How to Survive Adolescence: The Glorious Mechanics of Defiance
Girlhood (2014) 3/4
Bold, brawling, beautifully observed, and acted with wonderful conviction, Girlhood is a blast of oxygen to the coming-of-age genre; an energetic, hugely uplifting, and fascinatingly textured film that’s both a lament for sweetness lost and a celebration of wisdom and identity gained, often at the very same moment.
Fed up with an abusive family situation, dead-end school prospects, and the “boys’ law” in the neighbourhood, Marieme starts a new life after meeting a group of three free-spirited girls. She changes her name and style, drops out of school, and begins stealing to be accepted into the gang. When her home becomes unbearable, Marieme seeks solace in an older man who promises her money and protection. Realizing the lifestyle will never result in the freedom and independence she desires, she finally decides to take matters into her own hands.
Buoyed by a captivating central performance from stunning newcomer Karidja Touré, Girlhood contains a few standout scenes of daring camaraderie and carefree elation. Led by the swaggering alpha Lady (Assa Sylla), the foursome pools their pilfered resources together for a one-night hotel stay; an occasion for pizza partying, bubble baths, bong hits, and, most rapturously, a lip-synched/sing-along performance to Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” Bathed in blue light, intoxicated by temporary freedom, the young women are “a vision of ecstasy.”
Writer-director Céline Sciamma (Water Lilies, Tomboy) gets unaffected performances from her entire non-professional cast—who were scouted from the street—expertly placing them in the nebulous region between child and adult. (Sciamma was mentored by brilliant minimalist Xavier Beauvois (Of Gods and Men), during her time at the major French film school, La Fémis.) Sciamma’s touch is more nimble and nuanced in Girlhood, and she refuses to pin any of its characters down, even in their vacillations. It’s a fascinating exercise in the enlightenment that can happen when a filmmaker shifts the traditional male cinematic gaze slightly, and uncovers a whole new world.
Sciamma pushes past superficial anthropological study to deliver a vital, nonjudgmental character study. Even as she stops at familiar stations on the road to maturity—problems at home, new friendships, first love—Sciamma revels in the risky, reckless exuberance of adolescence, and basks in the sheer joy of filming every minute of it. The tense, involving result confirms Sciamma’s mastery over a genre too often reduced to its simplest ingredients. The milieu is Pariah, but it’s combined with the yearning naiveté of An Education’s Jenny Mallor and the dangerous experimentation of Thirteen’s Tracy Freeland.
Girlhood’s non-patronizing, credible representation of class, race, and gender is a rare and perceptive illustration of the intricacies of social inequality. While the malignant power that comes from having a scary home life never dissipates, Girlhood doesn’t feel like a misery-mongering expression of high-minded, condescending concern. It presents the characters’ grim reality without surrendering its lightness of touch, its compassion, or its hope.
In many ways, Girlhood is, quite aptly, the feminist answer to Boyhood—whereas Boyhood has the natural endpoint of Mason growing into a young adult, Girlhood stretches out in front of Marieme, an uncertain path leading into a milky haze. It captures the emotional minefield of adolescence and the intensity of female friendship, with a visceral blow to wherever those memories lay dormant. Marieme’s new friends are almost a necessary influence—she needs to step sideways before she can step forward.
Illustrating the ways an indifferent society boxes in the people who grow up in project-style boxes, Girlhood throbs with the global now, yet remains keyed to the minutiae of the teenage lives portrayed therein. Raw, insistent, and precisely directed—especially in a bravura opening football sequence that inverts expectations—Girlhood veers between being a celebration of defensively violent sisterhood, and a chronicle of the vicious cycle of poverty, yanking us into the life of its protagonist.
Near the end, Sciamma cuts to a close-up of Marieme climbing carpeted stairs to a swank, all-white party. She’s shed her usual hoodie and jeans, and donned black heels, a flaming red cocktail dress, and an ice-blond wig. She’s never looked more womanly, and she’s never been more trapped. Girlhood has all the punchy life force and quiet determination of its sixteen-year-old heroine.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) 3/4
Precocious, faux-primitive, and bracingly post-punk, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a glorious pastiche of styles; a haunting love story between two misfits; a joyful mash-up of genre, archetype, and iconography; and a refreshing take on one of the oldest legends in existence. Sly, slick, slinky, and fearlessly subversive, it’s a wholly original work without a single unique thought or idea.
In the Iranian ghost-town Bad City—a place that reeks of death and isolation—the townspeople are unaware they are being stalked by a lonesome vampire. When young Arash loses his car to a drug kingpin as a result of his father’s uncontrolled gambling debts, he finds an unexpected niqab-wearing ally who harbours a dark secret.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night grabs you by the throat with its moody style, pulsating soundtrack, and offbeat editing. The wildly inventive combination is intoxicating: absurd, eerie, languid, possessed by the calm of an inevitable beauty. As seductive as its title—a declarative sentence that encompasses many mysteries—A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night mimics the rhythms of silent films with a dreamlike pull into a dreamspace all its own.
Shot in Bakersfield, CA, which passes for the nocturnal reaches of Iran, writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour reveals herself to be a sensualist and voracious cinephile—openly referencing films from Godard to Point Break; falling in line with a tradition of wry formalism stretching back through Aki Kaurismäki. Amirpour combs through history, blending conventional elements—the classic tones of Nosferatu and Frankenstein, the pop culture genius of Kill Bill, the political overtones of Persepolis, the hipster coolness of Only Lovers Left Alive—into something rather groundbreaking. Its prolific influences span spaghetti westerns, graphic novels, horror films, and the Iranian New Wave.
Amirpour’s unmistakable compositions also borrow from outside: wide, evocative vistas are intercut with murky city streets where shadowy figures follow one another. Employing chiaroscuro to create an unearthed aesthetic, Amirpour boasts an incredible eye for arrangements, and a wonderful gift for choreography. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is close to the noir sensibility of Let the Right One In, and contains the most enthralling bedroom decor since Emma Watson’s record-dappled walls in The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
With sparse dialogue, spooky atmosphere, and a sensationally eclectic score, much of the narrative is conveyed by images alone. Lyle Vincent’s unrelentingly gorgeous high-contrast monochrome cinematography gets us almost all the way there; his black-and-white visuals and stark landscapes almost frostbitten in their cold clarity. Amirpour is more concerned with creating memorable tableaux, which her characters often drift around like kelp in deep water.
Cryptic and solemnly fatalistic, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is a beguiling and unpredictably funny look at personal desire; about the willful ignorance required to see the best in the people we love, and sometimes suck on. It creeps up on you with the nimble powers of its supernatural focus. With its bloodsucker mentality, jukebox funkiness, and gender-politics righteousness, it may become a totem for the hipster world. The expressionist silhouettes, wilted patriarchy, and floating chador make the whole experience feel forbidden; there’s something in the nothing.
It’s true that A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night feels more like an elaborate, code-scrambling gesture than the organic statement of a fully-formed artist, and when all is digested, its strangeness seems as empty of substance as cotton candy. But why does it matter? It’s a debut, and it has style, imagination, and a devil-may-care attitude that’s insanely alluring, and sometimes spellbinding. And it’s chic and sophisticated to boot.
Just when you thought you’d seen every possible variation on the vampire tale, along comes a fractured Farsi fright flick that serves as a striking calling card for Amirpour. If A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is the kind of promising first feature that can’t help but imply that its creator will do better next time, it’s also an essential reminder that artists working from an old playbook can still delight and surprise.
Timbuktu (2014) 3/4
Elegantly artful, gracefully assembled, and ultimately disquieting, Timbuktu is a bitter cry from the heart; a quiet work of savage truth; and a timely film with a powerful message. Patient, restrained, and heartbreaking, it’s a breathing, bleeding reaction to a genuine human rights crisis; a response, a supplement, and a protest to the horrors that flash by on the news.
Along a river on the outer fringes of Timbuktu—a small city on the southern edge of the Sahara that was once an important centre for trade and scholarship under the medieval empire—live Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) and his wife, Satima (Toulou Kiki), along with their twelve-year-old daughter, Toya, and Issan, an orphaned boy they have adopted. With one foot in the past and one in the present, Kidane and his family sleep in a traditional open-door tent, but one of their cows is named GPS.
Issan’s boyish inattentiveness and Kidane’s angry feud with a fisherman lead to bloodshed; an angry saleswoman in the marketplace tries to shame her oppressors; a group of boys play soccer on a dirt field with an imaginary ball. It’s remorselessly grim—music, laughter, cigarettes, and sports are forbidden; people are terrorized, flogged, stoned, and shot at point blank range—yet gracefully assembled and appropriately confrontational.
The best political art forges a human connection, and never feels didactic or driven by overweening ideology. In Timbuktu, every scene and shift in tone or mood is designed to cut through the stereotypes that divide the world. When we observe a nomadic Tuareg tribesman’s domestic life as filled with familiar strife and comedy, or bored young Al-Qaeda affiliates more interested in debating their favourite European soccer teams than in enforcing Sharia law, we no longer perceive their situation as alien.
These characters are wonderfully nuanced: warm and jealous and petty and fearful. Kidane’s pleas to see his daughter’s face before death may move you to tears. Abdelkerim, the doleful head of the local militia, is just as recognizable, and far from a Koran-muttering lunatic—he’s a mid-level, mid-career, semi-corrupt army officer who’s looking out for No. 1; someone who conceals his chain-smoking from his superiors, and gloats about his designs on the “enemy.”
In providing audiences a chance to bear witness to unspeakable suffering as well as dazzling defiance, Timbuktu reminds us that ideology is deaf and blind, and the militant threat is nowhere near as great to Westerners as to the people of Mali, Syria, Yemen, or Iraq. That Timbuktu also makes the crucial, heretical, point that Islamic militants are human beings more likely to be driven by greed or lust or power than by zealotry, just reinforces its necessity.
Writer-director Abderrahmane Sissako (Waiting for Happiness, Bamako) actually shot the film on the dunes of neighbouring Mauritania, where he was born. His style is deliberately composed and poetically precise; almost devout or monastic as he depicts visceral trauma without hysterics, expresses outrage with religious oppression, and offering moments of humour and startling beauty. The film’s methods are boldly unorthodox, and its eccentricities plunge its audience from unwavering vulnerability to nihilistic absurdity.
In rare cases, indignation and tragedy can be rendered with clarity yet subtlety, setting hysteria aside for deeper, more richly shaded tones. Timbuktu is such a case. Sissako’s vision is so offhandedly seductive, it takes a while before you realize what threat is gathering, and from where. Rather than shock, Sissako envelops us in a heavy sadness as happiness is besieged, then destroyed, by the same species who had created it.
Timbuktu is a meticulous, maddeningly truthful, morally devastating film about ordinary Malian people trying to live under harassment by swaggering jihadists toting Kalashnikov rifles, sinking into an abyss as unrelenting as the sand surrounding them. How to describe what it’s like for a Muslim community under the rule of violent insurgents? It’s repressive, humiliating, treacherous, and tragic, just like for the rest of us. Timbuktu is an act of resistance and revenge that throbs with humanity, and asserts the power of secularism.
For more reviews, visit Absurdity & Serenity at absurditys.wordpress.com.