Lingui :The Sacred Bonds

 

An outsider’s critical view of a Muslim community in the arid, North African country of Chad.   The filmmaker moved to France decades ago. His protagonist, Amina, was shunned by family and expelled from school when she got pregnant at age 15.

Everyone roots for the underdog, especially when their cause is just. And that’s all this film offers except for high end photography. Such a feeling for color, texture, luminosity, and space. That’s what drove me to see the next scene more than the predictable,  feel good story based on gender politics.  But yes, it was also good to see a protagonist so sweet, gentle, indomitable, rebellious, and devoted. Perhaps she’s even unique in cinema.   I have no idea how real she might appear to the people who live there.

The ‘sacred bonds’ here are only between women - suggesting a society as dysfunctional at the family level as the nation of Chad is politically. 

If he had said “I admire your independence. May I love and protect you as your husband?”

 he might have gotten a different response.  Or maybe not.  She was used to doing the protecting, not receiving it.  Regardless, the above visual is typical of the painterly quality.

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• various thoughts

Since Amina’s sister was wearing bracelets worth 600,000 CFA (1080 USD) we can assume that she was not raised in poverty.  She had options in life, but they were lost when she got pregnant as a teenager - and as she explains to her daughter, she was not raped.  She was in love with the baby-father - and expresses no regrets.  She resents being cast out by her family - but practices the Muslim faith that condemns her.  She kneels in prayer daily outside the mosque she is forbidden to enter. Yet she also does not trust the imam to help with her daughter.

Why does the neighbor allow her to cudgel him in response to his rape of  her daughter?  And why did the daughter conceal that fact until after her abortion?  Shame is a strong motivator in this community.  But still Amina, desperate to help her daughter, offers to sell her body to the man who has loaned her money and wants to marry her.  She really is an outcast and rebel- while her daughter would rather kill herself than live that kind of life.

Regarding that man who lends her money, Brahim, he’s not really given a fair shake by Amina and various movie reviewers.  I assume that her offer to sell herself was an act of desperation, but it was also an insult he did not deserve.  The film gives us no reason to believe that his offer of love and protection was not sincere.

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The review in the New York Times immediately put the film into the triumphant Feminism of American gender politics - and maybe that was intended.  It began as follows:

Freedom doesn’t come easily in “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” an electric liberation story about a mother and daughter. It is fought for — and seized — by women who, in saving themselves, save one another. For the daughter, autonomy means securing an abortion in a country that forbids it. For the mother, an observant Muslim, self-sovereignty is a revolutionary act, one that necessitates a shift in thinking and in being. It means saying no, dancing, sneaking smokes and fighting when need be. It means finding new ways to be a woman in this man’s world.

Pawel Pawlikowski: The Woman in the Fifth

 

A talented and successful young American intellectual  is so self centered, frustrated, and abusive he ends up penniless in a sordid Paris SRO where he shares the bathroom with a very large, very black, very belligerent man who refuses to flush the toilet. A terrible fate - but not really in need of further resolution. 

Strange things begin to happen. Is it supernatural? Possibly the story is redeemed by making viewers decide how much has been imagined/written by the protagonist himself. But like the infinite regressions in a hall of mirrors, nothing is at stake  - it’s just slick cleverness. Convincing acting and good filming, however. 

The sugar coated nihilism of the privileged and entitled.

Jarmusch : Father, Mother, Sister, Brother

 

It’s no coincidence that all three pairs of siblings get along and all their parents primarily lived in self created worlds. The kids needed each other to validate a life experience that no one else can understand. 

 Watching the film is frustrating because sparsely revealed backstories promise to be so fascinating. The film has a good aftertaste, though, as parents’ homes move from frumpy casual to airtight perfection to totally stripped and bare - the film ending with the sweet sorrow of a stuffed storage locker in Paris. 

 The precious moments of life are sufficient - no elaborate fantasy or high pressure drama is required. No one in this film is ever bored- so neither is the curious viewer.

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It’s more like a collage than an anthology of independent stories.

The intense,  wildly different father and mother of parts one and two allow the absence of parents in part three to deliver a powerful wave of emotional loss that has totaled the bereaved children - possibly for their entire lives.  One or both are druggies. 

The declining competency/normality of the children progresses from each story to the next.  The first adult child we meet is the only one who is married with children of her own.   

The film works much better in memory than in watching it.

History of Sound

 

This is one of those films, like “Charade”, where you really don’t know what happened until the end when you realize that the title of the film really does say it all. “The History of Sound” is the story of how a musically gifted child left the backwoods of Kentucky and eventually discovered his vocation as an ethno-musicologist.

The film is promoted as a period gay romance, and several reviewers on Mubi were disappointed with the predictably tragic denouement. I nearly quit viewing when the story moved to Rome. But as it turns out, more of the screen time is about becoming a professional scholar.  Not really an appropriate theme for the cinematic arts of drama, motion, and color - far more intellectual than sensual - but it’s kinda cool to have the climax of a two hour film be a few well spoken lines written in the introduction of an academic monograph. 

 Once you appreciate that, all of the pieces fit together so nicely: from the opening monolog spoken above a forest stream … to dad singing on the back porch…to the meeting of like minds in a Boston bar…to the invitation to join a Summer recording project….to etc etc. Yes, there is some hot steamy sex with both genders, but the essential relationship is that of minds not bodies. If Lionel had not met David, he likely would have spent his life picking out tunes in a Kentucky cabin. The truth of a folk song seemed to interest him a whole lot more than standing in front of an audience. 

 An important film personally for me - and perhaps for others who are forever hooked by the aesthetic enthusiasms of their parent(s). No other pleasure is greater or deeper.

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 BTW, some nice scenes with the young Ladyship. She was so cute, rich, and appealing, I really wanted Lionel to stay with her and live in a palatial manor, but like Odysseus with Calypso, our hero’s destiny lay elsewhere. He absolutely had to go back home - one way or another.

BTW II - seems doubtful that Lionel ever identified as homosexual.  In a discussion with David, he shares none of the oppression that David feels, and David envies him for that.  Sexual urges just spontaneously happen  - and after he leaves the Ladyship, we don’t see him having any more for the rest of his life.  He writes that song is a way of coping with the “messiness” of life - and apparently he’d rather sing than make any more messes.

BTW III - David acknowledges that he will say whatever is needed to get what he wants - so he is definitely an unreliable narrator concerning his life story.  He even misleads Lionel by saying that his song recording project was sanctioned by the college where he teaches. Nothing he says can be believed.   Perhaps that’s why Lionel doesn’t try harder to stay with him instead of leaving for Europe.  The film is unclear about that.