Bosnian war is the absurdist setting for The Tour, Markovic

Film review. The Tour (Turneja) is the latest film by the Serbian director Goran Markovic, and it has been selected as Serbia’s candidate for the Oscar Foreign Film category, 2009.

It’s been fifteen years since the war in Bosnia, and no matter how much Serbians and everyone else in the region would like this particular chapter of history to disappear, it keeps popping up, bringing with it the ghosts of suffering and genocide. So, now that Radovan Karadzic is finally going on trial in the Hague, bringing even more shame on the Bosnian Serbs with his antics and resistance, is it really time for a Serbian comedy on the topic? Director Goran Markovic seemed to think so, and he came up with something unique and wise, and at times quite funny.

Turneja, (The Tour) is a very moving and successful film about the comic absurdity of human suffering. Markovic pulls it off by using as his main characters a troupe of clueless actors from Belgrade, so self absorbed and ego-driven that they allow themselves to be transported right to the front lines of the war in Serbian held Bosnia to perform for the troops. They have been lured by the prospect of making some scarce money, but they soon find that they are paid in insults, injury and fearsome misadventure. But in spite of the horror, they are troupers and they will survive. The absurdist theater of war turns out to be a fitting place for these over-the-top thespians, and they manage to bring poetry to the Serbian fighters, and then to the Croatians and Muslims, as well, when they find themselves bumbling about, criss-crossing the battle lines. This is not to say that they learn anything from this experience, or that the fighters have been instilled with the civilizing effects of high culture in any way. The fact is, that no one learns anything in this film, because there is nothing to be learned from the repulsive murderous dysfunction of that conflict. And that is, perhaps, Markovic’s point.

Goran Markovic is an experienced filmmaker whose work has been well-known but perhaps not so well-received critically over the years. With this film, however, he seems to have found his stride. He has found the perfect stand-in for the Serbian people in the street: the self indulgent but good hearted actors who suddenly find that while they had been busy emoting their bogus lines to the rafters the whole world outside their theater had gone mad. Markovic knows actors, he is the son of two of them, and he has spent his life in the world of theater and film. He makes these characters speak with great humanity, even as they are lying, preening and elbowing each other out of the frame. What they recite is perhaps not as important as the life that they breathe into their words. They are in contrast to the nationalist writer who has come to the front to sing the praises of Serbian revenge and terror. Whereas their words bring them freedom and gets the guns momentarily quiet, the writer’s words bring him food and privilege and sends people to their deaths.

The battlefields are the main theater of this story, but this reality is framed by the broken, empty theater in Belgrade where the film begins and ends. It is also an apt metaphor for the state of Serbian culture itself at the end of those years of conflict: terribly wounded, but still full of life and aching to rebuild.

Camino: Eroding the foundations of fundamentalism one tear at a time.

A film review. Camino, (2009) directed by Javier Fesser

If suffering brings us close to God, then I guess everyone coming out of this film will be practically knocking on Heaven’s door. It is an excruciating look at the tortured life of a little girl as she suffers with a domineering mother, a fanatical religion and an extremely painful disease. This dark, nightmarish melodrama is an intelligent look at the hypocrisy and deadening effect of fundamentalist religion on the human spirit, but unfortunately, the medicine is as grim as the condition, and the film is a torture to watch.

Nerea Camacho, in the title role, is a beautiful little girl and a fine actress, though it seems that she has been directed here to ham and mug for the camera in order to jerk every last tear out of the viewer. But it’s a formula as effective as it is obvious, and not surprisingly, the little girl was awarded a Goya for best new actress. In all, the film received 6 Goyas as well as ten other Spanish film awards, reflecting its big box-office success in Spain. However, I don’t think it will do as well in the international markets, since the Spanish guilty pleasure in masochistic religious tales does not travel very well. Besides that, the cultish Opus Dei Catholicism depicted here seems a long way off from the lives of most modern Europeans. Add to that the clumsy symbolism, the bloody hospital scenes as gruesome as a Santeria prayer card and a relentlessly maudlin musical score and what brought some audiences to tears will send others to the nearest exit.

That is not to say that this is an inconsequential film. The story is well written, working on several levels at once. Every action is symbolic and reflective of some other action, every belief is both proven and debunked along the way. This makes for a surprisingly complex melodrama. A particularly striking example of this is the extended double-entendre sequence at the end, which can be read as a cynical depiction of the way zealots misinterpret human experience, or possibly how the most carnal human love and the love of God are all one and the same thing. Moreover, the characterizations are very subtly drawn, to make us reflect on the ways that people use and abuse religious dogma to support their own ambitions and prejudices. A very telling scene, in which Camino’s older sister, a novice in an Opus Dei community house, speaks with a more experienced nun about her attachment to her family. The older woman gives her an explanation of family devotion that makes it sound precisely orchestrated by the devil himself. There are other scenes in which Camino’s mother uses religion to manipulate her daughter to reject the pleasures of life. In these moments the film tells us something important about the power of fundamentalist religion to make people renounce their love of humanity for some imagined love for God, as though their responsibilities to the human race are a mere distraction from their responsibilities to God. Yet, this is done in ways that make these fundamentalists seem perfectly real and chillingly reasonable.

The information at the end of the film states that the story is based on the life of a girl named Alexia who died in 1985 and is now in the process of beatification. It is hard to figure how this story, which shows how the love of human life can be misinterpreted and twisted for the glorification of a misguided religion, can be reconciled with that process.

Okay, hopefully that will permanently discredit the fanatics at Opus Dei. Now, let’s see the really important one: the Taliban version.

Pappi Corsicato’s Il Seme della Discordia. Discord Indeed.

I wanted to like the film, I really did. All the hype about the Neapolitan Almodovar was enticing, and the look, décor and colors of the preview clips were very promising. And who could resist a director named Pappi? But I knew something was wrong when the lead actress, Caterina Murino started talking at the meet and greet before the viewing. She was sitting right next to the director, and still she had the nerve to say, (I’m paraphrasing):
“It was really difficult at first to work with Pappi, but then we got a working relationship and ended up loving each other. It was impossible to play the roles as Pappi wanted. All of these actors all of them with lots of experience, were asked to act in ways that they had never acted before. When I saw the final product, after Pappi’s editing, it was not the film that I had acted in, so radically had he changed it. No more questions, please, let’s watch the film. Then if you still have questions, I’m sure Pappi will be glad to answer them.”

Nominated at Venice for the Golden Lion. They wanted to like the film too.

She was like her last name: murino, like a wall.

The basic problem with the script is that one crucial element in the story is a rape. There is no way to make a rape humorous. Pappi did his best to minimize it by never actually mentioning the fact. That helped, but it remained the 800 pound gorilla in the room whenever the story took a humorous turn. There were ways to write the rape out of the story, perhaps amnesia or mistaken identities. I have it all figured out. Pappi, please consult me before signing off on any more problematic scripts.

There was also an emphasis on the wrong characters. We see way too much of her mother, and not enough of the flirty salesgirl and the gayboys at the café bar. They are the lighthearted (and lightheaded) characters that could make the comedy soar. It would also be more interesting to see more of the husband, and to get more involved in his problematic position. However, it’s not too late: these characters can all be developed in other scripts.

Il seme della discordia. Hmmm, I wonder what exactly was this seed of discord. Was it the baby, the situation, the actress, the director or just the script?

Alas, things could be much, much, much better. Corsicato is a really fine director with a great sense of comic timing and the subtleties of la commedia all’italiana. Recently he delighted his fans with a short film, made under the sponsorship of the Garofalo pasta company, and distributed exclusively on the web. Questione di gusti, or A Question of Taste is a remake of a sketch from a Dino Risi film from 1971 “Noi donne siamo fatte così.” It is a satire on the fetishes and manias of the nouveau riche, as they try to present themselves as wildly uninhibited. The couple brags about their sexual exploits to the whole company of guests at their party, then have it out with screams and pistol shots as soon as the guests are out the door. Without subtitles, the visuals are a pleasure in themselves:

Scampia and South Bronx: burnt more by sin or by indifference?

The Scampia district on the outskirts of Naples has become infamous as the symbol of urban degradation, crime and despair, much like the South Bronx of the 1970s. And like that New York City neighborhood, there is much truth in this characterization, but also much that has been conveniently ignored or misunderstood. Is Scampia being unfairly labeled with the clichés of despair, just to give people an excuse to turn away?

Roberto Saviano‘s 2006 book, “Gomorra” brought the situation of this area to the consciousness of a wider public.

Saviano described the activities of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia, in a wider context over a long period of time, but it is the physical focus on Scampia that people remember. The open wounds of this impoverished neighborhood came to symbolize the rock hard cruelty and oppression of organized crime. The visual world of Scampia came alive with the movie version of “Gomorrah,” directed by Matteo Garrone. His setting of the story inside the pharaonic public housing projects, called “Le Vele” was searingly iconic. The film is a burning tool with a sharp edge that cuts the images of urban decay into the spectator’s brain, just as Saviano intended to cut his words into the reader’s mind. The objective for both artists was to bring the nation to action in order to resolve problems and it was brave and powerful work. However, too often, the effect is to make people look away with disgust, and to blame the victims, the people of the Naples slums, for their nightmare.

The “photogenic” aspect of the problem could not be denied. Photographers came to snap pictures, some sensationalistic, others with sensitivity and care. To this latter group belongs the photographer Norma Rossetti. Her images concentrate on the faces of the residents posing in their surroundings, places that are sometimes squalid and mean, and at other times sumptuous and fantastical in the way that the poor transform kitsch and throwaway objects into dreamy articles of wonderment. Her subjects can be laughed at by those who choose to keep these people at a distance. The odd material fetishes can be reason enough to consider the residents unreachable and beyond help. But that is a shame, because these people speak directly to the camera, in a language that is really not so hard to understand, and they speak about their humanity, their fragility and their love of life.

Click for more about Norma Rossetti's Scampia

The same was true in the South Bronx, where burning buildings, and sky high crime rates were considered the norm in the 1970s, and people simply turned their backs. If the South Bronx was ever mentioned at all, it was as a setting for sensationalistic films or as a symbol of the greed of slumlords or the corruption of city government. However, that was only a part of the story. There was a throbbing heart at the center of that dying neighborhood, and there were tens of thousands of people who were condemned to live that agony. They suffered, but they did not consider their suffering to be in vain. With the help of some enlightened city programs, which rebuilt lowcost housing, cleared out filthy vacant lots to plant gardens and used favorable tax policies to attract small businesses, the South Bronx was able to come back from the brink in some small but nevertheless spectacular ways.

Recently, the New York Times put together a photographic presentation using the photography of David Gonzalez to show the South Bronx during 1979. But they do not show the devastation of the infrastructure, instead, they show people, the beating heart at the center of it all. Photographs like this were not widely seen in 1979, because they were not considered particularly interesting. There was nothing newsworthy about a bunch of kids laughing, or people dancing on the sidewalk; what people wanted to see was the spectacular failure, the decay, the reason that they could just write off this place and concern themselves elsewhere. David Gonzalez had returned to the South Bronx to work in a school, teaching elementary school children to tell stories with photography. He says,

“Now, teaching children was interesting, because they just photographed their world. And even though they lived in this messed up neighborhood, they photographed utterly ordinary things, their parents at home, their kid sisters sleeping, their friends playing in the streets. And it taught me to just look at that. And so, I really didn’t photograph a lot of the rubble, if you will, I photographed the life that persisted in the middle of all this. And it was a really important lesson, that in this place that had been written off as hopeless, I found people just moving on.”

It may come as a shock to some people, but there is a certain pride in the people that live in even the most destitute circumstances, and a feeling of community that can be more powerful that anything else. David Gonzalez ends his slide show with these words:

“Having come from there, and more importantly, having gone back there, it’s something to be proud of, actually. And it’s not pride in the sense that I survived this tough place. It’s the pride that, I’m still part of this place in a very essential way.”

David Gonzalez South Bronx Photo Feature.
Perhaps if people had seen more photographs like these in 1979, they would have made more of an effort to help the Bronxites pull their neighborhoods up “by the bootstraps,” and perhaps have thus saved some of the lives that were lost through drugs and crime in the slow climb out of the depths.

Can the same be true for Scampia? Through a government redevelopment program, some of the enormous structures of “Le Vele” have been demolished, in an attempt to make the community less dense and more manageable. But although this may have been a necessary first step, the solution will not come with the simple destruction of the offending brick and mortar. A whole culture of pessimism and hopelessness has to change. That is beginning to happen, very, very slowly. Just as in South Bronx, there are several initiatives in Scampia which are using art training, information technology and music to give children a door to the wider world of culture and self esteem.

Earlier this year, a book by Davide Cerullo, “Ali Bruciate, I bambini di Scampia” appeared in Italy. It told the familiar story of children caught up in the drug trafficking and petty crime in the housing projects of Scampia. But in this partly autobiographical work, Cerullo aimed to give a more nuanced view of the lives of these young people, one in which there are alternatives, and there are exits that lead to sunlight and healthy lives. In April, 2009 he gave an interview to the Italian weekly Panorama, in which he echoed the words with of David Gonzales.

“E invece ai lettori che non sono di Scampia che messaggio vorrebbe far arrivare?”
“Che a Scampia, alle Vele in particolare, abita anche tanta gente perbene, solidale, che vive realmente ogni giorno in comunione con gli altri. Solo che bisogna dare a questa gente uno straccio di opportunità, un’alternativa. E allora si potranno fare davvero miracoli. Io senza Scampia nel cuore non posso vivere. Vede quest’area verde qui intorno? Un tempo era tutta campagna e io bambino venivo ad aiutare mio padre che pascolava le pecore. Per me questo resta il quartiere più bello di Napoli. Vorrei che lo fosse per tutti.”

The translation:

Panorama Question:
“What is the message about Scampia that you would like your readers to come away with?”
Cerullo Answer:
“That in Scampia, and especially in “Le Vele,” there are many good people, that live every day in perfect harmony with each other. All that these people need is just a little bit of opportunity, an alternative. With that they would be able to perform miracles. I would not be able to live without Scampia in my heart. You see this bit of greenery here? This used to be open country, and when I was very small I came here to help my father herd his sheep. For me this is the most beautiful neighborhood in all of Naples. I wish it were that for everyone.”

The full article here.

in a video clip for FuoriTV, he says that he wanted to write about the children of Scampia because it is them that pay the highest price in the downgraded quality of life of this place. But he wrote his book to push people more to action, the people that claim to be doing something, but really do little. Like Saviano’s book, his work is being read in prisons, but in this case, it is helping the people in those places to find a reason not to give up hope.

The video interview here.

Today, the South Bronx is coming back to health little by little. And tomorrow… Scampia? It will happen, someday. The question is, when? And how many more people will have to suffer and die to make it come true?

Related Articles:

Gomorrah: A book and a film describe the Modern Plagues of Naples.

Naples on the Edge: Photography of Norma Rossetti.