Peace in Earth is hard to find

A young girl, Lenny, picks up a plate from a set table and deliberately drops it onto the floor. It shatters. She asks her mother, “India is going to be broken. Can you break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is?”

In an anxious hurry, Lenny gathers all of the dolls in her room. Choosing a rag doll, she persuades her young friend to pull one leg of the doll while she pulls the other. The doll rips almost in two, and she falls to her bed crying with the doll in her arms.

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“Lenny's was an entirely unique perspective. It came from within an impartial community, but was also the point of view of a child, who learnt about love, war, destruction and betrayal within a span of a few months.” Deepa Mehta on the film education website, http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/Earth/index.html/

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Film critic C. J. S. Wallia dismisses these two scenes in Earth as being “simplistic treatment of a complex history,” arguing that director Deepa “Mehta’s script fails to create dramatic situations that could bring out Lenny Baby’s anguished bewilderment of the tragic events of the partition” (http://www.indiastar.com/wallia22.html). Apparently witnessing a screaming man with his legs each tied to two jeeps as they are driven apart doesn’t quality as bewildering. Couple that macabre display with Lenny’s knowledge of the mutilation and violent death of the Ice Candy Man’s sisters and the riotous violence in the streets, and one can certainly empathize with her reactions. For anyone, let alone an 8-year-old girl, such events would cause distress and complete disillusionment with humanity.

* * *

Lenny Sethi tells the story of Earth, which unfolds during the final days of Britain’s 250-year-old occupation of India and the resulting division of the country into Pakistan and India. Director and screenwriter Deepa Mehta has taken the highly praised novel by Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India (originally published as Ice-Candy-Man) (http://www.monsoonmag.com/reviews/i3rev_julie2.html), and made a film which reveals the inexplicable violence, carnage, and brutality that resulted between countrymen when the British arbitrarily “gave” northwestern India to the Muslims.

It focuses on the friendships of a group of men who are held together by Lenny’s nanny, Shanta. They are moths to her light, each enamored to varying degrees by her beauty and magnetism. Lenny is significantly aware of Shanta’s position in the group, as well as her own as a sort of mascot. Representing all religions of India – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh – and various vocations – ice candy, masseur, gardener, zookeeper – this group is initially cohesive, but the bonds begin to wear and tatter as the eminent division of India approaches. “This is not only about Hindus and Muslims,” the ice candy man, Dil Navaz, tells Shanta. “It’s what’s inside us…we are all bastards, all animals. Like the lion in the zoo that Lenny-baby is so scared of. He just lies there, waiting for the cage to open. And when it does, then God help us all.” Then, in Lenny’s presence, Dil asks Shanta to marry him so “the animal that’s within me will be controlled.” Shanta shakes her head, but Lenny replies, “I will marry you ice candy man.”

After the brutal murders of his sisters and Shanta’s refusal, the Ice Candy Man’s lion is released and not even the charm of Shanta nor the admiration and infatuation of Lenny can keep it contained.

Lenny’s youthful point of view and her innocent perspective force us to view the events through impartial eyes. Some of her voyeuristic moments, like when she watches Shanta and Hasan the Masseur making love, border on creepy and irritating, but it is also the ultimate turning point for Dil, a voyeur himself, and his resolve to allow the lion to strike. His final act of betrayal of both Shanta and Lenny is shocking and anticipated at the same time.

* * *

I view Mehta as a film-making maverick, stepping outside the strict realm of Bollywood to create cinema that explores real world aspects of living in India, especially for females. While Earth is not explicitly a film about women in India, it does explore their treatment, even in areas where they appear to have more autonomy. Consider the mutilation and murder of women on the train from Gurdaspur City, their breasts removed and found collected in four sacks; or Shanta’s probable rape as she is carried away by angry men; or the mention of the desecration of women on all sides of the conflict. Finally, there is the subplot of Lenny’s young friend, Papoo, who is forced into an arranged marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather. Mehta develops this storyline extensively in Water, the last in her film trilogy: Fire, Earth, Water. An 8-year-old girl becomes a widow when her elderly husband dies, and is taken to a home for widows where she must live the rest of her life. In another look at the injustices towards women, Mehta brings Hindu deity into modern India as two sisters-in-law find comfort in each other when their traditional marriages – ones in which their husbands never display any gesture of love - bring them frustration and sadness. Since these women ultimately develop a sexual relationship, real time, real life Hindus were really pissed off about this film. On more than one level, Fire consumed some of its players and many members of its audience.

For an interview with Deepa Mehta about Earth, click here: http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/aug1999/meh-a06.shtml

Shoe. Ship. Sea. Smile.

Lamerica, Amelio's new film, is dedicated to all poor nations whose paupers dream of distant salvation in a mythical America, but either can't afford to leave or, like most Albanians who swarmed to Italy after the dictator's fall, are sent back on the very ships they came on.
- John Simon

The poignancy of director Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica culminates subtly during the closing scene as Partizani, a dangerously overcrowded ship, sails lopsided across the Adriatic Sea, filled with Albanian pilgrims hoping for a better way of life in Italy. While the scene is not unlike one that we Americans could imagine of our ancestors as they made their crossings to America, it differs in its spirit of melancholy and misgiving. One is left to wonder if the weary travelers will ever reach their destination: salvation from oppression.

That journey is one of the many themes found in Lamerica as we watch Gino and his partner, Fiore, attempt to exploit the crumbling Albanian economy – a look at the true nature of globalization – after the country is liberated from 50 years of Communism. By claiming they’ll establish a shoe manufacturing company in Albania, Gino and Fiore intend to reap the subsidies from the Italian government in their dubious humanitarian effort to help Albanians. This first show of deceit is followed by lingering deception throughout the film, as people and actions don’t quite turn out the way one would expect.

In search of a pseudo chairman for the shoe company, Gino and Fiore visit a dark and dilapidated prison where the prisoners remind one of zombies out of an American zombie movie, and discover Spiro Tozai, whom they believe to be Albanian. Turns out, Spiro is actually an Italian prisoner of World War II, Michele Talarico, who has spent the past 50 years in the Albanian prison. A frail, old man, he believes he is 20 and must get back home to his wife and son in Sicily. It’s not that Spiro/Talarico is deceptive, but that Gino and Fiore have managed to fool themselves. Gino, in particular, becomes a mockery of himself, as he is systematically stripped of his car, his business, his nationality, his personal space. On the other hand, Michele, while delusional about which decade he inhabits, becomes more and more certain about his journey and where he needs to be: Lamerica. “We can travel together,” he tells Gino once they reunite on board Partizani. “We’ve both been very unlucky, but we have to keep heart. America’s a big place.”

So we’re back to that precariously crowded ship wondering if it will make its destination, and if it does, will it be forced to turn back? The previous scene offers hope. Children sit around a nighttime fire, waiting for morning to make their passage. A young girl translates into Italian Albanian words being called out: son, husband, bread, song, love, cold, flower, good, hand, apple, shoe, ship, sea. After muttering sea, she smiles.

Awards for Lamerica

1994 European Film Awards - "Best Film"
1994 Venice Film Festival - 4 Awards including "Best Director"
1995 São Paulo International Film Festival - "Critics Award"
1995 David di Donatello: Best Cinematography, Best Score, Best Sound
1995 Nastro d'Argento: Best Director, Best Cinematography
1996 Goya Awards - Best European Film


Some notes on Communism according to Slavenka Drakulic in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

“Living conditions kill all privacy – or spread it out to the whole community” (p. 183).

“All of a sudden, private space became important, even fashionable in a country where for forty-five years, if not longer, nobody had even thought in these terms” (p. 97).

“Generally speaking, in any communist country there are not many things to throw away. One could even say that a communist household is almost the perfect example of an ecological unit, except that its ecology has a completely different origin: it doesn’t stem for a concern for nature, but from a specific kind of fear for the future” (p. 181).

Lamerica Review by John Simon

National Review, February 12, 1996

Before Bosnia, the most wretched Balkan country was Albania. For the Communist dictator Enver Hoxha, even Soviet Russia was too liberal; only Mao would do. But the miseries of this tiny, three-million-soul country go further back. In 1939, Mussolini's troops crossed the seventy miles of Adriatic Sea to rule Albania until 1943, when the Nazis took over. Under today's quasi-democracy, the country is still horribly poor. It reminded the filmmaker Gianni Amelio (Open Doors, Stolen Children) of that immediately postwar Italy that forced his grandfather to emigrate to Lamerica, as illiterate Italians refer to the United States, where he promptly failed.

Lamerica, Amelio's new film, is dedicated to all poor nations whose paupers dream of distant salvation in a mythical America, but either can't afford to leave or, like most Albanians who swarmed to Italy after the dictator's fall, are sent back on the very ships they came on. Equally tragic were the Italian soldiers who, upon the Duce's fall, changed their names, became Albanianized, and still ended up in inhuman Albanian prisons, where many of them died.

The film takes place in 1991, when two Italian con men, Fiore and young Gino, arrive in Albania to set up a bogus shoe factory, collect subsidies from Italy, and then scamper off. They need an Albanian figurehead to ostensibly run the company, and look for some abject fellow they can boss around. They find Spiro, a poor wretch in his seventies who languished in jail for decades and is too scared even to speak, and make him president. They clean him up, provide him with a decent suit that somehow refuses to hang right on him, and temporarily park him in an orphanage run by nuns. But Spiro escapes, and Gino in his jeep sets out to retrieve him.

He finally catches him, and they head back for Tirana, the capital. Along the way, every removable part of the jeep is stolen. Next, Gino's baggage and clothes; he even lands briefly in prison. Spiro, however, refuses to talk, even though it emerges that he is, like Gino, a Sicilian -- Michele, a soldier who left a wife and child back home. A half-century hiatus has befuddled his mind, just as greed and impotent rage at Spiro and the depredations of the starving Albanians have clouded Gino's. Meanwhile Fiore, unmasked by the authorities, has fled back to Italy, and the scam is dead. Gino is left hanging with a quirky and useless old man on his hands.

But Spiro-Michele now becomes friendly and communicative, and harder for Gino to dump. He tries to do it kindly, but it's no go; the two are stuck together until Spiro escapes again. Separately, though, both he and Gino are headed for the coast and for Italy. En route, as Gino becomes poorer and poorer, he mingles with fleeing Albanian youths on an overcrowded truck, and his world view begins to change. The very landscape, stark and crisscrossed by escapees and police, is a stern teacher. Yet the insipidities broadcast by Italian television seduce the Albanians into believing paradise awaits them across the water. Heartrendingly, Gino watches a little girl doing a frenzied dance she copied from Italian TV as her mother approaches him with the chilling suggestion that he take her child to Italy with him. Like so much in Lamerica, this actually happened; as it was being shot, the film kept incorporating real-life incidents into its screenplay.

Many things contribute to Lamerica's potency. A terrible irony hovers over the goings-on. Frustration for every character -- for the whole country -- is everywhere, even hunger and death. Yet the horrors tend to wear a comic face. Whatever goes wrenchingly wrong is somehow also comic in its absurdity, its perverse contrariness, bureaucratic or existential. But misfortune's grinning mask is more appalling than outright horror; as a genuine skull would be, posturing as a Halloween pumpkin.

In its final sequences, Lamerica becomes incandescently moving. Even then, this rigorously unsentimental film does not milk your tear ducts, however much it grips your heart and tightens your throat. From a screenplay partly by himself, Amelio has directed with his masterly trademark dryness. Yet it is not the soul that is dry, but the humor and the anger as suffering humanity is depicted in its shattered and audience-shattering essentials.

Michele Placido expertly balances the charm and menace of the charlatan Fiore; Enrico Lo Verso makes the transformation of the brash scoundrel Gino into a human being subtly gradual to the point of near-imperceptibility. Spiro-Michele is played by Carmelo di Mazzarelli, found by Amelio in the streets of a small Sicilian town where he had previously filmed. He lends the movie his bare-bones, no-frills presence, something few trained actors could have matched. Without imitating them, Lamerica transports us into the world of such masterworks as Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. It covers the enormous distance between despair and (probably unfounded) hope in less than two hours, but with enough insight to last you a lifetime.

COPYRIGHT 1996 National Review, Inc.