Jakarta film festival offers human relations

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Life on Jakarta's movie screens is not always about car chases, deafening explosions and endless body counts. There is another kind, one where people converse instead of shooting each other, where film characters fall in love instead of battling one another.

Such a life resides in the German film Beyond Silence, Iran's The Apple and Brazil's Central Station. All three speak eloquently of human relationships, especially relationships between parents and children. And the films are gracing the big screens this week as part of the nine-day Jakarta International Film Festival.

In Beyond Silence, an Oscar nominee last year for Best Foreign Language Film, we encounter Lara, a young woman torn between her duties to her parents and her personal musical ambition. Lara's father and mother are deaf, and she has been functioning as their interpreter to the hearing world since she was young. As a child, Lara enjoys her role, mediating her parents and the rest of the community with her sign language skills. Power lies in what she knows: she dispenses and withholds information from the two parties according to her whim.

But as she grows into adolescence, Lara is preoccupied with honing another of her talents as a promising clarinetist. She discovers her gift with the help of her aunt, Clarissa, who is an accomplished clarinetist. It becomes a source of conflict in the family because Lara's father, Martin, has always been overshadowed his sister's musical prowess since their childhood. He feels that the childless Clarissa is taking his daughter away from him.

Beyond Silence offers a simple premise where a family is divided between the deaf world and the hearing world. But out of that, director Caroline Link (and co-screenwriter with Beth Serlin) is able to build a powerful, emotional vehicle that bravely avoids cliches and sentimentality. Much of the film's strength stems from the silent scenes where characters exchange words through their hands.

We have nothing but subtitles to tell us what is going on, but this way we are invited to enter the minds of sign language users as they express themselves in their own special way. This film is adorned with passionate performances from Howie Seago (Martin), Sibylle Canonica (Clarissa), and the two remarkable actresses who share Lara's role: Tatjana Trieb (as the child Lara) and Sylvie Testud (the adult Lara).

The parent-child relationship is also touched on in The Apple. This modest film is inspired by an actual incident where a middle-aged man and his blind wife in Tehran were reported to the authorities for locking up their two 12-year-old daughters since infancy. Director Samira Makhmalbaf brought this story into her film, asking the Naderi family to play themselves in this fictionalized account, shot in semidocumentary style.

What transpires onscreen is a debate on the best way to raise children. The father asserts that he keeps the girls inside at all times because he wants to protect them: he has to go out to do some shopping while the blind mother cannot look after them.

"My daughters are like flowers, if they are exposed to the sun, they will soon fade," is an old-school wisdom he vehemently avows. But he is confronted by a woman social worker who visits the house and reminds him that because of his policy, the girls are illiterate and lacking in social skills.

As the two confer on the well-being of Zahra and Massoumeh, the film cuts away to follow the two girls as they are let out to explore their neighborhood for the first time. Makhmalbaf records their sometimes funny, sometimes ironic trek with a sardonic sensibility embellished with much symbolism and semiotics. She is careful enough not to sound judgmental in presenting her feministic point-of-view.

As a result, the debut of the 18-year-old director is a subtle, endearing picture that says so much about parent-child relationships since she worked on a script written by his father, the accomplished Iranian cineast Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

Although the two principal characters of Central Station are not related to each other, they might as well become a parent and a child. Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), a crusty ex-schoolteacher who gets money out of writing letters for illiterate people at Rio's Central Station, takes a new responsibility caring for nine-year-old Josue (Vinicius de Oliveira), who loses his mother in a fatal road accident. She reluctantly comes along as the boy decides to find his estranged father whom he has never met.

Director Walter Salles set up this road movie as a coming-of- age trip for Josue as he learns to swallow disappointment after disappointment along the way, and an eye-opening journey for Dora as she rediscovers her own humanity.

This is a wonderful cinematic masterpiece that deservedly won the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination this year for Best Foreign Language Film.

The film benefits from Montenegro's first-rate performance, which received a Best Actress Oscar nomination, and the extraordinary debut of Rio shoeshine boy de Oliveira, who, prior to this film, had never gone to the movies before, let alone acted in one.

These three films and dozens others like it exhibited in the festival are a blessing to moviegoers who rarely experience such exquisite cinema in their local film theaters. If some films disappear the moment you walk out the movie theater's doors, these films will linger in your memory for a long, long time.

The Apple will be screened at Usmar Ismail Film Center on Sunday, Nov. 21, at 7:30 p.m. Beyond Silence will be shown at the same place and time on Thursday, Nov. 25. Central Station is to be screened at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 24, at Graha Bakti Budaya TIM.