Foreign Language – Page 2 – All Good Movies

Artistic concepts and projects can span the world. If Shirley Jackson’s classic American short story The Lottery could be said to have an Albanian parallel, it would be Ismail Kadare’s novel Broken April, which a French and Swiss production group, in alliance with some very talented Brazillians, turned into 2001’s Behind the Sun.

The story is extremely simple, almost an Aesop’s fable. In rural Brazil in 1910, a family of sugar cane cutters has been feuding for generations with a family of ranchers. The conflict began when some land was stolen and one member of one of the families killed a member of the other. In response, the victimized family took precise revenge, killing one but not more than one of the members of the perpetrating family. That family then responded in kind. Over the decades countless members of both clans have died, but no one seems interested in stopping — or even questioning — the tradition of violence other than a young boy in the cane cutting family who goes by the name “Kid”. Meanwhile, an alluring pair of circus performers appear on the scene, with the potential to change the life of the “Kid” and that of his beloved older brother Tonho (played with vulnerability by Rodrigo Santoro), who is next in line to be murdered.

This is a movie of staggering beauty photographed by Walter Carvalho, a superstar of Brazilian film of whom most Americans have never heard (Director Walter Salles is somewhat better-known outside of Brazil, but not as much as he deserves). The arresting visuals are often accompanied by stylized, amped up sound, with a murderous chase through the cane fields being particularly hard to forget.

The acting is uniformly fine, including by the young Ravi Ramos Lacerda as “Kid” (He acquires another name — Pacu — as the film progresses). The actors draw us into a world of brutal simplicity leavened by moments of magic and tender affection. These latter moments are critical because the humanity that the actors infuse into the characters is precisely what makes the unreasoning doom that hovers over all of them so terrifying and maddening.

If you are one those readers who finds the symbols and allegory in much of Latin American literature to be heavy-handed, you may have a similar reaction to aspects of this movie. But even if the Gabriel García Márquez-esque story touches put you off a bit, it should not blunt your appreciation for this powerful, poetic piece of cinema. The exquisite visuals and heartfelt performances are virtually impossible not to appreciate.

Behind the Sun wasn’t promoted effectively when it was released, and as a result did not receive the audience attention it deserved. But those who found it constitute a band of fierce admirers which you would be fortunate to join.

Film buffs are one of the few groups of people who have extremely positive associations with the words “Weimar Republic”. The German film industry had an embarrassment of talent and explosive creativity in the 1920s. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of a number of innovative German movies of the era that profoundly influenced whole swaths of 20th century film worldwide: .

It’s a story within a story, told by a man named Francis (Friedrich Fehér) after he sees “his betrothed” walk by in a daze. They have shared an amazing experience he says, and then the film transitions to his bizarre tale of a carnival sideshow that features a fortune-telling somnambulist. The sideshow is operated by the mysterious Dr. Caligari (a magnetic Werner Krauss) who seems to have control over the sleepwalker Cesare (Conrad Veidt). The creepy Cesare blandly informs a carnival patron that he will die at dawn, and the prediction comes true! It’s one of a series of murders that have been terrorizing the countryside. But who is the killer, and what will happen to the fetching damsel in distress (Lil Dagover) whom Francis and his friendly rival Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) are trying to woo? Strap yourself in for cinema’s first horror film AND the first film with a twist ending (and what a twist!).

Made by Robert Wiene in 1919 or 1920 (depending on which film guide you believe), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari remains one of the most visually striking films in history. Expressionist artists Hermann Warm, Walter Röhrig and Walter Reimann produced a set design to die for, with light and shadows physically painted onto the walls and floors, twisted furnishings, canted windows and doors, and chiaroscuro galore. It’s a madman’s dreamscape, a physical expression of a warped psychology. Many of the actors move in a stylized way (Caligari recalls a scuttling spider, Cesare a cross between a mod dancer and the Frankenstein monster), further heightening the atmosphere of unreality. And it all would have looked even more mesmerizing at the time because the film was tinted rather than being in pure black and white.

Like the best art of this type, the unreality expresses a greater reality. Every one who has been in some bureaucratic backwater office to complete arcane paperwork under the oversight of an imbecile sees the truth in the design of the town clerk’s office in this movie. The cell at the police station conveys the complete desolation of the wrongly accused. And we have all met leaders of organisations whose personality and outlook are completely captured in the interior of the insane asylum director’s office.