Filmmaker has a long history of success in Montreal
BY JEFF HEINRICH, THE GAZETTE
Radu Mihaileanu aims to provoke with his latest film, about Muslim pesant women who go on a “love strike”.
Photograph by: Dave Sidaway, The Gazette
MONTREAL – Radu Mihaileanu makes movies about life’s underdogs, talks like a minister of culture, plays a mean game of tennis and frets about the Arab world plunging into war. That much, you learn from just a half-hour chat with the intense, 54-year-old Romanian-French-Jewish filmmaker, who flew in from Paris last week to promote the Quebec premiere of his new movie, The Source.
Shot in a mountain village in Morocco, the movie is a feminist parable about Muslim peasant women who go on a “love strike” against their lazy husbands. Like his other international pictures — the Holocaust tragicomedy Train of Life (1998), the African-Israeli child immigration drama Live and Become (2005) and the Russian classical-music comedy The Concert (2009) — the film aims to provoke.
And maybe also entertain — though that’s iffy.
Nominated last year for the Palme d’Or at Cannes as an entry from Morocco, The Source (in French, La source des femmes) has been criticized by a swath of the French press for being overlong (at 135 minutes) and overly didactic. It’s been called a message film that over-argues its case for Muslim female emancipation and short-shrifts the audience in the pleasure department.
In other words, a flop.
“Embarrassing exoticism,” was how Cahiers du Cinéma described it. “Lacking complexity … artificial,” Télérama opined. “Facile Manichaeism,” said Libération. “Saturated with clichés, without nuance,” said La Croix. A few critics liked it. “Full of charm and tenderness, it’s a luminous oriental tale in the form of a declaration of love letter for the Muslim woman,” enthused Le Figaroscope.
In the Arab world, the movie has been received like a breath of fresh air, perfectly timed to the popular uprisings of last year’s Arab Spring that led to regime change in countries like Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, insurrections in Syria and Bahrain, and street protests throughout most of the rest of the Arab nations, as well as Iran. Women, the filmmaker believes, are the key to change.
Which might explain why the movie has done so well in Morocco, where it opened in theatres last November.
“It’s one of the biggest box-office successes of the last 10 years there,” Mihaileanu said. “Women told me they’d first gone to see it secretly, then brought their girlfriends, who brought their husbands, who brought their in-laws and their parents and eventually the kids, too.”
Elsewhere, it’s been a riskier sell. The movie had limited screenings in Jordan and Lebanon, was shown at one independent cinema in the Tunisian capital, Tunis, and also, to the southeast, in Sousse (with both a lovemaking scene and a hamam, or women’s steam bath, scene cut out). And it screened at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival – “uncut, to my great surprise,” Mihaileanu said.
Pirated DVDs of the film are also making the rounds, reaching a whole new audience of women who wouldn’t otherwise have access to it.
“In France, I’m always fighting against DVD piracy, but for this film, I always dreamed it would get distributed that way,” Mihaileanu said. “That the DVD gets passed around under the burka, so to speak, with women sharing it this way, that’s just perfect.”
Mihaileanu — the divorced father of two college-age sons, one a budding actor, the other a novice scriptwriter — believes cinema should give audiences something to enjoy and also think about. He considers himself a disciple of Chaplin, Tarkovsky, Bergman and Miloš Forman — especially Forman, the Czech-American director of such stirring films as Amadeus, Hair and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
“People don’t come to the cinema only to find their daily lives and preoccupations and soul-searching and anxieties reflected on screen — they also want to be entertained,” Mihaileanu said. “The directors I idolize did both; their audiences left the theatre ‘amused,’ but also felt they’d taken a trip with their brains. A film can be profound and spectacular at the same time.
“I have the same preoccupation: to put on a show, create movement and songs and dance and ‘amusement,’ if you will, while also asking questions that make people think. Yes, I can be reproached for being didactic, but that’s often because I touch on subjects that are a bit delicate — like, ‘What if democracy in the Arab world were told through the point of view of women?’
“If I air voices that are complex and polemical, I have to give the average audience — people who don’t have the opportunity like I do to do a lot of research — the tools they need to interpret the statements they hear, such as ‘The Qur’an and sharia are the same thing,’ or ‘Imams are there to aid and abet terrorists.’ Artists have a duty to correct the clichés.”
Mihaileanu — looking Euro-cool for his Montreal round of media interviews with a mop of curly pepper-and-salt hair, scraggly beard and shiny black glasses, his tanned, tennis-honed body dressed in an open-necked white Lacoste dress shirt and navy blue stovepipe slacks, his voice lubricated by sips of green tea — shared his strong views on a lot of other things.
On the dearth of government spending on culture: “Only 0.15 per cent of the European countries’ budgets goes to culture, even though culture accounts for 4.5 per cent of the overall economy and employs 3.8 per cent of the labour force. Something’s wrong.”
On the global economic crisis: “The crisis we’re in isn’t so much an economic one as it is a crisis of meaning. People have lost the meaning of life, of why they’re on this Earth. We’re in a post-individualistic society now that’s actually profoundly narcissistic.”
On our obsession with digital devices: “More and more, we’re individuals in front of a screen, and a screen is four walls without a door and without windows. Cinema, at least, is a collective experience — that’s why I work in it.”
On Google: “It’s been famously pointed out that 90 per cent of people never get to Page 2 of their Google search — they never read past Page 1. Page 1 is the death of diversity; your information only gets there if you’re in agreement with Google.”
On fleeing totalitarian Romania in his early 20s: “When I got out, the antidote to the ‘prison’ I’d lived in was all the riches I’d been denied — diversity of people, of languages, of ideas, of religions. They gave me the passion to make films.”
On his countryman Ilie Nastase, the world’s top-ranked player in 1972-73: “We all adored watching his mad genius. His generation were poets; they inspired us. (I was well-ranked myself in Romania, and still play regularly at my club in Paris.)”
On what his five feature films have in common: “They all are about a fight for freedom, for rights, for the human need to stand up for oneself. At some point, we all have to stand up and say we’re proud of who we are.”
On the risk of a conflagration in the Arab world: “If the hardcore, obscurantist fundamentalists — not the ‘light’ ones who give democracy a chance — become allies in Syria, Iran, Jordan, Egypt and Afghanistan, there could be a lot of damage.”
On travelling to Cuba last winter with his boys: “I told them, ‘Hurry up, you might witness the end of communism here and the end of capitalism back to Europe. Think about it: Is your generation going to invent something new?’ ”
Mihileanu has often been asked if he’d like to go into politics — in France or in his homeland — but he scoffs at the idea and quotes his compatriot, the early 20th-century writer Panait Istrati: “ ‘I prefer to be the man who belongs to nothing.’ I don’t want to be obliged to be part of a party or a government that dictates what I should do. Besides, politics is not my métier — I’m an artist.”
A favourite of Montreal audiences, Mihileanu has a long history of success here. His debut film, Betrayal (in French, Trahir), about a poet coerced into informing for the secret police in Romania, won the Grand Prix des Amériques and two other top prizes at the 1993 Montreal World Film Festival. In 2009, The Concert was awarded the Prix du Public at the English-subtitled Cinemania film festival.
Eight years ago, Mihileanu almost got a Quebec co-production off the ground here. It was an adaptation of French-American writer Marc Behm’s 1991 crime novel Off the Wall, which Marie-Josée Croze auditioned for and Denise Robert was interested in producing. But the project died after Mihileanu couldn’t bring himself to approve the imperfect script.
He’s now preparing a new film — his first in English — that he plans to start shooting next year. Co-written (as with his other films) with Alain-Michel Blanc, it’s called Little Lion and tells the story of a modern-day Maasai — a lawyer — who leaves Tanzania to settle in Los Angeles, where he crosses swords with the greedy corporate legal elites that run the city.
Another morality tale à la Source? It sounds like it, although this one’s purely fictional, the filmmaker said — unlike the Moroccan film, which is based on a true story of mountain women in Turkey in 2001 who made headlines after going on “strike” and denying their husbands sex.
“Little Lion is a rendezvous between the origins of humanity in Africa, a certain way of life surrounded by nature in the Great Rift Valley, and the city of Los Angeles,” Mihileanu said of his new project.
“L.A. may not be the end of the world, but it’s pretty close,” he added, with a glimmer of a smile. “Silicon Valley, Hollywood — all the excesses that led to our crisis of the 21st century, they’re there.”
Maybe the director will find a new audience in L.A. After all, a long time ago, his beloved Chaplin did — until the McCarthyites booted his “pinko” ass out of town and back to Europe.
A cautionary tale, that.
jheinrich@montrealgazette.com
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