What is so remarkable about Harmony Lessons, the Kazakh entry in the competition, is its
maturity of form and astute handling of content. The team behind it - writer/director Emir
Baigazin, producer and cinematographer - is under 30, and its young teenagers
in high school.
Set in a small provincial town at the edge of the steppe, the
story unfolds meticulously around a quiet kid, bullied at school by a fiendish
gang, into which is planted the idea to kill.
His face a cipher, the motive behind the brutal experiments with bugs is
survival. The slaughtering of a sheep in
the opening sequence, shot in observational documentary style, is a clever
capsule of what is to come, and the psychological explanation of the kid’s obsession
with cleanliness and control. The audience’s
sympathy never once leaves the boy. Tightly
controlling the mise-en-scène, with long takes, sparse framing and a
naturalistic sound design, the film elides two carefully anticipated scenes in
order to thrust the narrative into a metaphorical ending, made all the more
powerful by its handling of emotions – the characters’ and ours. Harmony
Lessons depicts a faraway world made familiar by tapping on recognizable
human experiences – the pains of growing
up - while draining the geographical environment of any distracting local
color. I’d love to see the film
recognized by the Berlinale’s Bauer prize to emerging directors.
Another intriguing use of genre and plot is the deceptively
simple Neorealist drama An Episode in the
Life on an Iron Picker, a film from Bosnia, shot in five days by Danis
Tanovic with a skeletal crew on a budget of 17,000 euros. Based on an incident read in a newspaper, the
film is the reenactment of a dramatic episode: a Roma family, barely making ends
meet in the countryside, is forced to scrape its battered car into iron and
sell its parts to pay for the pregnant mother’s surgery.
The film begs a central question: Is it a documentary, like Nanook of the North, with the filmmaker
a present-day Flaherty observing the will to survive in a harsh environment –
punctuated almost poetically by recurring shots of a nuclear power plant? Or are we dealing with the fictionalized
scenario of Bicycle Thieves, an
update of the unsolvable moral conundrum of people outside of the economic
system? An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker cleverly poses the issue
in a way that incorporates simultaneously these mutually exclusive answers.
The gypsy couple came to the Berlinale – a study in glamour
contrast and red carpets - and recounted their plight to the journalists
attending the press conference. It was a
stunning experience, as if one had the chance to see Lamberto Maggiorana and family
agonize again over their stolen bicycle.
Another intriguing narrative experiment was seen out of
competition , Bad Blood, by the Dutch
filmmaker George Sluizer. He put
together and scored the unedited footage of the project he directing when River
Phoenix died suddenly in 1993. A
thriller set in the Southwest against a background of Hopi mytholohy, principal
photography was three fourth done, with some key scenes still to be shot. The film follows a Hollywood couple (Jonathan
Pryce and Judie Davis) stranded in what looks like Capitol Reef in Utah,
slowing falling in the hands of a disturbed angelic-looking young man of
partial Indian ancestry, the then-23-year-old Phoenix with raven hair and
sharply delineated features.
Not unlike Eisenstein’s unfinished Que Viva Mexico, a device outside of the diegesis gives the picture
structure and meaning – in this case the director narrates the missing parts
and plugs the plot gaps. What emerges is
not a remarkable film, perhaps not even a good one, but a two-fold experiment
bound to satisfy the viewer looking for something different. On the one hand, it is a horror story pitting
reason and science against Indian mysticism (interestingly, the slant is far
from PC). On the other Dark Blood embodies the romantic European
view of the American West – vast, majestic, dangerous – the way Werner Herzog has shown it in Grizzly Man. However, the logic of the box-office dictated
that Sluizer followed the tropes of the horror genre and its Hitchcockian
ending. Ironically, Dark Blood became the opposite of what it was born to be: it is a modernist work that comments on
itself. We can see why it found a slot
in the Berlinale …
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