Five Worthy Films at the MSPIFF

The Mpls. St. Paul. Intl. Film. Fest (MSPiFF) is in full swing, and it's great to see the halls and theaters full of people again. The scene can be chaotic, with rush lines and ticketed lines forming a hundred yards from the theater entrance, but that's part of the fun, I guess.  Hilary and I made it down to see five films over the weekend, and there was nary a stinker in the bunch. We've been to Mexico, Egypt, France, Sweden, and South Korea.

Cairo Conspiracy exemplifies the virtues of the event. If you haven't seen it, then it's unlikely you'll ever get a peek inside Al-Azhar University, the world's foremost center of Sunni Muslim clerical education. That in itself is worth the price of admission. But director Tarik Saleh uses the setting to spin an intricate tale of political and religious intrigue unlike any plot I've seen before.

As the film opens, a village fisherman's son named Adam—young, devout, and naive—wins a scholarship to study at Al-Azhar. Not long after he arrives, the reigning Grand Imam dies, and a power struggle ensues between followers of the various Sunni leaders who are vying to succeed him. The Egyptian government has a favorite choice, of course, and it also has a well-developed security network to make sure it gets what it wants. Trouble is, the clerical establishment considers itself to be above secular law, and the government has no way to know what's going on inside the walls of Al-Azhar. Through a series of events too obscure to relate here, a renegade colonel recruits Adam and orders him to bring news regularly from inside Al-Azhar to a coffee-shop assignation. Adam accepts the unorthodox assignment reluctantly, and he grows more uneasy still (as do we) after witnessing a violent event in the university courtyard.  It's hard to tell who is on who's side, not only inside but also outside the walls of Al-Azhar.

Night of the 12th, a "taut and piercing" police procedural, opens with a raucous retirement party at police headquarters, follows with a gruesome late-night murder, and proceeds through ninety minutes of detective work heavily interspersed with conversations and asides that expose the prevailing mentality of the force and various details of the officers' private lives. The youngest member of the team is excited about his upcoming wedding; one of the older officers is getting divorced. 

The murder victim, a young woman returning home on foot from a "girl's-night-out" at a friend's house, is portrayed as a good-natured young woman who entered easily into relationships with a variety of men, none of whom were deeply interested in her. Hence, suspects abound, though the perpetrator left little evidence behind and everyone seems to have an alibi. Thoughtful and generally low-key, the film has a day-to-day feel. The detectives become frustrated as the case grows cold, and gender issues take on new dimensions with the arrival of a female detective and prosecuting judge. Director Moll avoids polemical browbeating, giving us instead a complex and deftly nuanced rendering of modern life in small-town France.      

Ajoomma is a Mandarin word for "middle-aged woman," often translated as "auntie." In He Shuming's feature film debut, we follow the misadventures of Auntie Bee Hua as she departs alone on a package tour of South Korean tourist sites, after her son has dropped out due to an important job interview in California. Auntie, a recently widowed Singapore woman, has devoted her life to caring for her husband, raising her son, and watching Korean soap operas; she hasn't gotten out much. But her solo vacation would have gone much better were it not for the suave and irresponsible youngster leading the tour, who has plenty of problems of his own. The opening half-hour is tame, but it sets the scene for a riotous and touching sequence of events set in motion when Aunt Bee is left behind the tour at a remote apartment complex and comes to rely on the kindness of the elderly night security guard, Jung Su, to find her way back to the group. They don't speak the same language, but they manage to communicate. The episodes that follow combine elements of slapstick, desperation, schmaltz, and farce, with touches of inter-generational wisdom thrown in.

Hilma af Klint is a stagy but generally informative biopic focused on the life of the Swedish painter of "spiritual" abstractions, largely unknown during her lifetime but recently enjoying a surge in serious interest. The early death of a younger sister drew Hilma to currents of theosophy and the occult that were popular at the turn of the twentieth century, and in the film the young artist stresses again and again that her work is the creation of an unseen spirit that uses her merely as a vehicle. She is painting the unseen connections between all living things.

Himla developed her unusual style in the company of four or five other women who were also artists. They helped her with her work, though they generally lacked her visionary spirit and contented themselves with painting  conventional landscapes. Hilma sold  few if any works in her lifetime, and rarely exhibited them. Lacking a job or family income, she relied heavily on the financial generosity of one of the group, with whom she was also romantically involved for many years.

Swedish director Lasse Hallström fleshes out this scenario in a long series of episodes. He shows the women having tea together, giggling a lot, participating in séances, and invariably acquiescing to the suggestions and demands of their visionary leader. On the other hand, he makes little attempt to examine the underlying issues and contradictions involved, most importantly, how does the "spiritual" content of Hilma's art differ aesthetically from that of contemporary artists who were also driven or "inspired" to paint in non-representational ways? Does her work actually merit comparison to that of Kandinsky, Miro, Odilon Redon, Klee, and other self-professed spiritual painters? It may strike some viewers that it has more in common with decorative Art Nouveau swirls and Marimekko fabrics.

In any case, the film offers viewers like me, who had never heard of Hilma before, an avenue of ingress into the work of a Nordic artist who chose her own path and dedicated her life to it. 

Gods of Mexico is the strangest of the films we saw. It consists of a collection of powerful black-and-white images of indigenous Mexican women and men standing in frozen, tableau-like settings, and two lengthy color sequences, one depicting the activities at a salt farm, the other focusing on mining operations with hand tools deep within a maze of underground tunnels. In their static dignity, the tableau reminded me of the surreal photographs of Graciela Iturbide, while the long episodes with movement underscored the ardor and beauty of repetitive but inescapable work. These sequences also include episodes of shooting craps, cock-fighting, fireworks, dancing, and expert whistling. 

Call it the aestheticisation of the mundane, if you will. Or the romanticization of the "other." The Mexican consul who attended the screening doesn't seem to think so. He recited the Aztec names of the gods being represented, and tried to explain why people are corn, and why corn is people.

In any case, the absence of dialogue for ninety minutes helps us focus our attention on the solidity of people and their connections with other living things.  

In one scene that I will never forget, we see the cavernous interior of a mine, with water dripping down into two misshapen tin cans. In the tiny aperture of tunnel light, we see the silhouette of a man approaching. It might take him a minute, or five minutes, to reach the wider cavern. (No one is in a hurry here. Everything takes time.) He picks up one of the cans, drinks the water, and hurls the can off into the shadows. He picks up the second can, drinks the water, and sets it back down where it was before. 

Why?