Newsletter ... March 1999

THE CINEMATIC TOURIST: LESSONS OF FOREIGN FILMS

Ask film-lovers what they expect from a foreign film: "eye strain," they'll joke, squinting at imaginary sub-titles. Then, a little more solemnly, they'll mention something like "exploring other societies, windows on the world, insights into other cultures."

And of course they'll be right. Foreign films, with their hallmark contrast of sumptuousness and grittiness, their respect for detail and dialogue and their undisguised sense of place - a different, and for us, exotic place - provide us with a vicarious immersion experience like no other.

But sometimes, it's not the differences - of society, of culture - portrayed by these films, but the similarities that remain with us as we leave the theatre. It is our heightened awareness that no matter where we live, no matter how breathtakingly beautiful or shockingly sordid our surroundings, we are all subject to the human condition. Though we may go to a foreign film prepared to look though a window, we come away realizing that all the while we have been looking in a mirror.

This sense of universal meaning may be the key to the success enjoyed by two of the QFA's spring offerings, Central Station (March 31st) and Such a Long Journey (April 14th). While the first takes place in Brazil, and the second in India, their stories resonate with enduring truths and conflicting emotions familiar to us all.

In Central Station, aging Dora survives by writing letters for illiterate clients amidst the clamour of the Rio de Janeiro railway station. Having long ago traded the luxury of compassion and pity for the distance and disdain essential to her survival, she rarely bothers to mail the correspondence of her desperate customers. But when she composes a letter for a young mother who is promptly run over by a bus, Dora is faced with a challenge to her hard-scrabble heart. The mother leaves behind a young boy; her letter seeks the boy's father. Dora's subsequent odyssey on behalf of the boy is an unsentimental journey through the human conscience: stumblingly, reluctanctly, only half-heartedly does Dora do the right thing. And in the end she has only the vaguest and most completely private of moral victories to show for her deed.

Icelandic-Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson's film version of Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey sits us down at the crowded kitchen table of Bombay bank clerk Gustad Noble. Beset by a rebellious son, intrusive neighbours, uncertain political times and now, most alarmingly, a dangerous request from a long-lost friend, Gustad bears the bewildered look of a man who has reached his limit. Trying desperately to keep a finger in every crumbling dyke, Gustad is an ordinary man who must rise to the demands of extraordinary pressures. As he lashes out at his family, we see only too well the age-old, universal collision between father and son; we recognize just as uneasily the eternal balancing act of mother and wife, who stands literally in between, shielding her son from his father's anger and her husband from her son's disdain.

And then we head home. We may not have been able to feel the crush of the Rio railway station, or the throat-catching dust of the Brazilian shanty-town. We can't quite imagine the latrine-like air of a fetid Bombay neighbourhood. But we can identify with the weary, uncertain heroism of Dora, or Gustad's long, but love-driven personal journey.

We look abroad. And ultimately, we see ourselves.

Liz Mayer