes frighteningly too soon. What is also entirely absent from both prologue and film is the notion of transformation- alternate possibility.

The prologue also describes the trajectory of the story “Before I Forget” which follows Pierre, a 60ish HIV+ gay man, his small circle of contemporaries and the young hustlers they ardently seek out and support with repetitive rounds of sexual episodes more reminiscent of Sisyphus’ labors than spontaneous journeys of desire.

The story that unfolds is a captivating amalgam of unrelenting banality and touching humanity, describing a world in which nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo. Both the young and old characters are stuck in patterns so predictable their lives come to look more like the orbits of celestial clusters of inorganic matter, each distinctly different, yet carelessly and powerlessly caught in a magnetic pull, circling the Big Cock.

Really, this world is a binary solar system revolving around two opposite stars that each appear in the form of a literary statement. The Dark Star is a long cerebral quote about stupidity and man’s propensity for making wrong choices because of choosing form over content, marvelously conveyed over Pierre’s car-radio as he is about to set off for an afternoon’s saunter through the local porn theater. The Bright Star is a glorious re-found love-letter from the youthful Pierre’s old sugar daddy, Toutounne, crammed with the scrappy and radiant overflow of exacting particulars that leave no doubt about the real-life love and desire still pouring off the page fifteen years after the fact.

Pierre’s circle includes a claustrophobic and vain colleague whose only interest in Pierre is comparing the price of hustlers- his fantasies of vibrancy revolve around forbidden blow-jobs with armed policemen; George, the married lawyer whose slim, occasional chances for sexual tidbits on the side seem always to be thwarted by chance; and Paul, a former convict with a much darker past and more practical tastes. Paul was the heir of his sugar daddy Gaston and Paul, unlike Pierre, achieved the means to live as he wanted. Paul exemplifies in purist form life lived moment to moment solely with the aim of advantage. He stands for the aspect of rampant capitalism under which there is nothing not for sale and someone is always going to benefit. The challenge for economic man is never to lose sight of how the game is played; a winner will always hit the jackpot. Being the winner is not just all that counts, it is all there is.

Money and time are inextricably linked and honored above all else. At one extreme, the aim is automatic prolongation of life, lived or unlived; at the other extreme lies the unrelenting and unforgiving finitude of the pay-per-view “professional hour”- whether with the hustler or the psychologist- always commanding: ”Now/NotNow” and equally unable to conform to life as experience rather than schedule.

When Pierre climbs- with surprising alacrity- over an ivy-covered wall in the deep dark of a moonless night, we imagine that he is out for another round of half-hearted sexual encounters. It is rather a memory of the Bright Star now absent from his world that draws Pierre like a pilgrim into the shadows of the cemetery for a brief visit at Toutounne’s grave.

Perhaps this gives an idea for the film’s title; the cluster of preening and self-regarding, aging narcissists is more like a gaggle of old house pets, exotic spoiled cats, running after each delectably cute mouse, dangling the captured creature but no longer in the game for blood or potency. They have forgotten what it was they were after, what deep inner needs jumpstarted the pattern of desire while being unable to see it through. Pattern and aging have taken the place of encounter. They cannot move on. What unites them all is a narrowness of vision. Will they ever meet life with an openness to widening the spectrum of observation? The opportunity afforded Pierre by Toutounne’s letter may have been his last chance to remember- or be led into an appreciation- that a moment of real meeting has the unique capacity to alter the ultimate trajectory of the Sisyphean boulder’s path. Once the ability to be affected by felt experience disappears, repetition alone remains, along with the entrapment of pointless searches and yearned for degradations.

Pierre is infantile and obvious, with a matter-of-fact and contradictory presence that belies someone who has been loved for nothing more than being himself; he is quick to point out that he will not be so generous with the next generation.


Pierre can always be relied upon to do exactly what he says he won’t, so the film ends with a scene as slow as the prologue of the black dot. Dressed in drag, like an old suburban mall beer hall waitress out for a fancy dinner in the city, complete with a long and merciless raven-black wig and simple shift with lace trim, Pierre goes off to the sex club/porn theater with one of his regular hustlers. At last he turns and enters the theater, slowly swallowed into the pitch black that describes the future, both literally and figuratively, near and far.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

The narrator alone would have us believe that “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a comedy- and the first twenty minutes appear to be a glorious send-up of Woody Allen by Woody Allen. But something does not connect, even in these first scenes, between the dead stares of the two beautiful, youthful heroines and the unrelenting overflow of chatty and comical soundbites. Allen plays both sides of the cinematic/dramatic coin- not trusting us to simply watch the screen without micro-managing our observations and response, and tipping his hat that, perhaps, the narrator doth protest too much. The all-too-familiar too-true-to-life stereotypes that haunt all of Allen’s films must be constantly re-packaged with a barker’s sleight of tongue.

Vicky and Cristina, collegiate buddies with two months to kill set their sights on Barcelona, staying at the home of a distant relative, Judy, and her hedge fund husband, Mark. Vicky, the dark, serious scholarly one- engaged to be married- turns out (surprise!) to fall for the suave native artist. Mums the word as Cristina, the capricious blond- uninformed on all levels, including her best friend’s outré caprice- beds and eventually moves in with same suave native artist, Juan Antonio. Soon his ex-wife, Maria Elena, shows up as a caricature of creativity and danger.

A totally unexpected and creatively productive ménage a trois ensues at the artist’s very artistic abode until, predictably, Cristina’s inner alarm goes off, unilaterally signaling the end of their joint artistic harmony- her tank is full, time to drive on. The Europeans are hurt, outraged and dismayed, and can only revert to their historic and histrionic bickering. The Europeans cannot find fulfillment among themselves; they can remember and recognize something they can no longer produce.

Meanwhile Judy, the Barcelona surrogate Mom/hostess is revealed to be having an affair, unhappy and somehow unfulfilled in her marriage to the older model of Vicky’s fiancé. Vicky confides her secret and feelings for Juan Antonio to Judy, who tries to warn the younger woman away from the fate she continues to embrace. Too late for me, she laments, but not for Vicky. The possible truth of this view is lost in the attractively deep cushion of very good upholstery.

Really, Vicky’s plans for an elaborate social wedding in the Fall and the house in Bedford Hills need not be perturbed by finding out not only that she may not love the man she’s marrying, but that she may not even know what love is.

Cristina returns from a successful quick side trip to France intended to shake off the last effects of her multi-valent/partnered romance with the handsome European Art couple. Vicky finally tells Cristina of her single night of fallen love. Cristina reveals just how little affected she is from her great experience with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena by professing that, had she only known, she would gladly have stood aside for her best friend, as if her entire experience were little more in substance and meaning than another azure cashmere cardigan on sale at Bergdorf’s.

In the almost cluelessly unhappy world of “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” the narrator never shuts up; unrelenting good cheer wears away the fragile remnants of love and courage, like a cruel partner who giggles at the exact moment that wordlessly indicates you are, at best, having sex, not making love. Nothing is strong enough to break through or counter the lethargy of status quo and style; no encounter or revelation need interfere with habit, one’s preferred self-image or any long-booked social calendar.

This nightmare of McLuhanesque socially appropriate “traffic flow” cannot rightly be called tragic, for no one is awake or responsive to life; no one actually exercises choice; no one admits to a power greater than their own convenience, will or illusion; no touch leaves an impression; no call makes them stop and turn, irrevocably, into a life uncharted.

Exactly on schedule, as planned, the Americans go home.

The Edge of Heaven

Written and directed by Fatih Akin, “The Edge of Heaven” is a shimmering mosaic of exquisitely delicate counterpoint that nonetheless questions the modern inflation of applauding or expecting the orderly development of destiny. Above all it is a film about listening and liminal space. The messages these voices would bring are equally drowned out in the staid complacency of the university and by the deafening refrain of political radicals. Inner liberation as well as survival, growth and the possibilities of joy and fulfillment require being tuned in to what moment to moment events may be communicating.

Six characters, like the voices of a fugue, comprise three couples of parent and child, though their energic affinities lie along different lines of sympathy.

Ali, a Turkish national and pensioner who has worked his adult life in Germany and was widowed early, still has the vitality and desire in his senior years to seek out a prostitute. She, Yeter, turns out to be Turkish as well. Ali offers her a home with him, matching her current earnings, if she will sleep only with him. A better life for each, he reckons. After being threatened by Islamic vigilantes, Yeter accepts the offer, denying to herself that Ali will make sexual demands.

When he does, she hears neither the context of his demand nor the echo of her agreement. Shouting a false and belligerent declaration of her independence, Yeter punctuates her fury by pushing him violently away. In a rage at her refusal Ali slaps her; Yeter falls, hitting her head on a sharp edge and dies. He is sent to jail. Release for Ali comes only after his sentence is completed and he is deported back to Turkey, to the small town from which his journey began.

Ali’s son Nejat is a professor of German Literature at a university in Hamburg. Where his father is fiery and active, he is reflective and demure. He rejects the father he sees as a lecherous murderer. In an attempt to compensate for his father’s crime, Nejat goes to Istanbul to seek out Ayten, the daughter of his father’s accidental victim. She is nowhere to be found. What Nejat does find is a German language bookstore for sale whose owner wants to return to his homeland. Surprisingly more at home in Istanbul than the German university classroom, Nejat hears in this chance encounter an inner voice that harmonizes the divergent sonorities of his love of German and his awakened awareness of heritage.

Ayten, the missing daughter of the now dead mother, sees herself as a revolutionary and does take life-threatening risks. At a political rally, a plainclothes policeman is overpowered by the mob; his revolver falls and lands at Ayten’s feet. Quick and volatile, she grabs the gun, manages to escape the police and hides the weapon on the roof of a nondescript residential apartment building.

Ayten comes to Germany under an alias and tries to follow the clues that she hopes will lead to her mother, but Yeter has also been living under a kind of alias, disguising her real career from her daughter. Instead Ayten meets Charlotte, a university student her own age, who quickly grows infatuated with Ayten and brings the beautiful dark foreigner home to her bourgeois mother’s house. An unexpected romance develops between the two young women.

Charlotte’s mother, Susanna, does not wholly approve of or agree with her daughter’s desires and actions but she supports her. In a confrontation with Ayten, Susanna sees through the younger woman's political posturing and demands only that in her house Ayten not use vulgar language. In Susanna's simple delineating stand, Ayten is reminded of the mother she does not have.

In the search to find Yeter, Ayten is discovered by the authorities and must go through the lengthy and expensive process of seeking political asylum, paid for by Susanna. Ayten’s petition is denied on the grounds that her country is close to achieving a full western identity as an EU member. Like Ali, the illegal Ayten is returned to Turkey, though she now goes to jail for her former political activities.

As Nejat went in search of the to him unknown Ayten, Charlotte’s quest is to help her imprisoned lover. Susanna pleads with Charlotte to leave Istanbul and return home to her studies, to her own life. When Charlotte refuses, claiming that now she has found her life, Susanna withdraws her financial support. Through the bulletin board at the German bookstore now owned and run by Nejat, Charlotte comes to rent a room in his apartment.

In prison, Ayten is threatened by her former radical associates to turn over the gun she hid so long before. She enlists Charlotte’s help in recouping the hidden object, not revealing what it is.

Charlotte makes the parallel error to that of Ayten’s mother, Yeter. She focuses on what she wants out of life at the moment and forgets the reality of her outer environment. After retrieving the revolver, her bag is stolen by a gang of street urchins when she tries to brush off their entreaties for the blond foreigner to buy gum and tissues.

She brazenly chases after them and later, suddenly and unexpectedly, comes across the boys in an empty lot off a narrow side street as they wonder and marvel at the huge silver weapon. As she angrily screams her demand for the return of the gun, one of the boys pointlessly and unintentionally kills her.

In an attempt to understand her sorrowful loss, Susanna comes to Istanbul, to Nejat’s apartment, to collect the few belongings that are all that remain of her beloved daughter. She asks to spend the night in her daughter’s old room and falls asleep reading Charlotte’s diary. Susanna is awakened at dawn with the brilliant vision of her smiling daughter.

Though Charlotte could not listen to the world around her, she had listened to the inner voice that led her where it could. The vision attests to the complex fulfillment of a short life that it is difficult not to see as tragic. Susanna takes on her daughter’s wish and determination to help Ayten, who finds the parent she deeply needs in Charlotte’s anguished and willing mother.

Susanna happens to ask Nejat about his own father. She and Nejat share the ability to reflect on their experience, to patiently listen to the voices that would speak against habit and reflex, even against their former ideas of themselves. Nejat has a kind of epiphany, not unlike Susanna’s, through which he glimpses how the power of accident can re-route a life and is led toward the inevitable understanding of who his father is: a man he must forgive and embrace.

In this era the edge of heaven can only be approached through the personal encounter. Ali is freed from a meaningless, lonely and repetitious existence as a mere consumer in an inhospitable though highly developed world; Nejat enters into a life he previously could not have imagined or valued and comes to see his father’s essence; Ayten and Susanna encounter their shared ability to feel and act with courage. Without the two deaths, none of these revelations would occur. Redemption is only for those with the inner freedom to step outside their own trajectory and direct their voyage home.