Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 9 -15 November 2000 Issue No.507
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Pick of the week

Besides the Cannes 2000 Palme D'Or winner A Dancer in the Dark by Lars Von Trier, which opens the festival, the public is invited to take a peek at two earlier films by the Danish director, Breaking the Waves (1996) and The Idiots (1998). Unfortunately, his debut Forbrydelsens Element (The Element of Crime, 1984) is not being screened, although it opens with the call for prayer, a donkey and several minarets and contains the character of an Egyptian psychiatrist who repeatedly tells his patient, the protagonist, who spent 13 years in Cairo: "You seem to return to Cairo and me whenever you have a problem [..] I want you to leave Cairo, the sand, the desert, Al-Hubb Al-Taher, Al-Nil, Al-Nil Al-Khalid [pure love, the Nile, the eternal Nile]. It's too much for Europeans."
The first week also features jury head Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields (1984) and The Mission (1986), both produced by David Puttnam and with cinematography by Chris Menges. And while these films have all been around for some time now, seeing them on the big screen might not be a bad idea.
Below are some of the reasons why it just may be worthwhile catching them in the festival.

The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984)
The war correspondent film is a sub-genre of the war film, influenced by the guerrilla films that documented the civil wars and political unrest in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. The protagonist is typically a documentarist commissioned to shoot a film for a TV channel, as in Antonioni's Professione: Reporter or The Passenger (1975) or a journalist, as in Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986).
Set in Cambodia, The Killing Fields finds New York reporter Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterson) trying to find out what happened to his assistant, Dith Pran (Haing S Ngor), after Pnomh Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975. The most memorable scene of this film, courtesy of cinematographer Chris Menges, is the stumbling of the escaping Pran over a landscape covered with piles of skeletons.

The Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986)
In an Amazonian colony in the mid-18th century, Jesuits and natives try to defend their mission against a Spanish-Portuguese commercially-based alliance, which even dares to undermine the authority of the European Church.
Besides the final massacre of the native Indians and the Jesuit missionaries, the most remarkable scene in this film is when Roderiggo Mandosa (Robert De Niro), an ex-mercenary and slave merchant, tied to a huge load to weigh him down, struggles to climb the ragged and jagged waterfalls, a penance for having killed his own brother. Jeremy Irons, De Niro, Ray McAnally and Liam Neeson star, while the Amazonian setting makes this film a big screen must see.

Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier, 1996)
Set in the early 1970s' in northwest Scotland, this story of love and sacrifice received both critical and popular acclaim. Young Bess marries oil-rig worker Jan, despite the resistance of the Calvinist society she lives among, for she believes she has a special relationship with God and that he is blessing her choice. Her prayers for his return from the rig are answered when an accident renders him paralysed. Jan declares to Bess that he might get better if she takes a lover and relates to him all their amorous goings-on in detail. Robby Müller's ultra-realistic wide screen cinematography and a 1970s soundtrack featuring Deep Purple and Elton John, besides Emily Watson's Oscar nominated performance, make this film a feast for film lovers and a true triumph for contemporary cinema.

Idioterne (The Idiots, Lars Von Trier, 1998)
"My supreme goal as a director is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by the means available to me and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations."
Thus concludes the Dogma 95 manifesto, to which rules Von Trier most strictly adhered when making Idioterne (The Idiots), which he admits is a tribute to the French nouvelle vague and the swinging London period.
Alienated Karen encounters, disproves of, accepts, then joins the idiots -- a group of misfits who rebel against middle-class society and experiment with ways of subverting its norms and conventions by releasing the "inner idiot" in them, pretending to have some mental and/or physical handicap. Egocentrism drives the idiocy out of control, Karen ultimately abandons the group, but never succeeds in re-integrating herself into the kind of life she had so intensely subverted. Inspired by a Marquis De Sade line, Trier, who spends years over some scripts, finished this one in four days. Additionally, his own cinematography and direction make this a special piece of cinema, unlike the aesthetically compromising, similarly-themed The Beach, a Hollywood-produced recent effort from the Scottish trio Hodge, MacDonald and Boyle.

Mifune (S¿ren Kragh-Jacobsen, Denmark, 1999)
A Danish yuppie marries his boss's daughter and attempts to escape his poor, rural background. The death of his father forces him to return home and revisit all the skeletons in his closet: his mentally retarded older brother, his mother's suicide, childhood enemies. When he crosses paths with a Copenhagen prostitute fleeing her own demons, an unconventional romance develops. One of two films in the festival shot in accordance with the Dogma 95 Danish filmmakers' collective "vow of chastity" (see also Lars von Trier's The Idiots): filmed exclusively on-location, using hand-held cameras and no special effects.

And Life Goes On (Abbas Kiarostami, Iran, 1992)
The second film in Abbas Kiarostami's "earthquake trilogy." A film director drives his son from Tehran to an area devastated by a recent earthquake in search of two young boys who starred in his previous film. Many villagers survived the quake only because they left their homes to watch a World Cup soccer match on an outdoor communal television. Father and son encounter the survivors one by one on their journey, each of whom relates his own tale of suffering.

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