In a future time movies such as these two, with scripts that are dramatic machines, will feature automatons in staring roles. And no one will notice the difference. To be fair, Son of Babylon offers more potential for an actor to breathe; the young boy plays his plucky character with gusto and preciousness. To be judgmental, isn't that the performance of all children in road movies? Movies like these two I normally don't see, and seeing them during PIFF reminds me why I don't, and how they can sometimes offer surprises and delights despite themselves.
Son of Babylon is about people who know "Saddam is a bastard and the Americans are pigs." It offers tiny thrills and tiny tragedies with big emotions, like when the young boy boards the bus that drives away without the grandmother who frantically chases after it. Around these moments swirl a major tragedy, the one of Hussein and the collapse of Iraqi society.
The movie reminds you that so much went missing from the lives of these people. And as everything vanished around them, the people remained, roamers of the desolation, the truly post-apocalyptic, forced to become scavengers of terrible ruins; heartbroken people who visit mass graves in search of family members (I wrote this during the movie, which is sometimes boring). At times there's an almost overwhelming sadness to the movie (and really didn't require a road movie shtick in my opinion) including some late images of a mass grave and fragmented skeletal remains.
The First Grader is a movie about an 84 year old man who wants to attend school for the first time, and it's made for an 84 year old man seeing a movie for the first time (that line © me). This is apparent from the very beginning, and so I thought, okay, the surface rings false, but what about the subsurface? I kept trying to see it, but the dramatic jet engines were on full thrust, and you know what that's like, with the wind of drama blowing so fiercely in my face that I sometimes had to close my eyes. There's a lot of emphasis on the man's age and determination without an expansion of character, except there are these horribly cheesy flashbacks of his past tribulations.
My friends, there is a flashback, at the moment the old man approaches a pencil sharpener, of a horrendous moment from his past, involving a sharpened pencil being stuck inside his ear! This movie is based on a true story, but even if that part is entirely true I would've buried the damn thing, or saved it for my horror comedy, also titled The First Grader (aka The First Grader from Hell). It also reminded me that my good friend Joe Peeler is right and not every dramatic strand requires dialogue, because for example this movie shares a theme of the past haunting the present, like some of the other films this week, but in this movie I'm absolutely 100% sure because there are these lines: "Can't we just put the past behind us?" and, "The past is always present, never forget that." For a movie populated by people who don't like to be told what to do, it's odd this movie tells me how to feel.
"An old man, no better than a goat."
I'm not the audience for this movie anyway. There is an audience for this movie! I swear it, because at the end people applauded. My friends, I was there. I wasn't astounded either, conscious as I was of the fact that the man next to me kept wiping the tears from his face. Two-handed wipes across the face, maybe a thousand tears!!!!
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