Amsterdam Dispatch. 2.

At IDFA, there should be a special category for documentary comedy. The comedy tends to be unintentional, which is often the best kind.

Take Donkey in Lahore (site), an Australian documentary on what passes for love between a dreamer from Brisbane and a girl whom he encounters o the streets of Lahore, in Pakistan. You might as well call this doc The Life of Brian II. Faramarz K-Rahber's film follows star-eyed Brian as he travels from Brisbane to Pakistan to put on a puppet show. He's a talented puppeteer, but that isn't a craft that draws the groupies. In a huge square, he poses for a picture with a dark-eyed teenager named Amber who tells him teasingly that she wants to marry him. It turns out that this is one of the few sentences in English that she knows. No matter. Brian believes her, and he takes her up on it. And she's innocent enough to go along with it. And that's not the last stupid thing that he does.

In France, they call this kind of love-at-first-sight infatuation le coup de foudre - the thunderbolt. Brian is so dumb-struck after meeting the cute 15-year-old in Lahore with the big smile who asks him to marry her that he converts to Islam, taking the name Aamir. His hard-drinking wide-bodied Australian parents are amused. So are his lesbian sister and her partner. His fate is in Allah's hands.

Brian's hare-brained scheme to raise the funds to marry Amber involves building a puppet in the form of a donkey and convincing Pakistani television to film his puppet show. The puppet is a charming quirky creature in Brian's hands, but no one takes him up on the show, which leads to more miscommunication with a family that once thought all foreigners were rich.

This odd couple of Brian and Amber makes for the perfect extended sit-com. It's the clash of cultures where a quixotic man falls for a beautiful girl who turns out to be wrapped in several layers of tradition. When he's dealing with her family, half the time it's in translation with parents who speak no English.

The telephone calls between Brisbane and Lahore are skits in miscommunication that defy belief. Even more unbelievable, in the vein of Curb Your Enthusiasm, is Brian's resolve to go through with the marriage, even though he sells his house and spends most of his money while he waits dutifully for permission from Amber's parents. He rushes to Pakistan for his wedding, and then rushes back to Australia on his wedding night, because he can't afford the fee to change his flight. He's seen off by his wife in a wedding dress. Now that's a scene for a screwball comedy. In case you're wondering, they don't sleep together that night.

Sometimes the jokes come right out of a burlesque show. Brian shocks Amber and her parents when he tells them that his parents drink alcohol, as do his sister and her partner. When asked for more information about his sister, no one understands what a lesbian is, so Brian uses a vulgar Urdu word that is translated as "poofter." The jaws drop.

Donkey in Lahore is a fool's paradise in another way. Pakistan here is seen from inside Amber's family home, or from taxis taking Brian to and from the airport. It's a long way from the blocked streets of Karachi in A Mighty Heart, and it's odd to see a view from Pakistan that is so domestic, at a time when crowds are demonstrating in the streets and the government is condemned internationally for jailing its critics. But hey, at least our principal Asian ally in the war on terror is good for a few laughs.

The Western encounter with Islam, particularly its misperception of Iran, is what Mohammad Farokhmanesh wants to redress in Empire of Evil (site), a view into everyday life in Tehran through five people there. The director said that he made the film for a western audience in the hope of refuting the assumptions behind his title. (It's also for a western audience because it probably couldn't be shown in Iran.) You leave his film knowing more about Iran and Iranians than you might get from western media stories on the Iranian quest to make a nuclear bomb. For the whole picture, you'll have to see a lot more than this movie.

Yet Farokhmanesh won't let you forget that most Iranians are struggling with the strict rules of the Islamic Republic, and with an economy that keeps talented, motivated people underemployed. Serayesh, a young woman who teaches fencing to Iranian women, explains how she has been at a disadvantage in international competitions because she's forced to wear a headscarf under her helmet, and also required to wear an overgarment over her fencing suit. Married to a swimmer, she is not allowed to watch her husband compete. Her story reminds you of Offside, Jafar Panahi's brilliant film about girl soccer fans who dress as boys to sneak into matches at Tehran's largest stadium. When police catch the girls and cordon them off outside the stands, the guards are a captive audience for a debate on whether girls should be segregated out of sports events. You can guess who wins the argument, and you can also assume that nothing changes.

In one touching scene, young Golsa, a piano prodigy, is fitted for a headscarf that she will wear to school. A gentle mullah, another of the characters observed in the film, tries to argue that the veil honors women and does not demean them. None of the women interviewed in the film feels that way.

Women are also the most damaged economically by religious laws, but we follow characters through their daily lives and see that men, too, are hurting. Serayesh and her husband manage to get green cards, allowing them to live in the United States, but the two of them can't raise enough money to go there. She can't even find a part-time job. Abbas is a computer specialist who has to sell his computer for cash. He lives in a bare set of rooms with his retired father and disabled mother. He is also a Basiji, a volunteer to martyr himself in war. One brother, also a Basiji,  was killed in the Iran-Iraq War, and we visit his grave with Abbas. We also see Tehran on the national day to commemorate those martyrs, some of whom were between 13 and 15 when they were sent onto battlefields to die. Would a new generation of martyrs volunteer to fight in the event of the US invasion that we keep hearing about? The Bush administration would do well to consider that possibility before it declares that Iran will be the next "slam dunk."

Farokhmanesh, a resident of Germany for the last 15 years, spent a year (including 50 days of shooting), with official permission, to assemble his small "cast" and film The Empire of Evil. He admits that the title on his application for permission to shoot was The Wrong Picture, which may help explain why he got official clearance for a documentary that shows ordinary people chafing at the limits on their lives.

The Empire of Evil has a clean PBS look to it and a "balanced" tone in its gentle probe into the lives that Iranians actually live. No protesters are on-screen, no participants in the movements of students, women and bloggers who have been targeted for persecution by the regime. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it shows an Iran that stands somewhere between militant Islam and militant pro-Americanism. That's likely where most Iranians are.

For more on the West versus Islam, The Putin System, by Jean-Michel Carre and Jill Emery reminds us that Vladimir Putin mobilized his electorate in the wake of the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings in Moscow that he blamed on Muslim Chechens whom Putin called "wild animals." It turned out that the wild animals were really trained agents of the FSB (former KGB), where Putin had received his training. It also turned out that Russians were willing to believe anything about Chechens. It didn't help that Chechen commandos were responsible for the attack on a school in Beslan in 2000 that took the lives of 334 civilians. It was Putin's 9/11, the doc's narrator tells us.

The inquiry into a system that returns Russia to Soviet-style repressive government (and vast wealth for a business elite) deploys interviews, archival images and first-person narration, Adam Curtis-style. Not quite at Curtis's edgy level, but worth a view for a one-stop primer, The Putin System shows you post-communist Russia in the hands of a hard-line communist. And Putin's approval ratings are at more than 60 percent. The film has already played on television in Australia and Canada. More to come.

Posted by dwhudson at November 25, 2007 4:16 AM