The City and the City First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

There’s something to be said for the narrative and structural principles of incoherence, attempting to evoke a fractured place, culture, or time through a jumble of stories. The results can certainly be mixed, suffering from a surfeit of complications, or otherwise failing to link together its strands with anything more than the faintest of ideas. But in the right hands, it can be a revelation, little pieces adding up to a grand portrait that continually surprises as it digs deeper and deeper into the unknown. The City and the City, the first directorial collaboration between Syllas Tzoumerkas (The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea) and Christos Passalis (an actor known for Dogtooth and his appearances in Tzoumerkas’s past films, making his directorial debut here), falls somewhere in the middle of these two impulses in its chronicling of the Greek Jewish community Thessaloniki and its severe persecution by Nazi invaders in 1943. Across six chapters, something of a vague narrative develops as characters, including a Jewish family, drift in and out of the stories told, but many moments initially seem random or disconnected, linked only by the shared air of unease and dislocation in both narrative and presentation. Tzoumerkas and Passalis’s directorial presentation ascribes to a similar level of free mixing. While The City and the City appears to all be set in the 20th century, stretching from World War II to somewhere in the 1980s, at least several scenes make no efforts to hide the present state of the city, with modern cars and bright lights rushing by these people clad in period garb. Even the scenes more visibly set in the 1940s have a slippery relationship: the first chapter cuts between an impoverished clothes seller filmed in black-and-white — surrounded by a cascade of languages including Turkish, Armenian, and Ladino — and a richer Greek family filmed in color; the ordinary implication would be that these take place in separate times, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. The City and the City finds more of a focal point when it deals directly with the horrors of the Nazi occupation. An especially striking sequence depicts forced physical exercises run by the soldiers, where they torment men in extended takes whose camera focus seems to only capture a small circle in a different part of the frame with each shot. Such devices, along with the use of archival footage and explanatory intertitles, creates a more vivid sense of history and direct effects than many of the more deliberately obscure episodes. Perhaps The City and the City’s most incisive element comes in its chapter title cards: each one shows a particular government organization who forms the principal aggressor for the part. Crucially, this extends both before and after the Nazi occupation; while the penultimate scene, appearing to be either a flashback to or a revelation of a secret backroom where fascist torture is still taking place, muddles things too much, the central message becomes clear in these indicting moments: oppression will always threaten those not in power, especially the people of a specific community.

RRR First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

S. S. Rajamouli’s latest epic RRR begins with perhaps the most unexpected first song possible. A young girl, Malli (Twinkle Sharma), is singing to Catherine Buxton (Alison Doody), the wife of a Delhi governor (Ray Stevenson) who is visiting the Gond tribe in a forest located in the modern state of Telangana. After being charmed by this plaintive voice, the Buxtons trick Malli’s family into selling her as a plaything, severely beating her mother when she tries to resist. This, as the first of the three title cards that makes up RRR’s title helpfully points out, is The StoRy: a colonial force brutally asserting its force and power over the native people, with Malli’s innocence both registering strongly on an individual and a national, allegorical level. But such an appellation is as much pretext as it is the driving force for the narrative: the film quickly becomes the story of two real Telugu revolutionaries in an imagined account of a friendship that the two formed in the 1920s: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan). The two are presented, at least initially, as literally elementally opposed forces: Raju is introduced as The FiRe, first seen as a police officer fighting through literally hundreds of people to capture an Indian man for a superior, while Bheem is The WateR, whose opening scene finds him trapping an enormous tiger. At first glance, this appears to be the central conflict of the film, with Bheem, the tribe’s protector, attempting to rescue his lost lamb while Raju, the traitor cop, attempts to find the “outsider” in the teeming throngs of Delhi. But after an extraordinary sequence that finds the two of them meeting and then saving a boy caught in the water below a train derailment by jumping over a bridge and wrapping themselves in an Indian flag to avoid the flames, the title card, 30 minutes in, at last comes in and the entire dynamic shifts. RRR — which doesn’t stand for anything, as Rajamouli chose to use a title that could appeal to as wide an audience as possible given the grand sweep of the narrative; the fan-contest winner in Telugu was Raudraṁ raṇaṁ rudhiraṁ, which translates to Rage War Blood — thus presents a title, and a narrative, that is both united and divided. The two men, who clasp hands both in the air and underwater, quickly become best friends, sharing an interest in general frolicking and their impossibly productive workout regiments, while they both continue with their missions. The first revelation of their identities and perceived betrayals on both their parts comes to head at the final scene before the InteRRRval, during Bheem’s chaotic assault on the governor’s palace, before it is revealed that Raju actually joined the police force to obtain weapons for his own state’s revolution against the British. The cascading revelations about Raju and their effect on Bheem introduce an interesting, fitting balance of motivations. Bheem is never anything other than himself, a principled and kind man who will nonetheless do anything it takes to bring the tribe’s daughter home, while Raju’s character is complex and conflicted, equally committed to his ultimate cause though it requires active participation in the subjugation and maiming of his own people. But such concerns, and how they dovetail into the wider portrait of betrayal and redemption, arise just as much out of the time spent with building brotherhood as it does in the gloriously artificial action sequences. RRR is truly a packed film, but its 182 minutes never feel unjustified, and while the character relationships are simple and almost preordained from each character’s first appearance — especially with Jenny (Olivia Morris), the One Good British person who Bheem falls in love with, and Sita (Alia Bhatt), Raju’s fiancée — much of the pleasure of the film comes from the slow assemblage of every piece into place. It might be a machine, but it is one of magnificent intricacy and care; even the obvious CGI enhancements — including the wholly artificial animals — retain a great impact because of their firm grounding in real bodies and choreography. (It should be noted here that others more knowledgeable than I have written about the potential use, whether intentional or not, of the film to support the facist Hindu nationalism of Modi, though all antagonism in the film is directly squarely towards the British colonizers.) Any accurate survey of RRR inevitably (and rightly) devolves into a recounting of the most memorable set-pieces that Rajamouli crafts with swooping cameras, exaggerated angles, and rhythmic editing: the song “Naatu Naatu,” which begins as a rebuke to English pretentiousness at a party and becomes a joyous competition between men and women alike to see who at the dance will be the last one standing; a prison break that involves Raju dual-wielding rifles while sitting on Bheem’s shoulders; the sheer chaos of the raid on the palace, with so much action going on in the background as Bheem and Raju face off with hose and torch in hand, respectively. But what sticks just as vividly in the mind are the defiance of Bheem as he is lacerated by a spiked whip, his refusal to kneel inspiring the crowd of Indians to stampede the guards; the improbable spectacle of the governor being launched from his car and firing his rifle in mid-air; Raju maintaining his figure while in prison by exercising even as he is being starved. RRR’s rousing narrative derives its power equally from its central supermen, so incredibly statuesque and charismatic, and its feel for communal action, each scene another cog in this tale of sacrifice and resistance. In terms of sheer spectacle in the current landscape, Rajamouli and his collaborators are nigh unmatched in viscerality and clarity of vision.

Singing in the Wilderness First Draft

Complete first draft for In Review Online.

Chinese documentary has long been a vibrant and all too underseen area of filmmaking, even before the international recognition of masters like Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing. In reaction to the overt stylizations and lavish filmmaking of the Fifth Generation, which itself rejected the Cultural Revolution’s social realism, the Sixth Generation operated in a neo-realist fashion, skirting the lines of documentary in its use of non-actors and much more quotidian plots. Concurrently, full-fledged documentarians like Wu Wenguang and Yue Jiang began their own even more independent movement. The newest trend appears to be Chinese documentarians who received their education in the United States, making films resolutely about their native land while maintaining a certain distance in form and/or subject matter; Zhu Shengze is the foremost leader of this loose movement at present. Another member is Chen Dongnan, who makes her feature-length debut with Singing in the Wilderness. The documentary, shot over close to a decade, follows the farming people of the Little Well Village in Fumin County of China’s Yunnan province. They belong to the A-Hmao subset of the Miao people, a historically oppressed and poor minority within China who were pushed to the mountaintops by the Han Chinese majority thousands of years ago. This village, in stark contrast to the vast majority of China, which mostly follows either atheism or folk religions, has embraced Christianity, and their church choir, conducted by Long Guangyuan, has become a backbone of the community. Once Zhang Xiaoming, the county propaganda minister, becomes enraptured by their untrained yet passionate singing, their rise to international fame begins, leading to appearances in Beijing and Lincoln Center, events which challenge the group’s identity in the face of government advertising and mandated subject matter. At the same time, the film follows two choir members as they embark on marriage: Zhang Yaping (referred to simply as Ping in the chyron), who has a volatile relationship with her husband from another, bigger village, and Wang Jiansheng (Sheng) who longs to become a preacher and chafes against the farming lifestyle and his arranged marriage. Chen cannily ties all of these threads into a larger tapestry of the sweeping nature of China’s modernization and image creation that people like Jia have also captured so astutely. What makes this particular instance special is its specificity, in both the ethnic and religious aspects. Throughout, there is the implicit idea, never directly commented on by the villagers, of a certain exoticization: before their first performance, the villagers, who normally otherwise wear fairly modern clothing, are given traditional garb that emphasizes uniformity and tradition which, as a village elder observes in one of just two talking heads, has already mostly faded away: he sings part of a Miao ethnic song before sadly noting that he’s forgotten the rest of it, and that there are no more people who remember such songs. Instead, the villagers find their identity in these songs which aren’t in their native language: Singing in the Wilderness, at least in its international releases, probably ought to note the many times where the film switches between A-Hmao and Mandarin: the former is used during most of the conversations between villagers, including in their urban settings, and the latter is used during the semi-common use of voiceover, the singing of songs (secular and non-secular alike), and official announcements; an especially notable recurring theme is Sheng’s use of Mandarin rather than A-Hmao during his sermons, presumably in an effort to be able to minister to a wider region of China than his immediate people. This tension between the village and the wider world recurs without ever necessarily being used as a cudgel to emphasize the beauty of the former. While it is startling to see Europeans being led through a guided tour of the village, along with almost a shock-cut to promotional footage and a performance of “Mamma Mia” on China’s Got Talent, Chen does not solely rely on such wild extremes, instead carefully drawing out how each incursion relates to the villagers’ predicaments. This especially comes to the fore in the turbulent emotional journeys both Ping and Sheng go on; crucially they are both linked explicitly to Christianity and singing, two pursuits seen as incompatible with the prescribed means of life. Singing in the Wilderness, aside from decrying the corrupt aborted land development that drastically cut down on farming space, doesn’t aim to suggest that one approach is necessarily better than the other, but Chen’s faithful evocation of a resolutely modern type of struggle resounds with a clarity all its own.

Andrew Norman Wilson

1. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (2019)
2. Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016)
3. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: The Old Victrola (2019)
4. Impersonator (2021)
5. In the Air Tonight (2020)
6. The Unthinkable Bygone (2016)

1. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: Lavender Town Syndrome (2019)
2. Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016)
3. Z = |Z/Z•Z-1 mod 2|-1: The Old Victrola (2019)
4. Impersonator (2021)
5. In the Air Tonight (2020)
6. The Unthinkable Bygone (2016)