With the events swirling around the TTC and City Hall in early September, my filmgoing showed down a bit.

Reviewed here:

• Unfinished Stories
• L’Avocat de la terreur
• Alexandra
• Obscene

Unfinished Stories, written and directed by Pourya Azarbayjani ***

Unfinished Stories is a collection of intersecting tales of people on the streets of Teheran at night.  The principal characters are women, and their situations are by our Western measure quite ordinary, but fascinating to see in Iran where only the most conservative face is shown to the world.

Saterah (Saterah Pesyani) longs for her boyfriend, but neither family supports the marriage.  After running away from home, she tries, fruitlessly, to contact her friend from a pay phone, but the calls are always intercepted by his mother.

Hangemah (Hangemah Ghaziani) is pregnant, but her husband doesn’t want the child, and she is looking for a clinic where, on the quiet, someone will perform an abortion.

Saiideh (Saiiden Amir Saii) has a newborn infant but she cannot pay the hospital bills as her husband is in jail.  She steals her child, or so she thinks, and runs into the night.

The men we do meet play secondary roles.  A soldier waiting for a bus wants to call his lover, and he is sitting next to Saterah.  A policeman’s wife has serious heart problems, but he cannot get her into hospital.  An old man sits in a cafe.  Eventually, he goes home by taxi, but the ride is shared with the woman and her stolen baby.

In the midst of everything, a woman stands on a bridge contemplating suicide, but we’re unsure who she is.  She jumps, and her death snarls the taxi, hysterical mother and all, in traffic.

This is a film about small, everyday characters, and it is a mark of Azarbayjani’s skill that, despite an episodic two year shooting period, there is no loss of continuity.  The cast is drawn from Iranian theatre.  Our screening was the world premier, and at the Q&A, someone asked Azarbayjani how the film would be received in Iran.  He replied that this is not a popular form in Iranian cinema.  Let’s hope that someone choses to distribute this film even on a limited basis and that we will see more work from this new director.

L’Avocat de la terreur, by Barbet Schroeder (English title:  Terror’s Advocate) ***

Dating back to the Algerian war of the 50s, Jacques Vergès has defended a who’s who of modern terrorists.  Or so we would call them. 

Many are still alive and gave interviews for this film.  Their political outlooks are, of course, different from ours — one country’s hero is another’s arch villain.  The fascination lies in the interconnections, an international co-ordination that current-day press treat as a recent phenomenon, but which has been around for decades.

Some are quite adamant about their actions, some are “retired” and some rationalize by hating maimings but not murders.

Vergès is around today only because, unlike the rest of the Algerian legal defence team, he was not assassinated by the French.  In the trial of Klaus Barbie (a.k.a The Butcher of Lyon), Vergès tried to establish that French actions in Algeria were on a par with Nazi atrocities.  You might say he has a problem with governments and easily sides with, or at least works for, those who would bring them down.

He can be quite charming, but that’s the allure of a dangerous man.  Vergès claims he would defend George W.  Bush if only the man would plead guilty.  It’s a nice line, but is masks the horrors of his clients ranging from Pol Pot up to Milosevic.

At 2:15, this film is a tad too long, but it is worth seeing for historical background and an alternative view of much of our current events.

Alexandra, written and directed by Alexander Sokurov **1/2

In this quiet film about peace and co-existence, Alexander Sokurov brings us Galina Vishnevskaya as Alexandra, an old woman visiting her grandson Denis (Vasily Shevtsov), an army captain stationed in Chechnya.

Nothing really seems to happen, but this is a story about people trapped in war, not the heroics of war itself.  Alexandra has not seen Denis for seven years, and as she wanders around his camp, she is saddened by the state of his troops and their gear.  In many ways, she is Mother Russia bemoaning how a once-proud army has come to such a rag-tag state. 

One day, Alexandra visits the local market, a short walk from the camp.  The locals are suspicious of this visiting Russian, but she befirends a woman on one of the stalls, a former teacher, and they go home for tea.  It’s rather bad tea, and they are sitting in an apartment block partly reduced to rubble by shelling.  On her trip back to the camp, Alexandra has a guide who knows a shortcut.  When they come to a checkpoint, the Russians know the Chechnyan guide and everyone is very friendly.  All the same, the locals resent the occupying army.

A few days later, it’s time for Alexandra to leave.  She visits the market again, there is much friendly talk and hopes of a visit to St. Petersburg even though we, the audience, doubt this will ever happen.  Meanwhile, the army is moving out on major operation that inevitably will bring no good to the Chechnyans.

Alexandra is full of small incidents, bits of character, observations that the two “sides” are not all that different, and a pervading sadness that the fighting is even necessary.  This is an intriguing counterpart to all of the Iraq-inspired stories in the 2007 festival.  Peace should be so easy, but reality is much less hopeful.

Obscene, by Neil Ortenberg & Daniel O’Connor ***

In our “enlightened” age, we think that hiding writings from public view in the name of protection from obscenity is absurd, with the possible exception of certain types of exploitative material, but this is a comparatively recent situation.  Censorship has been around for a long time affecting authors now considered to as modern greats.

Obscene is the story of Grove Press, the Evergreen Review and their founder, Barney Rosset.  The film works on three levels — as biography, as history and as a subtle warning.

Rosset himself is an odd hero.  His family was well-off, and this gave him the means both to operate as a publisher and to take on the legal establishment.  Gradually, however, he was forced to sell off land in The Hamptons and eventually lost control of Grove Press itself.

As history, Obscene is a walk through modern literary culture with the battles for publication of works by authors such as Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs.  The list of authors published in the Review is an impressive one, and Rosset fought many battles to keep their works in print.   

To someone living in the age of the web, the constraints of the 1950s are hard to imagine, but I remember a time when having certain books in high school would earn you a stiff lecture and detentions.  At least one of those books is now a staple of English lit courses. 

In one hilarious newsreel clip, a young Gerald Ford holds up a copy of the Review and proclaims it the worst sort of filth.  This was long before Ford became president in the wake of Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon. 

Battles to change legal, political and public opinion and mores don’t come easily, and Rosset was one of many whose actions brought on the liberal framework of 1960s and beyond.  We live in another age when some would tell us what to read and control whose ideas we can hear, all with a subtle undercurrent that those who don’t conform are less than worthy of respect.  I will return to this in the review of Trumbo on Day 10.

For more information about Obscene, visit its website at Double O Film Productions and their page “Who Is Barney Rosset“.