PORT DJEMA A
France Italy Greece
(93 mi) 1998 d: Eric
Heumann
Actually shot in Eritrea, where from the opening shot of an
airplane one sees Ethiopian Airlines, this is a brilliant, intricately woven
story that intelligently advances shot by shot, thought by thought, with
terrific use of sound, layered in sumptuous music by Sanjay Mishra along with
other sounds of northern Africa, with an acute interest in what’s taking place
both inside and outside of one contemplative white French doctor who ventures
into the heart of a fictitious ex-Colonial French territory in East Africa
that’s undergoing a bloody civil war unseen by tourists who are forbidden to
travel into the war zones, but like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the deeper he explores the region, the more he
uncovers the profound human consequences.
Heumann produced recent Angelopoulos films LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST (1988)
and ULYSSES GAZE (1995), also the recent French film INDOCHINE (1992), here he
co-writes his first feature with Jacques Lebas, a French doctor, who from 1988
to 1991 ran humanitarian medical organizations in Lebanon, Romania, Cambodia,
and the Soviet Union, raising questions about treating “the world’s
wounds.” Angelopoulos co-produces the
film and lends his extraordinary cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis, whose camera
slowly follows the doctor down empty streets, moving through the hot, desolate
Third World terrain filled with hidden faces with unknown agendas, quick
glances from people who disappear in an eyelash, or dead serious looks by
soldiers carrying machine guns that are meant to intimidate foreigners into
believing their influence in places like this have been reduced to
nothing. To live here is to take sides,
otherwise life is meaningless. People
have no other business being there.
Keeping his purpose there a secret, Doctor Feldman, played
with very few words and an everpresent cigarette by Jean Yves Dubois, is called
an existential tourist by his own government, which claims neutrality in the
war, but has a military attaché in the field playing both sides against the
other, aiding one side by day, the other by night. With each moment filled with a sense of fear
and constant danger, mixed with images of great beauty, Feldman follows the tracks
of his friend and colleague, Antoine Barasse, the only doctor aiding the
rebel’s cause, who was recently murdered, but is heard throughout the film in
letters and tape recordings. With the
unsolicited help of a rebel cab driver and the accidental assistance from a
beautiful Swiss photographer (Nathalie Boutefeu), who unbeknownst to Feldman
turns out to be Barasse’s former lover, Feldman passes through violent military
checkpoints and enters the unknown danger zone where people are seen as tiny
specks against the immense desert landscape.
As he draws nearer to the conflict, bloody bodies are scattered around
the desert landscape. It is only with
the help of others that he finds the clinic, reporting to the Catholic Sister
in charge, where he has instructions from Barasse to look after a refugee
child, seen only in a photograph, and the Sister doesn’t recognize the
child. Confused, without the raison
d’etre that led him there in the first place, he takes the Sister’s advice and
leaves undetected, under cover of darkness early the next morning.
A woman tries to push a malnourished, dehydrated child into
his arms, pleading for help from a doctor, but he departs from this madness,
only to encounter more madness on the way out, alone, expressed by a single
boat sent to pick him up on a long, lonely shore. He returns to town, which is now being
evacuated, as guerilla fighters with machine guns are shooting over rooftops,
hiding under cover of laundry sheets hanging from a line, as helpless humans
flee for their lives only to encounter loyalist government troops, men with
guns who take sadistic pleasure at brutalizing others, slaughtering innocent
victims, punching and kicking Feldman, ripping up his passport for sport in
front of others, leaving him writhing on the ground, a feeble fragment of his
former self who has now lost his moral bearings in this Godforsaken
wasteland.
Alone, like all the others who are alone, he seems a
helpless victim, and his journey out of the war zone was no less harrowing than
his journey in. One wonders why he
didn’t stay, why he didn’t connect with the life and death urgency that
obviously required his expertise, which included the connection to the
mysterious woman he so easily becomes separated from without ever discovering
her unique interest in being there. He
passes on these opportunities, which one mustn’t take lightly, as they are so
rare. Besides the lingering aftereffects
of Colonialism, that seems to be the message of the film, to pay special
attention to the magical moments in one’s lifetime where you are in a position
to see around the corners, beyond the edges into the mysteriously unique realm
of the remarkable. His friend told him
the story of the refugee child just to get him there, but there never was a
child, there was only a war, and a very unique woman photographing the war who,
it turns out, took the picture years ago of that child, smiling in the face of
the unknowable.
