Walk on water

                                                 Walk on water by Eyton Fox

            In walk on water Eyal is an Israeli secret agent who is first seen in the middle of a mission where he assassinated a high-ranking member of Hamas. He gets back to Israel after the mission where his boss and co-workers congratulate him on another successful mission. After he shares a drink with everyone he heads home where he finds his wife has committed suicide. He finds a letter next to the bed and he sits down to read it when his boss shows up to help him.

            A month later Eyal returns to work eager to get back to the job he has been working on but the agency determines that he is not fit for duty yet so his boss assigns him to find an old Nazi war criminal and bring him in before he dies. He must pose as a travel guide for the grandchildren of the Nazi and try and find out where the man is hiding from them. He must pick up one of the grandchildren and take him to see the other grandchild who lives in a kibbutz or an Israeli commune.

            The two grandchildren and Pia and Axel quickly become friends with Eyal as he goes on day trips with them showing Axel around the country and taking Pia out for dinner. It is revealed that the reason Axel is here to visit his sister to try and convince her to come back home for their fathers seventieth birthday. Pia is outraged at this and refuses to return with him. She eventually tells him that she left home because she overheard their father talking to their grandfather on the phone and discovered they helped him escape and hide from the law.

While the three of them are out to dinner one night Axel finds out about a party going on that night in town. Pia and Eyal join him in the club and Eyal discovers that it is a gay club and he is visibly disgusted by the realization that Axel is a homosexual. Eyal asks to be removed from the assignment because of his homophobia but his boss insists that he finish the mission. Unable to convince his sister to return to Germany with him Axel leaves to go home alone. Pia stays at her kibbutz continuing to work and live there as she has for the past few years.

            Eyal flies to Germany to meet Axel and they spend time together eating dinner and going out to the bar. While walking in the subway a group of thugs attack Axel’s transsexual friends and Eyal comes to the rescue beating them up. Alex tells Eyal that he wished he had killed those thugs because they are a detriment to society. Axel invited Eyal to his father’s birthday party at the villa. His bringing an Israeli to the birthday party visibly disturbs Alex’s parents but they don’t say anything and act polite. After the cake is served Alex’s grandfather comes out to surprise his son for his seventieth birthday. Axel confronts his mother and storms off to find Eyal but he has already left to go meet his boss who is staying in town. Eyal tells the boss that the old Nazi is here in town and at the family’s villa. He says they can get him in a car and take him to the airport easily since there is no security but the boss tells him they are not hear to bring him to trial but to kill him. The boss gives Eyal a case of poison to use on the old man.

            Eyal returns to the villa and sneaks up the old man’s room. Axel sneaks up behind Eyal and watches him as he fills the syringe with poison and moves towards his grandfather. Eyal finds himself unable to kill the old man and when he turns around he sees Axel watching him, he rushes out of the room leaving Axel with his grandfather. Axel turns off the oxygen tank and kills his grandfather. He returns to the room to find Eyal siting on the bed teary eyed. He tells Axel that his wife told him in the suicide note that he kills everything he comes near and he can no longer kill anymore; he proceeds to break down in Alex’s arms. We next see Eyal two years later married to Pia with a small child living on the kibbutz together. He and Axel are good friends now and he recounts a dream involving both of them in his email to Axel.

            I find that the film deals with a few different issues that exist within the movie. Those are tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality and forgiveness of the past. Homosexuality is a theme that comes up in the film through the character Axel. Eyal is surprised and angry when he finds out that Axel is homosexual because they spent a long time together and did things like shower together naked at the beach. At first Eyal wants nothing to do with Axel and requests to be transferred from his mission because of this. But after he visits him in Berlin he learns that Axel’s orientation is unimportant to their friendship.

            In the film Eyal holds some resentment over the Germans because of their history with world war two. Even though they had nothing to do with it and they are peaceniks as he put it, he still harbors ill feelings over the role the Germans played over a half a century ago.  At the end of the film he comes face to face with a Nazi who caused the death of his family along with other Jewish families and yet he could not bring himself to kill the man. Was the ultimate revenge to have this man exist in a world that considered him a monster and forced him to hide in the darkest recesses of the world? Or was it making another point in the killing of the old Nazi by his own grandchild? I believe that this represented the German people taking power away from the Nazis who tainted their history to the point they do not like to reflect back on the past. This allows Axel and Eyal to forge a closer friendship since this along with the earlier encounter in the subway eradicates any doubts in Eyal’s mind about the good intentions of the German people. I believe that if Eyal could forgive the Germans for their atrocities over a half a century ago then maybe one day he can come to forgive the Palestinians for their violence and come to question why they commit these acts.

            I really enjoyed this film because it deals with several serious themes but it also has some pretty funny moments and it really shows you how this character Eyal who was such a hardened killer at the beginning of the film comes to find his tender side with the help of Axel and Pina. I did feel that the film did not deal much with the theme of the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict, which I guess I just, expected from an Israeli film. But overall it was definitely a great film that continued to impress me right up until the heartwarming ending.

            

Moolaade

                                                Moolaade by Ousmane Sembene

            In Moolaade a woman named Colle takes in a group of four girls who ran away from their genital cutting ceremony. They ask Colle to protect them as she protected her own child years ago from the genital cutting ceremony much to the village elder’s displeasure. She wraps colored rope around the entrance to her house and invoked Moolaade or magical protection so no one can enter the house to steal the little girls away.

            Colle is the second and favorite wife to her husband who is away at the beginning of the story.  The first wife does not agree with Colle’s plan to protect these girls because everyone else in the village is against her. The first wife does nothing to stop Colle because the four girls are taking residence inside Colle’s house so it is of little concern for her. She gradually comes to help Colle protect the girls but does it without anyone knowing for she fears what will happen if people find out.  Colle’s daughter Amastaou asks her why she is against the genital cutting ceremony and she tells a story of how she had two miscarriages and a painful childbirth with her only daughter where they had to cut her open.

            Amastaou’s fiancé Ibrahima returns from France and they both find out that they are forbid from marrying each other because Amastaou is not cut like the other women are. Ibrahima also witnesses the funeral of two small girls who drowned themselves in a well to avoid the genital mutilation. He finds it horrifying that the villages and relatives do not revolt against this practice, which has driven their children to their death.

            Colle’s husband returns from his trip and finds out from his brother a village elder of his wife’s deeds. The brother convinces him that the village considers him a laughing stock. He gives the husband a whip and tells him he must whip his wife in the town square to regain his lost manhood as well as end the magical protection spell she has cast over the household. As the husband whips Colle in front of the villagers she holds strong and refuses to utter the words to end the magical protection. Other women start cheering her on telling her not to fall. Her struggle has awoken something inside them all. When she is just about to fall to the floor the merchant Mercenaire rushes out and stops the whipping.

            Mercenaire who overcharged everyone in the village for the cheap goods he brought them was run out of the village not because of this but because he stood up for Colle and was a bad influence on the other women as well. He is killed off screen and the men steal all of his money. The village elders have the opinion that the radio has also influenced their women so they collect all of the radio’s that belong to the women and they burn them.

            The women unite over the pains caused to them, from the loss of their children to genital mutilation, the pain they themselves have suffered from it as well as the indignity of having their radio’s taken away from them. They watch their possessions taken from them and destroyed before their very eyes. The women stand up and disarm the women who cut the genitals and disarm them of their knives. They then take the knives to the village elders and tell them they are done watching their children get cut. Ibrahima and Colle’s husband both stand up and take the women’s side and leave the village elders. Ibrahima goes over to Amastaou and tells her that he wishes to marry her and he is proud of her for standing up and not getting cut.

            Moolaade was a very intense and powerful movie with a very important message at the center of it. Female genital mutilation is a practice that is horrifying to me in that it seems barbaric and yet it still exists today in our modern world. In certain areas of Africa this practice is commonplace. The reasons why people still go through with this practice are many, some said that it was good to protect ones virginity while there say that it will increase the chances of marriage and increase the pleasure of the husband.

            I have a friend who emigrated from an African country and he spoke of this practice before but he told me that most of the continent had moved beyond it and become more modern and more so some place he could be proud to come from. This movie was made fairly recently so I find it startling that this practice has yet to go the way of the dinosaur.

            Although you talked about how hard this movie was to get through for students in class, I found it to be possibly my favorite of all the films shown to us in class. It moved a little slow but it was so compelling a story that I barely noticed it and although the topic is grim and cringe worthy  (at least in my opinion I get queasy around subjects like that) it also contains a decent amount of humor, wit and charm from the characters.  The film was so well made and well shot it makes me want to investigate African cinema further, Tsotsi and this film are the two only African films I can recall watching as of now. 

Tsotsi

                                                           Tsotsi by Gavin Hood

            In Tsotsi a thug name David calls himself Tsotsi after fleeing from his home and abusive father as a child. He hangs with a gang and commits robberies and other crimes together. One nigh Tsotsi goes off on his own and commits an auto robbery shooting a woman in the chest. He drives off in her car and discovers that there is a baby strapped in the backseat of the car. He decides to take the baby back to his shack. He wants to keep the baby to raise it on his own. Tsotsi finds a local mother with a baby and forces her to feed the child and over time take care of it treating it as if it were her own baby. Tsotsi often goes out with the gang and leaves the baby with her after an a very bad incident where he discovered the baby covered in bugs under his bed.

            The baby’s mother survives her shooting and details Tsotsi’s description to the police where they make a drawing of him for a wanted sign. The picture and wanted sign are distributed throughout the city and they make their way into the slum where Tsotsi lives as well. Tsotsi decides to take his gang to the house where the auto robbery and baby kidnapping occurred. His gang ties up the husband who just came home from the hospital. They raid the house stealing valuables but Tsotsi spends his time packing a bag full of baby items to bring back with him.

            When one member of the gang decides to kill the husband because he sets off a house alarm Tsotsi decides to kill him because he did not want to harm the husband. Tsotsi and his other gang friend flee before ADT security shows up because of the house alarm. Later the mother taking care of the baby convinces Tsotsi to return the baby after discovering the flier with his description on it. When he goes to return the baby the police show up and cause a standoff. Tsotsi does not want to return the baby he keeps it in his arms, the father comes outside to convince Tsotsi to hand him his baby and after that the police arrest him.

            A major theme in Tsotsi is redemption. The main character David or Tsotsi as we come to know him as a hardened criminal slowly changes throughout the film. He proceeds to make moral decisions and goes out of his way to help others even though most of the problems he helps people with stem from his own actions. One example of this is where he brings his friend to his house to nurse him back to health even though he beat him within an inch of his life at the beginning of the film. The baby, whom he struggles to try and abandon with the car at the beginning, ends up bringing out the good in him and he cannot bring himself to part with the baby at the end. I also believe that his trying to raise the baby he was in some way trying to redeem or resolve the trauma from his childhood.

            

Central Station

                                                  Central Station by Walter Salles

Central Station tells the story of Dora a letter writer in the Rio de Janeiro central station. She witnesses the death of a woman who she had just written a letter out for. Josue the sun stays in the central station until Dora decides to take him home but she secretly sells him to human traffickers. When she tells her best friend what she has done Dora feels regret and goes back to save Josue. They then take a bus trip to northern Brazil to find Josue’s father. She attempts to abandon the boy and leave instructions for him to finish the rest of the trip without her. Josue gets off the bus before it leaves and finds her at the bus station where she decides to finish the trip with him.

            The first place they check turns out to be a house where the owners bought the place from Josue’s father. They tell Dora that Josue’s father sold the house after he won a new house in a state lottery and moved away. Dora gets the address of the new house and they journey further to find him. When they finally get to the new house in a very recently constructed development they again discover someone other than his father is living there. These people tell them that Josue’s father no longer lives here and he has disappeared.

While waiting for a bus Dora and Josue discover that one of Josue’s brothers works nearby and comes to find them when he hears of strangers looking for his father. He takes them back to his house where he lives with another brother who runs a woodshop in the backyard. Dora reads them a letter their father had sent them awhile back in which it says he went to Rio to meet Josue’s mother. Dora decides that it would be best for Josue to stay with his brothers to wait and hope for their fathers return.

I came to understand two themes of Central Station are Illiteracy and human trafficking, which plague modern Brazil. The film shows a country where a large portion of the population is illiterate relying on others to write and read messages for them. Its quite surprising to see such a widespread problem in such a modern world because illiteracy is such a minuscule problem/ occurrence in America that we tend to assume that other large countries such as Brazil would be much more literate. Many problems with communication in the film would be easily improved if everyone could write back and forth with their loved ones.

The other topic is human trafficking, which is shown briefly to us through Dora’s sale of Josue to a corrupt couple that will either sell him or use him for his organs. Dora saves Josue from a terrible fate when she realizes how wrong it was to sell him as a way to buy a new television. This is something that probably happens quite often in countries like Brazil, except the part where someone rescues them; because as the film shows it is easy for a child to suddenly slip through the cracks of society if his parents are lost and no one is around to take care of them.

I really enjoyed this film because it often straddled the line between tearful moments and ones that held a redemptive beauty. At first I really hated Dora because of how selfish and uncompassionate she was, it seemed no one in society was willing to care about a poor little boy who just lost his mother. But as the movie went along she slowly started to grow close to and have feelings for this small boy. In the end the boy seemed to help her just as much as she helped him.  She seems to overcome some of the emotional problems she holds inside herself regarding her father and how she lived her life in a very embittered fashion. 

Strawberry and Chocolate

            Strawberry and Chocolate by Tomas Gutierrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio

            In Strawberry and Chocolate David the main character suffers a terrible heartbreak from his fiancée who leaves him for another man. David ends up sitting in a park sulking and thinking about the events that led him to that moment and he suddenly meets a  gay man named Diego who offers David a signed book that interests him if he would come over his house. While there David finds Diego hitting on him and spills coffee on his shirt, after removing it David becomes flustered and he leaves Diego’s house in a hurry.

            Miguel, David’s roommate at the university convinces David to return to Diego’s house to gather evidence against him for his many subversive activities. David and Diego over time begin to form a friendship even though David gathers evidence of Diego’s subversive activities and items. Diego tries to expand David’s thinking to get him to see more than just the communist dogma that they teach him at university and David at the same time tries to convince him to change himself to fit better into society.

            During their time together David also starts a relationship with Nancy the building’s head of the revolutionary committee. She is responsible for reporting people who are being subversive but at the same time she spends time with Diego and often purchases illegal products herself. David falls in love with Nancy and  he tells Diego when they meet up again after spending some time apart. Diego is happy for David but announces that he must leave Havana because he is being kicked out of the country. David is saddened and he embraces Diego bringing him joy as he only wanted a hug from him the whole time and the both are glad to have encountered such a great friendship.

            The theme of Strawberry and Chocolate would probably be sexual politics. The film does a good job of tricking us at the beginning to assume that Diego’s seduction of David was purely physical. But as the film progresses Diego is more interested with politics, literature and art than sex with David. He opens his mind culturally and slowly chips away at the rigid formulaic dogma that had been implanted in David’s mind. He reveals himself later to be a curious young man who has learned to take in new experiences, the hunger for knowledge and to criticize his society as a means of helping to empower it and bring about change.

            I really enjoyed this movie as I have never seen a film from Cuba and I found it really interesting how the directors were allowed to get away with so much pointed criticism at their government all the while escaping the government censors. It is great when an established artist can look back on the their society and create a work that both criticizes it and empower it to create positive change just as Diego suggested to David in the movie.