More Films, More Films

Week two. The aftermath of war, and quite a few documentaries.

Ensemble offers a portrait of the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal as they embark on their first European tour. I suppose I've been spoiled by the recent Frederick Wiseman documentaries, but this effort seemed a little thin to me. The director never quite made it clear what kind of an orchestra we were observing, though it seemed to be a community-based entity that came together almost by chance and  kept itself alive long enough to attract some wealthy patrons and hire Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a top-notch conductor, to lead it.

The first half of the film tells the back-story of a few of the musicians and also includes extensive episodes of rehearsal time. The most interesting element in the second half, which follows the ensemble on tour, is the succession of European concert halls we visit. Some are hallowed venues—the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, for example -- while others are post-modern jewels and/or monstrosities. Nézet-Séguin, who guest-conducts often in Europe, is familiar with them all, and it's interesting to hear him describe the acoustics of these structures, one after another, to his musicians.

One film-fest "extra" that those who view the film in a theater or stream it online won't see is a charming video that the director shot with his iPhone. He was supposed to appear at the fest to discuss the film, but his wife, whom he met in Minneapolis five years ago at a festival, just had a baby. Here he is in the hospital, apologizing at length for his absence, then rotating the camera so we can see his wife breast-feeding their infant son from her hospital bed.

Meeting Gorbechev. Herzog begins this interesting if spotty documentary by presenting the former head of the USSR with what he thinks will be a startling question. "I am a German," he says. "The first German you ever encountered in your youth probably wanted to kill you. How does that make you feel?"

Gorbachev, after a long pause to listen to the translation on an earpiece, cracks a big smile and replies, "Wrong. My grandfather managed a collective farm. There was an ethnic German community nearby. They made gingerbread. Much better than anything we ate at home. My first encounters with Germans were very sweet."

And so it goes. Only a third of the film, I would guess, is dialog. The rest is stock footage recounting Gorbachev's career, his rise in the ranks of the Party, how broad his vision was compared to that of  the mass of apparatchiks and party hacks, his views about what the Soviet Union had to do to join the ranks of developed nations, his marriage to Raisa, and so on.

Film clips of foreign leaders including Margaret Thatcher, George Shultz, James  Baker, and Lech Walesa add perspective. But Herzog could more clearly have described the chain of events that included the failed coup-d'etat of 1991, the rise of Yeltsin, and the dissolution of the USSR. Many young viewers are entirely unfamiliar with these events, and for those of us who read about it in the papers at the time, the details have drifted out of focus.    

The film is well worth seeing, but because it focuses on a world-class statesman rather a quirky outsider,  it lacks the poetry and eccentricity we associate with a typical Herzog documentary, among which I'd include Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Grizzly Man, Encounters at the Ends of the Earth, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Golden Harvest takes a long and affectionate look at something that's warmed the hearts of women and men since ancient times—olive oil. The film's writer and director, Alia Yunis, is from St. Paul, Minnesota, but her parents are Palestinian, and as a youth she was embarrassed by how "different" they were, and confused by how much olive oil they used in their cooking. This eventually sent on a quest to find out about the cultivation of olive trees, the pressing of the olives, and the "culture" of the oil itself, which differs from country to country. 

She visits Palestine, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Israel, discusses the growing market for "extra virgin" oil, the issue of adulterated oil from Tunisia Turkey, and other hot places being labeled as "extra virgin" Italian oil, and so on. She visits organic farms in Italy and co-ops in Spain exploring the diversity of approaches to the plant. Some producers harvest the olives by hand using little rakes, while others make use of heavy-duty machinery, yanking the trunks in every direction to loosen the olives from the branches. Some high-end bottlers hire connoisseurs to blend the oils from different orchards for export. Others are content to keep people employed and produce an affordable oil for home consumption.

It's a rambling journey, but the stops are varied and the enthusiasm high, the common threads being only the olive itself and the narrator's good-natured and whimsical curiosity. After the film, I felt it imperative to make one further stop—at the supermarket, to pick up some hummus and a variety of items from the olive bar. 

The Silence of Others opens with a very old woman placing flowers on a mound by the side of a highway. "In two days they'll be gone," she says, looking into the camera. My husband is buried there. Next is a white-haired man who tells us, "I was tortured by the Franco regime for my political activities. My torturer lives in that apartment right across the street."

I'm probably not remembering the scenes accurately, but these are the stories around which directors Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar build their film. Shot over the course of six years, it deals with the efforts of victims of the Franco regime and their loved ones to bring those individuals who persecuted them to justice—a task made more difficult by the fact that the Spanish government passed a law when Franco died giving amnesty to political criminals on both sides of the political divide.

The film isn't merely an expose of past crimes, however. It follows the efforts of a variety of victims to get legal redress under an international war crimes protocol. Their cases are eventually taken up by a court in Argentina. The Spanish court is reluctant to cooperate. It's a fascinating struggle, as well as a moving memorial to those who suffered and often died during the forty years of Franco's rule.

The Interpreter, a fictional narrative, also takes up the issue of war crimes, albeit at one generational remove. By a strange twist of events, a Slovak interpreter named Ali takes a job translating for Georg, the son of the S.S. chief who murdered his parents. Georg is determined not to feel guilty about crimes he didn't commit; he witnessed the effects of second-hand remorse on his sister, who starved herself to death at the age of twenty. All the same, he's deeply troubled by his ancestry and wants to visit the places in Slovakia where his father was stationed. But he doesn't speak the language.

Ali is marginally courteous, if terse and sometimes disdainful of his boorish, skirt-chasing "employer." Georg would like Ali to loosen up a bit. The first half of the film is comic, slow-burn, odd-couple stuff, though every scene carries undercurrents of Ali's indignation. At one remote farm where Jew's were hidden and later discovered and shot, an old friend asks Ali, "Why  did you bring that man here?" Ali replies, "Because he knows nothing."

As the road trip continues, we learn more about Georg, his father, and Ali, and what might have been simply an exercise in glib reconciliation takes on the aura of a minor masterpiece.  

   

Equally satisfying is the Finnish period piece Land of Hope, in which Anni, the daughter of a high-and-mighty bakery-owner, marries a clumsy lumberjack and takes up a new way of life on the farm he was eligible to receive in compensation for his war service—presuming he married first. A variety of colorful minor characters add fiber to the story, including the woman who donated the land, her alcoholic son, Anni's sister, and especially the crotchety old man who lives just around the point, often shows up in a rowboat, and provides all sorts of good advice to the young couple about clearing their land.

Oona Airola shines in the role of Anni. Her exuberance and grit allow her negotiate the labrinth of her father's business affairs and also keep the dream of the lakeside farm alive in the midst of a few setbacks. One reviewer observed: "Although almost everyone in this film seems to be marked by the war in one way or another, they still offer a helping hand or at least bring over a fish, while the most engaging supporting character turns out to be a horse – which, let’s face it, should always be the case."

Director Markku Pölönen has never made a splash on the international scene, perhaps because he's not much interested in villains. In a recent interview he remarked: 

I’ve always admired Frank Capra. You can choose the way you look at the world. You can see it as hell, but my theory is that at least 97.3% of the people living on this planet are good. The rest are arseholes. Maybe I’m a romantic, but you can walk on the sunny side of the street or stay in the shadow. Me? I like the sun. In order to survive, these people had to work together. You couldn’t just go to some office and say: 'I am in trouble, and I need money.' You had to trust your neighbors. I was born in 1957 – in the countryside, things don’t change that quickly, so we didn’t have electricity until I was 14 years old. I lived the same life as people after the war. But I have no interest in “social-issue cinema”; it’s not my cup of tea. I like films that end happily, and I try to see good things in people. Directing is not just a profession – it’s a way of seeing the world and showing it to others.