Immigrant experiences, desires and day-to-day struggles link this week’s selection of films, which span continents, periods and styles in their explorations of the relationships between “us” and “them”, “over here” and “over there”, using unique but memorable visual storytelling methods.
THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL
Perfumed Nightmare – Mubi.com
Filipino director Kidlat Tahimik helms and stars in this bold, innovative mix of fiction and documentary that, since its release in 1977, has gone on to enjoy acclaimed status from Francis Ford Coppola and Werner Herzog and is celebrated as a milestone of independent filmmaking from beyond the hallowed western centres of the medium.
Tahimik plays a jeepney driver in a remote village, obsessed with American culture — listening to the Voice of America on his radio, dreaming of life as an astronaut and serving as the president of his local Wernher Von Braun fan club. When an encounter with an American businessman who runs a gumball machine empire in Paris allows the young Americanophile to fulfill his lifelong ambition to experience western culture in Paris, he soon finds the dream doesn’t quite match the reality. The underlying realities of 20th century inhumane modernity quickly become all-too apparent to Tahimik’s deceptively perceptive naif, shaped as he is by his experiences as a villager in a country with its own deep and painful history of war, colonialism and economic inequality ensuring the scales quickly fall from his eyes.
Smart, sardonic, energetic and wry, it’s an impressive mix of personal, political, documentary and fantasy filmmaking whose message about the shallow attractions of other places, offered by mainstream popular culture, being a smokescreen remain as relevant now as they ever were.
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THE STONE-COLD CLASSIC
A Dessert for Constance – Mubi.com
Sara Maldoror, born in Southwest France of Guadalupian descent, was a pioneering if underappreciated director of films that sought to shine a light on Africa and the African diaspora experience in the tumultuous 20th century.
Here she takes a charming and heartfelt positive approach to a gently uplifting, short, quietly funny and satirical tale of two inseparable Senegalese emigres in Paris. Bokolo and Mamadou work at the very bottom of late 1970s Paris as street sweepers, invisible to broader society but best friends and supporters of each other. When a friend is taken horribly ill the friends desperately try to come up with a way of making enough money to ensure their friend can return home to Senegal.
The discovery of a 19th century cookbook ignites a mad idea in the pair as they decide to use its classic French secrets to help win a prestigious TV cooking show and use the money to get their friend back home.
Taking sharp satirical aim at racist stereotypes, the film’s brisk 63 minutes effectively realise Maldoror’s goal of showing audiences that, through her loveable and ingenious characters and their real-life inspirations, those who “may sweep the streets” nevertheless understand friendship and solidarity.
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THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
13 Tzameti – Mubi.com
Georgian director Géla Babluani’s 2005 original black and white thriller is a twisty, pacy genre outing that has at its heart the themes of day-to-day survival for migrants in the harsh, unwelcoming metropoles of western Europe.
Starring the director’s brother Georges Baluani, the film tells the story of a 22-year-old Georgian immigrant named Sebastien who leads an impoverished life on the margins of Paris, constantly struggling to support his family.
Sebastien works in the home of his neighbour, a pitiful heroin addict, and one day, soon after his neighbour dies from an overdose, his widow tells the hapless Sebastien she’s unable to pay him. Furious and with no recourse, the young man overhears a conversation about the upcoming delivery of a package that promises to make the widow rich. Desperate, intrigued and with nothing left to lose, the young migrant makes a fateful decision to intercept the package and secure its promised windfall for himself and his own family.
The problems and inciting incident for the pacy, tense, increasingly noirish series of events that propel the rest of the film arise when Sebastien discovers the package doesn’t quite hold what he thought it might. Rather than wads of cash, he’s greeted by an envelope that holds instructions for a mysterious job that will, if executed, result in his eventual financial success. As he follows the envelope’s increasingly twisted and potentially fateful instructions, Sebastien finds himself at the centre of a dark and twisted nightmare, the strings of which are being pulled by sinister sadists far above him on the food chain.
As the tension builds and the twists keep you guessing, Babluani manages to keep the genre expectations and the bigger themes tightly controlled as the film rushes towards a gripping and fateful climax.
Winner of the 2006 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema and the Best Debut Film at the Venice Film Festival, the film went on to be remade by its director as a lacklustre colour 2010 action vehicle for Jason Statham and 50 Cent.
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