I still have several more Film Fest tasty treats that I want to talk about here… so I’m trying to get my blogposts written while hovering tentatively within the jetBlue hot spots in the airports. Unfortunately, the Nashville airport has no such thing… they charge you for the signal. Tres annoying!
So, anyway, I saw two more little narrative films that were both so pointedly grounded in their sense of place that I feel like I can talk about them together. The first is a really simple, but gorgeously shot, movie that came out of the African nation of Chad. It’s called Dry Season. The film guide for the festival describes it as a story about thwarted revenge... but that’s not entirely accurate. As the story goes, a young man is sent, by his blind, green-robed grandfather, from one dusty little desert town to another dusty little desert town to exact revenge upon the man who killed his father. Except that our villain turns out to be a gruff but generous bread baker-- who quickly takes the young guy on as his apprentice. And then when time comes for our hero to kill his newly adoptive father-figure, well, he fakes it. After all, the grandfather is blind, right? Any ol’ gunshot sound is a good as a true-aimed one.
This is the sort of film that isn’t groundbreaking in its filming or its storytelling, but it’s still pretty impressive that something this fluid and poetic and polished is coming out of a place like Chad. In some ways, it reminded me a little of Burnt by the Sun, a great little film that was one of the first stories-about-home to escape the Communist Soviet Union right after the fall. The characters in both are wholly products of their homeland and yet do not seem exoticized or fetishized for an American audience. Dialogue is employed minimally in Dry Season, but these people are intensely expressive-- the boy pouts and the old baker guy grouses-- and their triumphs and foibles are played out visually in such a way that the audience doesn’t feel led thru the story, but rather the story happens irrespective of the audience. Handholding on the part of the filmmakers is simply unnecessary.
Really, I’d anticipated that this would be a sad story, full of tough consequences, in the way that Tsotsi was. But, I was pleasantly surprised to find a sweet and simple story full of humor and a more complicated form of justice than I expected from a movie billed as a “revenge story." It’s much more of an “adoptive family” sort of movie, I guess. For a real revenge story, I’d be much more likely to direct viewers to the like of Corean director Chan-wook Park's Revenge Trilogy (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance—great and wicked films, all). However, for something homey that’s not about YOUR home, Dry Season is a sweet and sharp little film. May it find delicious distribution!
And I’d like to pair this film with a deeply, deeply American movie called Swedish Auto. I must concede that my feelings about this film are a little colored by the fact that I was utterly charmed by the director/screenwriter, Derek Sieg, during his Q&A session after the screening. Most folks seemed interested in asking him about technical filmmaking and marketing issues but I wanted to know how, as a writer, he defines his boundaries of "home." He'd said that he wrote the script while living in L.A., but it's set in Charlottesville, VA... where he grew up. And it's a very Charlottesville movie. Caressingly so. So, I wanted him to talk about writing about home when you're not home.
I suppose this is a thing I notice because I had to leave the South and move to Tucson in order to write my manuscript... which is mostly about the South-- Southern food and Southern race relations-- and just about every poem has a Southern accent when I hear it in my head. And I'm never so accutely aware that I'm a white girl from the South as when I'm not living there. Just yesterday, a co-worker totally raised my dander with her assumptions about racism and bumpkinism in my little corner of the country--- of course, there's far greater KKK membership in the mostly-white Midwestern states than there could possibly be in the southern states where the population is so much more diverse that it simply cannot support the same sorts of de facto segregation that, you know, Ohio can. I mean, Mississippi has one of the largest Vietnamese populations in the country and Nashville is home to more Kurds than just about any other metropolitan area. And that doesn't even address the fact that, in parts of the South, African Americans are barely a minority anymore. But I'm not saying that there aren't rednecks in Tennessee... of course there are. But there are also rednecks in New York. And Oregon. And certainly also in this co-worker's home state of Maryland. But simply because some white supremicists claim one particular region over another as their "home," they'll never be able make the region subject to any sort of group-think bigotry. That's just nonsense and so painfully offensive I can't even stand it. People are people-- and they will have their biases and blindspots, but those are definitely not predicated on where they're born/raised/reside. Wow.. this paragraph is rather tangential, eh?
Anyway, as I was saying, it seems to me that it's a rather writerly concession to move away from home and then obsessively write about nothing but home. Many of the shots in Swedish Auto are tight and close in; they lovingly probe the nooks and crannies of Charlottesville in such a way that belies the director's familiarity and comfort with this city. Sieg's clearly in love with this place. However, I find it pointed and significant that the resolution of his plot requires that his protagonists leave Charlottesville. When I asked him about his feelings about his subject matter, he became a little more animated and talked a little about exorcising those old demons of youth. Moreover, I think, he was excited to be acknowledged as much for being a writer as he is for being a filmmaker, though. Hence my being charmed: I love me some writerly enthusiasm! Well, and there's no denying that he's quite handsome, as well.
This is not to say, of course, that his filmmaking practice was anything less than thoroughly engaging. He whipped out a couple smart stage tricks-- including a sound effect and some flashing orange lights to denote an off-camera explosion. And because two of his characters where notable voyeurs, he was able to employ a succession of interesting through-the-window shots and cat-n-mouse kinda scenes in such a way that they felt new and untrodden.
I have a feeling that this movie, too, is likely to find distribution much in the same vein as a movie like Junebug. In many ways, it's got such a quintessentially "indie movie" feel-- and Lukas Haas, a frequent indie player, and January Jones (fresh from her knock-out spot in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) inhabit these characters in a manner that is sensitive without being sentimental. While the script isn't dialogue heavy, it does occasionally dip into some slightly stock-sounding conversation, but overall, this film embodies the sorts of tensions that are very familiar to me: simultaneous loyalty towards and restlessness within that one place that you'll always consider home, no matter how far away, and for however long, you go. It's this place that imprints itself upon you and your identity in such a way that you'll always feel obligated to answer for it even while it pricks and festers in the back of your brain. And maybe that's just what it's like to have a home.
How strange that I feel this way about Nashville, even though I've never felt more at-home (i.e., happy) than I did when I lived in Tucson. Must I always have such an affinity for the thing I rasp against most?
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