Lions – Jazmín López and Meteora – Spiros Stathoulopoulos

Lions (Leones) (Jazmín López – Argentina/France/Netherlands) 82 minutes

Meteora (Spiros Stathoulopoulos – Germany/Greece) 82 minutes

Young Argentine director Jazmín López’s debut film is an elliptical exploration of youthful grief that manages to be both slight and weighty at the one time. Five young rich kids from Buenos Aires embark on a day trip to the country where they appear to be looking for the holiday home belonging to the family of one of them. There is a brother and sister – the nervy, and possibly autistic, Arturo (Pablo Sigal) and Sofi (Macarena del Corro) – Sofi’s boyfriend Félix (Tomás Mackinlay), Niki (Diego Vegezzi) who goes around recording all the sound within his earshot, and Isa (Julia Volpato), who has recently lost her brother in a car crash in which at least one or two of the party may have been also involved.

Lions is a meandering film in which the quintet wander through the lush greenery, telling each other inconsequential jokes and anecdotes, playing games (one is the ‘Hemingway game’, that variation on the six-word short story) and being revisited by the fatal car crash that claimed the life of Isa’s brother. There is no real plot to speak of – what recognisable narrative elements there are drift in and out like the sounds and noises on Niki’s dictaphone. Occasionally López introduces a trope that suggests some drama might be around the corner, like when the edgy Arturo steals a pistol from a tractor they come across, but there is Chekovian pay-off to be had.

The film ends with something resembling a narrative conclusion but an ambiguous close is as near a concession to convention that López makes. Her free-wheeling narrative will madden many (and, to be fair, it does at times have the feel of a student film about it) but the performances are fresh and natural and she has a nice way of incorporating diegetic music into the fabric of the film (Daniel Johnston’s ‘Devil Town’ and Sonic Youth’s  ‘Do You Believe in Rapture’ interpreted by the characters). There are touches of Gus Van Sant (director of photography Matías Mesa operated the Steadicam on Elephant and Gerry) and Terrence Malick about Lions (and, like much cinema that reminds you of Malick, it is far more interesting than the Texan mystic’s current output) and, after Santiago Mitre’s recent El Estudiante, is another glimpse of a very talented young Argentine director.





Another impressive film from a young director is the second feature from the Greek Spiros Stathoulopoulos. His first film, PVC-1, was set in his mother’s native Colombia and was notable for being one single continuous take. Meteora is similarly formally inventive, mixing live action and mesmerising animation in the style of Orthodox icons, even if the story at its core is hardly original – forbidden love between a monk and a nun at the famed Meteora monastery complex in northern Greece.

The convent and the monastery stand opposite one another, atop precipitate limestone buttes (so precipitate that the only way to access the convent is to be hoisted up inside a net). Theo, a young monk (Theo Alexander – best known as Talbot in True Blood) woos Urania, a Russian nun (Tamila Koulieva), communicating with her via light reflected into each other’s bedroom windows. What starts off as a seemingly innocuous friendship soon turns carnal and you wonder quite how Spiros Stathoulopoulos got clearance for the film from the notoriously conservative Greek Orthodox church.

Nothing much happens in the film – Stathoulopoulos even (wisely) refrains from having the couple face any retributive justice for their transgressions. Instead he documents the minutiae of monastery life and the farming hinterland – the slaughter and skinning of a goat reminded me of the ethnographic cinema of Michelangelo Frammartino or the Iranian Abol-Fazl Jalili. We see the film’s narrative reflected and glossed in the beautiful animation sequences. There are voice-over asides on faith but, though a theological consultant is credited in the closing titles, it is hard to glean much from that angle. The strength of Meteora is its narrative and formal beauty – undoubtedly helped by having such a photogenic location; it is a little gem of ontological cinema – the pleasure is all in watching the action unfold before your eyes, as ordinary people go about their business in an extraordinary environment.

Blair to Join the Only True and Holy Apostolic Church

Tony Blair wants to become a Catholic, so say the reports from his meeting with the Pope in the Vatican where Ben Sez gave him a ticking-off about not just a certain illegal war prosecuted by the Pretty Straight Guy but also abortion and stem-cell research (offering Tony a commendably swift yet fell condensation of the perils of being a Catholic - the rest of us have had to face them from day one, but I suppose this willingness to be chastised is one of those weird Public School things). Blair, by waiting until he steps down to convert, saves his former bosses the Windsors the embarrassment of having a Taig in Downing Street, lest one of the younger Royals be tempted to marry a papist contrary to the curiously undemocratic Act of Settlement, 1701, which would scupper their chances of ascending to the throne.

Libération, meanwhile, celebrates (!) Blair's departure today with a British-themed 'Made in UK' edition (yes, the French media's employment of English is as lazy and as misguided as the English media's is of the language of Molière). Features include an explanation of the Granita pact and wholesale cutting-and-pasting from Schott's Miscellany. «Jolly good show!» comme diraient les anglophiles français.

Uncle Psalm

Michael Dwyer, 'film critic' of The Irish Times usually has a problem with the Cannes Film Festival every year, mainly to do with the awards bestowed on films in foreign languages directed by people with unpronouncable names, starring actors that sometimes aren't really actors at all. In the past the scorn he has poured on films such as Lars Von Trier's The Idiots and the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta has been so contrary to my own impressions of those same films that by now I take his dislike of a film as a recommendation. This year, Dwyer was relatively happy (he even liked the unstarry Romanian Palme d'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) but there were a couple of films that he grumbled over, such as Raphael Nadjari's Tehilim, which I instantly resolved to see, when it got released here on Wednesday.

Nadjari is a French director who, strangely has never made a feature in France; he decamped to New York to make his first three, and in the past three years he has made two, Avanim and now Tehilim in Israel. Both films are impassive examinations of the tension between faith and secularism in contemporary Israel; both open in a Talmudic school, Avanim in Tel Aviv and Tehilim in Jerusalem. In Tehilim (the title of which means 'Psalms' in Hebrew) the devout father of a young family inexplicably goes missing after a minor car crash. The family attempts to come to terms with his disappearance, which leads to a falling-out between the secular-minded mother and her young sons, who are a good deal more observant under the guidance of their grandfather and uncle. Little happens in the film, and students of orthodox plotting will find the dénouement to be underwhelming, but Nadjari is always interested more in character than in entertainment and aided by superb performances by all the cast, he produces a quiet, unfussy drama that was never going to win much at Cannes but is more than persuasive in its own right. It is not as impressive as Avanim, which treated of the embittered reaction of a young woman born into a religious family after her secret lover is killed in a suicide attack, but should be seen by a wide (-ish) audience.

Just Like in Real Life

I'm not a fan of the International Herald Tribune but occasionally it does provide a bumper issue within its very thin pages and today's is one of those. We learn of the first rail crossing between North and South Korea since the end of the Korean war fifty-four years ago and the campaign of harrassment and vilification conducted by Hindu fundamentalists against an Indian Muslim artist (it is strange how the Western media, so given to the word 'Islamofascism', has yet to start using 'Hindufascism' even though fanatics allied to the former ruling BJP have been long engaged in undemocratic activities against everyone from Muslims in Gujurat to filmmaker Deepa Mehta to Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty, but I suppose the Western conception of all Hindus as peaceful cow-loving Gandhi-followers precludes such a stance). Best of all is the story from a correspondent in the Czech Republic about Cimrman, a fictitious Czech character born in the 1960s as a satirical prop against the Stalinist dictatorship, and who has since inspired fourteen plays written "on his behalf", given his name to an asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter and is soon to be immortalised in the name of a mountain in Russia. Cimrman is a product of a Central and Eastern European imagination that champions the little man that has produced the majestic oeuvre of Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek, Ivan Klima, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivo Andric and countless others and which has recently been reincarnated in the superb Romanian films The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12.08, East of Bucharest. The discovery of this fantastic character, so dear to Czechs and an irrepressible resistant against tyranny made my day in a way that few other things have recently. Three cheers for the Czechs.

The closest thing we have to Cimrman in the English-speaking world is Matt Groëning's peerless creation The Simpsons, which celebrates its 400th episode this week. I have long suspected that this most brilliant of TV shows is underappreciated and, most likely, wildly misunderstood in its homeland, and this piece in The Nation confirms this. The liberal scribe muses about the series: "[it's] terribly animated (at least by Pixar or Dreamworks standards), unabashedly crude and, at times, prone to deus ex machina endings". To say that The Simpsons is 'terribly animated by Pixar or Dreamworks standards' is akin to saying that Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' was a bit badly drawn compared to John Singer Sargent's draughtsmanship, but middle-brows will be middle-brows. As an example of The Simpson's brilliance, here's a wee taste of one of the greatest episodes. Watch it all; it's funny because it's true...

Arabesque

Another piece from the Christian Science Monitor, which treats of a court case being brought by six imams removed from an American Airlines flight after complaints from concerned passengers. I will let the article speak for itself on this episode of paranoia and ignorance gone mad; the airport police report is revealing of how shallow American understanding is of those crazy guys that kneel and pray to Mecca: '6 suspicious Arabic men on plane spread out in their seats'. 'Arabic' is a language and does not refer to a people, the word they are looking for is 'Arab'. Intelligent people should know the difference.

Another Side of Iranian Society

I wrote last year about a piece in the New York Times on growing up as a Jew in Iran, and the Christian Science Monitor has a great article today on the Islamic Republic's small but ancient Jewish community. Now numbering 25,000 but guaranteed civic and religious freedoms that might come as a surprise to those that see Iran only as the fulcrum of the Axis of Evil, the community sees no contradiction between their religion and their nationality. Recently-deposed Israeli president Moshe Katsav is a native of Isfahan, and there is one Jewish member of the Iranian Assembly. It might be pointed out that there are also many Iranian Muslims that have no truck with the decrepit theocracy that reigns in the country. President Ahmadinejad is, of course, a nasty piece of work and he doesn't stint on the anti-semitism but Iran is a complex country where constituencies overlap - a large sector of the Shia clergy is liberal and pro-reform - and the country, for all its faults, has a remarkable culture and civic society that towers over the wretched pro-West dictatorships of the Arabian peninsula. There are many in the West, like John McCain that think that a bombing of Iran might sort its problems out for good, but as Ciamak Moresadegh, the Chairman of the Tehran Jewish Committee points out, 'if a war were to start, we would also be a target. When a missile lands, it does not ask if you are a Muslim or a Jew. It lands.'

The Christian Science Monitor is a paper that is not very well known outside the US and its excellent online edition and RSS feeds are well worth bookmarking as it is one of the few genuinely independent American news sources.

Jesus Built My Hot Rod

I didn't expect to like Jesus Camp, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's Oscar-nominated documentary, not because of its subject matter - a summer camp for indocrinating American youngsters with the lethal absurdities of Evangelical Christianity - but because I knew what political tack it was going to take. And a shared political viewpoint in a political film can often make for very dull viewing. I found this last year when I went to see Fernando Solanas' The Dignity of the Nobodies, a documentary about the sufferings of working- and middle-class people following the collapse of the Argentine economy in 2001. Solanas is a fine filmmaker and his fictional features are exemplary but the atmosphere in that film, itself a sequel to the more probing Social Genocide, was stiflingly worthy and there was little room to scrutinise.

So I was not expecting too much from Ewing and Grady's film. I did expect to despair at the nonsense that is spouted throughout the film by the charmismatic, ornery preacher-teacher Becky Fischer, a footsoldier in the Evangelical movement that, quite worryingly has the ear of the current US administration. And I also expected to despair at the sadness of hundreds of obese, badly-dressed rubes stealing the childhood years of their offspring, at one point a mother forcefully raises the hand of her toddler to participate in a 'hands-up everyone' activity at one of Fischer's ceremonies, while another child is told in a disturbingly avuncular way by a preacher that she 'looks so beautiful' with her mouth gagged by a 'LIFE' sticker. But that was all going to be so-far so-expected. The cleverness of Ewing and Grady's approach however lies in a deceptively simple conceit: attack the Evangelicals from the perspective of mainstream Christianity, via Mike Papantonio's Air America Religion show 'The Ring of Fire'. It might seem a bit contrived (as Papantonio's show itself is) but it allows a distance that rids the film of the self-righteousness that would otherwise have made it insufferably tedious. Other than Papantonio's sequences there is no narration and the utterings of Fischer and her fellow faithful stand and fall of their volition.

In reality there is little point in analysing the beliefs of these people as they are beyond any form of reasoning - however sophistic; the lunatic extremes of other religions, such as Wahhabite Islam, Free Presbyterianism, Hasidic Judaism and Tridentine Catholicism cannot match American Evangelism for supreme barminess. They all have theological underpinnings, however deluded and disingenuous they might be - the Evangelicals reach the parts that theology can't touch. They operate on nothing other than dumb faith - as Church leader Ted Haggard says, 'it's written in the Bible', that's all that's needed - and boy, is their faith dumb.

There is a peculiarly American character to this form of religion - and I don't mean that as a slur on the US - the Evangelical movement gained its momentum from Revivals that swept across the Deep South following the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and it has offered the very thing that Tocqueville recognised in the American character almost two centuries ago: 'a love of physical gratification, the notion of bettering one's condition, the excitement of competition, the charm of anticipated success.' One can be saved almost instantly - it's simply another branch of consumerism - and the saved induce a state of godly rapture in themselves (or are certainly encouraged to do so) and there is a clear pleasure taken by the Evangelicals in their difference from the damned, the evil and the sinners that constitute the rest of society. More than once in the film the comparison with sport is made and of course the biggest ball game of the lot is the Second Coming, which the Evangelicals are in better shape to contest than the rest of us. Thus lies the logic behind the Evangelical's aggressive support for Israel: the Holy Land must be in the hands of allies of Christians in order to allow Jesus' spaceship to land without a hitch when the Coming comes to pass. The helpful Jews will of course see the light and convert in order to be saved, or be consigned to Hell with all the rest of us. Now, according to a rigid reading of the Book of Revolution there is only room for 'twelve times twelve thousand' souls in Christ's spaceship, so we are left with only 144,000 to ascend to heaven. It sounds a bit like Deep Impact to me but I'm sure only the brightest and most brilliant will be selected such as those folks that pray with Fischer to ask the Lord not to permit Satan to interfere with the camp's computer network and Power Point presentations.

The Evangelicals' improbable philo-semitism also incorporates intermittent Hebrew chants, a fondness for Israeli flags, and a strange take on history. Fischer claims that 'this country [the US, of course] was built on Judaeo-Christian values', proving herself to be blissfully unaware of the Founding Fathers' contempt for the theocratic urges of the New England puritans (and their dubious standards of hygiene, as one biographer of George Washington has remarked), and also the long history of anti-semitism in the US, which did not really abate until the 1960s, well after the Holocaust. There are many asinine elements of the European left that profess a similar level of ignorance about the US but they may be forgiven theirs if this is what passes for historical consciousness in the Land of the Free. But then again, the Evangelicals do think that the world is but 5,000 years old so they do have a rather selective historiography.

Jesus Camp, good as it is, would blossom into an especially worthwhile project if it were to become a Seven-Up-type series to see the effects of the brainwashing on the children as they grow up, but I imagine that getting co-operation of the principals might be difficult after the success of this film. As I said, there is no reasoning or arguing with these people: they are quite simply insane. Regime change at the next election will stem their influence somewhat but even so any future Democrat president will keep a close eye on them. Seeing as they are not going to go away perhaps the best containing measure would be one that was suggested over thirty years ago by the maverick political candidate Hal Phillip Walker in Robert Altman's Nashville: tax them. And tax all other religions too. That would soon draw the sting from them. An unlikely development but one that should be kept in the air to see how it flies.

Catholic Atheist

More on the Census - not surprisingly every religion in the State saw a rise in its numbers in the past four years, mainly due to immigration from Eastern Europe and Africa, which helped the numbers of Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians and Muslims increase. Even the tiny Jewish community swelled a little, by 140 to 1,930. Interestingly there are places on the census for 'atheist', 'agnostic' and - a sure sign of maturity for Ireland - 'no religion'. Last census there were 500 atheists in Ireland - I wonder do Irish atheists call themselves the '500 club' because of this? This year there are 929 godless folk in the Republic. I can't remember what I designated myself as in the 2002 Census (I left for France just a month or so after it) - it might have been atheist, but if I wasn't feeling too bolshy on the night I might just have put down Catholic anyway. It reminds me of my mother's experiences of teaching religion to the Catholic students at Sligo Grammar School - when students were asked what their religion was so as to be allotted the correct 'Christian Doctrine' class, a claim of being an atheist would be met by the Principal telling them 'look, you're either a Catholic atheist, or a Protestant atheist.'

A Strange Week

It has been a strange week, with the announcement of the commissioning of an 'official' film of Ian Paisley's life, to be scripted by Gary Mitchell, the alleged murder of Pakistan cricket coach Bob Woolmer after his team's sensational defeat by Ireland and news of the State of Israel's very own MySpace page. There is an amusing article on the latter in Salon by former Israeli Presidential scriptwriter Gregory Levey, treating of a charm offensive by Israel to win the hearts of the under-35 age group in the US. Though the site is separated by as little as two degrees from some very unsavoury elements, it is largely inoffensive as are most of the comments left on it. In any case I'll be a Zionist for one day tomorrow to cheer Yossi Benayoun and Co. on against England; aren't we so petty, the Irish?

As for Paisley, if I were to spot the Grand Old Reverend in water-borne difficulties I would find it hard to intervene to save him, not least because I can't swim (and I imagine the man upstairs would, in most likelihood, be picking up the tab on that one). But that considered, I can envisage the film being a fascinating prospect, charting the life and rise to power of a genuine anachronistic religious nutcase, a sort of bin Laden with Ovaltine and slippers. I wonder if Big Ian will insist that all involved on the film abstain from the 'Devil's buttermilk' for the duration of the shoot?

Richard Dawkins and A.N. Wilson

Further to the post on Saturday about Richard Dawkins' scorning of Peter Kay's simple faith, it appears that the biologist was entrapped, to a certain extent, as this letter of clarification attests. Dawkins was fed an anonymous quote and asked to comment on it, which is, shall we say, not really cricket. However, as Dawkins admits that he is regularly sought out for such rent-a-quotes, you would think that he might have asked to whom the original comment was to be attributed, as many more careful people would do. Though I find Dawkins' evangilism counter-productive and tiring I have a certain degree of sympathy for him as the story first originated in an article in the Daily Mail, by the insufferable A.N. Wilson, an Anglican High Church Militant, probably the most zealous Protestant in Britain. A good few years ago, at the Booker Prize ceremony that John McGahern attended for his nomination for Amongst Women, Wilson ungraciously accused McGahern in front of a number of guests, of supporting the IRA in the novel, an accusation that any literate person that read it would view as absolute tosh. McGahern, a man who was possessed of more dignity than many men better than Wilson, simply nodded and gave an indulgent smile. I suppose he figured you had to suffer fools like Wilson at ceremonies such as those.

My Zealous God

Never a man to let an opportunity slip to smash a walnut with a sledgehammer, Darwinist and renowned aetheist Richard Dawkins has lambasted chirpy comedian Peter Kay, for professing in his autobiography to believe in a 'comforting God'. Dawkins, who clearly was not doing much else at the time, fumed:

'How can you take seriously someone who likes to believe something because he finds it 'comforting'?

'If evidence were found for a supreme being I would change my mind instantly -with pride and with great surprise. Would I find it comforting? What matters is what is true, and we discover truth by evidence, not what we would 'like'.'

And there was I thinking that Peter Kay was just a comedian. It is not the first time that Dawkins has been unnecessarily arrogant and boorish on the issue of belief in God. He is one of the greatest biologists of the last fifty years and he has well earned his respect as both an eminent theorist of evolution and his public fame due to the success of his books. However, his use of this fame is both embarrassing and tiresome. You wonder if Dawkins has any social skills to speak of; even in the columns he has written for The Guardian, The Independent and others his evangelical arrogance has been an embarrassment to many of his admirers, and if anything, his belligerence has set the cause of secularism, not to mention, aetheism, back decades. Though I suppose it is a bit of a novel diversion from the old 'but religion has been the cause of so many wars' line. Even the most brilliant intellectuals can be damn silly at times.

This Week's Movies

Pressures of time prevent me from going into detail about four films I saw in the past week and liked (as most people who know me would aver, this is an unprecedented phenomenon) but I will list them anyway, three of them are German: Matthias Luthardt's film-school graduation piece Pingpong, about a poor cousin cuckoo's presence in his rich uncle's family nest. Icily gripping and wonderfully edited. Then there is the Stasi thriller The Lives of Others that, despite some rickety characterisation, is great entertainment, and the main Stasi guy is the spitting image of Colm Tóibín.

A friend of mine in Dublin warned me off Philip Gröning's three-hour documentary on the silent Carthusian monks of La Grande Chartreuse in Grenoble, Into Great Silence. This friend goes on Buddhist retreats and Unitarian services and Tridentine masses while managing to be both gay and left-wing, but found three hours about monks intolerably boring. So the omens were not good but I found it engaging for the most part and a fascinating look at people that use utensils everyday that are usually only found these days in movie prop departments. Like ewers and so on. Mind you, the core audience for films like this is getting on a bit, when I finally got to see it after seeing it sold out twice, I was one of only about five people in the audience under the age of sixty. Last was the Catalan director Marc Recha's August Days, a road movie starring Recha and his brother David as themselves as they drive their camper van along the Ebro during a heatwave. I loved Recha's debut feature Tree of Cherries, which I saw in the Dublin Film Festival a long time ago and this film has the same balmy magnificence even though the difficulties putting a plot together is at times too obvious. But he more than makes up for that in the filming and the pacing.

I also finally got to see Robert Altman's Nashville on DVD, which is probably the best of all the Altman's I've seen. Most amazing is the music, which as well as being brilliant, was entirely written and performed by the cast. That's all for this week though. I'm off to Vienna for the weekend and I'm leaving the laptop at home. More next week.

Chronicle of a Death Foreskinned

Only a week before Christmas comes the news that Jesus' foreskin has gone missing, stolen from a shoebox in the parochial house of Calcata in Italy. I will leave it to Slate to fill in the details, but what I find shocking is not the relative fuss being made over such an item of dubious providence, but the relative lack of fuss being made. This is the godly prepuce after all, does a slight taciturnity on the part of the faithful betray a lack of belief in its really having once hung on the tip of Jesus' johnson?

Requiem

Good atheist as I am I nonetheless have a fondness for films with religious themes. Not religious films such as the dourly devotional The Greatest Story Ever Told or The Passion of the Christ, nor Martin Scorsese's ethnic tourist trips The Last Temptation of Christ or Kundun. I really couldn't care less about the major personalities of world religion, on film at least, but it is the religiosity of ordinary people that I find fascinating. The obvious examples are Bresson and Dreyer, two-thirds of Paul Schrader's 'blessed trinity' - strangely enough, the third, Yasujiro Ozu, was so disinterested by religion as to be practically secular in his gentle, old-fashioned work - and there is also Lars von Trier, and even the anti-religious cinema constituted of such films as The Magdalene Sisters, Ken Loach's Raining Stones, Bunuel's Viridiana and The Milky Way. A film that is so remarkable as to bear immediate comparison to both Bresson and Dreyer is the second film by the young German director Hans-Christian Schmid entitled Requiem, which is one of the most moving portrayals of mental illness and undying faith that I have ever seen.

Requiem, based on the true story of Anneliese Michel, tells the tale of a 21-year-old German student Michaela, played by the brilliant Sandra Hüller - resembling a young Diane Keaton -, who is raised in the sort of diabolically-strict Catholic family that every Catholic dreads waking up one day to find it their own, and who suffers from an exceptionally debilitating strain of epilepsy that threatens her college career, and which she despairs of ever escaping. Tied to her strident faith, nurtured by an embittered harridan of a mother and a loving but sadly powerless father, and her obsession with an obscure martyred saint, her mental well-being wavers to a point that nobody, even her devout parents and parish priest, are capable of absorbing it in a way explicable to them.

Though it is likely that Michaela's illness is purely corporeal, the temporal location of her situation, after the loss in certainty among the German catholics, renders her trauma all the more unsettling. Her psychosis is not accepted, even by the clerics and the faithful, as spiritual due to their own faith's wavering, until it is too late. When exorcism finally takes place, it is much more disturbing than in William Friedkin's film because, as well as being patently inappropriate, it takes place amid an environment of such selfless love, with even the embittered mother casting off her coldness in her daughter's hour of need. We see a world of unconditional love and one where rationalism has supposedly killed off all lingering traces of religious superstition, but Michaela, in her conviction that her illness makes her special, constitutes a nightmarish throwback to the past. There is a great similarity to von Trier's mighty Breaking the Waves but this film avoids von Trier's algebra of suffering, a schematism that misled many of his critics into accusing him of rampant misogyny (it is there in his other films but exists only as a decoy in Breaking the Waves). Requiem rather progresses in a sober fashion with occasional fits of activity as the heroine tries to live a normal social life, and consequently suffers further seizures. The film's combination of static shots and intimate handheld camerawork recalls the Dardenne brothers and the opening two scenes draw the viewer in rapidly like no film since Rosetta. The film is set in the mid-70s but its period detail is for the most part restrained, no kitsch set design or platform shoes; the one concession to the era is a fantastic scene where Michaela almost breaks down trying to replace a dried-up typewriter ribbon. It is a scene that will be familiar to anyone that has felt unreasonably stymied by household obstacles, but it is rendered frightening by the intensity of Hüller's performance.

After years of so-so output, German cinema is once again a major creative force, which, to be honest, is the least that can be expected of Europe's largest country. As well as popular hits such as Goodbye Lenin! and Downfall there is also a new wave of young directors such as Schmid, Christoph Hochhaüsler, and Henner Winckler. Like the recent films of the last two, Requiem is distinguished by its heartfelt sympathy for young people, and its effortless dramatisation of their stories. But that boils Requiem down too much. There is an awful lot there. That's why I am going to see it again tomorrow.

Limbo No More

After a quiet first year in office, Pope Benedict XVI is hardly ever out of the news now. A more bookish figure than his predecessor - he prefers a modest Volkswagen Golf to the Popemobile - Ben Sez (as they call him in France) is dismantling one of the oldest concepts of Catholic dogma - limbo - in an attempt to win converts in Africa and Asia, two parts of the world where God is still King. The move is to allow stillborn children to go to heaven, which they do not as long as limbo is there. Islam is a bit more flexible in this regard, allowing stillborn souls free access to paradise. I will inevitably be profane in viewing the Pope's effort in a mercantile fashion, as a marketing ploy in a price war with rival religions. Or maybe it is only a case of pragmatic management, a way of speeding up the queues, like New Labour have been trying to do with the NHS. In any case, the abolishment of limbo is unlikely to have repercussions for those of us who actually got born, or so it seems to an eye as theologically naked as mine. What does the future hold for limbo dancing then?

Notre Damned If You Do...

Le Parvis Notre Dame, the square in front of the famous Paris cathedral, popular with tourists and pigeons alike is due to be renamed tomorrow Place Jean Paul II (anyone with a knack for translation will see the name of the last Pope in there somewhere). The Socialist-run city council voted last year for the change in name, though it is being resisted by a number of troublesome groups, such as the Greens, the Communists and the queers. The latter of which is the wonderful direct-action-oriented Act-Up Paris, who are like Peter Tatchell, but with a more wicked sense of humour (last year after the banlieue riots they put up posters of Nicolas Sarkozy around town, with the caption 'Votez Le Pen'). They are planning to crash the popish party tomorrow.

I have to say I am with the Greens, queers and commies on this one. JP2 had his good points, not least his renunciation of the traditional anti-semitism of the Catholic Church, ironic that it took a pontiff from a still largely anti-semitic country such as Poland to do it. But his firmness on issues of sex and contraception had disastrous consequences for the control of poverty and AIDS in the developing world and his insistently anachronistic reign drove millions of people in the Western world from the Church. I count myself among those, though to be totally honest, it was really the boredom of the Mass that did it. JP2, despite having lived in Paris at one point (in the Collège des Irlandais, now home to the Irish Cultural Centre) really has no place in a free and decadent city such as this one. He will be smiling away in his grave though, as the little park at the back of Notre Dame bears the name of John XXIII; his ideological opposite takes the back seat on this one.