ND/NF Dispatch. 2.

One of the reasons for going to film festivals is to find curiosities. That is, films that you're almost sure to see nowhere else but a festival, and a festival dedicated to showing new talent. There were at least two of these films at the just-closed New Directors / New Films series at Lincoln Center. If you missed them, don't go to your local movie house - look for them on the festival circuit.

The Swiss film Stealth (Comme des voleurs, "Like Thieves") opens with an odd proposition. Lionel Baier (who is also the director of the film) is a radio journalist and author, the son of a well-meaning Swiss pastor, who discovers what we are led to believe is a deep family secret: he is Polish. The "scandal" is really a lot less terrifying. His great-grandfather was Polish, or a least Lionel is led to believe that he was.

Preposterous? Every screenwriter is looking for that new twist on familiar stories. And the tale triggered by a hint, if not proof of an unknown origin, especially a taboo origin, has been the staple of cinema since the medium's beginnings. The first feature films, which adapted popular stage plays of those days, retold the stories of melodramas about "respectable" people who had hidden their Jewish origins in order to "pass" as they climbed the ladder of proper society. Southern literature at its most gothic has sagas that reveal a character's secret one-sixteenth of African blood. Bear in mind that in some parts of the South the "one-drop rule" may still be in effect today.

It was certainly in effect in 1949 for the film Lost Boundaries, directed by Alfred L Werker and based on a true story in which Mel Ferrer plays a doctor in New Hampshire who is outed as having "black blood." In a solemn denouement, he looks at his pursuers and at the camera and says, "I am a Negro." (Perhaps his confession to having mixed blood is no coincidence, coming at a time when Congressional committees following the Alger Hiss scandal and on into the McCarthy era were trying to wring confessions from anyone who had any contact with "Communists," even if those contacts were decades earlier.) Let's not forget Advise and Consent, Otto Preminger's 1962 film adapted from Allen Drury's Washington potboiler of the same year, in which, amid hearings about communist ties, a promising political star kills himself when it comes out that he's gay. (For more on this story of Preminger and an early film with a gay element in its sub-plot, watch for Foster Hirsch's biography of Preminger, which Arthur A Knopf will publish in September.)

We don't have to worry about homophobia or hidden gay subtexts in Stealth. Lionel is openly gay and living, as the film begins, with his handsome yoga teacher partner. Here the deeply dark roots are Polish. It changes everything. Lionel finds a Polish au pair, who's fired when a Slovak girl is willing to work for half her salary, and he proposes to marry her, just to protect a fellow Pole - he even tries to have sex with the young woman. The story really gets moving when, at the spur of the moment, he and his sister set out for Poland by car. After they survive a fist fight along the way, with a tough guy whom they catch beating up his girlfriend, and after their car is stolen by a Swiss hitchhiker whom they befriend, the brother and sister learn that their great-grandfather was a deadbeat who knocked up their Swiss grandmother when she visited Poland. They also learn of a more noble distant relative who died heroically on horseback, fighting Nazi tanks in the blitzkrieg of 1939. (There is a subtext here: the Poles certainly fought a lot harder against the Nazis than the Swiss ever did.) This revelation, prefigured in dream sequences of bodies plunging into a dark lake, is a quixotic parallel to the quixotic enterprise of tracking down one's Polish roots from a century ago, and the even more quixotic gambit of making a film about the whole thing. Stealth really has a lot more to do with the concept of making a documentary journey into one's own origins than with reviving the old melodramas about hidden family secrets. Oh, and by the way, in the course of his adventures in Poland, Lionel meets and befriends Stan, a Polish student speaking fluent French who, in case you haven't guessed, turns out to be gay.

Congorama [site], by the French-Canadian director Philippe Falardeau fits a similar bill - a mystery about hidden roots that shaped the destiny of its characters on two continents - and on three continents, if you count Africa. The film (veteran of Cannes, Toronto, and just about every festival in between) opens with a world exposition in Brussels in the late 1950s centered around the Belgian Congo. Olivier Gourmet (heroic actor of the Dardenne brothers' films) is Michel, a failed inventor, the ne'er-do-well son of a now-demented famous writer, who is married to a practical-minded Congolese woman who runs a restaurant. His dark-skinned son doesn't look anything like Michel, raising questions about who the boy's father might be. It turns out that Michel has been adopted and that his real parents conceived him at the 1958 exposition, and that he was born in the hinterlands of Quebec, where he then journeys, a la Stealth, in a moment of despair after failing to sell an automated tortoise-shaped lawnmower to a French-Canadian company. Got it?

Then he's picked up hitchhiking at random by Louis, who turns out to be the son of another prominent engineer, the designer of an electric car. If this isn't all completely improbable, Louis, who was born at Montreal's Expo 67, drives into an accident, caused when the car swerves to miss hitting an emu that escapes from a game farm in the middle of nowhere. Michel ultimately makes it back to Brussels with plans for the electric car that are hidden beneath one of the seats. The car is his first success, even though it isn't "his." Somehow Louis, who survives, manages to return to Europe to confront him. (God, this is starting to sound a lot like Babel.)

Yes, in case you haven't guessed, pivotal random events can shape one's destiny, even when they happen on the other side of the globe. But isn't that what globalization means, with the additional suggestion that what we perceive as random events may have an even more deliberate layer to them? As with Stealth, we know this already. The real question is whether we learn anything more from either film.

Posted by dwhudson at April 2, 2007 12:34 PM