A Thousand Months
A THOUSAND MONTHS takes place in Morocco, in 1981, in a small town in the heart of the Atlas Mountains during the month of Ramadan. Seven-year-old Mehdi is a model student, so trusted that he has the special task of guarding his teacher’s highly valued chair each evening. He lives with his mother and grandfather while his father—he thinks—is off working in France; in fact his father is in prison, but the adults all do their utmost to shield Mehdi from the truth. Brilliantly composing his wide, wide CinemaScope frame, Faouzi Bensaïdi, who has worked with Andre Techiné and directed prize-winning short films, makes an extremely impressive feature debut, aided immeasurably by a wonderfully layered performance by young actor, Fouad Labied. 124 min. Morocco/France, 2003.
Dogville
Troubling, startling and sure to be controversial, DOGVILLE, Lars von Trier’s autopsy of Americana and the roots of terrorism, has its signifiers soundly in place: a stage set reminiscent of Our Town, a novel by Mark Twain, a character named Tom Edison, and a mystery woman—played with poetic aplomb by Nicole Kidman—seeking refuge in a hamlet so closed in on itself that its people virtually yearn to become a mob. Exploding the myth of bucolic American innocence, von Trier subverts the complacent self-image of the United States the way de Tocqueville once did its democracy, Upton Sinclair the malevolence of its commerce and John Steinbeck its illusions of community. The remarkable cast includes Paul Bettany, Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara and James Caan. 177 min. Denmark/Sweden/France, 2003.
S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
In the mid-70s, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge converted the Tuol Sleng High School in Phnom Penh into the notorious S21 detention center. Between 1975 and 1977, roughly 17,000 people passed through its doors. Only seven survived. In S21: THE KHMER ROUGE KILLING MACHINE, filmmaker Rithy Panh, who himself spent four years in a Khmer Rouge labor camp, works with the same sense of devotion and relentless pursuit of truth as Claude Lanzmann. He accompanies the detention center’s official painter, Vann Nath, on his first visit to S21 in more than 20 years, during which he confronts several of his former captors and tormentors. Like Lanzmann, Panh uses cinema to get the facts on record: the guards re-enact their former routines, victims are remembered and named, and their stories are told. 101 min. France, 2003.
Mansion By The Lake
Very loosely based on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Lester James Peries's MANSION BY THE LAKE follows a family of formerly wealthy, expatriate Sri Lankan landowners, now impoverished, as they return from England to the magnificent country estate they left behind. Now 84, Peries has been making films in his native country since Rekawa in 1956; his newest is a deeply moving study of a caste and a country torn apart by social change, told with a sublime serenity and restraint. 106 min. Sri Lanka, 2003.
Pornography
Polish author Witold Gombrowicz was one of the most remarkable writers of the 20th century; PORNOGRAPHY, the provocative adaptation of his third novel, which he described as “a descent to the dark limits of the conscience and the body,” should win him new admirers. Set in Nazi-occupied Poland, Pornography focuses on two middle-aged men: Frederic, a theater and film director, and Witold, a writer who serves as a wry commentator. The two journey out to the country estate of Hippolyte, a friend of Witold marginally involved in the resistance. There they encounter German soldiers and partisans, young lovers and even younger murderers, patriots and Catholics, while Frederic reveals an uncanny ability to hear clearly even distant and delicate sounds. Director Jan Jakub Kolski effectively finds the cinematic means to capture Gombrowicz’s abrupt changes of mood and tone and almost surreal juxtapositions, while anchoring the story in a very concrete time and place. 117 min. Poland, 2003.
