Global Cinema 30: Cameroon – Sisters in Law (2005)

It’s a fair while since I last did a ‘Global Cinema’ feature. For some reason I got a bit stuck on Cameroon and have ended up recycling an older review that I think I put up at some point, but not as its own post. Anyway, it’s a worthwhile film (like anything by Kim Longinotto) and while an indigenous production may have been more interesting, it’s not exactly a country with a widely distributed cinematic output.

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Republic of Cameroon (aka République du Cameroun)
population 26,546,000 | capital Yaoundé (1.8m) | largest cities Douala (1.9m), Yaoundé, Bafoussam (800k), Bamenda (270k), Garoua (236k) | area 475,442 km² | religion Christianity (71%), Islam (24%) | official language English, French (français) | major ethnicity Cameroon Highlanders (31%), Equatorial Bantu (19%), Kirdi (11%), Fulani (10%) | currency Central African CFA franc (FCFA) [XAF] | internet .cm

A West-Central African country, bordered by Nigeria, Chad, the Central African Republic (inland) and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Republic on the Congo, it opens onto the Gulf of Guinea at the Bight of Biafra (or Bonny), though most of the country sits inland. The area was first settled in the Neolithic era and its longest continuous inhabitants are the Baka (pygmies). Indigenous inhabitants of the Lake Chad region founded the Sao culture around 500 CE, leading to the Kanem then Bornu Empire. The earliest Europeans to arrive were the Portuguese in 1472, who noticed shrimps in the Wouri River and called it Rio dos Camarões, leading to the English name Cameroon. The Germans were the earliest to stake a claim in 1884, but after World War I, it was taken over by the League of Nations and split between French and much smaller British territories (the latter administered from Nigeria). France outlawed the independence party UPC in 1955, leading to a guerrilla war that eventuated in independence under Ahmadou Ahidjo in 1960, while the Southern Cameroons (under British rule) also voted for independence and joined with the formerly French state on 1 October 1961. Ahidjo stepped down in 1982 and passed power to Paul Biya who remains President (the longest-ruling non-royal world leader). A territorial dispute with Nigeria over the oil-rich Bakassi peninsula was resolved in Cameroon’s favour in 2006. Separatists in the formerly British territories continue to agitate for independence as Ambazonia.

There is both French and English-language filmmaking in the country (the latter sometimes referred to as Collywood, apparently). Filmmaking didn’t really begin until independence, largely French-taught with filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Dikongué Pipa (who directed Muna Moto in 1975) and a handful of others throughout the 70s and 80s. A few cinemas were even sustained for a time, but now much exhibition tends to happen at mobile cinemas. A film festival began in 2016, though there’s still not a huge international recognition of Cameroon’s filmmaking, hence the film I’ve focused on is a collaboration with a UK documentarian.

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Sisters in Law (2005)

Kim Longinotto tells another fascinating story of women in marginalised spaces fighting for rights, this time in Cameroon. There’s clearly a wider picture of a society based on ‘traditional’ values trying to change, or rather being pushed to do so by the strong women of this story (whether those bringing charges of assault, rape and the like, or those defending them or judging their cases). However the film really focuses in on these key four stories and follows them through, and it is in its way, after all the detailed accounts of abuses heard earlier, a heartening one.

CREDITS
Directors/Writers Florence Ayisi and Kim Longinotto; Cinematographer Longinotto; Length 104 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Wednesday 18 May 2016.

Criterion Sunday 360: “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes” (1971/2005)

This Criterion release collects two films, and I present below reviews of both of them. The first is listed as 1968 on the packaging (and 1967 by some sources), and I discuss the dates below, but I have listed it as 1971 because that’s the date on the film. Of course, strictly-speaking it was never publicly screened for a number of decades, so there’s a case that it should be much later.

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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1971)

There is some question about the date of this film: it’s generally listed as 1968 (including on the director’s website), but the date of production that shows up on-screen at the end of the film, and on the Wikipedia page and elsewhere, it states it wasn’t completed until 1971, and certainly doesn’t seem to have been screened publicly for quite some time after that (1991 according to AllMovie). Then again, this is hardly a straightforward film by any means, being ostensibly a documentary but one about a film-within-a-film (called Over the Cliff, being made with a variety of actors tested out, seemingly in the style of a Cassavetes picture). It’s also a film in which even its documentary subjects — the filmmakers themselves, the loudest among them soon becoming Bob Rosen (the production manager), and Jonathan Gordon (one of the soundmen), along with the director — may be characters or versions of themselves that don’t match reality. Most straightforwardly this can be seen in the character of the director, Bill Greaves (William Greaves), who seems rather coarse and even a bit flamboyant at times, but then we also see his crew sitting around discussing him, casting aspersions on his quality as a director, but also aware they’re being filmed and suggesting even that he may be outside the room listening (and all of these may well be true, along with the possibility that this is a staged scene). And of course there’s that extra level whereby the African-American director is being discussed and picked apart by a (largely) white crew, putting his actions in a spotlight that’s matched against their own expectations. The film, then, which frequently splits into two or three different images, openly toys with the limits of its own fictions (and truths), and does so in an evocative, constantly questioning sort of way that’s appealing to anyone who grew up as an audience regularly confronting such issues in self-consciously metatextual films of the 1990s and 2000s.

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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½ (2005)

It’s fairly clear at this point — even to the participants in the film — that this long-delayed follow-up to Take One lacks something of the immediacy of the first. It uses the footage shot in 1968 as a starting point, picking up from the final shot of the first film (over that film’s end credits) to lead directly into the opening credits of this one, following a brief crew introduction on a NYC balcony. It picks up with another two actors rehearsing the roles of Freddie and Alice, in this case a mixed-race pairing (unlike the two we see for most of Take One‘s running time). There’s half an hour following of footage from 1968 of what was presumably originally going to be Take Two (the director William Greaves even makes reference to it at one point, suggesting he had a very clear idea of how these films would have been delineated back then, had he had the funding). We then very briskly skip forward some 30 years to a Q&A following a screening of the original film, at which Steve Buscemi makes an appearance (as a champion of the original and a producer on its follow-up). The dynamics remain fairly similar, with crew discussions taking place without the director, and then with footage from Central Park of the filming of the two actors, who have returned, older and greyer, to reprise their characters. It seems more interested in the dynamic between them than the original film ever was, but then this one lacks the on-screen charisma of production manager Bob Rosen (though Jonathan the soundman is back). It’s a sweet film, and hardly ever boring exactly, but it feels more like a reflective tangent to the urgency and immediacy of the original film.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
[Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One] Director/Writer William Greaves; Cinematographers Steven Larner and Terence Macartney-Filgate; Starring Don Fellows, Patricia Ree Gilbert, William Greaves; Length 75 minutes.
Seen at home (Criterion Channel streaming), London, Monday 29 June 2020.

[Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½] Director/Writer William Greaves; Cinematographers Steven Larner, Terence Macartney-Filgate, Henry Adebonojo, Phil Parmet and Jonathan Weaver; Starring Audrey Heningham, Shannon Baker, William Greaves; Length 100 minutes.
Seen at home (Criterion Channel streaming), London, Monday 29 June 2020.

بابا عزیز Bab’Aziz (2005)

The Tunisian director Nacer Khemir made this film, the third in his so-called ‘Desert Trilogy’ made over three decades, in both Tunisia and Iran, so it’s both a North African and a Middle Eastern film at the same time, in Arabic and Farsi. It tells a sort of pan-Islamic tale of mysticism, but it harks back to a storytelling tradition that’s based more on the journey and the details than on any particular destination.

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This isn’t a period film (there are cars and roads and signs of modernity), but then again it also feels really unmoored from any specific time, or even place — some characters speak in Farsi, some reply in Arabic, and that’s just how it is, a sort of pan-Islamic world utopian vision of deserts and dervishes. It functions, then, less as a film about the world as a film of a spiritual journey or quest — if I knew more about Sufism (a sort of ecstatic, dance-focused branch of Islam), I might be able to pick up on more specific reference points. An old dervish (the father Aziz of the title, played by Parviz Shahinkhou) and his young granddaughter (Maryam Hamid) trek across a desert in search of a gathering of other dervishes (those practising Sufism), while he tells a story of a Narcissus-like prince. Gradually other people they meet add in their own stories, and by the end you realise that in fact nothing very much has really happened at a plot level, but it’s all in the telling. However, it’s a beautiful rendering of this environment, with many sweeping, gorgeous shots of the desert, rich colours and expressive performances. Plot, sometimes, really is a very minor consideration.

CREDITS
Director Nacer Khemir ناصر خمير‎; Writers Tonino Guerra and Khemir; Cinematographer Mahmoud Kalari محمود کلاری; Starring Parviz Shahinkhou پرویز شاهین‌خو, Maryam Hamid مریم حمید, Golshifteh Farahani گلشیفته فراهانی‎; Length 98 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Monday 26 March 2018.

Шар нохойн там Shar nokhoir tam (The Cave of the Yellow Dog, 2005)

Following up further with the BFI Player’s women directors list, having already gone on at length about the offerings in my post about My Twentieth Century, I spotted an odd little film I’d not previously heard of, a Mongolian drama set out on the steppes amongst a traditional family, with a gentle energy (it’s only a U certificate).

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This Mongolian film very much reminds me of those 1980s and 1990s Iranian films, which were always so empathetic and understanding towards children and families — though of course they also often symbolically loaded the films further with political allegory that is not quite so relevant here. However, some of the same strategies are at work in terms of crafting a gentle story that barely really has any plot — a young girl played by Nansal Batchuluun takes in a dog, the presence of which is resisted by her parents — but is more of a pretext for presenting traditional peripatetic Mongolian life on the steppes, in all its harsh beauty, as the family settles for a time in various valleys before packing up and moving on. It all looks great, and it never really rouses itself much from its ambling pace, but partially that’s just the movement of life, and it’s a wonderful thing.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Byambasuren Davaa Даваагийн Бямбасүрэн; Cinematographer Daniel Schönauer; Starring Nansal Batchuluun Нансал Батчулуун, Urjindorjyn Batchuluun Ү. Батчулуун; Length 93 minutes.
Seen at home (BFI Player streaming), London, Thursday 2 April 2020.

Films by Kevin Jerome Everson

Kevin Jerome Everson has been working for fewer than two decades but has already amassed a prodigious body of work, including a huge number of short films. A number of his features and a few short films were presented online as part of a retrospective on Mubi in 2018, which introduced this filmmaker to my attention. Clearly he has his themes and his interests, but with so many films it’s difficult to give more than a hint at his distinctive style.

Films by Warwick Thornton

In my week focusing on Australian films, I’ve already covered some modern classics including Aboriginal director Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil (1993) and a number of documentaries interrogating Australia’s colonialist and racist societal dynamics, notably Another Country (2015). Warwick Thornton is probably the most prominent director from an Aboriginal background currently working in the country, and over the course of a number of short films and two features has burrowed into this history, stepping back to the 1920s with his most recent feature Sweet Country.

Two Films by Carlos Reygadas: Battle in Heaven (2005) and Our Time (2018)

For most of the past week, my blog has been focusing on the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, with a roster of mighty melodramas, but in the modern era directors like Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu have found box office success (both in Mexico and in the United States, where many of them work now) in a variety of genres, though often still tending towards the dark and thorny. None has gained quite as much fervid festival acclaim (not to mention exasperated brickbats) than Carlos Reygadas, who unlike his contemporaries has remained in Mexico to make his films, rich with religious symbolism, copious sex and an austerely formal camera style. He made his name with Japón (2001, which is on the Criterion Collection now), and followed with the divisive Battle in Heaven (2005, below), with its Bressonian approach to non-actors combined with rather more florid content than Bresson would ever have countenanced. 2007’s Silent Light is to my mind his finest picture in terms of reconciling his themes and formal style, dealing with a Mennonite community, but Post Tenebras Lux (2012) has many admirers. His most recent film (Our Time) is also his longest, and is reviewed below.

Film Round-Up May 2016

So much for writing separate posts for everything; that didn’t really work out for me in the long-term. I still watch a lot of movies (more than ever) but in terms of writing I go through phases, as I’m sure many of us who try and write about films do, and right now I’ve not really felt an urge to write up my film reviews (beyond a few short sentences on Letterboxd). So here’s a round-up of stuff I saw in May. See below the cut for reviews of…

Captain America: Civil War (2016, USA)
Cold Comfort Farm (1995, UK)
Desperately Seeking Susan (1985, USA)
Down with Love (2003, USA)
Everybody Wants Some!! (2016, USA)
Evolution (2015, France/Belgium/Spain)
Feminists Insha’allah! The Story of Arab Feminism (2014, France)
A Flickering Truth (2015, New Zealand)
Green Room (2015, USA)
Hamlet liikemaailmassa (Hamlet Goes Business) (1987, Finland)
Heart of a Dog (2015, USA)
Lemonade (2016, USA)
Losing Ground (1982, USA)
Lovely Rita (2001, Austria/Germany)
Luck by Chance (2009, India)
As Mil e Uma Noites: Volume 3, O Encantado (Arabian Nights Volume 3: The Enchanted One) (2015, Portugal/France/Germany/Switzerland)
Money Monster (2016, USA)
Mon roi (aka My King) (2015, France)
My Life Without Me (2003, Canada/Spain)
Our Kind of Traitor (2016, UK)
Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties) (1975, Italy)
Picture Bride (1994, USA)
Radio On (1979, UK/West Germany)
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (2014, USA)
Sisters in Law (2005, UK/Cameroon)
Star Men (2015, USA/UK/Canada)
Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005, USA)
Trouble Every Day (2001, France/Germany/Japan)
Underground (1928, UK)
L’Une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t) (1977, France)
Visage (Face) (2009, France/Taiwan)
Zir-e poost-e shahr (Under the Skin of the City) (2001, Iran)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

As the series has progressed, there’s been a definite move towards darker textures and emotions. The possibility was always hinted at by the looming gothic architecture of the main locations, but now that the leads are in the midst of adolescence, one gets the sense that the filmmakers feel safer venturing into rather more disturbing territory. Hence the presence here of the “Death Eaters”, a cult-like fraternity dedicated to the resurrection of the spectacularly creepy Lord Voldemort (played appropriately by Ralph Fiennes), as well as far more terror and peril than the previous instalments allowed — even the otherwise more assured Prisoner of Azkaban — reflected in its higher classification (a 12 certificate rather than PG for the previous films).

There’s still of course a fantastic amount of plot, as well as of wizardy nonsense, on show, making this also the longest film of the lot so far. We move breathlessly from a shadowy opening which introduces David Tennant as someone clearly evil, to the Quidditch World Cup, where the Death Eaters make their first terrorising appearance, straight on back to Hogwarts, where there’s yet another new Dark Arts teacher (Brendan Gleeson’s delightfully unhinged Professor Moody) and a big competition between three different wizarding academies which takes up the remainder of the film. Thankfully, with all this to shoehorn in, we don’t have to sit through too much Quidditch, still the silliest of all possible sports (where the spectators in the stadium get to watch teams scoring goals, while somewhere out in the ether far from view, a couple of wizards chase a little flying thing, the capture of which pretty much renders all the stadium play meaningless).

We do, however, get a sense of a far bigger world of magic, as students from two different countries enter the picture — the elegant French ladies of Beauxbatons, and the beefy Germanic boys of Durmstrang. One student from each academy gets to compete in the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and while the French lady doesn’t fare too well, somehow the weedy Harry (who is also competing, much to everyone’s surprise) manages better pitted by now against the glowering East European chap (their provenance is all rather vaguely Teutonic). There’s also a second competitor from Hogwarts, the taciturn pretty boy Cedric (played by a gurning Robert Pattinson, in his first taste of adolescent-centred blockbuster franchise filmmaking). Meanwhile, threading through the whole thing are hints at the upcoming and unholy resurrection of Lord Voldemort, and his presence in the background makes everything in the film seem rather more grave. Even the Tournament is a treacherous and potentially deadly affair, as the wizards are pitted against huge fire-breathing dragons and sent into dangerous waters to complete their quests, though health and safety has never seemed to be a particular concern of Hogwarts or the wizarding world.

The visuals are all handled perfectly competently by the director and cinematographer roped in for this latest instalment (the director being the venerable Mike Newell, a journeyman who has shown competence on comedies like Four Weddings and a Funeral as on the mafia drama Donnie Brasco), and if nothing impresses quite as much as in Cuarón’s film, at least it never gets too plodding. It all adds up to a fine two-and-a-half hours of entertainment, and at long last, with the arrival of Voldemort, has begun to resolve more strongly into an ongoing storyline that one suspects will be developed further in the final four films of the series.

Next: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)

CREDITS
Director Mike Newell; Writer Steve Kloves (based on the novel by J.K. Rowling); Cinematographer Roger Pratt; Starring Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes; Length 157 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Saturday 28 December 2013.

Pride and Prejudice (2005)

There have been a lot of adaptations and reimaginings of novels by Jane Austen (there was a particular glut of them in the 1990s), and for my sins I’ve seen a fair few, such that I’m never really sure what’s going on and who’s who whenever an Austen film starts. I feel like I should know the stories better, but they always seem to involve a bit of to-do around social status, some mentions of the gentleman’s annual income, several lengthy dance sequences, and many many glorious frocks. As staples of the ‘heritage film’ — a moribund genre if ever there was one, laid out by Merchant-Ivory and focused above all on bloodless period frippery — they should by all rights be terrible, but I must admit I like the odd period film with all their stuffed shirts and wilful heroines.

In terms of being a particular departure for the genre, I shan’t mount any great defence of this 2005 adaptation, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen as the prideful and prejudicial protagonists. If you are convinced that the heritage film privileges a conservative, prettified and cleaned-up view of history-as-nostalgia more apt to be commodified as home design or fashion choices, then you won’t be changing your mind with this film. There are some gorgeous views of the English countryside, of the Bennets’ gently dilapidated home, and of the grand estates to which several of the Bennets aspire, and very little historical or political context. The choice to move the setting from the early-19th century of the novel to the late-18th century seems motivated more by a desire to incorporate different frocks and thus differentiate the enterprise from the more famous television adaption of ten years earlier (the one with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle).

All those caveats aside, this is an excellent production of the Austen novel, well-mounted and acted, beautifully-filmed, and which is generous with the characters (as generous as it could be, given it’s not a six-hour TV mini-series). There is some particularly nice early flair with the camera, featuring long sinuous tracking shots, and a stand-out sequence during a dance which moves in one take through several rooms and catches little vignettes and dialogue from various of the characters.

Sadly, this inventiveness with the mise en scène largely cedes to more classical filmmaking as the drama progresses, but luckily the acting holds its own. I’ve not always been fond of angular, toothsome Keira Knightley in the past, but as the winsome (and, yes, wilful) Elizabeth Bennet she does rather well with what is very much the central role. Macfadyen gloms moodily around the edges, displaying the required want of sociability rather than mere haughty imperiousness — that quality is left to his best friend’s sister, played perfectly by Kelly Reilly. The rest of the Bennet family are by turns shrill (Brenda Blethyn’s mother), giggly (Carey Mulligan and Jena Malone as Kitty and Lydia) and moody (the stand-out Mary, played by Talulah Riley). Their boisterousness is rather distracting from the precarious background to the story’s predicament — that if the daughters are not married, the family will become destitute — something that only Donald Sutherland’s father and Rosamund Pike as eldest sister Jane seem to carry. As the man to whom the family fortune will fall, Tom Hollander is a comedic highlight as the desperately unctuous Mr Collins.

It may not be cinematic cutting edge, but it’s the kind of straightforward, nicely-made and well-acted confection that makes for comforting viewing. There’s at least something to that, so I’m happy to allow this as a worthwhile addition to an already oversubscribed genre.

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CREDITS
Director Joe Wright; Writer Deborah Moggach (based on the novel by Jane Austen); Cinematographer Roman Osin; Starring Keira Knightley, Matthew Macfadyen, Tom Hollander, Donald Sutherland, Kelly Reilly; Length 129 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Tuesday 21 May 2013.