September 18-24, 2003
screen picks
Love & Diane (Fri., Sept. 19, Sun., Sept. 21 and Tue.-Thu., Sept. 2325, 7 p.m., $8.50-$10, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) The weight of time is one of the hardest things for a movie to convey -- a simple dissolve might convey its passage, but how to make that passage felt, rather than just perceived? The issue is particularly germane to Jennifer Dworkin's documentary, Love & Diane, because the time that's elapsing is particularly precious: the first years of a child's life. As 18-year-old Love Hinson struggles to regain custody of her infant son, Donyaeh, you're only too aware that the longer the process drags on, the less happy the potential reunion might be. And yet you see that Love's problems aren't of the kind that can be quickly resolved: most notably a violent temper and a refusal to stick with court-ordered psychotherapy, to say nothing of her intensely charged relationship with her mother, Diane Hazzard.
Like Steve James' Stevie and Frederick Wiseman's Domestic Violence, Love & Diane shows that the systems created to help families in need have become a gnarled web of incompatible half-measures: Due to Diane's conviction for child neglect, Donyaeh won't be released into Love's care until she moves out; Donyaeh's caretaker is eligible for a "rent enhancement" check, but Love can't get custody until she gets her own apartment, which she can't afford without that check. (Diane and three of her children are forced to move as well.) Because Love is HIV-positive, she's eligible for additional assistance, but only if she becomes sick, at which point she might be unable to care for her son.
Dworkin's doc isn't a bleeding-heart treatise; while laying out the history of often-fatal alcoholism in Diane's family, and the six years Love cycled through group homes while her mother was recovering from crack addiction, she admits their complicity in their own situations. Watching Love's lawyer respond to the news that she's stopped going to therapy, again, despite multiple warnings that it's her only hope to regain custody, you can only marvel at the patience in the lawyer's reproach: You may feel like giving her a shake. (It would be one thing if the therapy requirement were arbitrary, but given Love's obvious unwillingness to confront her own past or her anger toward her mother, the need for therapy is incontestable.) Without vilifying "the system," Love & Diane shows how its attempts to alleviate pain end up causing more of it: Diane, who called social services after a family blowout, can only hang her head and sob, "What'd I do? What'd I do?" (That's not counting the collateral damage: One of the story's most agonizing tensions comes from wondering how Donyaeh's doting foster mother might react if Love gets him back.) It took Dworkin five years of filming to find a happy place to end her story, and that's still quicker than many. Dworkin and Hazzard will be present at Friday night's screening, part of Scribe Video Center's Producers' Forums.
Films From Along the Silk Road (Thu.-Sun., Sept. 18-21, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) The film's in International House's Silk Road series, boiled down from a larger retrospective unveiled at Lincoln Center earlier this year, are of the kind invariably described as "poetic," which is to say they prize impressionistic logic over continuity, imagery over exposition. How much of this is regional style, how much programmer bias is difficult to say, although Ardak Amirkulov's The Fall of Otrar, shown at I-House in January, suggests Kazakhstan, at least, has more red-blooded stuff to offer. Still, there's definitely a regional tradition on display here, if not the only one.
Khodjakuli Narliev's The Daughter-in-Law (Thu., 8 p.m.) and Ali Khamraev's Without Fear (Fri., 8 p.m.) both date from 1972, and each looks to the past to reflect on the present. Hailing from Turkmenistan, The Daughter-in-Law is shot in desert reds and yellows that recall the most eye-popping of African cinema, and returns to the period immediately after World War II, charting the simultaneous (if not precisely overlapping) grief of a lost soldier's wife and father. Opening with a carefully edited sequence in which the two frantically empty a well to protect their sheep from contaminated water, the film contrasts the pressures of their daily toil with the temptation to reflect on the past and imagine the future that might have been (or might be, if you believe the wife's hopes that her husband is merely missing and not dead). Narliev's conclusion falls back on naturalist cliches, always a danger in the realm of the quote-unquote poetic, but the movie's tone is dreamlike enough that you can just dismiss it as yet another vision.
Without Fear looks back to 1920s Uzbekistan, following a Red Army officer assigned the unenviable task of convincing village women to remove their Muslim veils (here called yashmaks) and modernize. (The removal of the yashmak, here signifying the end of mourning, plays a central role in The Daughter-in-Law as well.) The film's crisp black-and-white imagery and delicate dissection of the tension between tradition and freedom contrasts dramatically with the hackneyed tropes of Khamraev's Man Follows Birds (Sat., 8 p.m.). Not since Valerie and Her Week of Wonders has I-House shown a movie so clumsy in its coming-of-age poetics, so unwilling to shackle its blocky images to anything so trivial as a plot.
Too bad I-House didn't double up on Darezhan Omirbaev instead. Over the course of five features, the Kazakh director has been acknowledged as the region's pre-eminent filmmaker. Kairat (Sun., 7 p.m.) is, like Man Follows Birds, an impressionistic coming-of-age film, but Omirbaev's poetry doesn't come between quotation marks; his images are more suggestive than insistent, a breeze past your cheek rather than a poke in your ribs. The film follows its adolescent hero through various rites of passage -- driver's ed, what might be his first date -- with monochromatic lucidity: When the camera discovers Kairat and his date at the movies, a disembodied shot of their arms barely touching conveys both their nascent longing and their unwillingness to admit it. Sunday's free screening, which also includes Omirbaev's short, July, will be introduced by Kazakh ambassador Kanat B. Saudabayev, and new International House president Oliver Franklin.
Unmade Beds/The Foreigner (Fri., Sept. 19, 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th and Race sts., 215-568-4515, ext. 4099, www.voicenet.com/~jschwart) There's no question Amos Poe had some cool friends. While Wednesday night's screening of Blank Generation (1976), which opened ICA's Patti Smith exhibit, showed Poe's gift for getting close to Smith, Television, Ramones, Talking Heads and Richard Hell (unfortunately without sound-recording equipment), his first two dramatic features, presented back-to-back by Secret Cinema, feature cameos by Debbie Harry, The Cramps (as a street gang), The Erasers and a host of all-but-forgotten CBGB scenesters. Unfortunately, as a filmmaker, Poe makes a great social coordinator. By far the more competent of the two, The Foreigner (1978) is an unholy marriage of Andy Warhol and Alphaville that starts with endless shots of bottle-blond foreign spy Max Menace (Eric Mitchell) walking the streets, and ends with endless shots of him running through the streets. This is progress? Unmade Beds (1976) doesn't even have that much momentum; a supposed Breathless remake, it mines Godard for atmosphere but not intelligence. For punk historians only.
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