Brisbane trots out concern about a public perception that the Times has a liberal bias, with a straight face, as best one might guess from the text, and without asking or perhaps even wondering just who perceives NYT in this way. My perception is that NYT is a fairly solid, mainstream source of news, comparable to the Wall Street Journal and The Economist. The editorial page has a liberal slant, just as the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and The Economist are conservative. The op-ed page is determinedly balanced, as at the Washington Post and many other daily papers, with for instance Paul Krugman offset by David Brooks, as at the Post E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson appear alongside Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson.

No doubt the conviction that NYT is an organ of liberalism is deeply and sincerely held by people who get their news from Fox News and anyone who thinks Congressman Allen West (R-Fla) may be on to something with his charge that 78 to 81 Democrats in the House of Representatives are members of the Communist Party (Amy Bingham, Rep. Allen West Says Up To 81 House Members Are Communists, ABC News, April 11, 2012). Who else thinks this way? Neoconservative dead-enders? Occupants of the ballyhooed center? Would anything but a hatchet job on Obama convince such people that NYT does not have a liberal bias? Is this what Brisbane has in mind for the paper?

Brisbane echoes a centrist line pushed by a pack high-profile pundits such as NYT columnists Tom Friedman and David Brooks and Washington Post columnist Matt Miller. They lay the nation’s problems and government’s failure to address them on twin, fringe extremes of left/liberal/Democratic and right/conservative/Republican. Neither extreme is large enough to implement its policies without compromise, and neither is amenable to compromise. Both act to frustrate and undermine the center, where political wisdom and virtue are to be found—along with Friedman, Brooks, Miller, and most Americans.

Centrist dogma rests on some dubious premises, the kind that appear reasonable at first but do not hold up to scrutiny: The two major political parties have moved to the extremes with the Democrats becoming more liberal and the Republicans more conservative. The two parties are equally to blame for all that ails the nation. Between the extremes is the virtuous center, characterized by a pragmatic bent and indifference, if not outright hostility, to ideology. In that center inheres a uniquely American character, maybe even exceptionalism, that when I was a kid we read about in our fifth-grade social studies textbooks.

Now has the Democratic Party really moved left to become more liberal? I speak loosely here, because liberal and left are not synonymous terms, although many on the right routinely speak as if they were, even those not prone to engage in such rhetorical excess as Monsieur Newton Gingrich when he claims that Barack Obama is the most radical president in history. Far from becoming more liberal or leftist, Democrats have run with a number of policies once identified with moderate Republicans. A prime example is the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, which was vilified by Republicans the instant Obama adopted it.  As the Republican Party has moved further and further right, so too has liberalism, so that what was once considered a moderately right position is now flaming liberalism. It is the Republicans for whom compromise is anathema.

More pernicious is the readiness to apportion blame equally to both parties under the guise of balance. Take Matt Miller’s recent column Tax Talk — Big Lies and Straight Truths (Washington Post, 11 April 2012). His unexceptional theme is that both parties lie when talking about taxes, the economy, and the national budget, Republicans when they claim there is no need to raise taxes at all, Democrats when they claim that raising taxes only on people earning more than $250,000 will suffice. Miller grudgingly acknowledges that the two claims are not of equal demerit with a pro forma qualification offered in passing: “Let’s start with the GOP lie (which I should note for the False Equivalency Police is the more egregious).” He then blithely goes on to write as if Republican and Democratic claims were indeed equivalently untrue.

Perhaps somewhere Friedman, Brooks, Miller, or some of their comrades who put themselves at the vanguard of the center actually analyze the make-up of that group. Typically they speak vaguely of a center that seems to consist of Americans who are either swing voters or those who do not vote at all and as if the center represented some kind of common ground from which the country might be governed effectively. Yet another Washington Post columnist, Steven Pearlstein, puts it succinctly: “In the vision of politics that many of us carry around in our heads, it is the ‘median voter,’ at the center of the ideological spectrum, who ultimately is supposed to determine the long-term course of government policy.” (Turned off from politics? That’s exactly what the politicians want, Wash Post, April 20, 2012). If you throw all those swing voters and nonvoters who reject both major parties into some mythical center, you end up with a hodgepodge, ragtag bunch. Homogenous clusters within this amorphous center amount to no more than splinter groups (see Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Beyond Red vs. Blue: A Political Typology). How a national consensus might be cobbled together remains unaddressed. Whether such consensus, typified by Pearlstein’s “median voter” at the center of the ideological spectrum, might actually be a source of good policy is up for debate.

The analysis from the center is couched in nonpartisan rhetoric ever at pains to avoid the appearance that it is more critical of Republicans than of Democrats, more critical of conservatives than of liberals. Whose interests are served when this devotion to specious principles of neutrality and balance leads to an inaccurate account of issues, policies, and actions? An engaging counterpoint to Friedman, Brooks, and Miller can be found in a new book by Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute: It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. Mann and Ornstein laid out the book’s themes in a recent column in the Washington Post straightforwardly titled Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem, (Washington Post, April 27, 2012). (See also NPR, Extremism in Congress: ’Even Worse Than It Looks’?)

By no means do I wish to suggest that Democrats and liberals are above reproach or that they should be exempt from criticism, much less blindly supported. They are a feckless lot. Unfortunately, neither the apostles of the center nor the Occupy movement offer a viable alternative program or even much in the way of useful analysis.

memo from the editorial desk

A minor editorial revision was made approximately 12 hours after this essay was initially posted. The final four sentences, relating to the upcoming presidential election, were deleted because the topic merits more extensive development than I want to get into at present.  The deleted passage did not contribute substantively to the essay’s themes.

A second editorial revision was made 5/10/2012 in the next to the last paragraph at the end of the first sentence: “more critical of liberals than of conservatives” was changed to “more critical of conservatives than of liberals”. I wrote in precipitous haste, as Samuel Johnson would put it.

Racial and ethnic divisions remain woven into the national fabric, as they remain woven into the human fabric, inextricable from contests for wealth and power, competition for food, shelter, land, water, and other finite resources, a human tendency, perhaps not universal but far from rare, to see the other as a competitor in our pursuit of happiness and better lives for ourselves and those dear to us. It would take an almost willful blindness to deny this.

The killing of Trayvon Martin would have been little noted and soon forgotten had his family and others not pursued the matter. Maybe the investigation was shoddy because local authorities simply did not take much interest in the death of a black kid at the hands of—as some see it—a citizen concerned for the safety of his neighborhood. Maybe it was shoddy because the authorities concluded in good faith that their hands were tied by Florida law. Either way, shoddy. My sympathy lies with Martin and his family. Their integrity, the depth of their grief, and the legitimacy of their demand that justice be done are without question. I believe that race was a factor in what happened. That said, I wonder if the focus on race may distract us from other factors that bear on the incident and its terrible outcome.

Let us say for the sake of argument that George Zimmerman acted in good faith when he engaged in armed patrol of his community. To his mind he was a good citizen safeguarding his family, friends, neighbors, and their property. How widespread this kind of thinking might be is open to debate. It seems to be far from rare, and it may be safe to say it is becoming increasingly common. Not a few among us are convinced that only they and their guns stand between their families, their communities, their property, and barbarous hordes that menace from every side. At the same time, Americans of widely divergent views spanning the political spectrum share a conviction that the authorities are a malignant force aligned against them. The fetishization of firearms and “Stand Your Ground” laws encourage those who are already inclined to take the law into their own hands and mete out justice on the spot. A native strain of vigilantism tied in with the frontier spirit and that aspect of the American character rooted in extreme individualism and animus toward government in general and taxation in particular provide fertile soil for this kind of thinking.

Is there reason to believe that Zimmerman would have acted differently had Trayvon Martin been a white kid wearing a hoodie and baggy pants, a white kid with tattoos and some attitude, who looked no more like he belonged in the neighborhood that a black kid did? And might not that white kid have felt threatened and stood his ground, in accordance with the precepts of “Stand Your Ground,” defensive and afraid but not wanting to admit it, even to himself, falling back on surliness and arrogance, as I can imagine a kid might in that circumstance, as I can imagine I might?

I suppose the point that I am circling about has something to do with a human inclination to reductionism, to putting things down to a single cause, all the better if the scenario is painted in black and white with good and evil clearly delineated. Racism as an explanatory device works well for this, and all the better because it too often truly is a factor, even today, even granting that we have come a long way in the past 50 years. It is tempting to wrap it all up in a nice package, tie a ribbon around it, and be satisfied—race, racism, racial profiling, guilty. We do ourselves and our tenuous faith in democracy no service if we let it go at that.

References

Peter Grier, Trayvon Martin case: Three key questions still not answered, The Christian Science Monitor, March 29, 2012

Patrik Jonsson, Gun nation: Inside America’s gun-carry culture, The Christian Science Monitor, March 11, 2012

Brad Knickerbocker, Trayvon Martin case: Conflicting evidence emerges, The Christian Science Monitor, April 1, 2012

Race, Politics And The Trayvon Martin Case, All Things Considered, National Public Radio, April 1, 2012

[House Speaker John] Boehner comes out and says Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entrée, that’s inappropriate. Not this stuff. And it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.

Will had a point when he added, “It is the responsibility of conservatives to police the right and its excesses, just as the liberals unfailingly fail to police the excesses on their own side.” I might quibble about Will’s use of the adverb “unfailingly,” but his point is generally well taken.

My opinion of Rush Limbaugh is every bit as harsh as his opinion of Sandra Fluke. Why anyone should take him seriously baffles me, yet clearly a fair number of people do. So why am I made uncomfortable by the movement to muzzle Limbaugh and demands for an apology that no one should expect to be sincere?

I recall the fight against censorship waged through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, thinking of James Joyce and Ulysses, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg and “Howl,” Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and his seven words you can’t say on television. Whether Limbaugh belongs in this company is not the point. I am more interested in how the use of words like “slut” in public discourse is in no way exceptionable. Is what Limbaugh said about Fluke markedly worse than what one is liable to find surfing television channels or the web at any time, day or night? The question is posed not to excuse Limbaugh but to note the loosening of old restrictions on speech acceptable in the public domain and a general coarsening of the culture during my lifetime—without getting into speculation about cause and effect, which follows from what, and so on. There is very little anymore that lies beyond the pale. Openness is preferable to censorship, whether that censorship stems from government or from the market, but it would be naïve to deny that this openness is accompanied by consequences that are not all admirable. Notions such as decorum and restraint, courtesy, decency, and civility have been rendered all but quaint.

Up to what point is colorful invective and inventive polemic an acceptable part of the rough-and-tumble of politics and public discourse and where does it go too far? I am comfortable saying that Rush Limbaugh once again crossed a line that he routinely crosses and it is right to call him to account on it. But exactly where is that line? Who decides? Did Hunter S. Thompson cross the line when he described Hubert Humphrey as a “treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current”? Pity the poor liberals, who routinely pretzel themselves trying to defend freedom of expression while decrying “hate speech.” There is presently underway an admirable campaign to delegitimize use of the word “gay” as a slur, gibe, or insult. Alas, what else is there to say about those uniforms worn by the Baylor men’s basketball team in Saturday’s game against Colorado? Did I just cross a line, albeit with tongue firmly planted in cheek?

Freedom of artistic expression is a bedrock principle. Yet there are always boundaries, and reasonable people may disagree about precisely where the boundaries lie. None of this was handed down to us on tablets inscribed by God. It just did not happen that way. We must make our own way through argument and debate and the good-faith attempt at critical examination of our own most fundamental principles and beliefs. Thus, I sometimes find myself obliged to defend works of art for which I do not care. Andres Serrano’s notorious Immersion (Piss Christ) provides a ready example. The conception is juvenile. Any claim to aesthetic value or political statement is undermined by the title and substance of the piece. Is the offense Christians take to Piss Christ any more surprising, any more or less justified, than that women take to Limbaugh’s slur?

Does it follow from my defense of Serrano’s right to produce and display Piss Christ as a work of art that I should defend Limbaugh’s right to use “slut” in political commentary? I think maybe it does. Limbaugh’s choice of words and his predilection for ad hominem attack as a method of argument tells us something about the kind of person he chooses to be, nothing about Sandra Fluke. Nor do they shed any light whatsoever on the political issues in dispute. Limbaugh’s outrage lies less in derogatory remarks directed at this or that individual, however outrageous those remarks may be, than in his by no means negligible contribution to the national discord and trivialization of the debate about matters of genuine social and political import.

Where does this leave us? Oh, I don’t know. It is important that people of good will speak out, as many have done, against the likes of Rush Limbaugh and the mean spirit and puerile thinking that are his trademarks. I believe that, as I believe that this matter of speech and freedom of expression remains a thorny one. Many of the issues that divide us are thorny. Consensus might be possible if this were not so. All we can do is examine our own beliefs as critically as we are capable and act in accord with our conclusions and conscience. It is probably a good principle to remember that it is always possible that we are wrong.

Jean Gentil has left Haiti for the Dominican Republic in search of a better life. The film opens with Jean applying for a job as an accountant. He does not get the job. Later he returns to his room, where he is behind on the rent, to find the door padlocked. He retrieves his belongings from the garbage bin and sets out. A dignified man wearing a dress shirt and slacks, Jean is a devout Christian and an educated man, a former teacher who speaks English, French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole. He is also a sad man, without a trace of hope, alive but not living. The situation is heartrending, but the film could not fail more completely to convey any sense of who Jean Gentil is or draw us to him. He is a cipher without being a mystery we care to unravel. The festival program notes describe something I did not see: “With its stunning landscape, naturalistic performances, and focus on character rather than societal injustice, this gentle film makes an inspiring, universal statement of the triumph of human dignity.” Jean Gentil is winner of the Special Jury Mention at the Venice Film Festival and the Special Jury Award for Originality and Innovation at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. Others found in it something I did not.

Extraterrestrial (Spain)
dir. Nacho Vigalondo
(90 mins)

A mildly amusing film with a clever premise. A young man awakes in a bed and apartment not his own, with not a clue how he got there. Neither he nor the lovely young woman who lives in the apartment knows the other’s name or has any recollection of what happened the night before. Things take a science-fictiony twist when they find that cell phone and internet service are down and a huge spaceship hovers above a deserted Madrid. At once I thought of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic Childhood’s End. Turns out Madrid is only almost deserted. Still around is the young woman’s neighbor, a dweebish stalker with an obsession. Then her boyfriend shows up. The premise of the alien invasion becomes a set-up for a goofy romantic comedy. Amusing and somewhat creative scenarios and dialogue but nothing special.

Patagonia (Great Britain)
dir. Marc Evans
(118 mins)

Two storylines whose only connection are Wales and a community of Welsh natives in a remote region of Argentina. An elderly Patagonian woman is determined to return to Wales to visit the farm where her mother lived as a child. A Welsh couple, not married and with some issues in the relationship, travel to Patagonia, he on commission to photograph chapels in desert locations, she on vacation. The couple endure love’s trials and tribulations in a litany of silences and unintended betrayals, while a teenage Patagonian boy who sets out to accompany the old woman, a neighbor of his family, to the city for eye surgery finds himself and the science fiction book he’s reading shanghaied to Wales, where he comes of age through encounter with romance and death. Rhys and Gwen, Cerys, Alejandro and the blonde Welsh college girl he meets briefly in a Cardiff bar before she passes out and is taken away in an ambulance, only to have their paths cross again at a campground in the countryside. For two hours they transported me. Argentine mountains, desert, an emptiness vast as a heart longing to be filled, the incredible clarity of the air, night sky smeared white with stars, juxtaposed against the stubby, rugged, green mountains and blue lakes of Wales, Cerys questing for the stream of primrose, her mother’s farm, as I quest for a lucidly that lies always beyond my fathom. When young Alejandro tells Cerys he has found something he likes—to travel—the old woman smiles and says, that is why you should always carry a passport.

PIFF 2012 was a good PIFF. I saw twelve films, a good number for me, nothing like for some cinema buffs. On the festival’s second Saturday, a full week yet to run, I found myself in line for the Gerhard Richter documentary with a couple who had seen 37 films to that point. Yikes. For me they would start to run together and I would feel run ragged a ways before I reached that lofty number.
What matters is that I enjoyed some nice films that remained with me as I left the theater and even now as I think back on them. I offer what follows not as a ranking or scorecard but more in the way of a provisional summing up. Others may have different impressions. That is as it should be.

Two I did not care for at all: Clown (Denmark) and Jean Gentil (Dominican Republic).
Two okay little films that I am happy to have seen once: Morgen (Romania), Extraterrestial (Spain)
Two good films, quite well done: Gerhard Richter (Germany) and The Front Line (South Korea). I think of these two as somewhat distinct because the Richter is a documentary, fascinating  but different in kind from the other films I saw, and Front Line is a war film, excellent but devastating.
Two nice little films, perhaps a cut below the very best but not by much, certainly rewarding: Where Do We Go Now? (Lebanon) and Goodbye, First Love (France).
Four I like a lot. They are borderline exceptional, and I will see them again if the opportunity arises: Snows of Kilimanjaro (France), Toll Booth (Turkey), Patagonia (Great Britain), and The Salt of Life (Italy).

The fascinating documentary about German artist Gerhard Richter is another PIFF film I did not see coming. I had no notion that I would find Richter and his work compelling. His abstract paintings and overpainted photographs are not up my alley at all. Figuration in some aspect is usually present in works that touch me, though more strict realism not so much, photorealism not at all. For all the influence Surrealism brings to bear on my work as a poet, the standard-bearers among Surrealist artists—for example, Dalí, Duchamp, Ernst, Man Ray—generally leave me cold; Miró is a notable exception. Abstraction may be intellectually interesting but is seldom moving, with rare exceptions such as certain paintings by Jackson Pollack that convey an undeniable intensity. Chagall, Monet, Picasso, Braque, Roualt, Courbet, and Rodin are among the artists to whom I return time and again.

My previous acquaintance with Richter was sketchy. I recollect viewing a few paintings on display, perhaps a small show, in a museum somewhere, most likely Portland Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, or Vancouver Art Gallery. If memory serves I found the works on exhibit of some interest but was not particularly struck by them. The film was just another listing in the festival program until I happened on a Facebook note posted by Melissa Sillitoe (Show and Tell Gallery) expressing enthusiasm for Richter’s abstract paintings (also showing that Facebook occasionally serves a function beyond idle blather). The documentary played on a Saturday afternoon at a time when nothing else cried for my attention. Why not, I thought.

Gerhard Richter was born in East Germany and studied art at the Academy in Dresden. The Academy’s rigorous, five-year program provided a thorough training in traditional technique with daily activities in life drawings, still lifes, and figurative painting in oils, accompanied by art history up to the onset of Impressionism, when bourgeois decadence set in, and classes in Russian, politics, and economics that held no appeal for the young Richter.

After graduation Richter set out on what could have become a comfortable career as an artist supported by the state, teaching evening classes for the public in exchange for a studio and modest income. He enjoyed some success as a painter of murals and public art, with “solidly modeled figures of healthy men, women and children engaged in life-enhancing activities” conveying themes of health and happiness in a Socialist paradise.

As is evident from Richter’s mature work, Socialist Realism did not provide an aesthetic adequate to his needs as an artist. There was nothing for him in East Germany. He saw no future for himself as a public artist, and there were no role models for being an independent artist. Something of a cranky iconoclast, Richter was not attracted to the underground scene, of which he says,

[T]there were freelance, self-employed artists. But there were no good painters among them. The independent artists, some of them, were overproud of their independence; they made a cult out of their status. I always had a bad feeling about that, their pride, their self-importance. (Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: The Day Is Long, Art in America, 1/1/2002)

A breakthrough came when he saw the show documenta II (for a description of the exhibit, see also documenta 2) in Kassel, West Germany, in 1959, which featured works by Jackson Pollock, Jean Fautrier, and Lucio Fontana, among many others. Richter found in these paintings the “expression of a totally different and entirely new content.”

He split for the West, defecting in 1961, and enrolled in the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf. Asked what it was like to be a young artist in Germany 1962 or 1963, Richter replied,

We swam in a pool of hope. We thought, “We’ll just do it.” It was not a problem that the others, first the French and then American artists, were selling so well and at such high prices. It was not a topic. We were young, and the older German artists like Nay and Georg Meistermann were not very famous and not much liked. Their works were less expensive, and we felt that was only right because they were stupid.

I never had the feeling that I was a modern artist…. [T]he good modern artists, like Carl Andre, Bob Ryman, I like very much. But modern art has always only shown itself to me in trends and blowhards, so I couldn’t be a modern artist. (Storr interview)

A fair portion of the documentary is devoted to footage of the artist painting, applying paint with brush or squeegee, stepping back to consider the canvas, putting it aside altogether for a time, declaring it good but only for two hours, after which it will not be good anymore. I was struck by the risks taken by a painter working in abstraction as Richter does where accident is so much part of the process. There is no going back if a move does not work out. With a portrait or landscape, say, one might be able to paint over something that does not pan out and get back to what was there before. Even when there is something, a play of light, say, that cannot be precisely gotten back, the artist at least has a shot. With Richter’s abstract paintings, there is nowhere to go but forward. There were two instances in the film where I thought he went too far and lost paintings I was quite taken with. There he seemed content with the end result. Clearly the paintings as I liked them were not what he wanted.

In the Storr interview, Richter admits to what he calls a trick: “In the abstract paintings, there’s sometimes this trick. I have to be careful not to do it, but I sometimes cover the painting with white and then everything is beautiful and new and fresh, like snow. All the misery is over, the terror.”

Richter has some reputation for being difficult. The film conveys the impression of a man likely to dig in his heels if pressed to do something he is not inclined to do. Nonetheless, he also comes across as engaging, thoughtful and reflective but never pedantic or too full of himself. His observations about his himself and his art can be both playful and serious. He delighted in recollecting his first show in America (circa 1972), an exhibit of blurred photographs and gray paintings, when two young American artists told him, “Great show, but the gray ones, bullshit.”

In a more serious vein he injects a moral element into the determination of whether a work of art is good or bad, in something of an echo of Keats’ equation of beauty and truth.

The most important thing, in life and for humanity, is to decide what is good and what is bad. And it’s the most difficult. I remember a time when it was out of fashion to judge a painting good. But all my real constructive experiences with people were about good or not good, with Polke, Palermo, Fischer or the sculptor Isa Genzken, who is very strict. “That’s ugly, terrible,” she’d say. It’s very important.
. . .

It always means good and bad. I don’t know if it is the same in English, but in German if you say it’s a good painting, you already mean it’s beautiful; if you say it’s a bad painting, you imply also that it’s ugly. It almost has moral connotations of good and evil. If we say something is beautiful, then we mean it’s good. (Storr interview)

Although I do not think quite in these terms myself, I find the theme resonant. The moral component of a work of art may lie not in anything explicit in it, subject matter, overt theme, style, but rather in its being as art, that is, if it is legitimately art, impossible as that is to pin down. Here I would invoke the spirit of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s assertion that while hard-core pornography might be hard to define, he knew it when he saw it. Beauty and truth will always elude the straitjacket of definition. That does not mean that we cannot talk about these things in an intelligent and fruitful way, only that there will always remain something beyond everything that can be said, Emerson’s “under every deep a lower deep opens.”

Gregory Corso once remarked that if he finds the poet interesting, he will find the poem interesting. While I would not accept this as a hard-and-fast rule, there is something to it. Yes, a work of art must stand or fall on its own. The greatness of Shakespeare’s plays is not contingent on knowledge about his life. At the same time, context—biographical, historical, social—is not irrelevant. My perception of Gerhard Richter’s art is now colored by what I saw of him in the documentary and what I learned about his life and thinking from the biographical note on the website Gerhard Richter and from Robert Storr’s interview. The paintings are more intriguing and my experience of them richer for that.

Morgen is a quietly nice little film set near the Romanian border with Hungary. Nelu is a security guard at a grocery store where he patrols the aisles wearing a jacket with the words “Predator Security” emblazoned on the back. His is an uneventful life shared with his grumpy wife and a lackadaisical dog in a rundown farmhouse outside town. One day while fishing Nelu catches a Turk, a bearded little fellow with a hangdog look about him and no papers. Nelu speaks no Turkish. The Turk speaks no Romanian. Still they talk to one another, the Turk’s words not provided with subtitles, so the audience understands him no more than Nelu does. Nelu takes the Turk under his wing and endeavors to help him cross the border into Hungary to make his way to Germany, where it seems that he is bound. Obstacles pop up in the form of Nelu’s wife, who is adamant that she does not want a stranger in the house, and a pair of border security guards who want only to see the Turk moved on to another jurisdiction where he will be someone else’s problem. Meantime Nelu’s attempts to smuggle the Turk across the border prove comically inept. I could only be touched as the two men bond after a fashion and Nelu refuses to abandon his friend. Not my favorite of the festival, not a film of which I would say that you should make an effort to see it, Morgen is nonetheless rewarding. It draws us a little bit from our own world and a bit into another that we might carry with us as we leave the cinema.

Toll Booth
dir. Tolga Karaçelik
2/23 8:30pm Pioneer Place 5
2/25 3:30pm Lloyd Mall 6
(96 mins)

I did not see this one coming. What begins as a mildly, somewhat quirkily humorous story about a man with a boring job and a seriously ill yet domineering father turns into an account of the toll booth attendant’s descent into madness.

Kenan does not join in the workplace banter or engage in chitchat with the drivers who pull up to his toll booth. He asks for the ticket, tells the drivers what is owed, and counts out their change. The festival program note describes him as taciturn. A coworker calls him Robot. At home his relationship with his father is marked by tension and simmering rage that never quite erupts. The father wants to fix Kenan up with a woman from the neighborhood who stays with him during the day while Kenan is at work. She is a perfectly nice young woman and clearly receptive to the idea. Kenan is not interested.

At night Kenan stays up trying to fix his father’s old car, the source of a lone fond memory from a boyhood where his mother died of cancer and his father grew embittered and distant. Kenan keeps his attempts to restore the car secret from his father, who never finds satisfaction with anything Kenan does. Beset by hallucinatory dreams, he sleeps fitfully at best. As he slowly unravels, he begins to hallucinate at the toll booth, one day suffering a minor meltdown as he imagines his father as the driver of the car pulled up to his booth, mocking him with accusations of secret desire for the neighbor, that he stares at her ass and fantasizes about humping  her. As a consequence his superiors transfer him from the busy, high-profile toll plaza to a remote outpost where he will be the only attendant and perhaps four cars pass through during the entire shift. One of those cars is the exact same model as his father’s car, and it is driven by a beautiful woman who shows up precisely at 10:20 each morning. Kenan is enchanted at the first encounter. Soon enchantment turns to obsession.

The pace is slow; a woman behind me in line for yesterday’s documentary about Gerhard Richter likened it to watching paint dry. I would not quibble with her assessment. The drying paint bubbles over on occasion into unanticipated humor, as when a white-haired, bearded fellow suddenly appears weaving between the vehicles lined up to pay their tolls, chased by a woman attendant screaming, “You here again, you perv! I told you not to come back. I will fuck you up!” She has to be pulled off the poor fellow, a truck driver who we are left to imagine did something to offend her, perhaps ogling as he looked down from the truck cabin or making some proposition to which she was not amiably disposed.

Dream and reality, whatever either may be, slip into and out of one another. Kenan’s grip becomes ever more tenuous as the film builds to a conclusion of mesmerizing intensity. When the lights came up at the end, a woman in the row behind me exclaimed this was the best one she had seen yet and invoked Fellini. I thought of Bergman.

Goodbye First Love is a sweet film. At the outset Camille is fifteen and in love with Sullivan, older but not by a lot, perhaps a couple of years. Those who speak so knowingly of such things in segments on public radio and popular books, offering up generous recommendations for self-help, doses of therapy, and pharmaceutical cocktails, might say Camille is a tad obsessed. Sullivan loves Camille in turn but tells her they need more in their lives than each other, a reasonably perceptive observation while also rationalization for his trip to South America with two friends. At first Sullivan writes frequently, and Camille pushes pins into a map to plot his journey. As happens, after a time Sullivan’s letters cease to arrive. Eight years pass. Camille sets out on a career as an architect and finds new love. Then a chance encounter brings Sullivan back into her life. The two young people discover their love neither over nor a whit less complicated than before. Løve paces her film with exquisite patience, an evocation of profound feeling, melancholy, and surpassing tenderness.

I saw The Front Line because I was able to catch a press screening yesterday afternoon and that is what was playing. An excellent film with a fine cast offers a fresh take on some conventions of the genre, among them the stupidity and callousness of commanding officers, insubordination, drug addiction, romance, and fraternization with the enemy, along with familiar types, the grizzled sarge, the wise guy, the new kid. A young South Korean officer sums up: “The enemy isn’t the commies. The enemy is the war.” At the end a North Korean officer no longer knows what they were fighting for. “It has been so long. I forgot.” That I walked away empty is a testament to The Front Line‘s effectiveness in conveying its theme of the awful waste and stupidity of war.

Director Robert Guédiguian returns to Marseille and working-class concerns that occupied him in Marius and Jeannette (1997), a film I recall seeing some years ago and liking, though details escape me. The recollection led me to Snows of Kilimanjaro (no relation to Hemingway) at the film festival, and oh am I delighted that it did, for Snows of Kilimanjaro is a wonder, glorious in many ways. I adore it.

The film opens on the Marseille waterfront where union workers are gathered outside a plant whose workforce is being downsized due to globalization. The twenty men who will lose their jobs are determined by a random drawing conducted by Michel, the union representative. To the surprise and dismay of Raoul, Michel’s comrade, lifelong friend, and brother-in-law, Michel draws his own name from the box. As union representative he did not have to include his name in the drawing, but to allow himself preferential treatment would be unthinkable.

Michel will be okay even with the early retirement he did not seek. He has his pension, and his wife, Marie-Claire has her work, and they have their children and grandchildren. Perhaps most of all, Michel and Marie-Claire have each other. Although Snows of Kilimanjaro is not a love story, the relationship between Michel and Marie-Claire is as beautiful a depiction of love as I have ever seen in film. This love is nothing like the love described by Batiste in Les enfants du paradis, an impossible love that Garance tells him exists only in dream, not in reality, to which Batiste responds, “Dream, reality, it’s all the same or what’s the use in living.” The love of Michel and Marie-Claire is rooted in a shared life and the shared values that shape it, family and work, and sense of our common humanity as socialists in the tradition of Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), whose name Michel is given to invoking.

The younger workers who have been downsized are not as fortunate as Michel. They have not been employed long enough to qualify for a pension. Other jobs are difficult to find. The bitterness and desperation of one unemployed young worker leads to a crime that traumatizes Michel and Marie-Claire, Raoul, and Raoul’s wife, Marie-Claire’s sister, Denise, and moreover gives rise to a crisis of conscience. Michel wonders if he the union was wrong to decide the layoffs with a random drawing that had a more severe impact on some than on others. Was the union too ready to compromise with management? Might there have been a better way? He also wonders if he is right to enjoy a comfortable retirement, albeit one for which he has worked and sacrificed his entire life, while others cannot find work and provide for their families. Has he ended up just another comfortable bourgeois?

I do not want to say too much about the plot because the way it plays out is handled so by deftly Guédiguian. The characters are finely wrought and realistic, their actions believable. I simply like Michel and Marie-Claire and care about what happens to them. Snows of Kilimanjaro is about principles, conscience, integrity, family, human relationships, ordinary life, a serious film in the very best sense. I give this one all the stars in the sky.

Clown is the movie for you if you like your humor crude and sophomoric. Pals Frank and Caspar plan a canoeing vacation because the women will not want to accompany them on it. Caspar dubs it the Tour de Pussy, pretty well establishing the guys’ intentions and the caliber of wit on display in this film. Just before they set out, Frank’s girlfriend informs him she is pregnant and considering an abortion because he is not father material. Whereupon Frank abducts his eleven-year-old nephew and brings him along on the canoeing trip, thinking somehow they will bond and thus demonstrate he is father material. There ensues a succession of clunky mishaps, silly behavior, pot, sex, penis jokes, man-flirting gone awry, a busload of drunken high school students, and armed robbery, all absent a hint, an iota, a scintilla of subtlety, understatement, or cleverness, not a moment of pathos or sense of anything genuine that might lead to empathy. I could have done without this one.