Weekly round-up

>> An Iranian mama, radical
drama and wartime trauma

by MALCOLM FRASER

Café Transit

In a small Iranian town near the Turkish border, out-of-towner Reyhan (Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy) finds out about local customs the hard way when her husband dies. Her brother-in-law Nasser (Parvis Parastui) intends to marry her according to tradition, and he isn’t thrilled with her independent ways, particularly since these include opening a roadside café that competes directly with his restaurant. Orafaiy has to raise her two kids and keep the café going while weathering the old-fashioned townspeople’s disapproval, which increases substantially when she takes in a transient Russian woman (Svieta Mikalishina) and attracts the affections of a Greek trucker (Vanchos Constantin).

Writer-director Kambuzia Partovi maintains the high standards set by recent Iranian cinema. Though she doesn’t flex philosophical heaviness like Abbas Kiarostami or bold genre-mashing like the Makhmalbaf family, she has an elegantly understated style, her deceptively simple narrative and aesthetic approach peppered with subtle flourishes. Major dramatic moments are sometimes drawn out in agonizingly realistic detail, other times skipped over completely, the audience left to connect the dots themselves.

Cinematic context aside, the film is also a fascinating slice of life. The culture of the multi-national truck stop is intriguing, and the scenes of Orafaiy preparing her dishes make for some of the best food cinema since Ang Lee’s pre-Hollywood days. And at a time when Iran is being portrayed as the new evil empire, the insight into its culture and everyday life is also much appreciated. How could anyone want to bomb a country that turns out films like this?

La Faute à Fidel

Nine-year-old French girl Anna (Nina Kervel-Bey) starts off this unorthodox family drama in a pretty happy place. Her well-to-do family provides for her, her bratty little brother causes only slight irritation and her head is contentedly full of princess fantasies and Catholic-school pieties. But it’s 1970, and her world is about to be shaken up. Her Spanish father (Stefano Accorsi), after his brother-in-law is killed fighting against Franco’s fascist regime, decides to get involved in socialist politics, supporting the Allende government in Chile.

Meanwhile, her mother (Julie Depardieu) forsakes fashion journalism to write a book about abortion rights. All this means ditching their bourgeois mansion for a little apartment, which often plays host to shabby, bearded, cigar-smoking radicals. The confused girl is forced to navigate this reality shift, caught between a lingering sense of loss and a desire to please her scatterbrained parents.

Never stiff or cloyingly cute, Kervel gives a performance the likes of which kids on this side of the Atlantic just don’t deliver. Her cherubic face intensely captures the spectrum of childhood emotion, with all its naïveté, righteous indignation, misguided attempts to please and strangely acute perception.

Director Julie Gavras (daughter of director Costa-Gavras) presides over a thoughtful and sympathetic story that’s also beautifully shot and designed. It’s not a perfect film; it drags a little towards the end, and the adult characters could be a bit more fleshed out. But it captures brilliantly the moral dilemmas that humans of all ages face when trying to do the right thing.

BYE-BYE, BOURGEOIS LIFE: La Faute à Fidel

Illuminados por el fuego

In Argentinian director Tristàn Bauer’s drama, Esteban (Gaston Pauls) is drawn back into memories of his Falklands War service when his old army buddy Vargas (Pablo Ribba) is rendered comatose by a drug overdose. Visiting his friend’s hospital bed, Pauls flashes back to the hellish trauma of the war.

The film racked up many prizes on the festival circuit, including an audience award at Montreal’s Festivalissimo, so obviously Bauer is doing something right. All the same, the film feels underwhelming for a couple of reasons. First, the horrors of war depicted here are pretty familiar. The soldiers are too young and naïve for what they’re getting into, their military leaders are mean bastards, the food and coffee are no good, and once the actual fighting starts they realize that it’s kinda harsh to see your friends blown to pieces right in front of you.

All undoubtedly truthful, but nothing we haven’t seen in a million war movies (or absorbed in actual coverage of today’s ongoing wars). With close to zero context of the war in question, the battlefield scenes feel a bit generic.

Secondly, and more importantly from an aesthetic point of view, the film is all shot with minimal lighting, which makes its frequent night scenes difficult to watch. Presumably Bauer is going for a naturalistic look, which is all well and good until someone loses their eyesight from squinting to discern the action onscreen. The title becomes ironic, since the film would benefit from both literal and figurative illumination.

All films open this Friday, July 27

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