In 2001, British satirist Chris Morris drew a great deal of fire from the government and popular press for an episode of his mockumentary series Brass Eye entitled “Paedogeddon!” [The program in question mockingly pondered such matters as why Britain was so completely overrun with pedophiles (some disguising themselves, absurdly, as schoolhouses) and what measures could be taken to protect children from being lured into their clutches (including locking the children up in cabinets, and corralling them in stadiums for the night). With the doleful, self-serious tones of a news broadcaster, Morris ingenuously asked, “Why can we no longer think of the British Isles without the word ‘pedoph’ in front of them?”
Of course the point of Morris’s program—which is both brilliant and in incredibly bad taste—was not to poke fun at the idea of “interfering with children,” but at the mass hysteria, hypocritical moralizing, and even seemingly perverse attraction that the subject causes. And while it might be a stretch to say that there’s something weirdly, specifically British about this medley of confused reactions, the United Kingdom does seem to boast more freakish high-profile sex-criminals and child-murderers than most. The existence of Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, Fred and Rosemary West, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, and all the various rippers and stranglers over the years explains the country’s peculiar flair for the mythologization of monsters, fueled by conservative ideologues and red-top tabloids, and met with rubber-necking fascination by the general public.
Enter David Peace, a Yorkshireman self-exiled in Tokyo, with a debut quartet of novels—Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999), Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), Nineteen Eighty (2001) and Nineteen Eighty-Three (2002)—that track a legacy of corruption, ennui, and, yes, pedophilia in the Leeds-Bradford area over the span of those titular years. Read Leo Goldsmith’s review of the Red Riding trilogy.
Most of the gay Israeli films that have made their way to the U.S. have seemed to prefer narratives of extreme conflict. Of course there have been exceptions (last year’s glib yet exceedingly hot romantic comedy Antarctica‘s only issues were, refreshingly, those of sex and commitment), but for the most part, they place their central homosexual couplings within larger political or social frameworks that make them seem like extraordinary challenges to embrace or overcome. So in Eytan Fox’s breakout Yossi and Jagger, it’s not just a clandestine gay love affair, but one enacted within the uber-masculine barracks and battlefields of the Israeli army, and Fox’s follow-up, The Bubble, depicts, with increasing histrionics, the romance between a Palestinian and his Tel Aviv lover. Being lovers cast out of the mainstream isn’t enough; here another dimension of repression and catastrophe is layered onto homosexual desire. Of course this is the stuff of classic melodrama—the more odds the better—and it makes perfect sense in the context of a country constantly in turmoil.
Now here’s another to add to the growing subgenre of films about the two-pronged repression of gay Israelis: Haim Tabakman’s Eyes Wide Open, which situates its tenuous same-sex affair in the Orthodox community in contemporary Jerusalem. As one can imagine, much tortured hand wringing, heavy-breathing, and mezuzah-kissing ensues. Aaron (Zohar Strauss) is the thirtysomething son of a recently deceased butcher who has taken over his father’s shop. He hires a new assistant, the mysterious and undeniably hot yeshiva dropout Ezri (Ran Danker). At first he nimbly staves off the obvious attraction he has to Ezri by taking up what he perceives as a holy challenge and proudly resisting temptation. But not only is Aaron G-D-fearing, he’s also married (to a properly drab housewife, played by someone named, simply, Tinkerbell) with a couple of anonymous children, so the discovery of his eventual transgression is twofold, setting off reverberations at home and in the entire finger-wagging neighborhood.
Aaron’s ultimate decision to bed the teasing, more sensual and open Ezri—whose sexual wickedness is what might have gotten him expelled from school—happens rather abruptly, especially after his insistent, vocal Talmud interpretation that man should not enjoy life and abstain from pleasure, and that embracing life’s obstacles brings one closer to the almighty. (“You are a masterpiece,” he tells Ezri. “A challenge to overcome.”) But once he sees Ezri bending over a big Francis Bacon-esque slab of beef, all is lost: muted longing becomes passionate meat-locker lip-locking. And who can blame him? Ran Danker is flat-out dishy, and a lust object for any inclined viewer, regardless of denomination—unencumbered by too long or stiff a beard, Ezri goes for the more casual close shave. Plus his eyes are like pools of fresh chopped liver, and he has a tendency to unabashedly strip all the way down when bathing in the local holy spring. Sex trumps all—the gloves (and yarmulkes) are off. Read Michael Koresky’s review of Eyes Wide Open.
Ajami gets right to the tragic heart of the matter. Before the viewer knows what or whom he’s watching, a young boy is gunned down in the middle of a city street in broad daylight. Though a backstory is soon provided, the incident truly and crucially never makes sense. Revenge, recompense, clumsy justice, even apparently legitimate legal proceedings provide a measure of context and set the rest of the narrative in motion, but the brutal fact of the murder is never gotten over. Violence will return, again and again over the course of the film, but it is not to be justified by theoretical or political abstractions, and its impact is never softened. For all of its stories, characters, and perspectives, Ajami is essentially a sustained gaze into a widening, all-encompassing trap. Life is cheap, death is random, and no one is safe. Read Eric Hynes’s review of Ajami.
Off and Running, the feature debut from documentary filmmaker Nicole Opper, jumps right into the existential crises of its heroine, Avery Klein-Cloud, dispensing with the introduction of background information before delving into conflict. Here, in the same breath that she tells us her name, Avery confesses with frank, articulate anxiety that she has decided to contact her birth mother for the first time, and proceeds to read to us from the letter she has agonized over for so long. The fifteen-year-old African American track star was adopted at a very young age by a lesbian couple who are raising her in Brooklyn with her likewise adopted brothers Rafi, a mixed-race child born of a substance-abusing mother, and Zay Zay, a much younger Korean boy. While the family is obviously close, there is an immediate sense that they are about to enter a period of great tension. The suddenness with which we are thrust into the action is refreshing, as is Opper’s refusal to milk the complex situation for emotional effect, but these instincts also underscore a persistent predilection to tell rather than show.
About three quarters of the way through 44 Inch Chest, a battered and bloodied Melvil Poupaud, sitting handcuffed in a chair, looks at the camera for the first time. The expression on the art-house heartthrob’s face betrays fear, bewilderment, and possibly a tinge of regret. It’s almost as if he’s thinking: “I was in Rohmer’s Conte d’été, I was in Desplechin’s Un Conte de Noël, now I’ve got a wordless part, tied to a chair, in Un Cunt de Londres . . .”
In truth, so overused is the “c” profanity in 44 Inch Chest that its power is fractionally distilled to trace levels within the first reel—and this, coming from a movie whose greatest selling point according to the UK poster is that it is “from the writers of Sexy Beast.” While it’s encouraging that the stock of screenwriters has risen to the point of providing taglines for movie posters, I seem to recall that in Jonathan Glazer’s seductive gangster elegy (almost ten years ago, now), Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) first uttered the c-word on his belated entrance in reel two, a perfectly pitched moment which invoked menacing disquiet and nervous laughter: “Gotta change my shirt, I’m sweating like a c***.” As the marketers are so desperate to cash in on 44 Inch Chest’s superior stable mate (this completes a writers’ trilogy for David Scinto and Louis Mellis, with Sexy Beast and 2000’s Gangster No.1, but their collaboration has since ended in acrimony), they presumably won’t object if we make the relevant comparisons. Read the rest of Julien Allen’s review of 44 Inch Chest.
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