bavatuesdays

I’m using Blaugust as an excuse to push myself to write more regularly about my film podcasting, so far so good. Got one post out over each of the last four days, and this one will make five. I still have to catch up on two days, but given I’m finding a groove and there’s no travel on deck—the good money is on me nailing it. This is not my first blog rodeo, people, I’m a veteran. While you flog yourself, I blog myself into a frenzy of cultural genius.

Anyway, our most recent series on indie international family films of the 90s has been a real treat. Of the six films we have lined up, I saw half of them in the theater when they were released in the US, specifically Muriel’s Wedding (1994), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and The Stolen Children (1992).

Life is Sweet (1990) I never caught in the theater when it came out, but I’ve seen it over the last two decades given Anto and I are huge Mike Leigh fans. The White Balloon (1995) and Central Station (1998) were new to me, and they were a total treat. In fact, the six films in this series are all pretty amazing in their own way, and as MBS and I have commented repeatedly during this series, looking back, the 90s were a definite golden era worldwide for independent film.

In this post I wanted to quickly map a theme that has been coming up again and again for me during this series, namely the way in which the family becomes a lens for reading the state of the nation. It might be a bit of a stretched thesis—so be kind and rewind your aggression—but I can’t help but want to see these films as missives to the rest of the world (as well as domestically) about the struggles of a moment.

Muriel’s Wedding (1994): “You’re terrible, Muriel!” —this was our first discussion of the series, and I don’t think my mind was really thinking about the politics of Australia, in large part because I was not studied up on Paul Keating’s Labor government and the ambitious vision of a new Australia in the wake of the early recession of the 90s that hit hard—I can remember shit being tough in the US too. That context gives the Heslops’ unemployment and the marginal local politics of Porpoise Spit a different resonance—the land outside that grand national story of prosperity. I’ll have to dig in on this more, but I spent most of the podcast talking about how refreshing it was to see intentionally grotesque characters celebrating everything but Hollywood beauty. When I first saw this in 1994 it felt so new and fun that I hadn’t even thought about the politics undergirding it, but when MBS and I write our book about the State of Family Around the World in the 1990s, all that will change.

The next film in the series, The White Balloon (1995), blew my mind. I remember its release and subsequent acclaim in the US, but I stupidly wrote it off as a kids movie. In this brilliant film you follow the young girl Razieh into the streets of Tehran, where a lost banknote turns a simple trip for a goldfish into a child’s journey through the strange and contradictory world of adults. In reading around the film, it was clear that children’s stories and parable offered Iranian filmmakers a way to address larger social questions without confronting censorship head-on. That gives the film’s apparent simplicity a political function from the beginning. Unlike in Muriel’s Wedding, in this film we finally dig in a bit on the political context: the post-Iran-Iraq War reconstruction, difficult economic conditions, Afghan refugees, and the Rafsanjani years of 1989-97. The film’s tiny street-level story gives us an image of what “rebuilding” actually looks like in ordinary life for one family.

By the time we get midway into the series with the wonderful Life is Sweet, the political is impossible to refuse, and that is due in large part to the fact that Leigh is a poet of the proletariat. To understand the politics of a working-class family in 1990 Britain is to understand the brutal war waged against labor throughout the 80s. Class is no longer background texture; it is the organizing framework. It’s everywhere in this film: the details of the house, the jobs, the kids still living at home, the father’s boring but competent institutional kitchen job, the mother working multiple jobs. This is a family operating under real financial constraints. Both Leigh and Ken Loach deal with class in a way Hollywood rarely does. That said, Leigh’s politics emerge less from somebody being politically “correct” than from what political-economic conditions actually do to people. This might also be a result of us having a bit more knowledge of the Thatcher 80s given our own experience under Reagan, but nonetheless few filmmakers capture the impact of such widespread political turmoil on the average family as Leigh does. Leigh understands better than anyone that politics can be read through the family because the family is where economic and social policy becomes lived experience.

What really clicked for me in Zhang Yimou‘s Raise the Red Lantern was this idea of the family as system. The master barely needs to appear because the rules do all the work: the wives are kept fighting horizontally for lanterns, massages, meals, status, and attention rather than ever punching upward at the source of their misery. For one woman to win, three others have to lose, and that competition gets reproduced all the way down the hierarchy as Songlian, herself trapped by the system, turns around and brutalizes her servant. That feels especially potent in a film made just after Tiananmen, with an educated student as its protagonist, at the very moment China was opening economically while maintaining intense political control. Songlian keeps trying to resist the logic of the house, but the house always wins. Eventually the system takes you by the neck and makes you play by its rules. That is what makes the film so much more than a period melodrama: the family is not simply affected by politics, it is the political system in miniature.

What I loved about Walter Salles‘s Central Station is how the idea of family seems to expand until it becomes Brazil itself, which feels all the more significant given the politics of Brazilian filmmaking in the 1990s. After Fernando Collor de Mello gutted state support for cinema at the beginning of the decade, film production in Brazil nearly disappeared, only to re-emerge later in what became known as the Retomada, or rebirth of Brazilian cinema. Central Station comes directly out of that rebirth, and fittingly it seems determined to put Brazil itself back on screen—not simply the familiar images of crime, street kids, and poverty, but this enormous landscape of ordinary people, faith, memory, class, stories, and care. Dora and Josué begin almost completely unmoored, failed by fathers and institutions alike, but as they travel the country their search for family becomes something larger: a search for belonging within Brazil itself. If Raise the Red Lantern turns the family inward until it becomes a prison, Central Station turns the family outward until it becomes a nation—and, in a sense, the film is part of Brazilian cinema rediscovering that nation for itself.

That brings you up to date on what I believe has been one of our best tears yet on the Family Pictures Podcast. Our last film in the series will be recorded next Tuesday, and it’s Gianni Amelio‘s 1992 throwback to Italian neorealism: The Stolen Children (Il ladro di bambini). In a rare moment of actually being caught up on the next film we are going to discuss, I’ve had some time to talk with Antonella (my Italian insider) about the Italy of Amelio’s film. One of the things that immediately stood out was the widespread corruption surrounding its release, given that the film appears at the same moment the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) investigations begin. Mani Pulite was a nationwide judicial investigation into political corruption that was rotting out the core of the republic. It started with the arrest of Mario Chiesa on February 17, 1992, and subsequently exposed the vast Tangentopoli system of bribery linking politicians, public institutions, and business, ultimately helping bring down much of Italy’s First Republic.

Within months of the beginning of Mani Pulite came the murders of magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. They were assassinated separately by the mafia for their extensive work prosecuting high-level bosses connected to the Maxi Trial. My kids described these murders as “Italy’s 9/11 moment” to try and give me a sense of how deeply they shocked the nation.

So, in essence, the film comes out in an Italy where Mani Pulite has begun tearing apart the political establishment, and within months the murders of Falcone and Borsellino produce something like a national 9/11 moment—an extraordinary sense that the country’s institutions, politics, and very social order are coming apart. That’s my context going into the discussion for next week’s podcast, and now I have to re-watch the film and see how Amelio’s world of a makeshift, found family deals with crumbling institutions that have lost sight of their mission to help those most vulnerable.