Daily Archives: Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Mr Badii wants to kill himself. The problem is he doesn’t have anyone
to bury him. After a few unsuccessful encounters with men who
misconstrue his unspoken proposition, he picks up a young Kurdish
soldier in need of a lift. Having offered the young recruit a generous
sum in return for the work, the boy leaps out of the car and flees
across the hillside where Badii has already dug his grave. His second
prospective candidate is an Afghan seminarian, who objects on religious
grounds, quoting from scripture to dissuade him. The third is an Azeri
taxidermist who accepts the offer as he needs the money for his sick
child, but nonetheless tries to deter him from carrying out his plan.
He confesses that he too once planned to hang himself from a mulberry
tree, but upon tasting the mulberries, chose life. As darkness falls
over the city, Badii climbs into his grave and closes his eyes, and
darkness falls upon us as the clouds open up.Abbas Kiarostami’s minimalist meditation on the circle of life is
notable for its use of long shots, such as in the closing sequences.
The film is punctuated throughout by shots of Badii’s car traversing
the winding hilly roads, usually while he is conversing with a
passenger. The visual distancing stands in contrast to the sound of the
dialogue, which always remains in the foreground as though
non-diegetic. This fusion of distance with proximity, like the frequent
framing of landscapes through car windows, generates suspense even in the
most mundane of moments.’Taste of Cherry’ confounded Western audiences accustomed to dramatic
performances and emotional manipulation with its apparent absence of
explanation or conclusion. It is never explained why Badii wants to
commit suicide but he tells the seminarian that Allah wouldn’t want any
of his children to suffer so much. We never see him take his pills but
when the rains fall on his open grave we are encouraged to believe that
he has ‘tasted the cherries’ and re-evaluated life. In his circuitous
search for meaning, it could be said that the soldier represents the
state; the seminarian, religion; and Azeri, what can happen but also
what has gone before. Badii is in turn ignored; told to continue living
but not given any reason to; and finally, told to experience nature and
appreciate the little things. The theocracy has little to offer him.The Iran depicted herein is a melting pot, or cultural mosaic, of other
Muslim world countries. We assume Badii is ethnically Persian, but his
fellow travellers all hail from foreign lands. Perhaps this signifies
the finity of the revolutionary state, in that no one has a vested
stake in it’s perpetuation. All three nations represented were
embroiled in conflict at this time, and maybe it was three foreign
perspectives who had known conflict which Badii needed.Much has been
said of the very final scene which I neglected to mention above as I do
not myself consider it part of the narrative. It consists of camcorder
footage of the director and crew shooting scenes of the Army on patrol
and would seem to me to be a disclaimer for the Iranian censors who I
imagine would be concerned with the film’s themes (it’s only a movie).
And it’s inclusion in the Western release would seem to highlight this
issue for foreign audiences.

As someone who was introduced to the films of Quentin Tarantino in the
2000s with Kill Bill, I have always been more familiar with the
indulgent fanboy side of him. For a time during his post-Jackie Brown
hiatus, many believed his next work would be something even more
low-key and maybe even profound. But all he has done since is lower
expectations with increasingly violent homages to cult sub-sub-genres
of movies he grew up with, even indirectly remaking two of his
favourites, as part of a Spaghetti Western trilogy: Inglourious
Basterds and now this, a loose remake/homage to the 1966 Spaghetti
Western Django starring Franco Nero, who features in a cameo here. It begins with the slave Django being unchained by German-born bounty
hunter ‘Dr’ King Schultz. A giant tooth wiggles atop Schultz’s carriage
impertinently throughout the picture, though unusually for a Tarantino
flic’, he at no point performs any impromptu dentistry on the crackers
and rednecks he’s gunning for. Schultz promises to free Django from
slavery upon collecting several bounties across the Deep South and then
repay him by rescuing Django’s conveniently German-speaking wife
Brunhilde from Francophile plantation owner Calvin Candie
(played with devilish menace by Leonardo DiCaprio) of Candyland.Jamie Foxx relishes executing every evil white man, reminiscent of
every Fred Williamson blaxploitation character while Christoph Waltz
gets to take off the Nazi uniform from his last QT collaboration and
play the guilty-ass white man. He is the most interesting and complex
of all the characters herein (though that may not be saying much) as
his arc of development reflects that of the European-American. He deals
with his guilt at not having done enough in the latter half of the
movie when he witnesses a slave’s tearing apart by dogs and one
Mandingo warrior gouge out another’s eyes for the pleasure of
‘Monsieur’ Candie.As with all Tarantini, revenge is served with bombastic effect. If
there is anything unconventional in the violence of the movie it is the
disproportionate meting out of cruelty to the slaveholders and Uncle
Toms, who only receive gunshots to the heart or unceremonious
kneecappings while innocent slaves are mauled, gouged of their eyes and
beaten with hammers or robbed of dignity in the aforementioned Mandingo
fights and of course, their heritage. Perhaps this is Quentin’s way of
reminding us his stories take place in unjust worlds not unlike the
ones we live in.Unlike most blaxploitation pictures set in the era, the slaves of the
movie are only freed after being bought with money by a white man and
this is why it could be argued it is a blaxploitation movie for white
audiences, coming to terms with the history of racial oppression in the
US and a new era where the ‘minorities’ of yesteryear collectively
comprise the majority but the white plurality is rapidly becoming
marginalized politically. Blood splatters white lilies, cotton, and
snow to remind us how white America got where it is. A black-n-white
President may symbolize the transitional phase the county is in but the
transformation has not yet been realised. The debt owed by many
Americans is not merely a monetary one.Although after pondering these issues, the film proceeds for another
half-hour wherein any remaining do-badders are riddled with bullets or
blown apart by dynamite in a fairly unimaginative and convoluted way.
Watching the weak climax one longs for the return of Sally Menke’s
guiding hand to guide a pair of scissors over the 2:15 mark and
graciously snip it loose. QT is definitely missing that woman’s
touch dearly: those scenes deleted could have sold countless ‘Extended Edition’ DVDs.As a genre film however, it is an excellent meshing of two deeply
entrenched yet juxtaposed American icons: the cowboy and the slave. The
former symbolizing America’s unity and freedom after the Civil War
somehow entwined with one representing America’s division (then between
North and South; a century later, between largely urban and rural) and
tyranny. In a movie ending on the eve of the Civil War, the future and
the past. Hip hop music is played to the desired startling effect over
images of Django’s horse seemingly strutting him into the Candyland
plantation but everything else has been seen before in one form or
another.It must sully the memories of cineastes who were once so electrified by
the jarring chords of the Miserloo nineteen years ago and the overnight
globalisation of that treasured American epithet, Motherf*cker, to see
what little Quentin Tarantino has done to show he’s learnt anything
since. Postmodernist masturbation may be enough for audiences these
days who disregard ‘elitist’ critics and their analyses but if this is
the case our filmmakers should unchain their own minds and emancipate
viewers worldwide with a cinema of meaning.