Saturday, more Bunuel, March 24

Movies since last post:

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
101 Nights
Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo
The Mirror

For some reason, watching Bunuel after an Iranian movie is very disappointing. I know that Bunuel movie was a good watch; I was amazed and I could feel the wheels turn in my head while I watched the movie: both a good and a bad sign. Good, because it was clearly a movie that would last beyond the viewing [say, unlike Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo, all swordplay and Mifune's growl, but nothing lingering in the mind], but bad because it was annoying to have my thoughts interrupt the viewing.

Later Bunuel seems very much occupied with terrorism--albeit of a kind very different from what is identified today as terrorism--and I am not sure if I like his take on it. Camus, Calvino and Bunuel share very similar experiences of violence, but Bunuel seems to have done least justice to his own experience of it, and to the gravity that is in the core of terrorism itself.

The reason I was disappointed with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie has less to do with that movie itself--although the twists towards the end became tiring and predictable, and lost its charm soon enough--but with the wit and beauty of the Iranian movie I watched just before it; The Mirror by Jafar Panahi.

I am a big fan of movies from tehran. I think the best movies made in the last decade have come from Iran. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's A Moment of Innocence is at any given moment, in any frame, more lyrical and insightful about the cinema of cinema that Bunuel's cast walking along a country road, looped endlessly in farcical ends that come undone when one of the cast wakes up from a horrid dream, as if it is the same for us when we shake the newspaper in resignation and throw it on the floor to shake from us the news of a new blast in Baghdad.

But, even better than Makhmalbaf's was Panahi's "Don't look into the camera, Mina Khanum." Dialogues in Iranian movies are a curious mix of the real and the fantastic: each word, each act seems poised as not to blaspheme through idolatry. When a little girl throws off her fake plaster cast and refuses to act anymore, the movie looks right through the mirror and laughs at us. The story about a little girl being lost "in the hustle-bustle of Tehran" then actually becomes about Mina being lost in Tehran, and we find ourselves in the bus where she travelled, where music intervened as if my cinematic magic, where each of our responses was recorded before cinema came undone, and we wince everytime the same thought is encountered across the divide of the unreal.

Again, I am running out of time. Coherence is a luxury.