Little Children and Kolja

Two movies about children, kind of. "Kolja," a Czech movie directed by Jan Sverak, depicts a child's power to transform the self-centered life of a concert cellist. It skirts the cliff-edge of sentimentality, but never falls over it, mainly because of the strong acting of Zdenek Sverak (Louka, the cellist, and the father of the director). The plot is also nicely complicated by the fact that Kolja is a Russian child in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia: no ponderous symbolism, but the human conflict of feelings towards a child of the oppressors.

"Little Children" is less conventional in its attitude towards children. The adults invest in their guardianship less admirable motives and feelings. Their lives exemplify Thoreau's words: "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." Todd Field directs the movie with empathetic insight into these desperate lives, and with a subtle eye to symbolism in characters and settings. Kate Winslet plays Sarah Pierce, the Madam Bovary figure who saves herself from falling into the abyss. Patrick Wilson plays the buff ex-jock who is not yet ready to leave the golden age of adolescence for married life as a stay-at-home dad. Jackie Earle Haley is utterly convincing as the paedophile persecuted by Noah Emmerich's ex-cop character, Larry Hedges.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more