The Magic Bus (Page 2)

Intimate, nuanced, complex and devastating, Laura Poitras's documentary My Country, My Country brings you into the life of one Dr. Riyadh, a plump and gray-mustached physician in Baghdad. You see him at home, which is lit as often as not by kerosene lamps and shaken by nearby explosions. You watch him as he gently cares for the ill, the indigent and the anxiety-ridden in his clinic in the Adhamiya district. You observe him at Abu Ghraib prison, collecting medical information on the prisoners crowded behind a chain-link fence. Most telling of all, you follow him from July 2004 through January 2005, as he stands for election in Iraq's Transitional National Assembly.

Should his fellow Sunnis go to the polls? At a meeting of his faction, the Iraqi Islamic Party, Riyadh argues that they must. To boycott the election, he says, is to condemn themselves to powerlessness. But given the pressures of American occupation, it isn't clear at the outset of the film whether Riyadh himself will vote. You wait until the closing scenes to discover what he will do, in a situation that bitterly divides him not only from his Shiite and Kurdish countrymen but from his Sunni community and (worst of all) his wife.

My Country, My Country screened earlier this year in New Directors/New Films, a series that by nature puts the stamp of art on its selections. The merit is deserved: Witness the film's continual sense of discovery, its endless unfolding of emotional complications and Poitras's near-miraculous conjuring of a whole story out of six months' chaos. What you see is a remarkable filmmaking achievement--and an indispensable record of one man's war.

* * *

Reminiscent sometimes of early Scorsese and sometimes of Tarantino, but never of the Dogme movement's holy idiocy, Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy is Denmark's finest exploration of the cinema of shaved skulls and tattoos. Having started in 1996 by making an unembarrassed genre picture, Refn went on to expand it into a mini-genre of its own in Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands (2004) and Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death (2005). Each of these subsequent films takes a character from the original Pusher and develops his story. The movies are therefore all the same: They involve drug deals gone bad in Copenhagen's underworld, where cameras are stylishly hand-held, the dialogue loquacious, the sex filthy and the violence extreme. The movies are all different: They introduce you to men from whom you'd flee in real life, then draw you deeply into their varying moral dilemmas.

Frank (Kim Bodnia), the protagonist of Pusher, spends a week trying to find love with a "champagne girl" (Laura Drasbaek) and so neglects a potentially fatal debt. Tonny (Mads Mikkelsen) of Pusher II is a brain-damaged ex-con, futilely struggling to please his gang-lord father and care for a baby that just might be his own. Milo (Zlatko Buric), the polyglot old-timer of Pusher III, only wants to put on a great 25th-birthday party for his daughter--he's doing all the cooking himself!--and stay with his Narcotics Anonymous program, but unfortunately he has to take time out to kill an Albanian business partner and dispose of the remains. Very few women of my acquaintance would sit through these proceedings; a good many of my male friends would prefer to watch The Band Wagon. But for any of my movie buddies who care to join me at the Pusher trilogy, I'll be happy to stand a drink afterward. We'll need it.

* * *

Short Take: The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d'Honneur) is arguably a slight and anecdotal film by Claude Chabrol, but it comes all the same from the old master's hand. Set in a provincial French city, within the circle of a cash-strapped but relentlessly proper family, The Bridesmaid concerns the sudden, obsessive love between Philippe (Benoît Magimel), a humorless young plumbing contractor, and sexy but inexplicable Senta (Laura Smet). Had Philippe watched any movies, he would know at once that Senta needs him like the ax needs the turkey. In his ignorance, though, he lets her draw him down a spiral stair to her lair, in the crumbling cellar of a semi-abandoned mansion, to be wrapped in her hot embrace and alarming confessions. Rather than believe what he's hearing, he chooses to think she's a mythomaniac--as if that would make her OK. But then, the outwardly normal Philippe has been sleeping recently with a piece of garden statuary, so it seems Senta has chosen the right mark. Desire has seldom seemed so abject, or want of imagination so fatal.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.