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Inner and outer upheavals, transcendence grounded in mud. Burma ca. 1988, "a land of monks and soldiers," a vast therapy center for the grieving American doctor (Patricia Arquette). (Numb behind her shades, she's unmoved by a Buddha statue in the jungle: "I was stone myself.") Inspiration comes from seeing Aung San Suu Kyi (Adelle Lutz) saunter beatifically past rifles during a march for democracy, in a few days martial law is declared and the visitor finds herself stranded in a military dictatorship. Narrow escapes amid massacres, near-rape in a decimated village. "Does the world know what is happening here?" The professor turned tour guide (U Aung Ko) takes a philosophical stance, "we are taught that suffering is the one promise life always keeps." The exoskeleton is a sort of Richard Attenborough epic, the progress from the personal to the political to the cosmic is the meditation John Boorman runs underneath it. The rickety Chevy that can only drive downhill sinks into the Irrawaddy River, heroine and companion continue aboard a bamboo raft where makeshift surgery is needed, cf. Hitchcock's Lifeboat. (A naval whistle announces the morning after a night vigil, the blackness of the screen is a passing ship's stern giving way to sunlight.) Collective tragedy is invisible unless televised, private tragedy meanwhile lies suspended between ghosts and dreams. "They are shadows, as we are shadows, briefly walking the earth, and soon gone." Spalding Gray's presence points up The Killing Fields, Missing and The Year of Living Dangerously are also taken account of. The upshot is a healer no longer flinching from blood, compassion melding into "perfect detachment" for protagonist and filmmaker alike. Cinematography by John Seale. With Frances McDormand, Johnny Cheah, Victor Slezak, Tiara Jacquelina, Jit Murad, and Hani Mohsin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |