THE ART AND POLITICS OF CINEMA
Vera Drake and Jennifer Abbott discuss The Corporation Pedro Almadover and the New Politics of Spain.
The Power of Female Solidarity: An Interview with Jennifer Abbott
The Legacy of Frank Capra A Second Look: Touchez pas au grisbi
VOLUME 30
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I want my films to explode with Life: An Interview with Mira Nair
Matters of Race: An Interview with Orlando Bagwell
THE TAQWACORES A IN DEPTH VIEW OF EYAD ZAHRA’S NEWEST FILM
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CONTENTS Articles 4
Pedro Almodovar and the New Politics of Spain
Film Reviews Vera Drake
43
reviewed by Leonard Quart
by Geoff Pingree
16
The Legacy of Frank Capra
26
A Second Look: Touchez pas au grisbi
Maria Full of Grace
44
reviewed by Vojislava Filipcevic
The Manchurian Candidate
44
reviewed by Robert Sklar
by Martha Nochimson
39
The Taqwacores by Sascha Aktar
Interviews 10
I Want My Films to Explode with Life: An Interview with Mira Nair by Karin Badt
20
The Power of Female Solidarity: An Interview with Ousmane Sembene by Richard Porton
28
The Life and Times of the Corporation: An Interview with Jennifer Abbott by Dennis West
34
Matters of Race: An Interview with Orlando Bagwell by Barbara Abrash
Book Reviews Sontag & Kael
60
reviewed by Scott Foundas
Hollywood Italians
60
reviewed by Marco Calavita
New Readings
60
reviewed by Bill Krohn
Rites on Realism reviewed by Leger Grindon
61
THE TAQWACORES A IN DEPTH VIEW OF EYAD ZAHRA’S NEWEST FILM
A Rummani Filmworks production; produced
and directed by Eyad Zahra;
cinematography by JP Perry; edited by Joshue Rosemnfield; original music by Omar Fadel; starring Bobby Naderi, Noureen Dewulf, Dominic Rains, Nav Mann and Ian Tran.
“There were moments when i couldnt watch. A scene between Jehangir and Yusef had me bawling..."
39.
-Michael Muhammed Knight
E
yad Zahra’s The Taqwacores is the product of a strange mixture of fantasy and reality. It is based on a novel by Michael Muhammad Knight (who co-wrote the screenplay) and depicts a fictitious hard-core punk Muslim scene. The novel, which was originally self published and excerpted in underground zines, actually inspired the formation of several Islamic punk bands, with names such as Osama’s Tunnel Diggers, in some sense creating fact out of fiction. The film tells the story of Yusef, a straitlaced PakistaniMuslim engineering student in search of housing for the new term. He ends up at a veritable den of iniquities: the house of a group of Muslim punks in Buffalo, New York. The film centers around Yusefs encounters with his housemates and their different takes on Islam and identity.
41.
“ THAT WAS MY
jihad THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN ME AND BY NUTS
“
C hi e f am ong the punk s is Jeha ngir
(Dominic Rains), the film’s antihero, sporting an impressive Mohawk dyed in bloodlike hues, and often wearing a studded leather jacket (although he is inexplicably shirtless for most of the film). He attempts to take Yusef under his wing as a guide to enable him to navigate the alien territory that is the house of the Taqwacores. A dark and brooding character, Jehangir spouts verses from the Koran in a philosophical manner and exudes a devilish charisma that every youth-film hero must have. Jehangir has an expansive vision of Islam, one that does not exclude his propensity for alcohol and women. “That was my jihad,” he tells Yusef at one point, “the struggle between me and my nuts.” He is revered by the other housemates, and is for the most part their spiritual leader. Jehangir’s major antagonist and rival for Yusefs loyalties is Umar (Nav Mann), a purist, with the letter X car ved onto the back of his hands. His version of Islam is closer to what Yusef knows. Umar constantly refers to a time “before,” when the house was not in its current state of disarray, when things were run differently, due to the presence of a more orthodox and “pious” man who has long since left. We see Yusefs conflict as he gets caught between Jehangir and Umar, the latter becoming more vicious and violent as the film progresses, and the Taqwacores influence the house more and more. The living room often ser ves as a mosque during the day, while rowdy punks converge there to party through the night. There is a constant negotiation between different versions of Islam throughout the film, which leads to a final, brutal clash of worlds. Yusef for the most part remains neutral and, despite being led down paths of introspection and questioning what he has always known, he ultimately sticks to his core beliefs. Perhaps the most fleshed out and, as
a result, interesting character in the film is Rabeya, played by actress Noureen Dewulf, an unidentifialble girl sheathed head-to-toe in what is known a”shulttlecock burka,” which is the garb of choice of only the most orthodox of Muslims, and which sports a fabric mesh in front of the wear’s face in order for them to breath, and if they are lucky, to talk. Rabeya is a walking paradox, with her riot grrrrrl attitude and veiled body. She challenges accepted Muslim precepts. Of note is her attitude towards a notorious Koranic verse, 4:34, which is often interpreted in a way that gives men carte blanche to beat their wives. Much to the consternation of Yusef, Rabeya has simply blacked it out in her copy of the Holy Book. This is an act of blasphemy, of course, as Muslims believe that the book must be venterated and kept in pure, clean place at all times. Rabeya memorably announces, however, that she “ didn’t need that one anymore,” and, after much careful thought, decided to “fuck it.” Nobody knows why she wears the burkha, which she has a d o r n e d with punkinf luenced patches. an d it is a subject of much deliberation throughout the film. Towards the en d, Jehangir has an epiphany, saying “ I know why Rabeya wears a burkha...for the same reason I have this,” pointing to his mohawk . Jehangir’s explanation is surprisingly banal. He has appearead to be a prophet for the disenfranchised an d one longs for him to say something more complex. This is a problem for the film as a whole, which never fully explains itself or ar ticulates a cohererant point of vie w.
(Continued on pages 45-46)
FILM REVIEWS VERA
DRAKE LIFE
With Vera Drake , Mike Leigh has made a painfully honest social tragedy, eschewing satire and stylization for a straightfoward, restrained and utterly true evocation of working class characters and their milieu. In the film, Leigh focouses on a warm, happy working-class Cockney family (far from the norm of his work) , living in an austere, clean flat in the early Fifties Horth London. The family’s life is turned upside down when the mother and wife Vera is arrested.
CHOICE
The film’s eponymous Vera (Imelda Staunton in a reveting performance) is a short, cheery, ordinary woman, who cleans the houses of upper-middle- and upper-class families-people who barely recognize her existence. She tends to her bedridden,aged mother and an invalid neighbor with solicitude and hot cups of tea. And for tweenty years, she has gently “helped out young girls in trouble,” her euphemistic way Produced by: Simon Channing Williams of saying that she secretly performs illegal Directed by and written by: Mike Leigh abortions ( abortion only becoming legal in Starring: ImeIda Staunton, Phil Davis, Peter Wight, Daniel Mays, England and Wales in 1967).
43.
Alex Kelly, Eddie Marsan, Heather Craney, Adrian Scarborough, Sally Hawkins, and Ruth Sheen. Color 125 mins
VERA (IMEIDA STAUTON) IS ARRESTED FOR PERFORMING ILLEGAL ABORTIONS IN MIKE LEIGH’S VERA DRAKE.
Vera is a seeming innocent who performs abortions free of charge, seeing them as acts of compassion. She is also not the sort of woman who would por vide a social or moral justification for her actions---illegal acts that are viewed by much of the public as murder. But Vera, a woman seemingly without a dark side, is just innately kind and caring, and that is the only explanation that the film offers for her behavior. Leigh never uses her plight to indulge in a direct critiqua of antiabortion laws, but rather conveys to us how few options women of Vera’s class have when confronted with an unwanted pregnancy.
-Leonard Quard
full
maria
Joshua Marston’s first feature follows Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a young, pregnant, recently dismissed factory worker in Columbia, as she impulsively embraces the opportunity to become a New York-bound drug ‘mule.’ Although the film presents a narrative of the drug trade from a female smuggler’s point of view, a perspective absent from mainstream poducts like Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), Maria Full of Grace is largely the story of an immigrant’s pilgrimage. The journey of seventeen-year-old Maria is really an escape from unemployment, an exploitative family, and the prospect of a loveless marriage. -Vojislava Filipcevic
of grace
Produced by: Becky Glupczynski Directed by and written by: Joshua Marston Starring: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Guilied Lopez, Yenny Paola Vega, Patricia Rae, Osvaldo Plasencia, Orlando Tobon, and John Alex Toro. Color 125 mins.
MARIA (CATALINA SANDINO) WASHING DRUG FILLED CAPSULES IN JOSHUA MARTSTON’S MARIA FULL OF GRACE.
THE MANCHURIAN
CANDIDATE
Produced by: Tina Sinatra, Scott Rudin, Jonathan Demme, IIona Herzberg, and Scott Aversano Directed by: Jonathan Demme Screenplay by: Daniel Pyne and Dean Geogaris. Starring: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Guilied Lopez, Yenny Paola Vega, Patricia Rae, Osvaldo Plasencia, Orlando Tobon, and John Alex Toro. Color 125 mins.
The first Manchurian Candidate movie, as you’ll recall, centered--along with many delectable sidebars--on a convoluted communist plot, through brainwashing and assassination to take over the United States presidency. Now comes, The Manchurian Candidate remake, based, according to the credits, on George Axelrod’s 1962 screenplay and the original novel by Richard Condon. In a flinch at the heart of this remake, and it carries over to every aspect of the movie. Looking back at the 1962 film after seeing the new version, you realize that its pulsating narrative drive leaves unexplained a lot of extremely crucial behavior. What compels Mrs. Iselin, Angela Lansbury’s character, to betray her country and become linchpin of a communist coup. Overall, the remake almost completely lacks the verbal wit and visual comedy that played with and against the terrors of the 1962 film. -Robert Sklar
RAYMOND (LIEV SCHREIBER) ANSWERS A OMINIOUS PHONE CALL FROM A STRANGER IN JONATHAN DEMME’S MANCHURIAN CANIDATE
“ i didn’t
need that one
45.
anymor
Rabeya seems to be typically rebellious American teenager. Pakistanis and Indians use the term “ABCD”---meaning American Born Confused Desi---to disparingly refer to such types, with the word desi commonly meaning “ native” or “one of us.” Rabeya and several of the other characters in the film seem perfect illustions of the ABCD concept. The novel on which the film is based does provide more complexity than the film on this and other issues, and it is impossible to evaluate the film without also discussing the book. The author Michael “Muhammed” Knight is a white American Muslim convert from upstate New York. Knight had an infinitely troubled childhood that is often cited as the reason he came to Islam at the age of sixteen. At this time two events transpired simultaneously; he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and then met his father for the first time. His father was a raging white supremacist who disparged his son’s newly found beliefs. At time, feeling rebellious towards his abusive father, Knight saw Islam “ as a correction of everything wrong in America,” and in his own life. In his zeal, he traveled to the Shah Faisal Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan, to learn more; he also very nearly missed going off to Chechnya to fight a holy war or jihad . Instead of going to war, Knight found himself increasingly disenchanted with the orthodoxies of the version of Islam to which hew was exposed, and penned The Taqwacores in 2002 as a bitter farwell to the religion. Knight’s sensational and simpleminded approach reveals itself even in the title, which combines a reductive translation for the Arab word taqwa, meaning “piety,” and then adding “core” (short for hard-core). In English,
re”
vaious translations that approach the Islamic spirit of taqwa are “pious God-fearing,” “God fearing piety,” “devout uprightness,” and “holy fear.” The detour into the definition of Taqwa illustrates Knight’s one-dimensional understanding. His characters are fighting too hard against things that don’t necessarily exist except in one version of Islam. The plain fact is that hard-core Muslims, nay hard-core zeolots of any kind, of any religion, are downright scary. Soprting a Mohawk does not make them cool. Punk was and always has been about dissing everything, and that includes God. Knight’s novel ultimately serves of Islam that give rise to such a bigoted proposals as “Burn a Koran Day.” Offense aside, the Taqwacore story cannot make any sort of meaningful statement about Islam, or any organized religion, to anyone deeply engaged in faith, largely because it’s appeal resides in its shock value. The baffling part of all this is that the imaginary world created by Knight actually inspired (or with its sheer brute force brainwashed) its unsuspecting dupes to create a “real” scene. How far the honest-to-goodness Taqwacores can go to actually provoke thought and affect change remains debatable. The Taqwacores, however, is finally not about Muslims, and it’s not about South Asians, but it is very much, and more importantly, a fascinating case study of the great experiment that is America. -Sascha Akhtar