More movie notes

Day Night Day Night, which I saw on Thursday, is one of the most haunting movies I have seen in a while. A few times per year, I try to see a movie that I know nothing about. This was one such movie and I was surprised and satisfied. It’s the story of a suicide bomber in New York City. The audience learns nothing, not what her cause is or even her name. In the credits, she is listed only as ‘she.’ My moving going companion and I debated that approach and a few plot points for quite a while after the film ended. It’s a slow film, almost meditative, with minimal dialogue, but fascinating. I’ve seen a few yellow backpacks [what she carries her bomb in] in the past few days. They now make me nervous.

Breaking and Entering was not so intriguing. I wanted to see it because Juliette Binoche plays a Bosnian refugee. She does it well – even saying some phrases in the local language [but speaking English with a Russian accent—I couldn’t have stated that there is a different between Russian- and BCS- (as I hear the American university language departments call Bosno-Croato-Serbian) accented English until her words just didn’t sound quite right]. Her performance did not redeem the film.

Maybe it plays differently in Peoria, but here, to me, it felt exploitative and minimizing to group escaping the siege of Sarajevo with melodramatic plot points like a possibly autistic daughter and a series of robberies. Dramatizing the conflict Juliette’s half-Bosniak half-Serb son has with his Serb relatives shouldn’t be followed by the subplot about the coworker who has a crush on the cleaning lady. The parallels don’t work for me. Maybe they should. Should war and ethnic tensions be as boilerplate in such movies as marital problems? Maybe such things should be portrayed as everyday occurrences? Should the movie get some credit for a least trying to connect the story of a ridiculously wealthy urban planner with the lives of those in the neighborhood he is gentrifying?