Port Djema

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.  

Process

PROCESS                   B+      

France  Great Britain  (93 mi)  2004  d:  C.S. Leigh

 Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.   

—Eckhardt von Horchheim  (1260 – 1327)

A very disturbing film – not as hated as Honoré’s MA MÈRE (2004) was at the Chicago Film Festival, but few found this scintillating.  Some simply dismissed it outright and found it easy to despise, thinking it overly pretentious and the worst that an art film can offer.  Stylistically exquisite, using a precise cinematic style which produces stark imagery from Angelopoulos’s cinematographer Yorgos Arvanitis, balanced by the unique and powerful qualities of Béatrice Dalle, the woman in black, from Betty Blue (37°2 Le Matin) (1986) and Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard (Dix-sept fois Céci... (2002), once more putting herself on an edge of reality where none of us have ever ventured.  In this film, she never says a single word, but the camera meticulously follows her through 29 exacting scenes as she becomes further and further distanced from this world until eventually, through a series of long, abstract, unexplained viewpoints, we eventually see her take her own life. 

Emotionally unapproachable throughout, the filmmaker is himself a performance artist, book editor, former art critic and exhibition curator, also a teenage American fashion designer prodigy in the early eighties who uses a distinctively elegant visual design of minimalist detachment.  Opening with an apparent failure to drown herself in the bathtub, next Dalle is sitting before a mirror, an actress preparing to go on stage, hesitatingly putting her wig on.  What follows is the best scene in the entire film, beginning with a long, single take from backstage, the camera views a lit stage, the motionless actors on the stage, and the completely passive audience sitting in the dark in the background, under the lights, which are flooding the scene.  Dalle is unable to utter a single word, and the camera moves slowly past the audience, which is surprisingly polite, veering up to the top row where the theater staff are busily trying to figure out what’s wrong, which is shown by a flurry of movement of two individuals who manage to move towards the stage.  On stage, the actors light cigarettes, stare at one another, but Dalle turns her back to the audience and silently cries.

It wouldn’t be Béatrice Dalle if there weren’t a sexual scene involving two men, and here the violent, animalistic sex eventually leaves Dalle separated and worlds apart from the other two.  After an attempt to eat ground glass, we learn of several tragedies, that she has one breast missing from a mastectomy, but also that she lost her daughter in a car accident while she was driving, and her husband (Guillaume Depardieu) crippled, with the song "Freedom" performed by J Mascis & The Fog J Mascis and the Fog - Freedom - YouTube (4:20) blaring, and at the time, neither she nor her husband were paying any attention to their crying child in the car.  She spends the rest of the film shattered, erasing all meaning from her life, as she is seen blacking out line after line from books and diaries.  

Interestingly, the film is interrupted by the title and various quotations from time to time, also, strangely and mysteriously annoying, the film is not subtitled.  While there are only two scenes with words, one, a long extended sequence where she is burning all her possessions while listening to a voice on a tape recording, which began as the voices of her husband and child replayed over and over again, but this eventually becomes the monotone drone of a long, unsubtitled poem read by her husband, which turns out to be “Les Noyades (The Drownings)” from Poems and Ballads (1866) by Algernon Charles Swinburne, seen in its entirety here: Les Noyades—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Book, etext, including a critique of the poem by Karen Alkalay-Gut here: NOYAD18.  The poem references a series of mass executions, especially priests and nuns, as well as women and children, known as the Drownings at Nantes during the Reign of Terror at the onset of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.  There’s also a radio discussion on Holocaust denial with subtitles omitted, but that is the entire dialogue for the entire film.

By the end of the film, the musical track is a spare, hauntingly expressive, oblique piano score that sounds like chromatic fifths written for the film by John Cale, an eerie score that is an interesting counterpart to the lovely, yet spacious Arvo Pärt piano music “Spiegel im Spiegel” Intro - Gerry - Gus Van Sant - YouTube (5:21) that plays in GERRY (2002).  With the page open from Julia Kristeva's Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, an art book with a photo of a Holocaust victim, she tattoos her own arm to match the arm in the photo.  She takes a subway ride of death where, wordlessly, someone leaves her a suicide kit.  By the end of the film, Dalle is alone in an ultra-stylish, modern suite with giant windows overlooking the Eiffel Tower, the Seine River, and a stream of traffic moving below, moving figures representing the life passing before her, the life she is leaving behind. 

There’s a brief epilogue, followed by a loud outburst of music that plays over the credits, a very upbeat song, sounding very much like David Bowie called “That’s Entertainment,” sung by a group called The Jam The Jam - That's Entertainment - YouTube (3:33).  There’s an interesting contrast between the passive audience in the beginning of the film and the audience that leaves the theater after experiencing this film, where the question becomes:  After witnessing death, are they still as passive and as emotionally uninvolved?