One of the horrible truths the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa produced was the knowledge that many of the perpetrators and victims of atrocities were never punished or compensated appropriately, if at all.
If an apartheid-era assassin still languishes in jail after more or less full disclosure, then the man he represented, ex-Chief of the Defence Force General Magnus Malan, was acquitted for lack of evidence in 1996 and died peacefully in his sleep on Nelson Mandela’s birthday this year.
Still, the perpetrators and the victims got their chance to disclose their deeds or express their pain, respectively, and that is better than nothing. Just. So, too, the War Crimes Tribunal in Cambodia concerning the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, many of whose cronies still serve in the present government.
The New Zealand connection is the horror story of Kerry Hamill (pictured), whose boat was blown into Kampuchean waters in 1978. He and Englishman John Dewhirst were captured, tortured for two months into making absurd confessions about being CIA spies and “crushed”, meaning executed.
When Kerry’s brother, transatlantic rowing champion Rob, was offered the chance to give a victim statement in Phnom Penh, he jumped at the chance to do something for his "beautiful brother" and director Annie Goldson documented that journey, and more.
This would obviously be an emotional trip and how she treated that arc would to a large extent determine the power of the film. There is nothing more embarrassing than a camera relentlessly waiting for someone to cry, but Goldson clearly built up such a good rapport with Hamill that it feels perfectly natural and non-intrusive when he does.
Another plus of Brother Number One is that it is not just about Hamill but also his Cambodian translator and a handful of survivors. The former, for example, is very clear about what should be done to Comrade Duch. He should be crushed, like most of her family was.
On a purely formal level, the film is attractively shot, well structured and effectively scored by ex-South African and Bright Blue guitarist Tom Fox and his musical partner, Marshall Smith.
But has any good come out of this depressingly familiar tale, in which Duch only got 19 years instead of life? Well, yes. If he might still one day leave jail alive, then at least four more killers have been brought out of the woodwork, including a woman, as a result of this trial: the work of some very dedicated human rights lawyers. Some truth, at least, will out.
Secondly, as long as trials like these exist and persist, political killers will know that there is a possibility that they might be indicted and live out their last days in confined shame, however comfortably.
And, on a personal level, it brought into perspective a friendly young barista who asked me about my accent. When I grumbled about how I was struggling to find work, Michael chun Long Yip told me about how his pregnant mother fled the killing fields of Cambodia and how he was born in a refugee camp in Mairuth, Thailand, in 1980.
Today their family runs the Espresso Workshop in Epsom, Auckland.
***
The Bobby Fischer Versus the World doco more or less tells us what we already know in the “troubled genius” vein. Granted, it does explain what makes the game so addictive to chess nuts (guilty, your honour), but it never attempts to defend the man. Some of his early comments are deeply astute, and if fellow world champion Mikhail Tal called him a perfect chess gentleman, then I’m more inclined to believe him than this film's maker, who doesn't seem prepared to explore that observation.
***
Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams also doesn’t quite work for me, mainly because his philosophical musings are somewhat dull and the amazing 30 000-year-old images of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc caves are repeated once too often. But he does come into his own in the postscript, showing a nuclear power station not far from the caves producing albino crocodiles in an artificial jungle powered by steam from the plant. Maybe if he’d played the two off against each other throughout we’d be on more solid, Herzogian ground.
***
Lastly, there is the problematic Australian feature film Sleeping Beauty.
In it a student goes to strange lengths to make money. Starting arrestingly with Lucy (Emily Browning) putting a thin medical pipe down her throat in a lab and almost choking, she "graduates" to being drugged so that rich old men can do anything with her except penetrate her naked, sleeping figure, hence the title. These lurid and often violent fantasies are then shown.
(It didn’t help that some prick next to me insisted on squeakily rubbing his bus ticket and ignoring me when I asked him to stop it. No one supported me either. Tolerance is one thing, slavish good manners another).
But how this non-penetration is monitored is never explained, since we never see these acts being observed by a third-party or their camera. Trust hardly seems to hold much currency here. Maybe that makes us, the viewers, the “guardian” or even “censor”, certainly the voyeur, which opens up a multitude of questions.
Place is not particularly important either. The Italian-style house Lucy goes to could be anywhere in the world, though the accents are obviously Australian.
After these sessions she goes home to her very passive boyfriend. When he takes an overdose she does not try to help him but holds him and weeps until he’s “gone”. She gets upset, too, when an old man decides to commit suicide next to her sleeping body, but otherwise nothing fazes her.
Jane Campion, who mentored author Julia Leigh in the making of this film, seems very much to favour the idea of passive or shackled males and called the film “sensuous”. One critic said it could not be made by a man, though whether that’s because the man would be “unafraid” to make it or be accused of sadism is another matter.
Entering the arena of (male-made) films like Eyes Wide Shut, Never Let Me Go and David Cronenburg’s Crash in tone and surreality, if not consistency, it’s difficult to gauge what the film is saying. Is it art or is it just a well acted, high-class excuse to look at a marble-like beauty?
There are certainly plenty of young naked female and old male bodies in it, but whether this constitutes sensuality free from any ideological biases is moot. Just because a woman shows us her sex as being fascinatingly compliant and men as disgusting pigs doesn’t necessarily make it art, liberated or liberating.
It is an "intriguing" if rather slow film, but the box office might not be quite as forgiving, and beauty without viewers tends to equate what viewers of porn tend to do with themselves, doesn't it?
Neil Sonnekus
No comments:
Post a Comment