Layla M

LAYLA M                  B            
Netherlands  Belgium  (110 mi)  2016  d:  Mijke de Jong           Topkapi Films [Netherlands]

It’s hard to make topical films, especially when the screen reality doesn’t match the authenticity of on-the-ground news reports of terrorist attacks, police crackdowns, angry demonstrations, or following the hordes of refugees swarming into Europe, not to mention those citizens left behind in the war zones and refugee camps.  It’s a searing reality that is difficult to digest, no matter how meticulously accurate the newscasts may be.  But as links to terror organizations have been discovered within major European cities, it has led to an accompanying rise of Islamophobia, including burkini bans on French and Corsican beaches, leaving people wondering how local citizens are being recruited into jihadist organizations, where this film attempts to answer some of those questions.  Dutch director Mijke de Jong, with a script written by her husband Jan Eilander, combine their efforts in a story studying the roots of the problem.  Set in Amsterdam, Layla (Nora El Houssour) is an 18-year old student studying to become a doctor who is a Dutch citizen with a Moroccan background, living at home with her middle class Muslim family.  While her parents, including her father (Mohammed Azzay) and mother (Esma Abouzahra), encourage her to follow a promising educational path that will lead to a better life, she gets more distracted by the way Muslims are treated differently than ordinary Dutch citizens, as they are profiled simply by their appearance, labelled agitators by referees in local soccer matches, and routinely singled out and arrested by police for practicing free speech, even getting into a heated discussion with a fellow student when asked not to pray, to the point where she feels ostracized by society.  As she explores her Muslim background, she devotes more of her time studying the Quran, where she learns to identify radical phrases, scours the Internet for YouTube coverage of attacks on Muslims throughout the country and atrocities to Muslims around the globe, which she immediately shares with her friends and family, and is disappointed by the timid reaction by her parents, who lead a comfortable life and don’t make waves. 

What’s clear, at least in this film, is that she comes from a loving family, where she’s had plenty of opportunities to succeed, something her parents don’t want her to jeopardize.  She’s a bit of a tomboy, as she loves to play soccer and mix it up with the boys, and can more than hold her own when it comes to a fiery attitude, including plenty of trash talking.  But in accordance with custom, she wears a headscarf and dresses modestly, but she’s a modern woman that believes women can stand up for themselves, joining a radical group of women called the Sisters who discuss ways they can help fight repression, passing out flyers, posting YouTube videos depicting the horrors in Syria and Gaza, while also meeting a male radicalized friend that she likes named Abdel (Ilias Addab) in clandestine Skype sessions.  Developing a growing indifference towards her studies, she makes a bold move to drop out of school, secretly marry Abdel, and run away to Belgium to join a jihadist training camp, where the intimacy expressed while traveling together are among the best scenes in the film, showing a joyful and loving relationship.  But they barely avoid arrest when they leave, heading for Amman, Jordan, where they plan a life of religious activism.  While she is embraced by the women, where one takes her out to the refugee camps, where the children are starved for affection and anyone willing to spend time with them, she is totally ignored by the men, including her husband, spending long hours alone with absolutely nothing to do, where as an Islamic wife she is expected to clean the house and serve food, and do little else, as they have no use for a woman’s ideas.  The extent of the patriarchal society is not only demeaning, but cruel, as they demand total subservience, something that’s simply not in her DNA.  While she loves her husband, he positively stifles her spirit, where she’s not allowed to do anything without the husband’s permission, as the man makes all the decisions, while the subject of men’s discussions is off-limits to women.

What the film does is humanize the character of Layla, as she is searching within herself and in a surrounding society for a world without insults and recriminations, where people can lead their lives in peace without continual disruptions by police and angry citizens.  For most college-age kids, this is a fairly common dream, a belief in social justice, a hope that everyone can be treated fairly.  Instead what they discover is a daily reality of discrimination and profiling, which exists as much in black communities in America as Islamic neighborhoods in Europe.  The heavy-handed treatment, the overreactions by police that result in the shooting deaths of innocent young black men, or the continued harassment of Muslim men with beards, only leads to a seething discontent, a breeding ground for anger and radicalization, where the result is a lack of trust with existing authorities, which can lead to the extremist radicalization the film examines.  While this film asks as many questions as it answers, it attempts to fill the holes in a better understanding of what people are up against, where there are no easy decisions when facing the cruel realities of life.  One is reminded of Merzak Allouache’s Algerian film The Repentant (El Taaib) (2012) which is largely seen through a jihadist’s eyes, where despite honest efforts, they may never fully integrate back into society, as they’ve crossed too many lines.  While this is a well-meaning film, it only addresses the initial phase of radicalization, where she’s too intelligent and there are too many obstacles placed in this one woman’s path for her to become a true believer, becoming a public service corrective for someone who has swayed from the path of the civilized and was tempted by the jihadists, but ends up discovering their own extremism is too harsh.  That’s not the case with everyone, especially those coming from impoverished communities decimated by war, where there’s no hope anywhere to be found.  This is fertile territory for extremist recruits, as they have no other options.  So this is a somewhat watered down picture, but it’s helpful nonetheless, revealing how mistreatment builds discontent, that better police procedures that recognize the rights of minorities would be in society’s larger interests, as discriminatory behavior will come back to bite you.  That’s something both Europe and the United States seem to be ignoring, instead plunging ahead with more sophisticated use of surveillance and profiling techniques, where targeting racial groups will only lead to more ruthless police confrontations and create even more animosity. 

(M)uchenik (The Student)

(M)UCHENIK (The Student)       D-                                    

Russia  (119 mi)  2016  d:  Kirill Serebrennikov

Without a doubt the worst film of the year, bordering on hysteria, as it’s poorly constructed, increasingly pretentious, becoming little more than an overblown mouthpiece for an ill-conceived authoritarian state, a metaphor for Putin’s Russia, as it fails to deal with any of the significant issues raised, religious freedom, a separation of church and state, as they’ve merged and become one conglomerate, including an alarming rise of homophobia and anti-Semitism, instead casting blame on whoever questions the authority’s handling of affairs.  Without an ounce of subtlety, this film rams the Biblical scriptures, as exemplified by the teenage rebellion of a religious zealot still in high school, through the administrative authorities of the Russian state who have adapted religious orthodoxy into their political platform, so are too weakly divided to stop him, none of which prevent this student from denouncing his teachers and fellow students, taking over classrooms at will, dominating the discussions, and literally bullying his way through school by extended rants of quoting Biblical verse at the top of his lungs, with onscreen titles acting as footnotes, reflecting the Biblical origins of each text.  Adapted from the German play Martyr by Marius von Mayenburg, the whole thing has the feeling of sermonizing and being preached at throughout, though the school’s tepid, near comical reaction reflects a satiric condemnation of the social conservatism that defines Putin’s rule, such as the passage of anti-gay laws.  Nonetheless, while it resembles Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) in the way a single child shows such utter contempt for his simple-headed mother and the world around him, finding vengeance in the wrath of God, hoping to force them all into the flames of hell, while he and only he is the mouthpiece for the Lord.  What makes little sense is his total transformation to a religious ideologue seemingly overnight, where the school and teachers have little clue how to deal with this volcanic force of Biblical hormones out of control, though anyone else that disrupted classrooms would be singled out and thoroughly dealt with by authorities.  But not this kid, who is treated with kid gloves, as if he actually is the coming Messiah. 

With parallels to Dietrich Brüggemann’s German film Stations of the Cross (Kreuzweg) (2014), another film about religious fundamentalism, it’s clear no matter what political system, liberal German or authoritarian Russian, authorities are ill-prepared to deal with overly exaggerated cases of fundamentalism, where the adherence to a single set of extremist religious beliefs, and an intolerance for anything else, overwhelms the existing societal structure, as it defies the aims of any modernized educational system, which is to provide as broad-based an education as possible.  Most schools would not tolerate any student taking over classrooms, period.  The only solution is to remove them as a disruptive force unless they can learn to behave themselves, and if not, they are free to seek alternative educational measures.  In free democratic societies, religious fundamentalists exist in small like-minded sects and aren’t integrated into mainstream society, as they would be thoroughly denounced by a majority of citizens who would not allow the manipulation of religious beliefs being forced upon them, which is why the Amish don’t run the public school systems of Pennsylvania, and al-Qaeda or Isis theocracy are not taught in schools across Europe.  But in an authoritarian state that may already be infused with religious doctrine, the idea that they would be stifled and handcuffed to do anything about it is simply ludicrous.  Nothing could be further from the truth, yet that is the premise of this film.  While dramatic enunciations might work on stage, the exaggerations onscreen clearly undermine the entire film, as audiences don’t tend to like being shouted at for two hours, unless the literary dialogue is brilliantly original, as is the case in Mike Nichols’ Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).  But there’s nothing original about this, as it plods on in purely amateurish fashion, especially the use of blaring heavy metal music, Laibach - God Is God - YouTube (3:50), which punctuates the film like a hammer to the head, making little connection to audiences.

The film pretends to be a satirical look at the dysfunction of Putin’s Russia, but most of this is so laughably bad that it’s awful, as its own narrow scope refuses common sense solutions, yet the system’s paranoid reaction is as telling as the bizarre behavior of the student himself, mirroring the major institutions in Russia that have become increasingly dominated by small-minded reactionaries and bigoted political followers, where in 2013 Putin made faith-based culture mandatory teaching in secondary schools.  The heavy-handed style, however, is its own undoing, as it’s hard to take anything seriously simply by the predictable and overly simplistic way it’s being presented, revealing little about the current state of high school education or religious orthodoxy in Russia.  Petr Skvortsov is excellent, however, as young Veniamin (Venya), the only developed character in the film, as the rest are all caricatures.  Spouting condemnation at every opportunity, where he envisions himself as the lone voice of the Holy Spirit, his spontaneous outbursts provide a literary text for the film.  After witnessing the bullying of a disabled young gay student, Grigory (Aleksandr Gorchilin, who played the role of Venya in the stage version), he takes him under his wing as his lone disciple, but is thwarted in his attempts to faith heal him by mimicking the miracles of Christ, eventually turning on him with a vengeance.  Similarly, Venya mocks his biology teacher Elena (Victoria Isakova), refuting her scientific teachings of evolution with the scripture’s view of Creation.  At an administrative hearing, the head authority (Svetlana Bragarnik) acquiesces to his demands and brings Creationism into the classroom alongside Darwin, while also caving in on his demands that girls be more modestly dressed, leaving Elena on her own as the sole voice of dissent against this young rabble rouser, yet she loses her grip as well, going off on her own deranged and often pathetic rants.  Rather than elevate the material, the Biblical scripture becomes the means to incite anti-gay and anti-Semitic rhetoric, where instead of inspirational, it serves a destructive purpose.  While there is interspersed humor throughout (as it is supposed to be a satire), not enough, apparently, as it bogs down in its own chosen rhetoric, a toxic, scorched earth, religious crusade leading to a somewhat frantic and ridiculously discombobulated ending, becoming gloomily fatalistic, as there are no forces standing in the way. 

Note

While the director has been an outspoken critic of Putin, his dissident views have landed him under house arrest, accused of corruption, making him the second director (after Iran’s Jafar Panahi) banned from attending the 2018 Cannes Film Festival due to government charges filed against them.