|
 |
|
The Barbarian Invasions Canada/France, 2003 Cast: Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau, Marie-Josée Croze, Marina Hands, Dorothée Berryman, Johanne Marie Tremblay, Pierre Curzi, Yves Jacques, Louise Portal, Dominique Michel A commentary by Ann Nugent This is not a review. It is my response to Denys Arcand's film The Barbarian Invasions . Every life needs imperfection, passion and meaning - that's my reading of Arcand's film at the narrative level. At first look the story is about the death of a man, a very ordinary man, a slightly-rumpled university lecturer, Rémy (Rémy Girard). Rémy is far from being perfect. He has pursued life's pleasures in the form of good food and wine, women, and almost ceaseless conversation, regardless of the cost to others, particularly his own family. His daughter is an adventurer, sailing the Pacific delivering yachts to wealthy clients. Her voice and face come to us jerkily through radio telephone, creating a strangely disembodied feeling. It's as though she has gone as far away from her family as possible. Rémy's estranged son, Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau) is the 'new' man - the prototype of the successful, emotionally self-contained man in the present generation of 30-40 year olds. He is an investment banker glued to a computer terminal, and locked in a virtual world where financial success is the only orientation, the only value. Sébastien is engaged to the beautiful Gaëlle (Marina Hands), a woman who wants security for herself and for the children of their marriage. She is not convinced by old-fashioned sentimental expressions of 'love'. Sentimental love was destroyed for her in the collapse of her own parents' marriage. Gaëlle and Sébastien are comfortable in their love-making, but hardly passionate. They are polite and they care for each other, but this is thin gruel, a safe non-risk-taking form of emotional life insurance. For Sébastien meaning is to be found in the things he manages, his banking deals, his markets, his risk transfers. Sébastien does not love money but he knows its efficacy in getting things done. Gaëlle works in a firm of art valuers and auctioneers, another hint at the pervasive power of money to turn beauty into a commodity. At the linear narrative level we see the change, the cross-over taking place between Sébastien and Rémy in the weeks leading up to Rémy's death. In this crossing-over both Rémy and Sébastien gain a deeper understanding of each other. It sounds mawkish; but it is not. Being present at the death of another person and forgiving all that has gone before - is a privilege that very few are able to achieve in this technological age. But Rémy and Sébastien do. A major figure in relieving Rémy's pain is Sébastien's childhood friend turned drug addict, Nathalie (a performance that won Marie-Jose Croze, Best Actress Award at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival). Natalie's interaction both with Sébastien and Rémy restore her self-respect and help her to try to break her habit. Sébastien comes to his father's aid, only because his mother , Rémy's ex-wife Louise (Dorothée Berrryman) begs him to. Sébastien is just the person she needs. He has the money and the skills to manipulate systems (and people). He uses all his know-how to ensure that his father has friends around him and is saved from the harsh prospect of dying in a noisy, over-crowded hospital. Money is the key in all Sébastien's exchanges: knowing when to offer it and when to hold back. Rousseau is not 'handsome' in the glamour sense, but his screen-presence is magnetic. He conveys a mesmerising self-assurance. Here is a man who can make things happen. Edge this with a restrained masculinity and women go weak at the knees. The story line occupies the foreground but at the same time Arcand uses his camera to question the changes taking place in Western society - for him Quebec, Canada. He shows what can only be described as the decay of those societies. The barbarians are not simply at the gates, they are within. There is however, a constant redeeming value - beauty. Rémy asks to be taken to the lake. His wheelchair is perched at the end of a jetty, around him is all the grandeur of the forest and water. The camera work of Guy Dufaux gives us a powerful understanding of the fragility and puniness of human existence when set against the abundance and glorious continuity of creation. At the same time he makes us aware that beauty is not only in nature; it is also in people, that inner spark. Throughout the film we catch glimpses of beauty in the flawed individuals gathered around Rémy. These glimpses of personal beauty are caught by the camera work; they are as subtle as changes in the light. Arcand seems to take a conservative right wing view of Canada's health system and its public institutions such as universities. Perhaps he is simply showing it as it is. The hospital's crowded corridors are compared with the up-to-date equipment and accommodation over the border in the United States, albeit that the United States hospital is a paying one. The decay, even corruption, of Canada's health system is exposed when Sébastien penetrates into the office of the chief administrator whose lips burble/verbal in managerial-ese; going round and round in circles in a vain attempt to reconcile opposite propositions: the difference between touted government policy and abysmally inadequate hospital practice. Sébastien locates the hospital's real power-brokers, the union organisers. He does deals with these decidedly shady looking characters who are little less than petty thieves. The union bosses make decisions not on any ethical basis but on the basis of getting goods for themselves. They gave another sinister, chilling image of the barbarians within. Gaëlle is called upon to value warehouses full of Catholic devotional statues and memorabilia from pre-Vatican II days. 'Is any of it of commercial value, can it be sold?' asks a relic priest in clerical garb. 'No, not on a world market,' she replies. The man is at a loss. It was some time in 1966, he says, that something happened; it was then the churches emptied. And he's right something did happen in the 60s. People refused to be ruled by institutions; they had a new vision, a new hope called 'freedom'. And that's the lament of this film - over time the vision shared by Rémy and his friends, of a brave new world, based on individual freedom, has failed them. In this decaying world, goodness goes underground. In contrast to the deserted churches, there is a 'barefoot mendicant ' , Sister Contance (Johanne Marie Tremblay) who walks the crowded corridors and rooms of the hospital giving Communion to those who wish to receive, regardless of their physical or moral states. The contrast carries the message: something has died but perhaps something is being re-born. Commodification of everything: when Rémy announces to his students that due to health reasons he will not be returning to lecture, a single hand slowly raises itself, 'Will that affect our deadlines?' the student asks. Defeated, dejected Rémy leaves the room, and the substitute teacher swings into action, dispensing the facts of history, just the facts, ma'am. No wonder the students seem to lack any sense of value or proportion. However, the students do visit Rémy and he is touched by their visit; but in the world of real-politic which is being manipulated by Sébastien, Rémy has been deceived. Like all dying people Rémy asks what he has achieved in life - he regrets the book he never wrote . He feels unworthy of the love of his daughter and his son. There's no doubt Rémy is a flawed human being, but his flawed-ness is what makes him able to be loved. His legacy to Sébastien is the possibility life without handrails, a life a bit more risky and open to imperfection and passion. We all give each other reasons to live. Arcand searches those reasons. Unlike the London working-class characters in Fred Schepisi's more sombre and more emotionally engaged Last Orders , Arcand's characters use intellectual arguments for their self-justification. Rémy and his friends, all lefties, were committed to their visions of how the world should be. Their visions were the product of intellectual work. But they became soft, and their visions proved fallacious. In their own lifetimes they'd seen their demi-gods, Mao, Stalin et al come tumbling down. But at least they were there, and at least they could trace their lineage of their thought back to the Greeks, back to the Enlightenment, back to the Founding Fathers. At least they knew where they were coming from. At least they believed in an intellectual life, independent of material consumption. What went wrong ? Has the intelligence DNA petered out? The tragedy portrayed in The Barbarian Invasions is that very little remains, in comparison to what Rémy's generation wanted to bequeath. Somehow the 60s dazzled them and in being deceived their legacy is diminished. Still, there was something of beauty in the 60s, or so they thought, but now it is horribly disfigured, and their children have been hurt by them, unintentionally perhaps, but hurt just the same. However, the story is not finished, there is still time and hope. And it is in Rémy's personal story, his dying, that we see a redeeming of the past. I'm not entering into the debate about euthanasia. The pertinent point is that Rémy is dying; not that he has appointed the hour. If I have a quibble it is that Rémy seems a bit chubby for a terminally ill cancer patient. We know death is not a jolly jaunt as it might appear in this film, but it can be accepted, and Rémy accepts. Redemption comes in the reunion of father and son, in his daughter's farewell from somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and in a lesser key Rémy's friendship with Nathalie. In the hours before Rémy's death, when the friends gather together at house by the lake, they know that life is nothing without beauty and the pleasure of the company of friends. If the film finished there it would have been too sweet for my taste. But the end frames suggest another sort of inheritance; that 'DNA' might work in unexpected ways. Sébastien takes Nathalie to his father's house, the house of his father's mistresses, the house his mother would never visit. He gives her the key. And the repressed attraction between them bursts out in Nathalie's farewell kiss. As Sébastien and Gaëlle fly back to London, Sébastien looks out the window and one has the feeling that he probably won't be quite as perfect or comfortable living with Gaëlle, as he has been. Some of us die screaming, afraid to let go; some die violently, shocked at the suddenness of death, some deaths, like Rémy's leave a sense of calm. Rémy's last memory is of his first erotic awakening, a clip from an old black and white movie, showing the thighs, not of a pin-up girl, but of a candidate saint. But then modesty can be a great aphrodisiac. Rémy dies an enviable death, surrounded by friends and with a smile on his face. © Ann Nugent May 2004 Jesus of Montreal: motifs and meanings • essay by Ann Nugent First published Blast Magazine, No.13-14, The film Jesus of Montreal, Canada/France (1989) directed by Denys Arcand, uses a modern re-enactment of the traditional Passion Play to deconstruct, allegorically and artistically, the realities of modern urban existence. Arcand's film is crystalline and prismatic. Just as a prism fractures a single beam of light into its diverse shafts of colour, so this film illuminates and separates the obscured motifs and meanings of living in a contemporary metropolis. Fundamentally the film is a Dostoyevsky-like debate about the human need for belief in some transcendental certainty. The film opens with two counter-poised images: Pergolesi's beautiful Stabat Mater sung in a church choir-loft; and the rejection of belief in an on-stage representation of existential angst against the god who is dead. In a sudden change of scene the film audience is catapulted our of the world of art into the noisily hollow chat of theatre groupies. How might meaning be found in this modern Babel? The Search 'You are looking for Jesus?' the library assistant asks Daniel Colombe, a drop-out actor who is researching the Jesus story for a revamped version of the passion play which he is to direct at a Catholic shrine. She answers on her own behalf 'He will find you'. The film, however, demolishes that pietistic Christian hope. Colombe works Hamlet's Soliloquy into the fabric of his passion play and so shows human beings' ever-continuing obsession with their own mortality. Throughout history people have attempted to explain the meaning of life (and death) by constructing myths. In Colombe's play, Pilate's speech to Jesus condemned to death, is a resume of the comparative religions up to the Roman occupation of Judea. Christian and classical myths are threaded throughout the film. The restaurant at the top of the corporation tower, the point of the three temptations before death of the Jesus-Colombe character, is called Charon, after the ferryman of who in Roman mythology, rows the souls of the dead across the Styx. This intertwining of pagan and christian allusions undermines the view that a return to practices based on christian religious belief alone can provide a basis for living in modern times. In Jesus of Montreal , Arcand also ridicules the superstitious explanations FO latterday fundamentalist cultists - the rigmarole about credit cards, 666, and outer-space visitations, is a comic high point of the film. Yet, he seems also to call into question the adequacy of scientific myths as shown in the sound and light collage of the origin of the universe. That sequence ' leaves a lot unanswered' says Rene, the apostle Paul figure. If explanations, pagan or christian, scientific or superstitious, do not provide a satisfactory basis for action by men and women living in modern times, what does? Answers, perhaps - In Jesus of Montreal, Arcand answers with two parallel hypotheses - Art and Knowledge. At the same time he sets about demolishing the anti-theses which are motors of live in modern Montreal. Arcand suggests that the anti-thesis of art (creativity) is the cannibalising of art in advertising in order to promote uncritical consumerism; and the anti-thesis of knowledge is a quasi-magical explanation of perception. In the film Arcand explores the nexus that exists between quasi-magic (false knowledge) and consumerism (false art). The nexus pivots around the creation of double images. Arcand's film, itself abounds with double images, working at different paces and at different levels of consciousness. In the film the parallels, references inter and intra, and the delayed recognition of the significance of phrases, images and actions, make a complex inter-connected web of meaning which mentally engages the viewer long after the reels have stopped turning. Thus in form, as well as in content, Arcand involves his audience in unravelling the double imaging that is endemic in modern life. His film, concerned as it is with the production of a play within a film, is an image of double-image, a re-representation. However, Arcand is homeopathetic in his intent, he attempts to use double-image effects to diagnose the double-imaging in modern society. Double images - institution, art and advertising Modern corporate society sustains its enterprises by proliferating double images. The double images are most evident in advertising. But they are also evident in the capacity of the corporations to 'incorporate' almost by sleight of hand, the activities and talents of people of goodwill. Arcand's film suggests that 'double images' are used by institutions, including corporations and the church, to delude individuals and consequently to reduce them to the status of slaves or robots. The black woman who calls to Jesus in the play, is a victim of hysteria, fostered by a church that preys upon her powerlessness as an impoverished citizen. The actors who are dubbing voices for a pornographic movie use their talents as robots, in order to make a living. They know their talents are being prostituted to serve market consumerism, but they feel unable to change the economic 'reality'. The peak of 'double images' occurs in the production of an advertising clip where false art and false knowledge coalesce. The concept, Kundera's 'lightness of being' (art) is being used to promote a product, esprit numero 7 , a perfume. Only in the deluding double imaging of advertising (essential to consumerism) could Kundera's concept and a perfume be juxtaposed. It is not until the end of the sequence that the audience realises that this is artful commerce, not art. In the film, modern corporate enterprises, including the church and the media, are castigated for prostituting art and artists. What are these corporate entities, where are they to be found? They seem as intangible as darkness. However, throughout the film, Arcand uses images of the city of Montreal, in daytime and at night, in it whole and its parts, to symbolise the elusive corporate nature of modern society. As well as the panoramic views of the city Arcand repeats shots of shafts of buildings that dwarf the men and women who walk in their shadow. In the subway the silver hypotenuse-escalator intersects with an apparently infinite perpendicular wall. Caught in its angle are the two young women singing Stabat Mater with their begging bowl, and behind them the head of the 'great actor' who sold his art for the advertising dollar. This complex single image is a powerful exposure of the way individuals are trapped into the service of, or cast out by, the so-called 'market regulated' corporations. Double Images - knowledge, technology and quasi-magic In Jesus of Montreal, Arcand seems to be making a distinction between knowledge and quasi-magically manipulated effects. He seems to be saying that in modern times there is a confusion between manipulated effects and sound technical knowledge and that this confusion is used by institutions to aggregate power. This idea is introduced very early in the film. In theatrical productions apparently magical effects, as all actors know, are obtained by technical means. In the passion play, Colombe and the actors re-present the miracles of Jesus. In doing so they expose the paper-thin distinction which believers are prepared to place between the miraculous and the magical. Since the magician flying in the night sky, explosions, Jesus walking on water (a submerged plank) are no more than cleverly contrived theatrical tricks, what price are the miracles of Jesus? In a comic yet poignant scene, the black woman takes the on-stage Jesus and his miracles as real. In her church-fostered magical way of thinking she is unable to distinguish between what is and what seems to be. It is not surprising that towards the end of the film, Raymond the priest-curator of the shrine, attempts to justify the selling of holy oils and medals and the pseudo-therapy of the confessional, as a cheap solace for the oppressed. But by them it is evident that he is more interested in hanging on to his sinecure in the institutional church than he is in awakening individual consciences (especially his own). Arcand's espousal of a knowledge-based understanding as opposed to a quasi-magical/miraculous world view reaches its un-rebuttable statement in the surgical transplant of Daniel's heart and eyes. Some people see this as a rather mawkish ending - the contrived resurrection of the dead actor. I don't. I see it as the brilliant finishing off of the debate which runs throughout the film. If one accepts that God is dead, then one has the choice of choosing between magic and knowledge. At the societal level, technology represents the efforts of human beings to apply human knowledge to actual problems in life. In the transplant operation we see the rerstoration of sight and the prolonging of life, not by miraculous intervention, but by the work and knowledge of human beings (even if a little over-acted in the film). In the film Daniel Colombe is well and truly dead and buried: his death is announced, the respirator is switched off, and the coffin is lowered into the crematorial ovens. There is not trick, there is no resurrection. However, some good does come of the death - another man's life is prolonged and a blind woman sees again. By contrasting two hospital scenes, one careless and life endangering, the other operating kindly and efficiently, Arcand subtly counterpoints the capacity of human beings to improve life by the application of technology and the human capacity to make misery by neglect. The wards of St Mark's Hospital are a condemnation of the social neglect that passes for welfare. Rehabilitation of the machine in movies I find the film's rehabilitation of technology refreshing. Technology has generally received a bad press in film. The machine in Metropolis is presented as the enslaver of human kind. Traditionally the makers of machines have been shown as fiends, dabbling in knowledge beyond their right - such as Victor Frankenstein, originally created in literature by 18 th century novelist Mary Shelley. Chaplin's Modern Times and more recently Rollerball, The Cars That Ate Paris, and Mad Max portray the power of the machine and/or failed technologies to wreak havoc in the humanscape. Arcand rightly turns the prism around. In Jesus of Montreal he implies that it is not technical knowledge but a propensity towards magical belief that enslaves human beings. The problem with the film is that in making a film that de-masks the manipulated/quasi-magical distortions practised by the corporations, church, advertising and commerce, Arcand has made a film that could be interpreted as a modern miracle play. The parallels with the gospel stories, the charismatic figure of Daniel Colombe, the appeal of the group of actors, as well as the clearly identified devil in the shape of the corporation lawyer, and the lose soul in the case of the 'bad' priest Raymond, all make possible a facile interpretation of a complex work. The transplant of Colombe's organs most of all lays the film open to being seen as a modern miracle play. When Jane Austen wrote Northanger Abbey in 1798, which was her rebuttal of the gothic novel, she used structures of the genre she was endeavouring to expose. In a paradoxical way her rebuttal of the gothic novel was itself a gothic novel. Arcand's film runs the risk of being caught in a similar trap. Moral wars in modern times Throughout the film Arcand portrays the difficulty which men and women have in making moral judgements and acting morally in modern contexts. The corporation lawyer is a nice chap, intelligent, reasonable and urbane. However, his stylish turn of phrases belies the erosion of the integrity of the individual which results from his suggestions. He smoothly facilitates the corporate mode within which everything - Oxfam, writers, artists, theatre groups can be either encompassed or bought. Although the temptation scene with the 'devil' lacks the dramatic power of the earlier temple scene when Colombe drives the crass advertising agents from the audition studio, it shows a more alluring and more persuasive incorporative gambit. Perhaps it is significant that after the death of Colombe his fellow actors go, not to their agents for more advertising work, but to the 'devil'. They gather for a meeting with the business-suited corporation lawyer, high in the corporation sky-scraper, the city spread out below them. They want to form a Daniel Colombe theatre company, in order to continue the ideas and inspiration of the dead actor. 'Of course', says the lawyer-facilitator of himself, ' he has always said there is box office in the avant garde'. Daniel's friends go along with the institutionalisation of their group with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Mirelle, alone, walks away. An ending or another beginning? What meaning does the film carry? I cam away from Arcand's Jesus of Montreal convinced that modern men and women need the un-deluding prismatic vision of artists. Like Iris Murdock, Arcand seems also to be saying that art by its nature is directed towards the good - not in a sentimental or pietistic way - but in an essential way. Further he seems to suggest that societies that mis-use and abuse the creative inquiries of artists (individual and collective) walk a perilous path towards total materialistic hedonism, or escapist, superstitious fantasy. For me, the film reaffirmed the human capacity and need for creative production. Without art there is no beauty, and without beauty, no goodness - and following Arcand's thread - without goodness there can be little hope of justice. The final scene in which the young women offer their song to the passing crowd, carries a bitter truth. The passer-by tosses a coin, but she doesn't pause to listen to the beauty of their song. Arcand's film challenges not only the artists whose creativity is being expropriated, but also their audiences - the men and women in the streets of the modern city - to listen to, to know and to value the singers' song. © Ann Nugent
Courage to Care …Some thoughts on the Courage to Care travelling exhibition which I saw at Moree in May 2003. Images from the Courage to Care exhibition that I saw at the Moree Plains Gallery just three weeks ago, are returning clearly to my mind. The exhibition narrates the most terrible destruction of human life in modern times (the Holocaust), but at the same time it gives some reason for hope, for keeping on, for constructing the good, for remembering. Colour-coded explanatory wall panels tell the story. Blue panels show Jewish people who survived the Holocaust and who now live in Australia; green panels relate the stories of those who dared to help the Jewish people, and brown panels are devoted to people like Raoul Wallenberg, Anna Frank, Oska Schindler and Chiune (Sampo) Sugehara who are now dead. As well, a video shows the survivors telling their own stories. Several display cabinets contain artefacts from concentration
camps and some Jewish sacred objects. The striped jacket of a Jewish
concentration camp prisoner, yellow stars which Jewish people were
obliged to wear, a little doll dressed in a camp uniform, and sacred
vessels and the Torah are on display. The little doll has an Australian
connection: it was made by a fifteen -year-old Jewish girl who was
a patient at the hospital for inmates from Bergen-Belsen. The girl
gave the doll to the then matron of the hospital, Australian nurse,
Muriel Doherty. The doll is now in the collection of the A.M. Rosenbaum
Jewish Museum, The Great Synagogue, Sydney.
Robert Grunschlag’s story of survival did not end with his journey to Australia. That was a physical rescue. His inner recovery came much later when he returned to Bolechow, a small Ukrainian town where he spent his childhood. His journey back opened a field of memory and emotion that had been locked for the whole of his adult life. After his return Robert Grunschlag began to talk. ‘His,’ he said, ‘was a happy childhood until the Germans arrived in September 1941’. The Jews of the town were rounded up, taken to the forest and shot. Seven hundred lie in a mass grave. Bob and his brother Jack, escaped by hiding in a neighbour’s hayloft. His mother was shot as she ran from their home. Today, the site of the mass grave is uncared for. In the local museum there is barely a trace of any Jewish presence. It is as if the atrocities had never happened. Today the town’s Synagogue is used as clothing factory equipped with a few primitive sewing machines. Indeed, Bob’s home video of his return shows the town in a state of decay with empty shelves in the shops and despair on the faces of the people. Bob recalls that during the war ‘every moment was loaded with danger’. After the Nazi’s second sweep through the town in 1942, Bob’s father Moses, believing that they would not survive a third sweep, decided to escape from the town. Moses set up a bunker hide-out high in the Carpathian mountains. Moses arranged with a local farmer, Petro Ilnicki, to supply monthly rations of rye and salt. Petro bought the food in distant markets so as not to raise suspicion. Of the sixteen people who were in the bunker only eight survived. Those eight included Bob, his brother Jack and their father, Moses. I had the privilege of listening in as Bob told his story to a group of adult Aboriginal students and artists. He told of his return with other members of his family and friends to their township in the Ukraine. His group offered to repair and restore the synagogue. The Mayor listened to their proposal and then said ‘if you want to repair it you’ll have to buy it’. When Bob pointed out the illogicality of buying back something that was already theirs I felt a buzz of agreement among his Aboriginal audience– why indeed buy back something that already belongs to you – from the Aboriginal point of view, the land. The Courage to Care project involves people with people.
About six members of the B’nai B’rith group and others
sympathetic to the project take turns in accompanying the exhibition.
These people act as interpreters and explainers so that visitors
feel immediately welcome. I met up with Adrianus Vanas one of those
courageous people who had helped Jews in Holland to survive. In
a conference session a young Aboriginal woman asked Adrianus if
he was afraid when he falsified documents and removed names from
deportation lists. ‘Never,’ he replied, ‘at that
time I was fearless; it was only after I feared; you couldn’t
show fear to a Nazi.’ Adrianus used his position as an employee
of the Dutch Government at Westerbork Camp, the largest Nazi transit
camp in Holland, to get Jewish people out of the camp and into safe
hiding places. Adrianus and his wife Bertha (who died 10th April
1999) risked their lives for others. They placed faith in the assurances
of the Underground that if anything happened to them their two children
would be cared for. Aged 84, Adrianus still has the upright posture
of fearless man. This exhibition aimed at high school students years 8 to 12 is educative in a deeply moral sense. The message for the students and for adults is that what we do, does matter. It challenges us to make our actions statements of what it means to be human. Underlying the exhibition is a disturbing question for each of us. As a non-Jew I ask myself ‘In similar circumstances what would I have done? Would I have looked the other way or would I have dared to care?’ Of course the answer is ‘I don’t know’. All I can hope is never to be put to the test, and if tested to have at least a portion of the courage shown both by the survivors and their helpers. Courage to Care travelling exhibition is well-designed, very accessible and informative, but even more importantly it moves us as human beings through sorrow to hope even in the most terrible of times. The exhibition deserves to be seen widely. ” Ann Nugent Courage to care Exhibition is an outreach project led by B’nai B’rith, a Jewish community service organisation committed to overcoming racism and discrimination and promoting understanding and harmony. Courage to Care website – www.couragetocare.com.au
© Ann Nugent
The power of the father
to have and to hurt… Swimming Upstream tells the story of the Fingleton family of Spring Hill in Brisbane in the 1950s and early 60s. Two of the Fingleton brothers excel at swimming; one (John) is favoured by his father and the other (Anthony) is rejected. The trust and warmth of John and Anthony’s childhood friendship is destroyed by their father’s covert strategies designed to ensure that John wins the Empire Games gold medal, and then goes on to the Olympic Games. The loss of the brothers’ friendship is at the heart of the film. There is a tad too much swimming in the film for my liking, but I could not help being mesmerised by Martin McGrath’s camerawork that captured exactly the play of the summer sun on the blue water of Brisbane’s stiffly chlorinated public pools. Indeed, the evocation of place and period is a major achievement of the film. The father, Harry (Geoffrey Rush), controls his children by withholding praise, or awarding it partially. He attempts to subjugate his wife by rationing tenderness and by erratic, alcohol-driven outbursts of physical violence. However , Dora (Judy Davis), strong in spirit, holds the line between the man and her children. The man takes no responsibility for his children. They are Dora’s. She was the one who wanted them, he says, and so conveniently discards his responsibilities as father. Fear generated by the father, and the comfort of the mother’s love are the polar points of the family’s emotional life. Harry might have been otherwise – there are glimmers of the ‘what once was and might be again’ in his anniversary waltz with Dora – evidence of the scraps of affection that kept Dora going. In the end he overplayed his hand by taking Dora’s book of newspaper clippings of Anthony’s successes. At this point he trespasses on her soul and in flaunting his brute power he exposed the fragility of its base. Judy Davis gives a nerve-stripping performance as Dora, the wife who almost falls over the edge but who comes back, tougher and, in a sense, wiser. Geoffrey Rush shows his great emotional range arousing both compassion and contempt for his character. I have compassion for the child Harry, dragged up in the slums of Spring Hill by an alcoholic mother; and I have compassion for the husband, Harry, who in other circumstances might have been Dora’s tender lover. But my feelings of compassion are overwhelmed by my contempt for a father who would manipulate his sons for his own emotional needs. The irony, as so often happens, is that his grand plans fail. But why was it Anthony who Harold so relentlessly rejected? The film could have thrown a little more light on the Harry’s motivations, conscious or unconscious. By not doing so the film leaves the possibility that Anthony Fingleton’s memory of his childhood might be mis-constructed. How could a father, even the worst of fathers, so consistently deny even the slightest praise to one of his children?
|
||
| < HOME |
I
was trying to comprehend the immensity of the numbers of Jewish
people killed: France 77 320, Austria 50 000, Poland 2 950 000 and
so the list goes on. ‘Did I know much about the history?’
the man beside me asked. ‘Not much,’ I confessed, ‘mainly
what I see in films.’ The man was Robert Grunschlag. And from
that moment everything shifted. I was no longing a person peering
in, trying to get a grip on the facts and figures. I was in conversation
with a person who had lived through the experience. Bob put it quite
bluntly ‘We lived like rats underground,’ he said, ‘
and mostly we were hungry and in fear.’