Review: MIFF ‘10: Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Enter the Void, Taqwacore
Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966)
Dir. Robert Bresson
On entering the cinema late at MIFF you are given this option: spend 5 minutes searching for a seat up the back or slide into one of the very front rows immediately. Naturally, I choose the front. The sensation of images washing over me (microseconds before anyone else) is what the cinema is all about. The film, Au Hasard Balthazar, Bresson’s canonical work from 1966, is the perfect film for this kind of viewing. The power of the images of Balthazar the donkey suffering at the hands of his masters is intensified through the largeness of the image and a sense of closeness that comes with sitting in the front row. I doubt that the image of Balthazar stumbling as he carries his master across rocky terrain will ever leave me.
MIFF’s tagline says nothing about the experience of this film. We are told that “the burden of humanity is placed on the shoulders and into the very being of one of God’s forgotten creatures in Bresson’s masterpiece, the ultimate animal film,” and I can’t help but think that the majority of the audience had based their entire decision to see this film on this tagline alone.
In the final shot we see Balthazar sitting in the very middle of a sea of sheep. Laughter erupts at the strangeness of this image but this is almost immediately followed by a collective intake of breath which is in turn followed by a silence that can only mean that the reality of this scene has been realised. Fin — no applause.
- Whitney Monaghan
Enter the Void
Dir. Gaspar Noé
Gaspar Noé made his mark in cinema culture for daring to visualise violent sexuality. His earlier films, I Stand Alone and Irreversible, mark his obsession with exploring those brutal realities that regularly lurk below the surface of everyday life. Noé succeeded because he did not attempt to visualise a universal reality, but chose to establish authority through individual experience: one woman’s rape, one man’s brutal murder, or one child’s sadistic torture by her father. Enter the Void, his most recent production co-written with his wife Lucile Hadzihalilovic, spectacularly fails because Noé diverts from this original theme, and instead attempts to universalise suffering.
A brother and sister, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) and Linda (Paz de la Huerta) are living together in Tokyo after being separated as children because of the death of their parents in a car accident. Shortly after the death, the children make a pact to always be together, but are unfortunately separated through the foster care system. From this harrowing experience, the two grow to share an incestuous bond. The point-of-view occasionally shifts; however, the story is primarily told through Oscar, with Noé regularly placing the camera in Oscar’s eyes or directly behind his head in the style of video games such as Halo. The opening 90 minutes of the film offer one brutal scene after another. The brother and sister are living typically depressing lives: Oscar is a drug dealer and Linda is a stripper at a seedy bar absurdly named ‘Money, Sex, Power’. Oscar is murdered by the police during a drug raid – a fact given to us early – but Noé shifts back and forth to moments before and after the shooting in an attempt to visualise the moment of death.
Watching Enter the Void is something like being on psychedelic drugs. Through Oscar, an interesting connection is made between the altered mental state of those suffering trauma and the emotional condition of the drug abuser. Unfortunately, this idea is not fully explored. Instead, it is apparent that Noé is more concerned with the potential effects of drugs. Frequent reference is made to DMT – the hallucinogenic that can supposedly conjure the experience of dying in users. Almost a full quarter of screen time is dedicated to an exploration of psychedelic hallucinations; practically every shot transition dissolves into an all-out 20 minute trip with fractals, hyper intense colours followed by a pure white screen (the cliché cinematic signifier of death). At my screening, the audience became quickly annoyed with this obsessive return to hallucination. The final forty minutes is fully dedicated to abstract visualisation, so repetitive that one witty viewer left and called out to the audience, “I’ll see you in four hours” – a remark that had everyone chuckling.
After exploring the plight of Oscar and Linda, the film plunges into an abstract investigation of sexuality, conception and birth – which seems to signify the sacredness of the child, the importance of breast feeding and the value of the whole family unit. Aside from the rather titillating shot of the head of a penis thrusting inside a vagina, the film concludes with the suggestion that all of the trauma could have been avoided had the children’s parents not suffered a brutal death. Overt self-indulgence from Noé was disappointing but, for me, that was not what truly made Enter the Void a non-success. Instead, it was the bizarre and unwelcome suggestion of the sacred and holy influence of the happy family.
- Lauren Jayne Bliss
Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam
Dir. Omar Majeed
Frustrated with simplistic media portrayals of an either demonised or sanitised Islam with nothing in-between, Michael Muhammed Knight wrote a novel about an imagined share house of Muslim kids who got high, played punk AND fasted at Ramadan. It was an unlived fantasy: effectively inventing the people he wanted to, but didn’t hang out with. Islamic punk kids from all over America would read it and reach out to him, inspired by the third way he described where their American upbringing and Eastern religious tradition could co-exist, and they could be free to criticize either. Gathering these far-flung forces of radical Islam, they go on tour to “piss people off” with songs like “I wanna fuck you during Ramadan”. Early media attention they garnered focused on the novelty of a “brown kid with a Mohawk”, and I did wonder if this film would get any further, as the first act was infused with the self-congratulatory energy of cool kids discovering each other for the first time.
They play at mid-west dive bars to like-minded middle class punk kids (Muslim and non-Muslim) and crash an Islamic conference in Chicago, where a room of wide-eyed teenage girls in Hijab cheering them on makes them think there might be more to “Taqwacore” than just pissing people off; finally, energised amidst a constant debate over what they do or should represent, they head to Pakistan. Testing the incidental punk vehicle which has brought them together, and questioning whether it can transcend bourgeois Western contexts, they hang out with Sufi dervishes, consume fearsome blocks of tarry Pakistani hash, and stage a gig next to the biggest mosque in Lahore along the way.
Happily the film largely stays out of the way of the story, balancing interview, live music and observational footage nicely so nothing feels overstated or overwrought. The characters are never shown as heroes, and their quotidian struggles with laziness, drugs and relevance are duly documented without taking away from their moments of victory. On some basic level it was fascinating to see that punk might still have some, well, punk left. If nothing else, I will be humming “Middle Eastern Zombies are the WORST kind” for quite a while!
- Jessie Scott
