SFIFF 52: 'Laila's Birthday' and '35 Shots of Rum'.

"Laila's Birthday' is Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi's fifth feature film, set in contemporary Ramallah and spanning a day in the life of the taxi-driver Abu Laila, as he negotiates the absurdities of life in a city trying its hardest to be normal under abnormal conditions. Its vision of life in modern Palestine is light and sweet; it emphasizes the warmth, humor, and levity of its citizens and in so doing, delivers a political message of great subtlety, because we share fraternal feeling with a people who do ordinary things in more or less the way we do, who love their children and go to work and try to walk between the lines even though the lines are always moving, who laugh and cry and make mistakes, say foolish things and forgive one another. We need more of this sort of filmmaking from Palestine if only to counterract the much darker and more volatile impression we get from watching 'the news'.

This being said, the film's strengths were in its documentary features and it did not succeed so well in the aesthetic department. For one thing, Abu Laila is irredeemably saturnine in aspect; I got tired of looking at his unsmiling visage in every frame. His attitude of embattled rectitude just struck me as false and un-funny. The series of odd encounters throughout his day also had a slightly contrived, artificial feel about them. I don't doubt their possibility, even probability, in this most impossible and improbable of all worlds - but the way they succeeded one another like sketches in a variety show created the distinct impression that we had not left the storyboard stage of the movie, which I cannot believe was the intention. The happy ending helped a little, but even then, the suddenly cobbled together aspect of Laila's surprise birthday party, salvaged from the dregs of her father's various encounters and tied up like a bow on a present, was off by a couple of degrees: either the film needed to be more straightforwardly funny, to support these little twists, or it should have dropped the cuteness and maintained the integrity of its otherwise rather whimsical, ambiguous air.

Claire Denis' '35 Shots of Rum' is, on the other hand, the quietly accomplished work of a true master. Nothing hurried, nothing overplayed, the relationships between its characters unfold in a sort of perfect time which seems to mimic true life despite the necessary compression of narrative filmmaking. Its lighting alone is worth a dissertation on the extraordinariness of the ordinary, evoking a twilit sub-Parisian interior landscape of great subtlety and intimacy which again perfectly matches its occupants' psychological terrain. Denis has famously proved herself a master of the highly charged human environment; in this film, she brings those powers to bear upon the intricacies of familial love and fealty and the results are a kind of revelation of what it is to be human without all the dysfunctional and/or alienated trappings we associate with less sophisticated films about 'real people'. Nothing too much happens, as is the way with much of real life, but the father, daughter, ex-lover and future husband that comprise this family of sorts show us subtleties of hope and fear, disappointment and courage, that are almost hypnotizing in their accumulated intensity and veracity. The actors are off-the-charts brilliant. This is a true jewel in Denis' crown of beautiful films.