Children of Paradise (1945) is the classic 190-minute film by director Marcel Carne and scenarist Jacques Prevert.  The paradise of the title is not 19th century Paris, the movie’s setting, but rather the personal paradise in some of the characters’ minds.  The “children” are mostly theatre actors; one who is not is an aristocratic, misanthropic criminal (Marcel Herrand)—often a fumbler of his crimes.  People with paradise in their minds want what they want, and invariably it involves the self more than other people.  Significantly, there is a sequence in which a man named Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault), as he tries to catch up with the elegant woman Garance (Arletty), disappears in a big crowd of merrymakers in the street.  A self now made anonymous seems to exist here.

(In French with English subtitles)

Children of Paradise (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t understand the meaning of the strange Iranian film, Gabbeh (1996).

Its protagonist is a girl who yearns to wed a man who howls exactly like a wolf but doesn’t seem to be one.  He’s a man.  A lot happens, even so—a mystifying lot—before the couple elope on horseback.  Love, resentment, birth, old age, death—the film poetically touches on all these matters.  I haven’t seen any of director Mohsen Makhmalbaf‘s other pictures, but they’re supposed to be political.  This one isn’t.  It appears to have something to do with existential truth, but is as figurative as it is visually entrancing.  I take Makhmalbaf to be an ambitious artist.

Postscript:  I have seen the director’s 2001 film, Kandahar, and was much impressed by it.

Gabbeh (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t understand the meaning of the strange Iranian film, Gabbeh (1996).

Its protagonist is a girl who yearns to wed a man who howls exactly like a wolf but doesn’t seem to be one.  He’s a man.  A lot happens, even so—a mystifying lot—before the couple elope on horseback.  Love, resentment, birth, old age, death—the film poetically touches on all these matters.  I haven’t seen any of director Mohsen Makhmalbaf‘s other pictures, but they’re supposed to be political.  This one isn’t.  It appears to have something to do with existential truth, but is as figurative as it is visually entrancing.  I take Makhmalbaf to be an ambitious artist.

Postscript:  I have seen the director’s 2001 film, Kandahar, and was much impressed by it.

Gabbeh (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Brian Moore‘s novel, The Colour of Blood, was published in 1987, before the fall of Communism in the Soviet bloc.  Its engaging action occurs in an unnamed Eastern European country, and the leader of the Catholic church there, Cardinal Bem, is a man honorable and peaceable and not at all fanatically anti-government.

However, as in his novel Black Robe, Moore, clearly lapsed, attempts to present the Catholic church as morally unworthy—unworthy in a way Cardinal Bem is not.  For there exists in this church a politically extremist faction which manages to kidnap Bem with the aim of blaming it on the Communist government.  False blame, then, will fall upon the Reds, but honest blame belongs to the Catholics.

Moore understands the far-reaching complexity in countries where there is tension between totalitarians and religious institutions, but he refuses to side with Catholic institutions.  Indeed, he tacitly deems the Church philosophically suspect since even the silence-of-God idea springs up before the novel’s last sentence—“The silence of God: would it change at the moment of his death?”  To tell the truth, it is no wonder Moore was Graham Greene‘s favorite living novelist.  Both men are unsuitable intellectual guides.

Matthew Weiner, the creator of the series Mad Men, is probably more politically liberal than conservative, and yet a final-season episode of his show acknowledges that Nixon, in 1969, was trying to end the Vietnam War, something leftists all over the country strongly doubted.  It is the Republican politician Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), not Nixon, who receives a jab for mendaciously saying he supports the President’s objective instead of the war effort, but such dishonesty emanates from pols on both the Right and the Left.  And it emanates from the basically liberal but oversensitive and scurvy Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), involved with a new girlfriend in the final season after his nice wife spurned him for his adultery.

The Mad Ave master, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), makes no political pronouncements but merely adheres to his religion of Coming Out On Top.  What he quietly realizes, however, is that without family he is too often on the bottom.  His physical separation from wife Megan (Jessica Pare), whom he can love (but does he?), parallels his separation from his children and, to be sure, his first wife.  Don cannot afford to let HIS religion trump family love, and an episode persuading us to believe this ends with daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka) flatly but sincerely telling Don, “Happy Valentine’s Day.  I love you.”  It is one of the many scenes that demonstrate how much Mad Men concentrates on the human heart.

Mad Men (Photo credit: Wikipedia)