About Reality, Appearances and just Who We Are

Yes, I thought I’d be at the press conference with Oliver Stone and John Travolta today. But I’ve already written about their (out of competition) film SAVAGES here on this blog. After the press screening of A PERDRE LA RAISON, a great co-production of France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland I just couldn’t bring myself to talk to those mainstreamers from Hollywood. Right now they’re on the red carpet, which is a green one in Zurich. I don’t care . . . And here’s why:

A PERDRE LA RAISON uses very soft tones in cinematography and music to describe a human catastrophe: What on earth might drive a woman to kill her four little children? When did the love Murielle had for her Maroccan husband Mounir turn into anxiety, depression and finally total blackout? And what power does a freakish old man wield over Mounir and his family? The guy pays for him, treats him like a father but then again like a slave – and he doesn’t let the young familiy go their own ways until the bitter end. The film works a lot with shadows in the foreground restricting the acting and breathing room of the characters in the background. There is no murdering on screen, no blood, no open desperation. But towards the end you remember to have seen four small white coffins being loaded on a Belgian airport into a plane to Marocco…

The other film I saw today, THE IMPOSTOR, was even more heart wrenching and disturbing, because it tells the real events about a guy who was mistreated as a child and at the age of 23 poses as the 16 year old Nicholas Barclay who had been missing from his home in Texas for almost 4 years. The weirdly likeable and disturbing man – who by the way looks nothing like the missed boy – passes US controls from Embassy to FBI and does achieve his coveted American identity, only to accuse the family – who lovingly had taken him in (wanting to believe he actually was the lost son) – of having murdered the kid he was posing as.

Tell me – why should I have cared for SAVAGES, when such artful strangeness comes my way?