magnusmax

Although braveness is a virtue attributed to a great array of films and television shows today, the "courage" requisite for accepting a generous paycheck to pose in an air-conditioned studio on the Burbank lot, is somehow dubious. Add to this the pampering from producers who claim certain ethnicities or gender orientations are somehow rarified and prized delicacies of the photographed world, and any shred of "courage" pales against the plucky daring-do of director Mohammad Rasoulof, whose vision and genuine courage gave birth to "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" among true perils and danger. One of the many joys of cinema is that everyone, regardless of identity, gets his moment to shine in his own perfectly unique story that offers a unique perspective, both teaching and entertaining his audience in the process. Such is the democratization the camera makes possible. But nobody has the right to call this "bold", "brave" or "ballsy" like the man who defied his authoritarian government to birth a film whose message would have seen him jailed for 8 years in an Iranian jail, had he not fled last-minute to Germany for refuge. He now lives in Europe, exiled from his country of birth. "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" became Germany's entry, and was ultimately nominated for Best International Feature Film, in the 97th Academy Awards.

At its heart, "Sacred Fig" is a film about truth and lies - and what happens to us when we live by lies. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn unwittingly wrote a prototype of the film's premise in the early 20th century, even holding to the agrarian theme: "In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." "Sacred Fig" offers a strong contrast between generational tendencies - a corrupt anti-moralism embodied in a world of grown-up bureaucracy, and a more humane compassion that tends young and vulnerable.

As Solzhenitsyn says, failure to censor evil on one hand, and persecution of the righteous on the other, are indeed both capital offences against truth. "Sacred Fig" presents itself as a moral cautionary tale, the results of living a lie. If untruthful words threaten life, untruthful actions are perfectly lethal. Iman's promotion to judge kickstarts the trouble, when his day-to-day makes unconscionable demands of his moral values. The demand for velocity in his work leaves no time to determine the fairness of the cases he must pass judgement on. Failure to execute his job will result in feelings of incompetence, loss of self-worth, and cancellation; proficiency will undermine his very sense of objective truth. This challenge to his innate sense of justice knocks him into a head spin as he struggles to reconcile professional and personal values. His decision to unfairly sentence detainees of the Tehranian government strikes his moral discernment a fatal blow at the same time as it germinates the seed of distrust deep within his own family. The audience learns that seeds can bring forth not just fruit, but also thorns.

In keeping with aspects of the traditional domestic values this tale is ensconced within, Iman's moral failure as father signals the beginning of the collapse of the family's sum integrity. Just as his act of untruthfulness at work surreptitiously opens the door to wholesale dishonesty elsewhere in his life, so the absence of a protector makes the family vulnerable to the same ills. Iman believes he can separate work from home life, but ends up making a worst-case demonstration for why it's a bad idea bringing stresses home from work. The minute he begins questioning the faithfulness of his family, he undercuts any level of mutual trust the family members previously enjoyed, dragging them down to a primitive-minded suspicion and subsequent violent dysfunctionality. In fact, this corrosive distrust is so prevalent that before long the audience is experiencing similar trust issues. Which of the characters can we trust? How can we, the audience, presume to vouch for characters we have spent only 30 minutes knowing? Our instinct to demonise and idolise characters is shattered and betrayed as we are forced to question the trustworthiness of each character. Life is not so simple. Cue the slow-burning rug pull of a realization that the characters we are watching are none other than ourselves. Through our implication in the trust games waged on screen, we are them; through our shared humanity, our shared subjectivity, the viewers experience sameness with those characters presented in the film. It is this relational, psychological, and moral dimension that the story draws its strength.

This is a film that is all about the integrity of the human person. It never blames incidents of our existence for evil. Rather, it rightly blames persons. It is of note that the primary Macguffin throughout the film's tense duration is the handgun Iman brings home - "to protect us" - and stores in a drawer by his bedside table. Nowhere is there any insinuation that the weapon is inherently evil; rather, when Najmeh weighs it in her hands, she says "it is heavy", as if referring rather to the responsibility that accompanies its bestowal than to the gun itself. Again, a testament to Rasoulof's keen comprehension of, and focus on, the exclusively human origin of evil in our world: He does not blame material objects that are faultless, but persons who are anything but so. This exoneration of neutral objects is extended to technology, which plays a very significant role in the movie. The sisters Rezvan and Sana are drawn along a divergent path from their parents practically from the outset, and the means for this is technology. As young women across the nation lead the charge against their repressive, patriarchally-wired state, taking to the streets to peacefully protest against the current government, the two sisters are exposed to a narrative that contradicts the television whose daily proclamations their parents so insistently claim to be dogma. Branding the film as unmistakably a creature of the Twitter-become-X era, the girls become hooked on the alternative media offered on their smartphones - media that depicts police brutality and street skirmishes without censorship. Without censorship, though not without intention. The way in which media represents viewpoints both implicitly and explicitly, the manner in which a ten-second clip can spark civil unrest and become the rallying cry for unquestionable rhetoric justifying untold violence, is obvious. The reliability of anonymous narrators who are incensed, and who are busy incensing others, is highlighted as dubious. In our world, we know that the path most followed is rarely the best - but does that crown the counter-narrative infallible by default? Of course, as "Sacred Fig" reminds us, it is seldom so simple.

As the sisters gaze, horrified and yet unable to look away, hunched together - a human triangle illuminated by the dour blue-white light of a phone, we are similarly fascinated and repulsed by the images of women attacked in the streets, by the broken bodies lying in the way. Mounds of photographic evidence pile up, cramming full the ledger of authoritarian abuse; the horror filling every crevice of their minds and hearts, defying belief, strangling pre-conceived notions, and extending the imperceptible fingers of anxiety across their hearts. Such a sensation is felt by those of us today who witness the bloody scenes seep out from wartorn Ukraine, from Israel and Gaza, from Iraq? We clamour for the right to see all, for transparency, but feel nauseous at the sight of blood, shaken to our core by images no person should have to see. And so the meta framing which compels us to relate to the characters is weaponized again - we gain a heightened sense of self-awareness as we slump in our plush cinema seats - witnesses to inhumane acts we cannot hope to resist save in spirit; the sisters do the same.

It is testimony to a tight grip on a cohesive narrative that the ponderous 2 hours and 47 minutes never tax the viewer. The third act is somewhat alienating, since to deliver the moral of the story, the crushing inevitability of justice must play out with the necessity of the Furies' retribution. This translates to a couple of final sequences that seem concerned no longer with character arcs, as though fate has sealed off the chance to repent. This gloomy finish leaves the viewer pessimistic and deflated. It forces us to ask the question: how do we identify the seed of the sacred fig? Is it the small acts of resistance? The struggle for life, for purity, for truth? "The Seed of the Sacred Fig" is all about sowing seeds for eternity, even if that means suffering for truth in this mortal realm below meantime.

Last night, I sat down in an auditorium brimming with a crowd of just three audience members, to (probably) Australia's first showing of Gareth Edward's esteemed fourth directorial effort. The sorry turnout forebodes a weekend of pain at the box office for The Creator. I wish I could say it was undeserved.

Going in, I sustained high hopes for what the critics had teased as a surprisingly emotional, existentially reflexive, and visually stunning work of cinema. The Creator is none of these things. The story and the characters who form it, suffer from an artificiality that makes every turn (there are no twists) feel contrived and forced. To the extent that attention is cast upon deeper, richer content, such as the human soul, human consciousness, and AI's value and place in the world, the film propagates a message as subversive as it is unconvincing - that machines are potentially equal in worth to human beings. The look and feel is oftentimes drab without intentionality, resulting more in mediocrity than in any kind of atmosphere that supports the story and the journey of the characters. In fact, characters who have never given the audience any reason to like them (and never will), and who bear little or no meaningful or consistent relationship with one another, traverse a world without traction, grounding, or realism - a supposedly hostile, novel land, which nonetheless holds little promise or threat - in a low-stakes torpor of brutality severed from sensibility through an induced torpor that desensitizes the viewer (deliberately or accidentally?) to life and death.

Combine this with a number of copy-and-paste cliches, presented unironically in aggressive bluntness (What? The antagonists are really those pesky white American military generals who happily overlook wartime atrocities carried out in the murky uncertainty of Asian territory in favour of attaining whatever self-seeking objectives of the day happen to motivate them... how revolutionary! I bet it took a good bit of thought to design that plotline.) The various inspirations from classic historical and filmographic locations are evident - but in place of using them as enrichment for a story already imbued with depth of its own, The Creator merely flags these tropes and leaves them at the door. Through lazy writing that denies its characters oxygen, these tropes become not enrichment, but baggage.

The Creator, then, is misguided philosophically, emotionally, and motivationally. With a good story, Edwards' eye for effects and staging could provide an invaluable asset, as it did in the much-celebrated Rogue One. The world-building, from the robotic farmers tending their rice paddies, to the impressive, Star Wars pastiche, NOMAD, all that pertains to VFX excels, reminding everyone of Edwards' unrivalled masterfulness in the field. However, all of the nifty innovations in the world cannot rescue a story whose mediocrity neither uplifts nor oppresses.

Edwards should stick to what he does best, and leave directing for those with a better grasp on what it is that makes us human.

Suzume is another pretty and imaginative film from director Makoto Shinkai, whose name has rapidly risen to the rank of household name for many anime devotees around the world.

Certainly it was not awful, and it's worth a watch. There's a very funny sequence involving some out-of-body magicking that had us laughing out loud.

Let's not be unrealistic, though. Sadly, the reviewers are correct: Suzume is by no means Shinkai's most original project to date. After the initial novelty of a few magical gimmicks wears off, we are left with a starkly modern (and consequently starkly unattractive) world - Japan's major cities, inhabited by armies of iPhone-wielding drones. Realistic, but miserable. Commonplace.

I think we watch Spirited Away because it spirits us away from what we know. Suzume feels all-too-familiar - and the glitz of an alternate dimension featuring Shinkai-staple pinky-blue skies studded with stars, is not enough to prevent us drowning in the empty mediocrity of a world of shallow characters and soul-crushingly ordinary glass temples (skyscrapers) we are all too well acquainted with already.