Film reviews

Azur and Asmar

I watched Azur and Asmar at The Cathay's 1st Anniversary Film Festival this evening. It's an animated feature in French and Arabic, based on one of the stories in A Thousand and One Nights.

Two boys are brought up as brothers, one the blond and blue-eyed son of a nobleman and the other the son of a Moroccan nurse who regards them both as her children. One day the nobleman carts his son off to study in the city and kicks the nurse and her son out of his house.

Years later the French boy returns, an adult now, and tells his father that he's venturing to the land across the sea to find and free the Fairy Djinn of the childhood tales that his nurse had recited to him. The story then follows his travails in Morocco as he goes in search of his long-lost surrogate mother and brother and the Fairy Djinn whom he knows he is destined to marry.

Ok, it sounds really corny when you read the plot summary, but I really couldn't help but adore this film. It contains no pretences or irony whatsoever. Unlike the animated features you get from Hollywood these days, there are no puns, no wisecracks, no bizarre kitschy elements that wink at the parents: "we know you're only here because of your kids, and you'd really rather watch a proper film, so here's a little thanks from us". But because it doesn't try, it really is a sweet and loveable film. Just sincere and child-like -- a real family film.

The art is beautiful too. The drawings are old-school, they look like paper cutouts. Of course the film looks like a child's work compared to the computer-designed animations of Pixar and Dreamworks, but I actually prefer it. Maybe because it takes me back to the cartoons of my own childhood, before cartoons started looking creepily like real people? The colours come in the shades available in a box of crayons, but nevertheless dazzling to look at, especially when the characters are walking through the Moroccan forest of palm trees, in the Moroccan souk in daylight and in the final setting, the Cave of Light.

The Russian commented that the film was rather blatant about its message of - for lack of a better phrase - racial harmony, but as he himself reasoned, you have to remember that it's a show for children.

I'd totally get this film on DVD if I see it, and watch it with my mother.

Familia

Ironically, Familia is about mothers and daughters, but I would sooner blind myself than watch it with my mother.

Don't get me wrong -- I liked this film, but a) there's a blowjob scene and b) there's a blowjob scene. Do you really need more than one reason not to watch a film with your mum when there's a blowjob scene in it?

Familia is a Canadian film. I am guessing Quebecois, specifically, because it's in French. I watched it at Alliance Française last night with Joon, who got free tickets from the Canadian High Commission. It pays to hang out with entertainment journalists!

The film follows the lives of two women and their daughters. Michelle and Janine are complete opposites: Michelle's a free-spirited gambling addict who barely notices what her daughter's up to, Janine is her sister-in-law, an uptight, successful interior designer whom her daughter Gabrielle calls "Hitler". Michelle gets into heavy debt and runs away with her daughter Margeurite -- they seek shelter in Janine's house.

Throughout their stay, which was initially meant to last just one night but stretches into weeks, the two daughters, Margeurite and Gabrielle, become best friends. Margeurite brings Gabrielle to her first party where she drinks and smokes pot for the first time. Gabrielle shows Margeurite the wonders of online sex and Internet porn.

In the meantime their relationship with their mothers become increasingly tense. Margeurite resolves never to turn into her mother but is it too late? Gabrielle is just trying to break free of her mother's increasingly suffocating over-protectiveness.

The mothers too, have their own problems: Michelle's trying to break her gambling habit but keeps failing and eventually resorts to stealing from Janine. Janine is coping with her husband's infidelity, as well as an unwanted loafer in her house. And both mothers are slowly realising that their daughters hate them.

The film starts with a slow shot of a foetus, and a voice-over rambling on about DNA and whether we inherit genes that determine how we behave as a person, or whether we can try to "disown" some of the genetic traits that our parents have given us, such as agressiveness or addictive personalities. And so we are meant to understand that the film will be an examination of this question. Will the two daughters turn out just like their mothers against their own wills?

Personally I think the film could do without this introduction. It works just fine simply as a depiction of two families, their struggles and their resolutions. It's an emotionally satisfying film -- the characters grow throughout the narrative and become better people by the end of it, more well-rounded, enriched people. It wasn't saccharine nor utterly depressing. It was completely believable and I could relate to almost every one of the main characters. The acting was spot on. But it would have been more satisfying had the film not made me this promise of some kind of pseudo-scientific dissection of genetic inheritances -- that's just impossible to do in a two-hour family drama.

Anyone with a mother or a daughter (especially if you're female yourself) would probably be able to relate to this film: the conflict between not wanting to turn out like your mother but realising that you are anyway, the frustration that comes with loving someone you didn't choose to love and thus having to accept all the ways that they are imperfect or different from you, the sheer torment of being an adolescent girl (and raising one).

I'm reminded of a scene from The Virgin Suicides, when the doctor says to Cecilia Lisbon after her attempted suicide, "What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad it gets," and Cecilia replies, "Obviously Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl."