Fiction/non-fiction

We've watched a couple of DVDs over the last few days.  One of these was The Way Back, which is supposed to be based on a true story of a group of escapees from a prison camp in Siberia during the Second World War three of whom managed to make it to India finally, by walking all the way.  When I say 'supposed' apparently there's a bit of argy-bargy gone over over the years as to how much truth and how much invention is contained in the original book on which the movie is based.  And then, of course, the movie makes some changes of its own.

Be that as it may, this movie, directed by Peter Weir, is surprisingly engrossing, especially considering that it's over two hours long and for a good deal of that time the characters are walking.  Yup, walking. Naturally, other stuff happens within that, and there are inter-relational things that go on, especially when the group of men is joined by a young girl who seems to be the only one capable of getting their histories out of them.  The main character, Janusz, played by Jim Sturgess (who kept reminding me of Sam Worthington of Avatar fame for some reason) is cast in the heroic mould: not only is it his intention to find the wife who betrayed him, he also wants to bring forgiveness to her.  But beside that underlining aim, he's also the one who has the endurance and determination and skills to keep going, and to assist the others to struggle on.  Of course some don't make it - we know that only three will survive because of a note at the beginning of the movie - but that doesn't stop us being involved with their journey; the adjective 'intrepid' barely covers it.  The cast includes Ed Harris as a grizzly old American caught up in the War - he's excellent - and Colin Farrell as a Russian criminal who only gets to come along because he has a very sharp knife.  Farrell does one of his wild man performances, and covers his natural intelligence under a guise of feral survival instincts.  He's excellent too.  Saoirse Ronan, who was only 16 at the time she made the movie, brings her wonderful waif presence to her role, and, for a time, becomes the centre around which the movie moves forward.

The characters walk through Siberian forests in blizzards, over mountains in the sunshine, out into the Siberian Desert where they nearly get cooked to death, up into Tibet (snow again), and finally to India, where the women are picking tea.  The photography is superb, and the things the actors themselves have to go through in the performance of their roles is sometimes almost beyond the call of duty.   I picked this movie up at the Library without knowing anything about it.  It was well worth getting.

The other film is a documentary called The Promise of Music.  Directed by the German, Enrique Sánchez Lansch, with a German film crew, this movie looks at a number of aspects relating to El Sistena, the system used in Venezuela to teach children music and bring them into a place where they're a contributing member of a proper orchestra.  It's publicly funded in that country, and the idea is now spreading further afield, both England and Scotland have begun to use it.  It has a deeper purpose that 'just' music-making; it aims to help youngsters from poverty areas to gain a good foothold in life and get themselves out of the poverty net.  As a result, in Venezuela it was under the Social Welfare area of the Government, rather than the Cultural one.  

While this movie looks in some degree at the process of El Sistena, it focuses more on some members of the Simón Bolivar Orquesta Sinfónica and its young conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, a lively and impassioned man who began his musical career as a violinist but quickly realised that conducting was his true love, and forte.  At the beginning the Orchestra (who also appear in the video on the Scottish version of El Sestina) is in the late stages of rehearsal for a concert in Bonn, where they'll play, amongst other things, Beethoven's Eroica Symphony.  We travel with them to Bonn and see part of the concert - though if you go to another section of the disc you can see the entire concert, including the wonderful piece at the end in which they truly let their hair down, Venezuelan-style.  This is only one of the many heart-warming moments: another is when several of the children's orchestras combine together to perform Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, with Dudamel conducting.  

But apart from the music performances, there are a number of interviews with various members of the orchestra showing how they came up through the ranks, how they feel about El Sestina, what it's like to be part of such an organisation, and much more.  These are often entertaining, as the young people, mostly in their early to mid-twenties, are a delight, though they take their music very seriously.  

Two comedies

I thought Weleda was the name of a flower, but it turns out to be a brand name for a line of health products.  These products are sold worldwide, even in New Zealand, but I've never heard of them.  Plainly all that advertising has been wasted on me, guys!

Equally, in the last two days I've watched a couple of movies that were also completely unfamiliar to me.  One is Italian, the other French (though most of the cast is Russian, and the first half of the film takes place in Moscow).

The Italian one would have to be the most lightweight movie I've seen in a long time.  It's called Pranzo di Ferragosto, has its director (Gianni di Gregorio) in the leading role as Gianni, a fifty-something bachelor who lives at home with his mum, drinks a lot of wine, seldom pays his bills and in general seems a bit of a waster.   Ferragosto is a major Italian holiday, and dates back two millennia.  Pranzo is merely a word for dinner, or lunch.   Because Gianni is in debt he finds himself having to look after three old ladies for the holiday as a kind of barter system for not paying his bills to his landlord and his doctor.   Along with the mother, the women take over, in the nicest quietest gentlest way, and if Gianni thought he had enough to do with placating his mother, he soon finds four women are more than quadruple the problem.   There's almost no story apart from that: the old women discover each other as friends and confidantes, Gianni runs round feeding them a lot and trying to get them off to bed (rather like adolescents) and in the end everyone comes out happy - or at least a little happier.

The four women in the cast are all non-professionals, and do a lovely job of conveying the four very different women in the story.  Not that 'lovely' is the word to apply to the actress, Valeria di Franciscis, who plays Gianni's Mum.  With a hideous wig that barely balances on her head, and a face covered in enormous dark spots, and strongly indented wrinkles and lines, and scarlet lipstick across thin lips, she must be one of the ugliest actresses ever to be seen in the movies.  But that's what old age does to people: makes them a lot less pleasant to look at than they were when young.  The other three women are a good deal less ugly, though they have almost as many lines and wrinkles.  

Mélanie Laurent

There are a lot of older people in the French film too - The Concert.  Because it concerns people who are no longer in the prime of life, age is something of a factor, though not quite to the extent it is in the Italian movie.  The Concert is about a once-famous Russian conductor now reduced to working as a cleaner in the Bolshoi Theatre.  This was the result of him having a number of Jews in his former orchestra and not being willing to give them up in order to further his own career.  As a result of a fax slip-up, he decides to persuade the former members of his orchestra to reform and take a trip to Paris where (supposedly) they've been invited to perform in lieu of the LA Orchestra, who've had to drop out.  With some difficulty he collects together the musicians from all sorts of reduced circumstances, as well as taking on as manager the very man who interrupted his last concert all those years ago, and made a laughing stock of him. 


In spite of that outline of the story, this is actually (for most of the film) a comedy - in fact it verges on farce at times.  The characters are all larger than life and some are drawn with very broad strokes.  The only truly serious character in the film is the young violin soloist (played by the gorgeous Mélanie Laurent) - her past and the loss of her parents haunts her somewhat, and she turns out to be part of the reason behind the mad trip to Paris.  Laurent has the unenviable task of 'playing' the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (in a reduced version) at the end of the movie: this would have to be one of the best simulations of violin playing I've seen in a movie.  


There's a large cast that works well together, wonderful music and the most interesting subtitles I've ever seen.  Several of the Russians have to speak French during the movie, but their French is obviously a bit less than perfect, and this is reflected hilariously in the subtitles.  


Of the two movies, I wouldn't greatly recommend the Italian one, unless you're content just to take it as it is: a piece of fluff with a minimal message about old age.  The French one won't be to everyone's taste either - it doesn't entirely seem to know whether it's a comedy or a farce or even a drama, but still manages to pull itself off.  Nevertheless, as an evening's entertainment, it has a number of good points, not least the wide-ranging music.