Film

Not your father’s barista: A Coffee in Berlin

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Against a hypnotic soundtrack, A Coffee in Berlin , always with humor and often with tenderness, demonstrates the inadequacy of both compassion and apology as salve to the wounds, personal and political, those we glibly categorize  as “just part of growing up” and those we justly brand evil and monstrous,through the eyes of an alienated twenty -something who can’t even manage to procure a  coffee in Berlin.

Young Nikko is neither hero nor anti-hero, but a young man seemingly lost in directionless motion, holding on to the privileges of his life ( family allowance, leisure, drugs, alcohol, sex, companionship) without  forming any great attachment to anything.  His is a  youth unburdened by responsibility but also devoid of promise, neither littered with belief nor sketched with direction.  He applies intelligence against authority which enables him to distinguish the absurd and inequitable from the bullying and  illegitimate but he seems unable to engage emotion to match his perception.  Nor is able, when he finds himself the offender, to direct his encounters to resolution.

Nikko passively inhabits a world which exists in the shadow of Hollywood creations and Washington power plays, as evidenced by his mimicing actor friend and the anti- US graffiti spattered about the city.

More poignantly, Nikko apparently cannot find his place in this landscape through which he travels unsuccessfully seeking a cup of coffee,haphazardly, at times, the phlegmatic wanderer, observing but ineffectually engaging others.  His contacts:  the neighbor, the old school mate, the buddy, the drug dealer, the thugs, the father, the probation officer, the bartender,  – each like a painted pony on the merry-go-round invite engagement, but Nikko avoids connection.  Filial attachment, even gratitude,is inoperative.  Nikko is immune to sentimentality. He demonstrates neither moral, ethical nor legal concerns for conformity with social standards.  While he can own the harm he caused a woman whom he bullied as a child, he acknowledges he cannot understand how she felt, and he refuses a new connection either in intimacy or in her own complex drama of angry behaviors.

Nikko is, however, drawn to connect with the old woman who offers only sandwiches and comfortable seating.  The viewer questions whether this kinship is born of some understanding which the young and the old can share about the limits of dreams.

Nikko’s other connection is presaged by a darkly humorous “film within a film.”  Nikko wanders into a movie set filming a cloying sentimental and savagely revisionist World War II drama wherein a SS officer falls in love with a Jewish woman whom he hides, becoming her savior and, at the fall of Berlin, himself, the persecuted.  Later, as an old and failing drunk attached himself to Nikko, the elder recalls Kristallnact, and what Berlin was like, through his eyes as a child.

We leave Nikko with his  coffee in Berlin, and we are, all of us, contemplating: To be a twenty-something, carrying the legacy of Kristallnact;  To be human, feeling adrift; To have the goal, only, of a coffee in Berlin.

Wadjda

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cropped-praying-girl-1.jpgWadjda is an award-winning movie  marketed as the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia.  As a western feminist, I consumed available press about the film  and decided to watch it as an act of support for the woman who made it and the story I understood that it told.  My conjured  images of black shrouds in the searing sun suggested that I would be moved and educated by this film.  How surprising, then, is the discovery of delight!

Black forms moving slowly on sunlit streets do in fact inhabit the film.  My western eyes see this without fully comprehending as I am willing to suspend judgement.

Behind the gates and doorways, in the daily action of the real lives of the largely  middle class women and girls we encounter in this movie, all is completely as we know it.  Appliances are modern, gleaming and available for the plentiful food.  Western popular music stimulates the tween girl as she surreptitiously creates bracelets and other “black market items.”  Mother and daughter share intimacies in large airy well-decorated rooms.  Discreet tensions and open conflict overflows from these spaces to the rooftop above where the women still dress in jeans and cool shirts looking down on their world.

Certainly the conservative culture controls female life.   Wadjda  watches her dignified, beautiful mother carefully groom her hair and apply her make-up in the morning before disappearing in a swirl of darkness.  The girl  flares in anger when a taxi driver, clearly economically and educationally disadvantaged and possibly an illegal immigrant, chides the woman like a child for being tardy in getting into his taxi for the three-hour ride through the desert to her employment.  The woman’s friend ultimately rejects this ordeal to find liberating employment in a local hospital.  The dynamics gently explored include the powerlessness of the women , the control of the driver, the ingenuity of the children and the authority of a male even if a mere boy.

Wadjda watches the mother she adores measure her own worth through her father’s eyes in terms of the quality and quanity of  food she prepares.  She struggles to comprehend why this beauty  subverts her own desires for style of dress and hair to please a man so rarely present.  Wadjda is beginning to comprehend  too well that, in her world, biology is destiny.

Contemplating the viewing of this film, I considered that this would indeed be a “foreign” culture.  How startling then to understand the complexity of emotions seen in Wadjda as she endures her conservative, female-dominated religious school.  The insistence of conformity in appearance, down to the shoes which are worn, the  absolute prohibition of any feminine decoration, including nail polish, the suspicion of female friendship, much less love, remain cross-cultural signifiers of  patriarchal social systems and female enforcerment.  Similarly, scenes where students mindlessly recite memorized “beliefs,” use of  shaming and group ostracism as disciplinary tactics and consequent consistent competitive subcultures are also well recognised.

Startling and joyous to feel recognition of the delight of  a child’s physical freedom.  As Wadjda runs down the street, even skips a bit, walks solitary but dreams of riding a bike, the memory of that joy is irrepressible.  When a child is lucky enough to have a full stomach, a secure roof and no present threat of physical harm or illness, exploring the sun -filled day with muscular limbs is a complete pleasure.  Even from my sedentary perch, watching Wadjda, I could recall so many  hours jumping in the sun-drenched Chesapeake waters. I could almost feel again the breeze through my hair on a spring evening as I rode my bike through shaded  streets of row homes or as I explored city spots which I could pretend were dark forests.

Watching Wadjda play with her precocious friend Abdullah, I envisioned my fair-haired daughter racing her friends aside a swimming pool in the summertime.  I remember the tension and  gladness I felt as I watched her small frame dart through other little bodies in pursuit of a soccer ball on a fall day.  I felt contentment that, though grown up, she still chases my puppy down the lane.

Wadjda is not a film which will change the world, if indeed any film can.  It is not a soapbox for any particular ideology.  The movie treats character and culture with respect but not without a critical lens.   For me the movie was a surprise.  It was a reminder that there are universals in life which transcend culture and political or religious systems:  childhood, sunlight, clean and open air, curiosity, hope, movement, friendship and love.

 

Realizations in Black and White

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I love film.  I love watching films in a nice theater with deep comfortable seats and equipped with an audio system that will allow the soundtrack to encircle me.  I have found films healthy food for my intellect, enhancing for my literary sense, challenging for my mind, directing for my reading.  But I can recall few  films that can begin to meet the power or the challenging intellectual and emotional impact of   Fruitvale Station.

If you had asked me before I entered the theater whether I was aware of racism in our society, I would have said, quite reflexively, in fact,  “of course.”

However, driving home after watching the power of this film, I recalled what had seemed to me at the time an embarrassing, but not so important incident. Leaving a medical facility while under the influence of anesthetic after a medical procedure, I was assaulted by a man, although not injured.  When I reported the incident to the facility staff, the first question posed:”Was he black?”

I did not realize then that because I did not query back, “Why, does it make a difference?” I was complicit in a racist exchange.

In many discussions, in many places, at many times, I might have posed as a person who had special insight into “the race question.”  I might have told you that I learned about white privilege early when I attended a 1% white elementary school in West Philadelphia.  I probably would have shared how it was through the indiscriminate brutality of the nuns towards the children of color and their simultaneous treatment of the white children as “special,” that I saw the ugly face of racism and the embarrassing privilege of being white in the U.S.   I possibly might have   recounted my early experience of friendship with black children, exchanging and sharing snacks, believing this represented my own surmounting of our society’s racial divide.  Or I might have opened up about the magical friendship which I shared with my best friend in college, Sheena.  Sadly, this friendship was lost in those politically charged days of the late 1970s  when  identity politics was such a personal struggle.  Measuring identity as a black woman and its room for friendship with white women took a terrible toll,  yet this was one of the tasks which could become paramount in our young world where we claimed, “the personal is political,” convinced that we understood.

If you had asked me about racists, I most likely would have told you about my family of origin:  Irish immigrants and their offspring who spouted hateful statements as the civil rights struggle, the assassinations, the legal changes unfolded before our eyes as I grew up in the 1960’s.

Yes, I  was quite comfortable with that my liberal credentials allowed me understanding of the “race question” in the United States.

Not anymore.  Not after experiencing Fruitvale Station.

The film has been criticized by bastions of conservative propaganda as “whitewashing” the factual life of Oscar Grant, who was executed by a white Oakland police officer in 2008.  This criticism is almost the point.

Fruitvale Station bases its plot on the life of Oscar Grant the day before he was murdered.  It is implicit in the film’s action that we cannot know whether every word uttered, every embrace exchanged, each flash of anger, each moment of kindness is “real” or fictional.

We have learned that fifty people can witness the same event and report it entirely differently.  Do we not understand at the very least that one person’s honest statement of fact can differ dramatically from that of another?

What matters in this film is not that this WAS the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, but that this could have been the experience of Mr. Grant or any one of the young black men sacrificed on the United States’ altar of racism.

As I watched the film, I slowly traveled a path of new awareness as to how white supremacy infiltrates the life of a young black man, his family, and his friends.  From the fear he sees in the eyes of a white woman whom he addresses without knowing her, to the realization he accepts that for an unconnected, disrespected young black male, there will be no second chances, I saw reflections of myself, my family, my friends.  The search for a greeting card with black faces, while perhaps a cliché, in this film is a moment of transcendent understanding.  The image of a dead pit-bull is heartbreaking as we  comprehend that we are often easily aroused to sympathy for abused animals even as we are reluctant to engage in a conversation about the depth of the racial divide.

Perhaps most stunningly the film moved my consciousness from the screen to the theater.  Here, the audience for this film in an upscale art house theater was at least 50% people of color. Never before had I shared a film experience with such a diverse audience in this cinema generally populated with white, urban film buffs.

Ultimately we are left with a true image, that of Oscar Grant’s child.  It is this achingly poignant image that testifies to the truth of this narrative.  In the child’s face, we see pain passed on to another generation that will struggle in a society ravaged by a humiliating racial history.  The natural movement of her eyes escaping the camera affirms that it matters not whether Oscar Grant in fact decided to “go straight” the day before he died.  It matters only that, as real-time video captured in this case, a young black father was targeted to the exclusion of any white train riders. He was accused of crime based on the color of his skin, what that skin color means to whites. What matters is the brutality that was witnessed and tolerated by hundreds of onlookers who lacked the courage to intervene.  What matters is the shot that ended another life which had limited chances to change the narrative he entered at the moment of his birth.

I left that theater with a sense of shame. Shame at my skin color, shame at my middle class life, shame at my education, and shame at my foolishness believing I could even begin to understand.

(This post was first written in January, 2013 when the film appeared in theaters.  The film is now available on DVD.)