PIFF Dispatch. 5.

One of the greatest passages in Thomas Hardy's epical poem, The Dynasts, contemplates the effect of Waterloo on the most innocent and unwilling of the battle's participants, the fowl and insects and creatures of the earth who are confused if not slain by the combat around them, below them, above them. Ahlaam (Dreams; site) looks at the Iraq war from the perspective of its most helpless witnesses, the inmates in a Bagdad psychiatric hospital. The horror around them is trebly terrifying to these damaged, fearful people.

Shot in 2004 amid the warfare, Mohamed Al Daradji's film begins with a prologue set in 2003 just before the government falls, then flashes back to 1998 and the proceeds to follow three people and how they ended up in the asylum. They are Ahlaam (Aseel Adel), a young woman delighted to finally have a date for her wedding; Ali Hussein Arahaif (Bashir Al Majid), a soldier taking up a position in the desert with his reluctant friend Hassan; and Mehadi Ali Al-Lami (Mohamed Hashim), a young student who is barred from bypassing military service for med school because of his party affiliation and his father's communist past. Soon, Ahlaam's wedding is disrupted by death, cracking her brain, and Ali is unjustly accused of desertion during Operation Desert Fox, with the the result that his right ear is cut off (graphically), and he is confined to a mental institution. They end up in the same place as Mehadi, who after all this time, has endured both military service and medical school to find a place in bedlam, an institution that still practices electroshock "therapy."

But at the 43-minute mark, the film jumps back to 2003. The city is being attacked from the air. Bombs hit the asylum, breaking it open. The confused, fearful inmates, unaware of what is going on, scatter. Mehadi tries to retrieve them, with the help of Ali, who's finally found a purpose. Unfortunately, terrible things happen to Ahlaam as she wanders the streets in a long, terrible, urgent sequence that brings the style and technique of Antonioni's great "city" films into the 21st century. Some small justice is served when the bombs dropped on the asylum interrupt the power (and Ahlaam's therapy) and kill the heartless doctor in charge of the institution. But from then forward, as Ahlaam's family desperately searches the streets for her, the film becomes grim beyond belief. For all its breaking news relevancy, the film ends inconclusively, the only way a film set in Bagdad right now can. As the tension winds tighter, the viewer may echo Ali, who mutters in the film's opening, "I want to leave. I don't want to leave."

Writing in Variety, Jay Weissberg found Ahlaam "worthy of true admiration."

A soap opera draped in colorful Festival garb, Pao's Story (Chuyen cua Pao) is a fine if slow paced tale of a young woman who gradually reconciles herself to her rural roots. Individual scenes are short, but the film feels longer than its 98 minutes, probably because in general, like a narcissist, it's rather smitten with its own beauty and elegance.

Ngo Quang Hai's award-winning debut is based on the tale "The Whisper of the Flute" by Do Bich Thuy and recounts the life of a girl born to a northern Vietnamese Hmong community, to the distress of the village as a whole, which was hoping for a son. After a prologue of an at-first mysterious content (a woman seemingly throwing herself into the sea), Pao's story formally begins, with Pao (Do Thi Hai Yen, of The Quiet American) narrating her life as we see it (successfully breaking yet again one of those many rigid modern screenwriting guru rules). Pao has a mean father, who mistreats the family dog, a long suffering mother who endures his coldness and vulgarity, another "mother" who comes and goes mysteriously, and later, a gentle suitor. There is usually a beautiful mountain backdrop, with pan flutes reminding us of the tale's simple dignity.

The village's backward beliefs are quietly criticized without being forcefully rebelled against by the central characters themselves, and the female leads are imbued with a greater sympathy, as per soap opera conventions. Audiences may laugh as a post-coital scene, set amid the flowers in moonlight, soars into a Morricone-esque musical riff with a chorus of women's voices trilling non-verbal notes, the art house equivalent of Dimitri Tiomkin telling us how to feel.

This is noble film festival-type material, celebrating as it does the dignity of man as he struggles against an unforgiving landscape, but the immature reactions and choices of the main character are likely to irritate more sophisticated audiences. This is the kind of faux-art filmmaking that needlessly underscores every point. It was brilliant of Fritz Lang, for example, to show the balloon caught in the phone wires in M as a synecdoche of a brutally murdered child. But in this film, you are shown both the symbol and the reference, as in a scene where Pao bemoans the departure of one of the characters to her mother washing clothes at the river bed and the we see a shot of some escaped clothes coursing down that same stream. End titles remind us that this is a true story, which is both unlikely and seemingly irrelevant. Ronnie Schieb has a more positive take in Variety.

37 Uses for a Dead Sheep: The Story of the Pamir Kirghiz may be the trend of the future. No longer will we have simple "movies" in the old, conventional linear sense. We will have meta-movies, films that inscribe their own critique into the text itself, movies that juggle all of past moviedom, that recount their own making as they unfold. Surely Guy Maddin is one forerunner of this approach, as are his acolytes, who made the HP Lovecraft adaptation, The Call of Cthulhu. But probably the godfather of Ben Hopkins's engaging quasi-documentary, is, consciously or not, William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, a 60s film that incorporates details of its own making as it rolls along.

Broken into a number of chapters ("This Is the Way of the World," "Iron Nails"), 37 Uses summarizes the recent travails of this small, nomadic tribe, who used to roam all of central Asia, but are now more or less confined to eastern Turkey, partially because of globalization and partially because of their political conflicts with most of their "host" nations. Hopkins is omnipresent in the film, interviewing members of the tribe, and also shown directing some fictional films within the film about the Pamir Kirghiz, filling in their 20th century backstory (these inner films are themselves tricked up Maddin-like with iris outs, imposed scratches, and intertitles).

Yet for all the juggling of time frames and film styles, the essential narrative thread is always clear, and Hopkins's approach livens up the usually deadly surface of most ethnographic films; Robert Gardner, I suspect, would probably not care too much for 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, but you never know. Other views: Leslie Felperin in Variety and Bilge Ebiri in New York.

Posted by dwhudson at February 22, 2007 10:45 AM