Tag Archives: Faith

Capsules

CAPSULE: TWELVE HOURS WITH MARIA [AS HORAS DE MARIA] (1977)

1 Comment

DIRECTED BY: António de Macedo

FEATURING: Eugénia Bettencourt, João D’Ávila, Cecília Guimarães

PLOT: After purportedly being raped by her stepfather and expelled from home by her mother, blind 23-year old Maria is interned in the ruined remains of an old psychiatric ward by her aunt, Sister Ângela, who entrusts her to the care of Doctor Firmino.

Still from Twelve Hours with Maria [As Horos de Maria] (1977)

COMMENTS: António de Macedo is one of Portugal’s most unjustly treated directors. One of the pioneers of the “Novo Cinema” movement (Portugal’s version of the “New Wave”) and the country’s only consistent representative of genre filmmaking, he abandoned the craft in the early 1990’s out of frustration with the open ostracism to which he was subject, including the government’s refusal to finance his movies. He nevertheless left behind an important, although little noticed, body of work including the relatively successful A Promessa (The Vows) (the first Portuguese film to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival) and lesser-known works that delved explicitly in fantastical territory. His retirement from cinema saw him focus on other interests: he was also a playwright, novelist, and an explorer of religion and esotericism.

Twelve Hours with Maria, which could be described as a Gothic psychodrama, proved controversial at the time of release, denounced as blasphemous by the Catholic Church and inciting the ire of conservative activists who sabotaged screenings with violence and protests.

Set entirely within the austere confines of the abandoned ward to which Maria is committed, the film’s tone is accordingly solitary and cold; when not focused on the main character, shots are of the bleak edifice’s broken windows and unruly surrounding vegetation. Maria’s only interactions are with her visiting aunt and the calm and professional Dr. Firmino.

The film opts for a structure based on mystery. The way Maria’s inner world, and the complete account of what brought her to her current situation, is gradually unveiled through dialogue and confessions, as well as the subtler hints given by her occasionally erratic behavior, generate the suspense. Besides the broken state in which she finds herself, Maria’s mystical sense of faith is her principal character trait and the apparent source of her strength. Believing that her blindness will eventually be cured by the grace of the Virgin, and demonstrating an unshakable trust in fate, Maria’s faith is consistently challenged (as well as paradoxically strengthened) by a world that continuously subjects her to suffering and isolation. Dr. Firmino’s rationalist and historicist tirades, including commentary on scripture that is brought to life in vivid reenactments, clashes with the aunt’s dogmatic beliefs.

Besides the caricatured nun, the main source of controversy at the time were scenes where the atheist doctor presents an alternative version of the Gospel story, outrageously extrapolating from apocryphal sources to include a twin brother of Jesus, a son taken as hostage by Roman authorities, and reducing Christ’s movement to a merely political affair, depicting him as a guerrilla leader. These sections, with the bright colors of the desert, Roman troops, and bloodshed, provide a much welcome visual and tonal counterpoint to the rest of the film’s stark presentation; they are almost reminiscent of s theological explorations in The Milky Way. The film firmly avoids a satirical or ironical posture, however, adopting instead a sober approach to the dilemma of faith as it haunts the protagonist. Bettencourt’s convincing performance greatly aids this portrayal, capturing the varied inflections of a mistreated and troubled soul.

Although the story and the problems it raises don’t exactly build to a grand conclusion, the pervasive sense of mystery and the careful unfolding of new details through each new interaction or piece of dialogue will certainly provide an intriguing treat for fans of films dealing with similar themes and moods.

Capsules

CAPSULE: MIMOSAS (2016)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY: Oliver Laxe

FEATURING: Ahmed Hammoud, Shakib Ben Omar

PLOT: A traveler accepts a mission to escort a dying sheik through a mountain pass, assisted by a mysterious younger man sent to help him by unknown benefactors.

Still from MIMOSAS (2016)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Every year, a handful of slow-paced, low-budget surreal features (usually European, sometimes from emerging markets) screen at film festivals, and quickly disappear from view and memory. This is one of them. Ultra-minimalist and lacking much visual texture beyond the glorious landscapes, its obscure basis in Sufi mysticism makes Mimosas unique, but not enough to overcome its baggage.

COMMENTS: There are two worlds in Mimosas. In one, a caravan of horses makes its way through Morocco’s snow-capped Atlas mountains, seeking to bury a sheik’s body in his homeland. These characters could have stepped out of an apocryphal chapter of the Old Testament or the Quran. The other is a modern world of junky taxis idling in a desert town, where scores of drivers jostle for rare fares. The mediator between these two worlds is young Shakib, a junior driver who we first see mocked by his fellow workers for messing up the details of the story of Iblis and Adam (when corrected, he responds, “let me finish my story, and interpret it as you want”). To his foreman’s amazement, Shakib is selected for a job; which, unaccountably, is to guide two roguish companions of the sheik on the quest to find his home town—no one knows exactly where it’s located—and put him at rest among his fathers.

Though Shakib may be inexperienced as a guide, he has one crucial trait: an unshakable faith, which shames the increasingly reluctant Ahmed into persevering through the rocks and snow, despite the fact that the city they are seeking seems to have vanished from all maps. Most of the movie is nothing more than a small team walking through the scenic landscape, with Shakib pressing Ahmed for his lack of faith; but the ending goes full-wacko, with the two worlds colliding, and Shakhib and Ahmed undertaking a new quest that crosses barriers of time and space.

With chapter titles taken from Sufi prayer positions and not a hint of blasphemy, there is little reason to doubt that the film’s attitude towards religion is sincere, which makes it more interesting. It has the shape of a religious parable, although the meaning is opaque. The Islamic influence makes it novel and exotic and gives the film a cultural leg up on similar projects; the unique perspective made it more intriguing to me than the superficially similar spiritual wilderness journey depicted in the The Ornithologist. Although it’s not a faith we Westerners generally associate with narrative subversion, there may be a future for Muslim surrealism.

Footage from the filming of Mimosas can be seen in Ben Rivers’ The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, which stars director Oliver Laxe as a director who abandons the project he is filming (which is, in fact, Mimosas). Mimosas won the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s not currently on DVD, but you can find it for digital rental at distributor Grasshopper Film‘s site.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There is a strange enchantment woven here. If the film speaks to you at all, you can expect to fall under its spell.”–Jennie Kermode, Eye for Film (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

259. THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

6 Comments

AKA Twinkle Twinkle Killer Kane

“Kane said quietly, ‘Why won’t you go to the moon?’

‘Why do camels have humps and cobras none? Good Christ, man, don’t ask the heart for reasons! Reasons are dangerous!'”

–William Peter Blatty, The Ninth Configuration (novel)

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Scott Wilson, Ed Flanders

PLOT: Col. Kane, a U.S. Marines psychiatrist, is assigned to an experimental program in a castle housing delusional military officers who are suspected malingerers. There, he bonds with Cutshaw, a militantly atheist and misanthropic astronaut, with whom he engages in passionate dialogues about the existence of God. One night, Cutshaw breaks out of the compound and heads for a bar frequented by a rough motorcycle gang; Kane follows.

Still from The Ninth Configuration (1980)

BACKGROUND:

  • William Peter Blatty (“The Exorcist”) adapted the screenplay from his own 1978 novel, which was itself a reworking of a 1966 novel (“Twinkle, Twinkle, ‘Killer’ Kane”) with which he had been dissatisfied. This was his directorial debut (in a career that reached three films with 2016’s Legion).
  • Blatty originally wrote a “Kane” screenplay that he hoped would be filmed by in the early Seventies, but they could not find a studio willing to produce it. Blatty and Friedkin collaborated on The Exorcist (1973) instead.
  • Although the script made the rounds in Hollywood for years, no studio would back The Ninth Configuration. Blatty eventually funded the film half with his own money and half with a donation from Pepsico, who were willing to provide funds for complicated international tax reasons so long as the film was shot entirely in Hungary.
  • Blatty has fiddled with the editing through the years, deleting and restoring scenes, so that cuts run anywhere from 99 minutes to 140 minutes.
  • According to Blatty, The Ninth Configuration‘s Cutshaw is the same character as the astronaut who attended the dinner party in The Exorcist.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: What else could it possibly be besides the crucifixion on the moon?

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Lunar Calvary; lunatic with a jet-pack; dog Hamlet

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Obsession is fertile soil for a weird movie. The Ninth Configuration is a movie in a madhouse that sets out to do nothing less than to prove the existence of God; it doesn’t, naturally, but the ambition involved makes for some strange choices, invoking a passion that carries the story over some rough patches.


Clip from The Ninth Configuration

COMMENTS: The Ninth Configuration posits that a world without Continue reading 259. THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

49. A SERIOUS MAN (2009)

9 Comments

NOTE: A Serious Man has been promoted onto the List of 366 Best Weird Movies of all time after initially being placed in the “Borderline Weird” category.  For reference,  you can read the original borderline weird entry here.

“Even though you can’t figure anything out, you will be responsible for it on the midterm.”–dream dialogue from A Serious Man

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

FEATURING: Michael Stubargh, Aaron Wolff, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Fyvush Finkel

PLOT: A Serious Man opens in the indeterminate past with a Jewish couple entertaining a man who may or may not be a dybbuk (ghost) on a snowy night somewhere in Eastern Europe. In 1967, in suburban Minnesota, a Jewish physics professor suffers from an escalating series of problems including a failing marriage, bratty kids, students willing to do anything for a passing grade, financial troubles, and a ne’er-do-well, mildly insane brother. Seeking advice on a life that seems to be spinning out of control, he visits three rabbis, each of whom is less helpful than the last.

Still from A Serious Man (2009)

BACKGROUND:

  • Though the film is not autobiographical, Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in suburban Minnesota roughly at the time the events of A Serious Man take place.
  • The core idea for the movie originated when the Coens considered making a short film about a boy who attends his bar mitzvah stoned. As the story expanded from that scene, the idea was originally to make the father and son’s stories of equal weight, but as the script evolved the story of the elder Gopnik assumed center stage.
  • The prologue is not an actual Jewish folktale. The Coens searched for an authentic legend to use but finally decided to create their own.
  • The movie makes extensive reference to quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, theories of modern physics which suggest that there are limitations on our ability to know basic reality.
  • The Coens’ script for A Serious Man was nominated for a Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar. The film won “Best Screenplay” or equivalent awards from the Boston Society of Film Critics, National Board of Review, and National Society of Film Critics.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The very last shot, which I can’t reveal here.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Superficially, A Serious Man is only mildly weird. There are a few dream sequences and multiple nonsense parables, but unlike the Coens’ definitely weird Barton Fink, this story of a suburban Jewish man beset by an improbably mounting set of real life woes contains no surrealistic fireworks (although there is a conspicuous surrealistic pillow).  On the other hand, A Serious Man has a skeletal undercurrent of ambiguity and disturbance running through it like a bone cancer; it feels weird at its core.  With a head-scratching prologue and epilogue bracketing a central fable about a goy’s teeth, the thoughtful and frequently brilliant A Serious Man earns its place on the List by mining the mysteries at the basis of existence.

Official trailer for A Serious Man

COMMENTS: A Serious Man is a retelling of that most fascinating parable in the Old Continue reading 49. A SERIOUS MAN (2009) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

40. PAN’S LABYRINTH [EL LABERINTO DEL FAUNO] (2006)

9 Comments

“I’m more interested in truth than in reality.”—Guillermo del Toro, Time Out interview

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones,

PLOT:  While blood trickles backwards from the ground into a prone girl’s nostril, a voiceover tells of a princess of the Underworld who escaped to the mortal realm and forgot her divinity. We then meet Ofelia, an eleven-year old girl who is traveling with her pregnant mother to stay with her new stepfather, a brutal Captain in the employ of the dictator Franco, who is hunting the Communist/Republican resistance hiding in the forest around a Spanish mill. With her mother’s difficult pregnancy and the cruel Captain’s indifference to her needs, Ofelia’s life becomes intolerable, until she is visited by a faun who promises to restore her to her rightful place as an immortal fairy princess if she can complete three tasks.

Still from Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

<BACKGROUND:

  • Despite the English language title, the faun in the movie is not the Greek nature god Pan.
  • Pan’s Labyrinth is intended as a “companion piece” to del Toro’s 2001 ghost story The Devil’s Backbone, which also features the experiences of an imaginative child during the Spanish Civil War.
  • Del Toro has tended to alternate making artistic, genre-tinged, Spanish language movies with smarter-than-usual big budget Hollywood fantasy projects. He followed the innovative Mexican vampire movie Cronos (1993) with Mimic (1997), and the psychological ghost story The Devil’s Backbone [El Espinazo del Diablo] (2001) with Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004), before returning to his Latin roots in 2006 with El Laberinto del Fauno. Since then he has made Hellboy II: The Golden Army and is slated to direct the upcoming live-action version of The Hobbit. If he holds true to form, we can expect another daring Spanish language film to follow his Tolkien adaptation.
  • Pan’s Labyrinth was in competition for the Golden Palm at Cannes, but the fantasy lost to Ken Loach’s Irish troubles drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley. It was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, but lost to the German Communist-era drama The Lives of Others.
  • Despite not winning any major awards, eight top critics—including Roger Ebert, Richard Corliss and Mark Kermode—selected El Laberinto del Fauno as the best film of 2006. With a 98% positive ranking, Metacrtitic considers it the second best reviewed film of 2006 (trailing only Army of Shadows, a lost 1969 Italian classic re-released in the United States in 2006).
  • Perhaps the most gratifying praise the movie received was a reported 22 minutes of applause from the Cannes audience.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The Pale Man, murderer of children, who sits eternally in front of an uneaten banquet with his eyeballs lying on a golden plate in front of him.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Pan’s Labyrinth is the textbook example of our rule that the better a movie is, the less weird it has to be to make the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. On one level, by blending a realistic wartime drama with a fairy tale that could almost be viewed as a conventional fantasy, the movie could be seen as merely novel, rather than weird. The way that Ofelia’s “fantasy” terrors bleed into and ominously echo the real world horrors of Franco’s Spain creates a sort of a weird resonance even when we are lodged in the “real” plot. The film is also suffused with weirdness’ close cousin, ambiguity, in that it never proves the realm of fairies and fauns to be a phantasmagoria; the evidence is deliberately conflicting on whether these wonders are all in Ofelia’s  head or not. The film is filled with masterful, memorable, visionary images, such as the moving mandrake root that resembles a woody baby and the giant toad that coughs out its own innards, though such marvels might be glimpsed briefly in a regulation fantasy films. Those elements are enough to nudge Pan’s Labyrinth from a mainstream fantasy in the direction of the surreal, but it’s the nightmare centerpiece with the Pale Man that tips Pan‘s scales into the weird.


Original (and somewhat misleading) trailer for Pan’s Labyrinth

COMMENTS:  You can have brilliant cinematography, masterful acting, awe-inspiring Continue reading 40. PAN’S LABYRINTH [EL LABERINTO DEL FAUNO] (2006) →