Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Wadjda

Haifa al-Monsour's "Wadjda," the first Saudi film to be sent to the Academy Awards for consideration, is an absolutely terrific film. There is quite literally no other film like it. It's filled with terrific performances, like first-time actress Waad Mohammed, who should be considered for an Oscar nomination. She and her fellow young actors put in better performances than most Hollywood adult actors.

Mohammed plays our protagonist, Wadjda. If there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has arrived, as Victor Hugo said, then I would add that there is also nothing more powerful than a young child finding her voice and pushing the envelope, particularly when said envelope is Saudi Arabia.  Such is the case with young Wadjda. The film begins with her and her fellow students reciting scripture including a section on patience. They repeat it. If there was ever a land that required copious amounts of such patience, it's the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and having been a resident here for a little more than two years, I can attest to that.

To give you an example, recently at a train station, I got into a somewhat heated argument with a ticket man because I was wearing shorts and not slacks. Several Saudi women, covered from head to toe in black abayas, watched to my right. I went off to speak with the security guard who smiled, shrugged, and said "mafi mushkala" (no problem) and I was shooed away to the train. It appears that Saudi Arabia has not yet discovered the uniquely human ability to look away at something which offends. Anyway, I waited for the train in anger, until I heard a "hello" several times from my left. There was an adorable young girl in a pink dress, and she smiled when I waved to her.  This girl was willing to smile at something (or someone) quite different, and yet she will likely grow up being taught to be offended at the simplest of things. Girls riding bicycles, perhaps.

This is somewhat the conundrum for young Wadjda. It's obvious from the lectures she receives from her mother and teachers that what she is doing is wrong. So what are the terribly forbidden acts she commits?  Well, for one, she listens to rock (or pop, or something). She sticks up for her mother against a mean driver.  And of course, she really wants a bike. Not only does she want a bike, but she wants to ride it faster than any boy. But she receives no support. "A woman's voice is taboo," according to her teacher. How appropriate it is that Wadjda gets a bit of an epiphany when she sees a bike atop a car, as if it's flying. But there are two obstacles for her in her quest. First, as Saudi Arabia is literally the only country in the world where women are banned from driving, she is prohibited from riding in public. (Recently, the country decreed that it is permissible for women to ride bikes, as long as they wear an abaya while doing so and be accompanied by a male guardian--so how often do you think that's going to happen?) Second, the bike costs about 800 Riyals (about $213).

Wadjda is not afraid to stand up for herself, either. She pokes fun at males, like when she quips to one teenager that even his "money cologne stinks," and to her young friend that she's too cute to be his sister.  (The relationship between them demonstrates a relaxed comfort in showing pre-teen romance in a country that deeply, terribly frowns upon it.) Wadjda almost gets caught in a scandal involving the mutawa, or religious police. (Yes, they seriously exist, and their abhorrent record includes banning hugging, scolding women in public, and even preventing a fire crew from saving girls in a burning school because if they escaped, they wouldn't be covered.) But her main hindrance besides her society is her principal (Ahd Kamel), called "the creature" by two rebellious teenage girls. This woman is fiercely traditionalist and not afraid to show it, running her school with an iron fist. She almost gleefully encourages the ostracizing of some of her sinful students. But while her mother (Reem Abdullah) of course offers Wadjda maternal support, she too is a bit of a purist. She scolds a friend who works at a hospital, one of those rare laissez-faire institutions in the country where men and woman actually talk to each other. Still, the mother-daughter relationship in the movie is heart-warming, and I got a bit choked up at some of the moments between them.

The obvious comparison is to "The Bicycle Thief," but the average moviegoer might be surprised at how entertaining a movie about a young girl obsessing over a bicycle can be. Even the competition for memorizing the Quran is surprisingly tense, without the use of hyperbolic editing or a predictable, manipulative score. You ought to see this film for two reasons: One, you will learn so much about a country that, for better or worse, has been and will continue to be linked to the United States and its allies. Two, it's an incredible film, truly one of the year's best. Its simplicity is matched by its potency, and al-Mansour deserves quite a bit of praise for being able to marry the two. This is one of the great coming-of-age films of our time.    

Saturday, November 16, 2013

The Joy Luck Club

We've been hearing a lot of nostalgia regarding 1993 in film. This year's "12 Years A Slave" is the new "Schindler's List." A.A. Dowd wrote a brilliant article on the visual effects of "Jurassic Park" and the terrible attempts of later films to recreate the visual magic. Perhaps the likely candidacy of Hillary Clinton has reminded some of the documentary "The War Room" about her husband's successful campaign for president, and maybe "Blackfish" reminded you of "Free Willy." We're in between Halloween and Christmas, so of course there's Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas." I haven't even mentioned "Groundhog Day," "The Piano," "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," "Tombstone,"  "Mrs. Doubtfire" or "The Fugitive."    

Like the other films, "The Joy Luck Club" is twenty years old this year, and it's as good as or better than some of the ones I mentioned. It's certainly as thought-provoking. I kept thinking about the Hofstede Center's analysis of China's culture. According to the Hofstede Center, China is a society that can be described as masculine--success-oriented and driven--along with acting in the "interests of the group and not necessarily of themselves." Additionally, China is "a society that believes that inequalities amongst people are acceptable." "People should not have aspirations beyond their rank."  Perhaps some of this has changed or is changing, but in 1993 I would guess not so much.  Is the American way so much better? Not necessarily, and you will notice that the U.S. and China share similar numbers in terms of masculinity/femininity, while being so much lower in long-term orientation, implying that American businesses and governments are not pragmatic in their long-term business goals. How shocking. Why is any of this important? Because the characters in Wayne Wang's film deal with these aspects of their cultures. The girls learn to shout in a quiet, traditionalist culture, and it's awesome.

But it's not the provocation of thought that makes "The Joy Luck Club" a great film, but its characters, screenplay, direction, score and other elements that do. At the start of the film, we are introduced to four mothers who meet often for a game of mahjong. After one of their members has passed away, the remaining three invite June, the daughter of the deceased, to play. "So I sat down on the east, where things begin," she tells us, "with my mother's best friends." This is the Joy Luck Club, and its three elderly members are referred to by the younger one as her aunties.  "Their connection with each other had more to do with hope," we are told, "than joy or luck."  The game is sort of a merging of memory; it's here where we begin to see the perspectives of eight women--four young American women and their mothers, immigrants from China.

This is a story of women and their mothers, and so it is as universal a story as possible. Not many things, for example, are as culturally universal as bragging mothers and their competitions for the most talented offspring. Case in point is the first story we are told. Young June (Melanie Chang) is a pianist in training, but she hits a few wrong notes and embarrasses her mother at a recital. A child's worst nightmare--hitting the wrong notes in front of an audience--is only slightly more humiliating than letting her parents down. An argument between the two provokes young June to shout that she wishes she were dead--"like them, the babies you killed in China." From here, we discover along with adult June that her aunties have found those two babies, once thought to be dead but now living in China.  The party which opens our film and we occasionally return to is a going-away party for June, and each of the seven characters gets a turn to tell her own story.

The stories are as equally fascinating as they are diverse. They range from tales of traditional marriage in China to complicated love in America, obedience versus empowerment, and high expectations from Tiger Moms against daughters who yearn for affection. The stories are surprisingly humorous. In one, a young Chinese girl explains to her husband (whom she has never met or even seen) on their wedding day that she prayed so that her husband would not be too old. Upon discovering that he has barely begun puberty, she exclaims that she must have prayed too hard. In another, one of the young ladies is asked by her white partner about her mother's hypothetical reaction to their marriage. Her response: "She'd rather get rectal cancer." The accounts are also rather adult--you might be surprised to see such sexual imagery in watermelon. But they can also be raw at times, with scenes of rape and slight allusions to China's one child policy. They all feature numerous characters, and hardly any is uninteresting.

"The Joy Luck Club" is not exactly the best acted movie in the world. Case in point, Ming-na Wen as June. Wen has an exceptional voice (you may recognize her as the voice of Mulan in the Disney film). But even with the rich material she is given, she doesn't deliver as hoped.  Neither do her three colleagues. The four mothers (Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen and Lisa Lu), however, are a joy, as are the child actors. And its screenplay, by Ronald Bass and Amy Tan (the author of the novel), is wonderfully written. I loved its lines, so simple yet so exciting, like one of the mothers telling us that "on that day, I learned to shout"; this is one of the very few movies to really get narration right. It's corny at times, especially towards the end, and its "I see you" moment is only slightly odder than when that line was uttered in "Avatar." Still, this really is a remarkable movie that will likely leave you thinking about for a long time, and surely deserves a spot on any top ten list of 1993.