From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 4/26/2005 4:55 AM
25.04.2005
The feel-bad factor

Here is a film that will not be showing at your local cinemas this week. Indeed its very title — The 3 Rooms of Melancholia — might have been deliberately constructed so as to minimise its commercial appeal. Then there is its subject matter: the child victims of the Chechen war. And its provenance: Finland. Not to mention that it is shot in excruciatingly long takes with virtually no dialogue. The music is not too catchy either.

Not one for that restless Saturday night, then. But it is an extraordinary work. I would garland it with more superlatives, just so that some courageous independent distributor could plunder a few fruity adjectives to use in a promotional poster; but frankly it is near pointless. I would commend it in the highest possible terms to all my readers, but the truth is you don’t have much chance of getting to see it at all.

The film is split into three sections — the three «rooms» of the title — which reflect the lives of children involved in the war in Chechnya. In the first section, «Longing», we see Russian orphans being trained in a military school in Kronstadt. We almost see their faces harden by the minute as they go through their drills. The officers are their surrogate parents; and what they lack in love and affection is compensated by abundant measures of rigour and discipline.

The second section, «Breathing», follows a comely middle-aged woman, Hadizhat, as she performs her appalling daily duties of separating Chechen children from parents who are too sick, or too wounded, or too distressed, to cope with them. The camera records one such separation in near-silence; only the sobs, and Hadizhat’s own hollow words of reassurance, can be heard.

In the third part, «Remembering», more damaged Chechen children: an 11-year-old boy who has been abused by Russian soldiers, a 19-year- old rape victim. They don’t speak to camera; they say very little at all. We observe their tired faces, which already look old. The portraits are interspersed with images of the barren landscape in which the children were born. A heavy sense of timelessness prevails, and of eternal recurrence. The film contains virtually no images of war; yet it is all about war, as an inexorable existential condition.

In one sense, it would be wrong to call The 3 Rooms of Melancholia an obscure film. I saw it at the Istanbul Film Festival, and it has already been warmly received at other international gatherings: Chicago, Sundance, Venice and Amsterdam, picking up awards at the last two. But in another sense, we all know it is far, far away from the mainstream of film culture.

I happened to watch it a couple of days after seeing The Interpreter, Sydney Pollack’s political thriller that deals with bloody events in a fictional — but all too truthful — turbulent southern African state. In Hollywood terms, it is more than respectably sophisticated and well-intentioned. But how deficient it seemed in retrospect, after watching The 3 Rooms. How absurd, to expect us to be moved by Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn huffing and puffing through bomb blasts, phoney accents and improbable plot twists, when the truth of war can be conveyed so simply and devastatingly by the face of a child.

It is of course an inappropriate comparison: entertainment cinema versus art cinema; unstoppable commercial imperative versus unclouded artistic vision. But The 3 Rooms and The Interpreter are both films, albeit at opposite ends of a wide-ranging spectrum. And I found myself, not for the first time, wondering why we spend so much time and money consuming one kind at the expense of the other. Why have we become so disrespectful of an art form, that we choose, en masse, to consume only its most vulgar products?

And what does it say of western society, that it manages to be culturally hegemonic and apparently infantile at one and the same time? Let us be generous, and concede that there is considerable art and craft in a well-made romantic comedy, and that it is churlish to disparage those (few) masters of the genuine feel-good movie, not least because we all like to feel good.

But let’s hear it, for once, also for the feel-bad film. We need to see more of them. It is surely unacceptable to limit our experience of the terrible things that happen in the world to a couple of minutes on the television news. Art has to hurt sometimes; to be pungent and scary. There are not always happy endings, or redemptive conclusions.

I leave you with the words of the director of The 3 Rooms, Pirjo Honkasalo, who will, rest assured, never become a name to drop at dinner parties: «I don’t care for truths, but when I’m not asleep or dreaming, I wish to know how the human tribe leads life, shapes history and expresses will. Europe is full of people who need grace to cope with a righteous rage that turns against them. Life is no court of justice; justice does not prevail, life does."

Peter Aspden / The Moscow Times
http://www.chechentimes.org/en/press/?id=28397