Silent Souls and Kawasaki's Rose

Right away, it was so nice PIFF had begun again. Silent Souls opens with an in-motion tracking shot: we're behind a bicycle with a bird cage resting on its rear, two birds inside. Switch to a reverse POV: a moment for the viewer to simply soak in the passing forest, the small puddles of water on the asphalt, the emotion of motion. I felt it then, and it was what we all said to each other when the movie was over: this is why we love movies. Poetry is alive in cinema. We (I) sometimes forget after so many visits to American multiplexes, but today we (I) remembered.

Silent Souls is a Russian movie with the personality of Russian and Finnish movies, and the film is about the Merja people, an ethnic minority from a historically Finnish enclave of Russia, a people experiencing the steady extinction of their culture, customs, and memories. The film explores internal and external reasons for this, and Aist admits that "no one remember anymore" the history of certain Merja traditions.

A terrible feeling of sadness of loss haunts the film. Aist (the narrator and one of two protagonists) has been asked by his friend Miron to travel with him to an emotionally significant river in order to perform the Merja death ritual, which involves rivers. A river is a sort of highway to heaven, and Aist tells us that if a Merja dies by drowning, they will simply weigh the body down without performing the death ritual. For them drowning is a privilege, and purposeful drowning is considered impolite, like cutting in line to arrive at heaven.

"A woman's body is also a river that carries grief away."

It captures well the feeling of hopeless loneliness in the midst of people - the type of loneliness sometimes called the worst. Aist and Miron, often in a car together, for most of the film together, seem incapable of truly bridging the distance between themselves, of truly connecting to each other. Another Merja custom is "smoking." Smoking is sharing private things about the dead that wouldn't have been shared while the person was alive; a process Aist refers to as turning "grief into tenderness" (a lovely sentiment worth expressing and demonstrating). Miron is sometimes smoking, but Aist wonders what Miron isn't saying, if he's really sharing anything unknown, and the audience is allowed to know, through flashbacks, things we can wonder whether the two know about each other.

The second film was Kawasaki's Rose, from Czech Republic, directed by Jan Hrebejk, whose film Shameless I saw at least year's PIFF. Like in Shameless, Hrebejk weaves disparate emotions into an unusually shaped narrative that flashes with moments of pain, beauty, and love. For example, there is a musical sequence of petty theft (chocolate bars) and arrest. This quality I most admire about Hrebejk.

It's a quality well-suited to some of Kawasaki's Rose, a film that explores entangled familial and national relationships. A son-in-law, who is a "jealous outcast from the family church," uncovers damaging secrets about a father-in-law he's always despised, and then much of the film deals with sins of the past haunting the sinner and sinned-against in the present. Unfortunately some of this material doesn't allow Hrebejk to shine. Branching paths are sometimes ideological rather than emotional, despite Hrebejk attempting to make them otherwise, and most points are followed through to their near-conclusions, which created a feeling of disconnect for me.

Kawasaki's Rose, like Silent Souls, has a theme of "a common fight against the loss of collective memory," but Silent Souls makes this theme universal and transcendent, and I think Kawasaki's Rose fails to do this. It fails because it has a specific, political agenda at its core, and though it searches for several ways to unbound its themes, including a documentary project within the movie, and the introduction of characters of different perspectives, its vacillation between the spiritual and tangible contaminates the sincerity of each. I would think my unfamiliarity with Czech politics of the 70s was one of the problems, but the film spends plenty of time explicating the historical political climate: doesn't this make it the film's problem and not mine? I guess maybe, maybe not.