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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
From the Philippines with love: "Imelda"
Former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos has been pursuing filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz through the courts, trying to halt screenings of Diaz's hilarious and tragic documentary "Imelda" (which has been playing to packed houses at New York's Film Forum and should reach you soon). Imelda -- she of the 6,000 or 200 pairs of shoes, depending on whom you believe -- shouldn't bother. Many Filipinos may never forgive her for her role in the corrupt and rapacious regime of her late husband, Ferdinand, nor should they. But filmgoers may well see Imelda, in her self-appointed quest to bring love and beauty to the world, as a self-deluded heroine in the mode of Blanche DuBois. Alternately pathetic, charismatic, strikingly intelligent, hard as tempered steel and (seemingly) diagnosably insane, she's certainly a figure you can't take your eyes off.
In fact, it's hard to imagine what Marcos objects to -- she granted Diaz extraordinary access to herself, her family and what remains of her once-grand retinue. The film is remarkably evenhanded in its treatment of Imelda's notorious excesses, and grants her ample time to expound on her increasingly dotty theories of cosmology, cosmetology and modern romance. (I cannot possibly summarize Imelda's grand spiritual theory; suffice it to say that the tree in the primordial Garden is related to the zeroes and ones of digital code, and the serpent's apple is -- yes! -- an Apple.)
In Imelda's mind, at least, her marriage as a teen beauty queen to an up-and-coming politician was a love match, not a merger of two influential families that created a dynasty in the newly independent postwar Philippines. Furthermore, it was her beauty and charm, her basic humility and goodness, that made her the confidante and dance partner of Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Qaddafi and Henry Kissinger, or drew Hollywood celebs by the planeload to her yacht parties. (Watch this movie and you will see George Hamilton, in a navy blazer and white slacks, crooning, "I can't give you anything but love/ Imelda"!) It wasn't, say, her behind-the-throne position of power in a nation uniquely poised between West and East, between Asia and America.
The thing is, as with so many people completely convinced of their own specialness, Imelda may be partly right. Don't misunderstand me here. Consciously or not, Imelda Marcos played a key role in a dictatorship that committed unpardonable crimes, and she appears to lie to herself about that fact to this day. Sure, some of the Filipino public still worships her, but then, Hitler and Stalin (and, more to the point, Eva Perón) still have followers who weep over their graves too. But the great service Diaz has done for posterity is to create a portrait of Imelda that captures her undeniable appeal -- her confidence, her clarity of purpose, her relentless conviction that tomorrow will be a sunny day -- as well as her repugnant qualities. No study of despotism, anybody's despotism, is complete without both.
"Father and Son": I dream of Russia
Even amid the onslaught of documentaries, we still need impenetrable art movies to remind us of the pain of existence, yes? Yes, absolutely. But do they have to be this impenetrable?
I thoroughly enjoyed "Father and Son," the new film from "Russian Ark" director Alexander Sokurov. I have no idea, however, whether I liked it for the right reasons, or whether anyone else is likely to agree. It's a stunningly beautiful set of semi-mythic tableaux, set partly on a rooftop soundstage that looks like a schoolboy's fantasy landscape, partly in the real city of Lisbon, Portugal, and partly in a set of never-explained dream sequences. These elements appear to add up to a meditation on the quality of a father's love for his son and vice versa, but I'm really only guessing. One thing is for sure: This is the most homoerotic film I've ever seen that didn't have any overt homosexuality in it (although Sokurov, apparently, has angrily rejected this interpretation).
A sequel of sorts to Sokurov's 1997 "Mother and Son" (which I haven't seen), this film begins with a fuzzy, golden-lit close-up of two entangled male bodies, with the perspective of the shot so tight we can't tell who's who or what is going on. It sure looks like sex, but in fact the stonily handsome Father (Andrei Shchetinin) is comforting his teenage Son (Alexei Nejmyshev) after what appears to be a bad dream. These two drift through the rest of the film like a couple of hunky cologne models, exchanging intimacies whose significance we can't grasp, bemoaning the absent women in their lives, harassing the friends who show up and inevitably begin the process of pulling them apart.
This entire movie -- blessedly, it's pretty short -- is like the languorous coda to a longer film by somebody like Tarkovsky or Bergman, or for that matter like the last scene of one of Chekhov's plays. The great drama has occurred, love has arisen and been dashed, the dreams of youth have been partly and incompletely replaced by the wisdom of age. Now comes the period when we can't quite sleep, when we stay up late drinking, when we exchange confidences that would make no sense in any other context. That isn't much of a story, and by normal standards it ain't much of a movie either. But it sure makes for a mood, and some devastatingly pretty pictures. Sometimes, maybe, that's all we need.
