The Source

I can't say I'd come across the 2011 film The Source before, and there don't seem to be many English-language reviews of it online. It's directed by Radu Mihăileanu, a Jewish Romanian-born French director who also wrote the script in collaboration with two French writers. It has more than one title: as you can see from the poster, it's called La Source des Femmes, (The Source of/for Women) but the poster on IMDB names it La Sorgente dell'Amore, which translates as The Source of Love. All are equally valid: there is dialogue in the film in which the source of or for women is discussed, and also the source of love, that is, where does love come from - the answer in the film is pretty much, from women, although that's not the whole story. 
But there's a further aspect to the word, source: in the movie the starting point for the story is the spring up on the hillside to which the women must go each day with their buckets to collect water. This water is the source of life - especially in the drought-stricken time in which the movie takes place - and its place far up on the hill is another source: a source of contention. The women argue that their menfolk (who sit around most of the day doing nothing because the drought has destroyed their crops and livestock) should take the money gained from passing tourists and use it to put a tap from the spring right within the village. The men are loathe to - among many reasons is the one that women should know their place, and if they only had to go to the water in the village, what else would they do with their time? 
One of the women, an outsider, whose husband (a much more kindly and gentle man than most in the village) has taught her to read and write, begins a sex strike, and this has ramifications for all concerned. The story is an old one - the bawdy Greek comedy, Lysistrata, is one of the oldest known versions of it - but Mihăileanu and his team have set it in a remote North African village where Islam is the dominating force, and where men have license to beat their wives (just as one would beat children, gently, to discipline them, says the local Imam), and to demand sex nightly, if they're so inclined. And where teenage girls are frequently thrown into marriage without any instruction or care. 
Unlike Aristophanes' play, the comedy is minimal (though the film is billed as a drama/comedy) and there are some vicious beatings, fights, slappings and the like. People's passions run high here, and no some seems immune from a good slap across the face. 
But the story has more to say than just bringing harmony back between husbands and wives - harmony does return, as you'd expect, but at considerable cost. There is the much bigger issue of Islam itself, which pervades the lives of the people alongside elements of folk religion. Though these people are Arabs, they've been in this part of the world a very long time. 
The gentle husband talks at one point of the Islamic Enlightenment. If there's such a thing, it's got very stony ground in which to grow in in this village, and at the film's end it's debatable as to whether it's made much progress. Certainly there's an important scene in which the educated wife fronts up to the Imam with great respect, and counters his views of how husbands and wives should behave by quoting back the Koran to him with great confidence. He's shaken by having a woman stand up to him, but, to his credit, does listen, and reflect on it. 
In spite of the male domination aspect, this is a film where women have the focus. They sing at the beginning and at the end (the film is almost a musical at times - some of the story is told in song, and some of the interactions between men and women, or women and women, take place in musical terms), they have two other wonderful scenes in which what they're singing is exactly what the men don't want to hear, and which publicly embarrasses them. and they have a scene in their bathhouse (where there is some nudity on display) in which they discuss sex quite openly as well as the prospect of a sex-strike. Women's talk may embarrass men, but the women aren't embarrassed by it - the group song early in the piece is quite forthright in this regard. 
Love is a big theme throughout - it's seldom mentioned by the men, except in terms of disparagement - but for the women it's a thing to hold onto dearly; if it can be received and given it's priceless. The educated couple at the centre of the movie celebrate love, even when it also seems to make their lives more complicated (a man the girl had loved previously turns up to make things difficult), and several of the women long for love but have never received it, including one who gets the educated women to write letters for her to a man she loves, named, somewhat improbably, Slim. 
At times the wealth of subplots almost gets in the way of the focus of the story (one scene, in which one of the young husbands tells the educated man just how much he hurt him when he treated him as a lesser person, seems to be going somewhere and then doesn't) but Mihăileanu holds it all in place somehow, and makes the film all the more rich for all its different elements. It could have been a diatribe against Islam and its treatment of women; it could have been political (there are a few elements of this); it could have been primarily a love story. It's all these and more.
And what a cast: Algerian Leila Bekhti is wondrous as the educated wife; her husband is played by Palestinian actor, Saleh Bakri, who manages to overcome the occasional inconsistencies in his role. The older women have faces that never came from any Hollywood movie (some of them may be non-professionals). Israeli actress Hiam Abbass plays the vicious mother-in-law with an underlying fury - justified, we learn in due course, but terrifying all the same. Biyouna, who has a face of considerable ugliness (but happens to be a great star in her native Algeria) plays the aging widow who encourages, provokes, and generally manages to keep her finger in several pies at once. This international cast - it also includes several French-born actors - speak and sing in Arabic throughout, and it's more satisfying than having them dubbed (though the film was dubbed into French for the French!)
The Source is a revelation: for one, a look at an area of the Arab world in which terrorists have no obvious presence; a picture of Islam in which jihad is mentioned but in a totally different context; and much more. The Dunedin Public Library has a copy.

Gripping and gritty movies

Taking a punt on movie choices can mean that often you wind up seeing something that's a bit of a dud. I usually prefer to have some idea about a movie before I watch it, even if it only costs me a couple of dollars from the Public Library.  However, last week I picked up three movies (we haven't watched the third) and the first two turned out to be crackers. 

One was Nothing but the Truth, which apparently didn't get much of a theatrical distribution for reasons that are beyond my understanding, in spite of having a top-notch cast: Kate Beckingsale, Alan Alda, Matt Dillon, Noah Wylie, Angela Bassett and Vera Farmiga, an actress who plays her roles with such intensity that the television screen threatens to go on fire. The film is based on a true-life case about a political reporter who refused to reveal the source of her story, and wound up in gaol for months.  However, the scriptwriter and director, Rod Lurie, has rewritten the thing from the ground up, changing all the details and the background, so that the film is presented as a proper drama, not as a piece trying to fit around a real-life episode.  It's all the stronger for this, and allows Lurie to write excellent roles for his cast, none of whom let him down.

Beckingsale's character is given the chance to write a piece for her major newspaper that will expose a female CIA agent, but refuses to name her source. This refusal gets her into deep trouble with the Government, and she is thrown into jail by a heavy-handed judge (the actor, in real life, was an attorney in the original case). This causes havoc to the CIA agent and her family, to the reporter's own family and doesn't, in the end, let her off the hook.  It's a tough film made tougher by the insistence on principles that the reporter clings to, and which she finally brings her lawyer around to. You may guess the surprise ending - my wife did, but I didn't; it neatly rounds the film off. 

The other film was originally played over four nights on British television. It's called Father & Son, and stars Dougray Scott, Sophie Okonedo, Ian Hart and Stephen Rea. It's a gripping piece that doesn't turn out the way you might expect; it's violent and dark, but it's about integrity and the idea that eventually the choices you make in life have to be for the sake of others or else you die from the inside out.

The story concerns a career criminal, Michael O'Connor, who wants to put all his bad behaviour behind him.  Unfortunately things aren't as easy as that, and he's forced to decide whether he will amend things he's done wrong properly, or only partially.  His teenage son, Sean, (Reece Noi), the child of a mixed marriage, is accused of a gang retaliation murder, though we know from the beginning that he's innocent. O'Connor hasn't seen his son in a while after his wife was murdered about five years back and there's considerable bitterness in the boy.  But behind the bitterness, we eventually learn, there's a great deal more going on than we first suspect, and part of the story is about the reconciliation required between O'Connor and his son, a reconciliation that needs to take place before things can be healed. There are father and son connections throughout the story, none of them very satisfactory at the start, and a host of brilliantly drawn and played characters.  Part of the story is also the truth about the murder that took place some years before, and how it fits into all the other elements.

Scott plays a tough man who seems at first to have matured; but we learn that his seeming vulnerability towards his new wife and unborn child is only skin-deep.  It takes far more to bring his true self to the surface. He's surrounded by duplicitous characters - the links between different people turns out to be nastier than we expect - and it takes a good deal of sorting out.  The writer was Frank Deasy - he died about the same time the series aired.  He had written the last episode in the Prime Suspect series, and the same grittiness is apparent here.

Off-screen, on-screen

Out this morning to watch part of my grandson's soccer game (he scored a goal, obligingly, while I was watching) and to walk the dog from Chingford Park to the Gardens shopping centre and back.   We'd been out with my son and his family last night - they shouted us a meal (paid for it, in case you're not familiar with the term 'shouted') - and he was saying that it seemed all we do was sit in front of computers and screens and hand-held devices and we never seemed to get out into the real world.  So I did some real world stuff this morning and walked the dog for nearly an hour, and watched 14 boys and a couple of girls play soccer.  The real world proved itself fit and well and able to provide a chill factor of I-don't-know-what, but it was pretty cold if you were standing still...which I wasn't because I was walking the dog, at least initially.  

Curiously enough there's a review of a book in the ODT this morning saying the same sort of thing as my son. The book is called iDisorder: understanding our obsession with technology and overcoming its hold on us.  Personally, if the book's anything like its subtitle, I suspect it's slightly overstating its case.  Yes, we do spend a lot of time in front of screens - for some of us that's our job (or has been) - but the real humans in our lives seem perfectly capable of getting our attention when they want to, and we theirs.  The real world is fit and well, I think.  I've had lunch with two guys this week, and coffee with a third, along with the meal we had out last night at which there were eight of us (and two iPads, and three iPhones).  I also spent two plus hours at the Dental School this week with real patients and real dentists (and was reading a non-Kindle book as well).  Last Monday I played at a concert for people in the Stroke Club.  We're going to see the Nuggets play tonight, and heading off to church tomorrow (where we'll assist with a very interactive church lunch) and then in the late afternoon I'm going to sing at Sunny Side Up's practice.   And if you'd asked me I would have thought I spend quite a bit of time in front of screens.  Perhaps I'm not so technology-obsessed as it seems. 

Seems like I have plenty of real life pedestrian bridges to the outside world.

Anyway, that wasn't really what I was going to talk about.  I was going to mention a couple more movies that I've watched this week - yup, both on screens (!)  The first of these was a fairly recent sci-fi style movie starring Jake Gyllenhaal (pronounced jill-en-hall, according to imdb.com).  It's called Source Code, and involves some real flimflam science (told us at considerable speed so that we don't have time to think too hard) about the brain having eight minutes of leftover information that can be accessed after a person has died.  Considering that the brain can't even retain more than seven numbers in its short term memory, on average, retaining eight minutes of not especially important stuff seems unlikely.  But the filmmakers manage to get away with this by having poor old Jake repeatedly going through the same sequence of events over and over in order to find out where a bomb has been planted on a train.  There's more to it than that, but I won't spoil it for you.  This is a movie worth watching, because it has some nice surprises.  And no bad language (it occurred to me after I'd been watching The Social Network the other day, that no one swore in it, or if they did it was fairly mild.  Which just goes to show that scriptwriters don't have to include endless foul language just because people in real life use it.)

Jake's supporting cast includes the delightful Michelle Monaghan, the versatile Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright, who manages to overcome the fact that the scriptwriters keep on avoiding having him telling the truth about what's going on, and who is saddled with a walking stick and glasses that seem to serve no functional purpose except to show he's a (slightly mad) scientist.  

The other movie was The Searchers, the old John Wayne/John Ford combo that had a depth and sensitivity in it that wasn't always a feature of Wayne movies.  He plays himself, as always, succinct in speech, mostly unemotional when others are losing their cool, obstinate and determined.  But he's in a story that's mostly strongly written, and is surrounded by a superb cast of Ford regulars and sundry others who do a great job.  I saw The Searchers years ago, but so strong is the long opening sequence that most of it remained in my mind.  In this section, Ethan (Wayne) returns home to his brother (and his brother's family) after years of being away in the American Civil War.  He's enthusiastically greeted by all the family: his sister-in-law, his two young nieces (one a teenager, the other around ten), his teenage nephew, and Martin Pawley, a part-Indian youth who's been adopted by the family (he's played very well by Jeffrey Hunter - who would one day play Jesus Christ in King of Kings).  This group of people are beautifully drawn and we become fond of them in the short time we get to know them.  There's a brief interruption as Ward Bond and his Texas Rangers come for a coffee.  Bond is loud and shatters the quiet of the family with enthusiastic ease, and each of his Rangers is a character in his own right. We become more familiar with them as the film goes on. They've come to report that Lars Jorgenson's cattle has been rustled by a group of Comanche, and Bond co-opts Ethan and Pawley into his Texas Rangers posse to get the cattle back. They leave, but by evening there's something ominous in the air.  A murdering bunch of Comanche come to the isolated farm and wipe out all but the two daughters, whom they capture.  The leader of these Indians is actually played by a German-born actor, known by this time as Henry Brandon, but born as Heinrich von Kleinbach.  (He played an Indian in another Ford movie as well.)

The rest of the film relates, for the most part, to the long search that Ethan and Pawley undertake in order to bring back the two girls.  At first they're accompanied by the older girl's boyfriend (played by Harry Carey Jr - he turned up as an 'old timer' in the last of the Back to the Future movies); he's the son of Lars Jorgenson.  When finding out that his beloved has been killed by the Indians he races madly into the Indian camp and is killed.  There's an interlude in which the two men come to the Jorgenson farm some time later and we learn that Pawley has been the long-time boyfriend of the Jorgenson daughter (played by Vera Miles, with great energy and gusto).  She almost persuades him to stay and become a farmer in partnership with Jorgenson, but the call of the search draws him away again.  By the time he returns she's just about to marry another fellow played by Ken Curtis with an over-the-top 'gosh gee' manner.  The wedding that doesn't happen is one of the less tense and more hilarious scenes in the movie.  

Eventually they find the Comanche again, and eventually (after five years!) they rescue the girl, who's now a teenager.  There's some debate about whether she'll survive the actual rescue, given Ethan's rather ambiguous attitude to her, but she does.  (She's played by a young Natalie Wood, and in the only moment of real inauthenticity in the movie, she appears with lipstick and plucked eyebrows and mascara, in spite of having been part of the Indian tribe for several years.)

It's a long movie, with plenty of time for detail, particularly from the excellent cast.  (There's even a late addition to the characters, a young Cavalry lieutenant, played delightfully by one of Wayne's own sons, Patrick Wayne.)  The scenery is magnificent, much of it in Monument Valley, the place that frequently appeared in Ford movies.  The photography is superb and the colour is as up to date as a modern movie.  And it's full of humour, with Ethan's 'That'll be the day' being the laconic answer to several angry outbursts from other characters.  

The five-year search might seem a bit over the top as an idea, but somehow it's made to work.  Wayne's attitude of stuff-everything-else is a great part of that workability.  And there's no doubt, in the light of this movie, that he was one of the great Hollywood stars.