There's something about the pressing issues of the day—global warming, the war in Iraq, the American healthcare crisis—that can sap a filmmaker's imagination. 

see also African business

Bamako
Writer and director: Abderrahmane Sissako. Cast: Aïssa Maïga, Tiécoura Traoré, Hélène Diarra, Habib Dembélé, Aïssata Tall Sall, William Bourdon, Roland Rappaport, Mamadou Kanouté, Danny Glover. (NR)

found at New Haven Advocate, CT - Jul 11, 2007

 

They seem too unwieldy to tackle any way other than head-on, with a grim demeanor, a few talking heads, and perhaps a PowerPoint presentation. But then Malian writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako (Waiting for Happiness) comes along and changes the game entirely. Taking on the rather wonkish subject of African debt relief, Sissako's Bamako makes the political personal, illuminating a complex issue with the formal audacity of an experimental theater piece.

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Bamako is set in a home in a poor neighborhood in Mali's capital city in which Melé, a beautiful young nightclub singer (Aïssa Maïga), is planning to leave her unemployed husband Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), who's under suspicion for stealing a gun. Here's the audacious part: While this little domestic drama is going on, the World Bank is on trial in their courtyard. It's a surreal conceit—every morning Melé comes into the courtyard to get a police officer or one of the witnesses to tie the back of her dress. A guard stands outside their gate under a speaker that broadcasts the proceedings to the neighborhood, keeping out those who aren't on the witness list for the day. While bewigged prosecutors call witnesses to testify about the damage done by the World Bank and the IMF's lending practices, life goes on: Women dye cloth, a couple marries, and a detective investigating Chaka hangs around, becoming a regular at the trial. Life bleeds in and out of the courtroom/yard, even at night, when the children gather around the TV to watch a spaghetti Western that is soon revealed to be playing out on the streets of Bamako.

The judge and lawyers are actual barristers and the witnesses, from several countries, are non-actors, speaking for themselves and making the consequences of abstract policy brutally concrete, while the characters in the story are played by actors, reading Sissako's words. Among these is a cameraman (Habib Dembélé) who attends the trial with his camcorder but doesn't turn it on because he's uninterested in watching people talk. He says he prefers to film dead people—a nod not only to Africa's skyrocketing mortality rate but to our own entertainment preferences. This weekend will you go see Captivity or Bamako? Looking into my box-office crystal ball, I see dead people.

 

You Kill Me
Director: John Dahl. Screenplay: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. Cast: Ben Kingsley, Téa Leoni, Luke Wilson, Bill Pullman, Philip Baker Hall, Dennis Farina. (R)

Or you could go see You Kill Me, in which Ben Kingsley plays Frank Falencyzk, an alcoholic hitman who falls for a high-powered yuppie (Téa Leoni) while drying out in San Francisco. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely's screenplay seems to have been spit out by a screenwriting program set on "quirky." It's not enough that Frank works for America's Funniest Ethnic Group, but the Polish mob makes its home in Buffalo (a punchline city as old as vaudeville) and is fighting the Irish for control of the lucrative snowplow racket. Alcoholics Anonymous has pretty much been mined of humor, so they give Frank a job as a mortician (send Evelyn Waugh's estate a check) and as his AA sponsor Luke Wilson, playing not just a homosexual but a toll collector on the Golden Gate Bridge. Bill Pullman puts in a truly bizarre performance as a real estate agent trawling the morgue for leads, another joke that was last funny circa Fibber McGee & Molly. Did I mention that Leoni has a pet turtle?

You Kill Me has been seen as a comeback for John Dahl (The Last Seduction), and it is visually sumptuous, with saturated colors and sculpted shadows. Except it's all wrong for the script, as is the heavy pacing—a movie like this should have the flat look and rapid clip of The In-Laws. Dahl seems to have assumed that if you treat your screenplay as if it has some depth it will reveal itself, but the truth is that a 45 rpm record played at 33 just sounds like a protracted yawn. Dahl's hand is also sure, if misguided, in the uniform way in which the characters overstress the script's Scorsesean profanity as if they were children saying naughty words. Kingsley, in a performance that can best be described as his gangster in Sexy Beast mugged by Being There's Chauncey Gardiner, is left to react to the wackiness around him while trying on various accents. (In one sentence he manages to pronounce "3" both "three" and "tree.") That he scores with Leoni's character says more about the Summer of Settling (see Knocked Up) than it does about Frank's imperceptible charm.

 

Brand Upon the Brain!
Director: Guy Maddin. Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles. Cast: Gretchen Krich, Sullivan Brown, Maya Lawson, Katherine E. Scharhon, Erik Steffen Maahs. Narrator: Isabella Rossellini. (NR)

To save money, You Kill Me was shot in Winnipeg, while Guy Maddin, Winnipeg's greatest filmmaker (all right, its only filmmaker) finally left the confines of the hometown, where he's made 21 films, for Seattle to make Brand Upon the Brain!, his latest excursion into the soggy depths of his genuinely eccentric imagination.

Maddin has been reimagining D.W. Griffith-era melodrama on a shoestring since the mid-'80's, working his myriad obsessions (Protestant repression, ice hockey, ostriches) into midnight movies that make David Lynch's look like mainstream Hollywood (and without that more celebrated filmmaker's pretensions). Like 2003's Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand is a serialized installment in the autobiography of Guy Maddin, now a boy (Sullivan Brown) living with his rebellious teenage sister (Maya Lawson) in a lighthouse in which his domineering mother (Gretchen Krich) and scientist father (Todd Jefferson Moore) run an orphanage. But someone's up to no good, and world-famous harp-playing teen detective Wendy Hale (Katherine E. Scharhon) is determined to get to the bottom of it.

Shot mostly in black-and-white Super 8, lit like a German Expressionist horror film, and played as a silent movie—heavy on the exclamation points and heavier on the Grand Guignol—Brand Upon the Brain! has enough plot threads for a few movies, so it's disappointing to see the orphans consigned to the background for most of this one. But if Maddin gets sidetracked by more prurient preoccupations, he gets a pass for thinking outside the frame. Like Cowards, Brand Upon the Brain! was conceived as something more than a mere movie. Cowards was originally an installation, each of its 10 parts unspooling in separate peep-show viewers, and Brand Upon the Brain! was first presented as a performance piece with live musicians, foley artists and an interlocutor who was more Japanese benshi than narrator, commenting on the action rather than describing it. To recreate the live experience, the sound effects on the print screening at Hartford's Cinestudio are a bit over the top, and Isabella Rossellini's voiceover sounds unmixed, as if she were in the theater egging you along.

"Everything that happens will happen again, twice," says Rossellini, an observation that seems to apply to a good deal of Maddin's often deliberately paced work. But unlike Cowards Bend the Knee, and pretty much all of Maddin's work save his breathtaking short The Heart of the World, Brand Upon the Brain! has been edited at an exhilarating clip. In this respect it may point to a new direction, perhaps an end to the second phase of a career that was heralded with 2000's Metropolis-aping Heart of the World and has recently seemed a little stuck. If Brand Upon the Brain! wraps up Maddin's discursion into silent movie simulacra, where he'll go next is the biggest cliffhanger of them all.

editor@newhavenadvocate.com