Spare Parts
Another day at the Berlinale, another film about the plight of refugees, political or economic - it hardly matters since there's hardly a difference anyway - trying to sneak across the border to a better life in Europe. What Spare Parts (Rezervni Deli), the only film at the Berlinale this year from eastern Europe, has in common with In This World is that it centers on two fates, albeit smugglers rather than immigrants. And what it shares with Distant Lights is that it sticks to one place: Slovenia's border with Italy.
Last year, 36,000 people were arrested in Slovenia for attempting to cross that border. About 400 a day are estimated to have made it across. This year, the total number of arrests is expected to rise to 50,000. Little wonder that this issue is one of Europe's hottest political potatoes or that filmmakers have begun to mine it for material.
Producer Danijel Hocevar, Alosa Kovacic (Rudi), Peter Musevski (Ludvik), director Damjan Kozole
This time around, we begin with fake archival footage of Ludvik (Peter Musevski), a former motorcycle speedway racing star, intercut with real archival footage of the grand opening of the nuclear power plant at Krsko, an otherwise smallish town on the northwest edge of what was then Yugoslavia. Tito cuts the ribbon, socialist hymns are sung, Ludvik crosses the finish line, the crowd cheers, a new future dawns.
Cut. Ludvik is now a bloated has-been and a widower, his wife lost to cancer as so many have been in the shadow of that plant. Damjan Kozole was once known in Yugoslavia as an avant experimental filmmaker but when the Wall fell and Yugoslavia fell apart and a decade of war broke out, Kozole turned to realism. "The times we live in are very brutal," he says, and particularly in places like his own hometown of Krsko.
The brutality he's talking about is reflected in the complete absence of any sense of morality in his main characters, the sense, in fact, that morals have become utterly irrelevant. Ludvik smuggles refugees because that's where the money is, but also because it's probably the only work available to guys like him (and there are many) and because, while he takes advantage of these refugees, charging them 1000 euros (just over $1000) each for that one trip across the border, he thinks, too, that he's helping them out.
And of course, he doesn't work alone. Two drivers, working in tandem with another pair in another van, load the passengers, drive the van into the woods where their Italian partner waits and unload them again. "Good luck," in English. "Go!" Early on, a second driver, Ludvik's young innocent partner, is initiated, classic mentor-rookie, buddy-picture style. We learn the trade through Rudi's eyes (Alosa Kovacic), see the refugee women taken advantage of (they can "earn" money for food and medicine in return for sexual favors), witness the suicide of those who can neither go on any longer nor face the lives they've left behind, discover the bodies of those who tried but simply couldn't make the trip.
Depressing? You bet. There is less relief, dramatic, comic or otherwise, from the dark brown haze suffocating this film than in the other two immigration films. That doesn't make it a worse film, of course, but it does make it a more monochromatic one, a film that conjures a world one is glad to leave once the credits roll.
The Twilight Samurai
Another sort of darkness entirely permeates the next feature, a majestic, classical sort of darkness. The Twilight Samurai (Tasogare Seibei) is Yoji Yamada's 77th film but his first genre piece. Not exactly a household name over here, the 71-year-old director is famous in Japan for his series of films, 48 in all, featuring Tora-san, a wandering modern-day adventurer.
Yamada started thinking about making a samurai picture about ten years ago, but he realized that Kurasawa, great as he was, was also lucky in that many specialists who understood the samurai class, its way of life, its fighting techniques and so on were still around when he made his series of classic samurai films. Now, he says, they must be trained and the knowledge is that much further removed.
Director Yoji Yamada, Min Tanaka (Yogoemon)
But Twilight departs from the genre in that it takes place in the waning days of Endo era, stretching from the beginning of the 17th century well into the 19th, when Japan cut itself off from the rest of the world. Its hero is a reluctant one. Seibei, played by Hiroyuki Sanada, has lost his wife to consumption, and so, must care for his two daughters and senile mother alone. He can't go out drinking with his fellow samurai and can hardly take care of himself at all; his kimono is torn and everyone around him complains of an unpleasant odor. This matters little, of course, to his youngest daughter, Ito, who narrates, we later learn, from a "present" located somewhere in the 1920s following the years of Restoration, wars with China and Russia, WWI, mass recession and the beginnings of fascism.
The world she recalls is a much simpler one, and this may be why, Yamada conjectures, the film has been such a box office hit in Japan. "The present day is very complex," he says. Blue and white collar workers alike are suffering and, as they watch this film set in a time when whole villages and their ways of doing things, when houses and everything in them remained exactly the same for generation after generation, many men in their 40s and 50s break down in tears. It was a time, Yamada says, in which "the family was the center of preservation, not consumption. People nowadays are obliged to want and to buy, and so, they suffer." The older generations were the film's first audiences, but they've evidently been successfully encouraging the younger ones to go and see it as well.
When Seibei learns that the girl he grew up with, Tomoe (Rie Miyazaki), is unhappy in her marriage because her husband gets nasty when he drinks (and he drinks a lot and often), he realizes he still has feelings for her. Soon enough, it becomes clear that those feelings are mutual and that Tomoe would make him a perfect wife and his daughters a perfect, loving mother. The confrontation with the husband is inevitable and beautifully understated. Armed with merely a wooden stick and a seemingly boundless modesty, Seibei readily defeats the husband. It was the only point in the middle of any press screening of all the films shown in the Competition that the seen-it-all-journalists broke out in applause.
But he won't marry Tomoe, despite her obvious willingness and her brother's request, because he thinks he earns too little and that, sooner or later, she would resent that, just as his first wife did. Time passes and the first inklings of the beginning of the end of Japan's long reign of peace are emerging. Long story short, a struggle between clans results in a death sentence for Yogoemon, a poor fighter much like Seibei, who's obliged to commit hari-kari but won't. The clan elders insist that Seibei finish him off, but he argues that years of gardening and tending to his daughters, years in which he's actually been quite happy, have squelched his killer instinct. He's simply the wrong guy for the job.
But the decision is out of his hands and the stand-off inside a dark house between Yogoemon, played by renowned Botuh dancer Min Tanaka, and Seibei becomes both a verbal and visual swan song for an entire way of life. Beautiful.
Anouk Aimée
 When festival director Dieter Kosslick escorted Berlinale guest of honor Anouk Aimée into the press room, there was an all but collective gasp of awe. Here's a woman who'll turn 71 in April but looks decades younger, radiates a bright... well, what else to call it but joie de vivre and who bears that awe I'm talking about with a casual and light ease. When the moderator (not Kosslick) intones, "If cinema is a mythology, then we are in the presence of a goddess," good for her for simply shrugging that off.
Right off, she's asked about Iraq. Good heavens. But she answers simply: "I am against the war. We must try to do things with peace. There is a way without killing innocent people. We've learned enough from history."
When the subject changes, as it should in this case, to cinema, though, her answers are just as plain and simple. Fellini was a genius and working with him was one of the greatest moments of her life. "Working with him wasn't work - it was life."
Claude Lelouch, with whom she made A Man and a Woman and the sequel that followed twenty years later, was like being with family. Families, in fact, become a running motif. "Fellini, Lelouch, Altman... It's all one family." There are fewer differences within the international filmmaking community, she suggests, than there are within individual nations.
Favorite actors? "Marcello!" That was an easy one. Marcello Mastroianni "was a dream of an actor, a dream of a person. He never took himself seriously." But she's also enjoyed working with Michel Piccoli and, emphasizing that she's still working, the young German actor August Diehl, with whom she's just completed a film.
We hover on this level for a while, and somehow, the half an hour is over and she rises, bathed in the blinding flashes of the cameras, and is gone.
|
Your cart
© 2006 All Media Guide, LLC. Portions of content provided by All Movie Guide®,
a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC.