Munyurangabo

I hadn't intended to write anything about Munyurangabo, because other people have done a fine job of it themselves: Robin Wood and Roger Ebert stand out, though others have also noticed the film's power.  But it's one of those movies that if you love it you really love it and you want to proselytize about it.  I figure my first post of the new year ought to be a positive and proselytizing one, so here we are...

I went into Munyurangabo knowing nothing about it -- I had stuck it on my Netflix queue at some point and forgotten why.  This may be the best way to watch it, not because there are lots of plot points to create suspense and surprise, but because it's the sort of film that, for some viewers, could be ruined by expectations.  On the other hand, the story of how the film was made is compelling, and could aid in appreciating its wonders, and though there are a couple of moments that benefit from surprise, surprise is certainly not essential to enjoying the film.  In other words, before you follow any of the links above or read the rest of this post, consider waiting till after you've seen the movie once.  Or just plunge ahead as I try to explain why I think it is such an extraordinary work of art.

"Akhil and Judy" by Avi Lall

Whenever I encounter a piece of writing that blows the top of my head off, I try to settle down and figure out how it works and what I so forcefully responded to within it. Sometimes I can figure it out, sometimes I can't. Sometimes the top of my head just won't go back on.

So it is with "Akhil and Judy" by Avi Lall, published in the latest issue of Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine. You might not have heard of Porcupine, but it's worth your attention; this issue in particular is rich with good poetry, prose, and pictures. But "Akhil and Judy" is the standout for me, and a standout among all the stories I have read this year, or, for that matter, any year.

I have a few hypotheses for why I find this story so affecting, so impressive, but I don't have much in the way of solid reasoning, though I'm going to try here to make my hypotheses hold some water. I know the story's effect on me: during one of my three readings, it brought me to the verge of tears; during another, I was struck by how charming and even funny it sometimes is. Each time I read it, the story took hold of my attention and imagination in a way few stories ever do -- I heard nothing other than the words, imagined nothing other than the images those words expressed.

It's a difficult story to summarize, and that's often a good sign. Summary cannot really convey how (and how well) this story works, because its subject matter is so vividly and inextricably connected to the narrative structure.

Nonetheless, there are things I can say. I can say it is the story of Akhil, who was born in India and then was brought by his father to Rwanda, where the family settled in Kibeho, where an orphaned girl named Isobelle saw apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and then, a few years later, everyone was in hell. Akhil and Isobelle met in a refugee camp and fled, eventually ending up in California. That's where the story begins:

Akhil and Isobelle first set eyes on each other while they were fleeing for their lives-- Akhil, amongst a throng of screaming people, from the east end of the camp, Isobelle, in a frenzied crowd, from the west. They stared, slowed down, crossed paths, turned to keep their eyes connected then continued their flight from the men with machetes and machine guns. Akhil hid in a toilet hole along with a mother suffocating her child. Isobelle buried herself beneath a pile of recently inaugurated corpses. When Isobelle later appeared, looking into the toilet hole, yelling for Akhil to get out, Akhil was convinced he finally had a real vision. Now the vision ends, or walks out the door, slamming it vengefully behind her.

Akhil decides to leave, and so he gets on a train to Portland, and there he meets a family from India with a little boy, and the little boy thinks Akhil is his lost brother, Mohammed. The family is from Ahmedabad, and left in 2002, a year after a terrible earthquake, and the year of a month of riots that began with a train on fire.

There's even more to the story, both foreground and background, but that's enough to let you know there's a lot. Yet "Akhil and Judy" isn't even twenty pages long. That's where some of its wonder lies: it compresses three continents and three decades of history into remarkably few words, and it does so without reducing the continents or the history to simple lessons or easy emotions. The affect of the sentences is flat, yet they gain power from Lall's careful control of tone and diction, with surprising (and effective) choices of words popping up every few sentences to keep the story from falling into an inappropriate deadpan. It stays, instead, tensely matter-of-fact, jutting now and again into lyrical images that would be much less effective were the whole striving for the same effect.

I would quote some passages to prove my point about the prose, but (in this case) to rip the words out of the story hobbles them. The sentences and paragraphs need each other for their rhythms and patterns, and what looks in an excerpt like too much or not enough proves itself to be, in the story itself, exactly right. The familiar doesn't lose its familiarity, doesn't become completely strange and new -- rather, it becomes both familiar and exact, satisfying in its inevitability, amazing in its ability to contain so much in a form that would, anywhere else, be mundane.

The title points to one part of the story I haven't yet mentioned. Early in the story (though not in their lives), Isobelle tells Akhil, "We have to become different people." Later, we discover what this means:

Their date was at a pier in Newport Beach. Akhil was supposed to come upon Isobelle and approach her as if for the first time, using an alias and a past made of fiction.

It doesn't work the first time -- Isobelle scoffs at Akhil as he pretends to be other than himself, and she walks away. But they try again, and this time they talk, with Akhil calling himself Jack, and Isobelle ("in a Jamaican accent that faded in and out") calling herself Judy. As the characters talk, fiction leads to something that sounds too convincing to be anything other than a horrible truth.

One of the reasons I find the story so effective, aside from how much it crams into its sentences and how well crafted those sentences are, is that it is not linear, and yet it is patterned. We move back and forth from the present-tense travels on the train to past-tense reminiscences and meditations. We gain glimmers of the past until, by the end, the accumulated bits of collage gain a shape in our minds, and all the previous sections grow richer and revelatory.

And so we have a story about time and memory and vision and loss and faith; about exile, truth, and family; about religion and politics, Akhil and Isobelle, Jack and Judy, Kibeho and Ahmedabad, us and them. It's a story so achingly sad at its heart that it is nearly unreadable, and yet the sadness is leavened with a hope in the possibility that comes from new beginnings, though that hope is tempered with the knowledge that survival is a blessing tempered by the ineradicable taste of ash on the tongue.

Sometimes in April

I've found hardly any reviews of Sometimes in April, a film about the Rwandan genocide written and directed by Raoul Peck and released by HBO in 2005, and it was purely by luck that I stumbled upon it through Netflix. There are aesthetic problems with the movie -- clunky dialogue, wooden acting, convoluted narrative -- that make it less satisfying than Hotel Rwanda, but it's still better than much of what fills the screens of the world, and it has a number of virtues that a good and fluent film like Hotel Rwanda lacks, as well as virtues not available through a documentary.

First, it's important to note that none of the flaws of Sometimes in April carry through the entire 140 minutes of the movie. Most of the major actors have at least a few moments of sensitive, subtle acting, and Idris Elba, Pamela Nomvete, Carole Karemera in particular all seemed to navigate between the moments of awkward writing and the re-enactment of horrific events with more grace than not, and sometimes with sublime poignancy. The most embarrassing scenes are ones involving bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. -- Debra Winger is simply awful as Prudence Bushnell , and the other actors are worse, like animatronic commediadell'arte caricatures.

Sometimes in April tells the story of two Hutu brothers, one of whom, Augustin (Elba), is a soldier married to a Tutsi woman (Karemera); the other, Honor矇 (Oris Erhuero), is a radio commentator famous for his incendiary, anti-Tutsi remarks. The story moves back and forth between 2004, when Augustin is trying to move on with his life and Honor矇 is in prison, and 1994, when Augustin's family is destroyed by the genocidaires. Interwoven into this central narrative strand is the story of Martine (Nomvete), a teacher who lives through the atrocities and eventually becomes Augustin's companion, and scenes of Bushnell trying to convince somebody -- anybody! -- in Washington that the killings in Rwanda were worth doing something to stop.

One of the greatest virtues of Sometimes in April is that is manages to convey so much without being either more incoherent or more didactic than it is. Over and over again, this is a movie that portrays complex events and ideas through imagery and characters. Sometimes it stumbles, certainly, but the task Peck has set for himself, his actors, and his crew is one that is nearly impossible -- an honest and accurate portrayal of the Rwandan genocide through a fictional story for a general, and probably uninformed, audience. There are scenes of brutality and scenes of beauty, and Peck pays particular interest to characters' faces: their expressions, their dignity, their eyes. Hotel Rwanda is a more structurally satisfying film mostly because it doesn't try to do nearly as much as Sometimes in April; I don't mean that as criticism of the former so much as praise for the ambition and, indeed, accomplishment of the latter.

Peck is an admirable director and writer in that he seems determined to tell African stories from an African point of view. His Lumumba is a thoughtful portrait of Patrice Lumumba, the first (and ill-fated) prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sometimes in April is a more epic movie, less focused on one person, and with much more material to synthesize.

Hotel Rwanda is notable not the least for being a major feature that doesn't overly concern itself with white people, which makes it a rare sort of movie, because usually films -- the ones financed by Hollywood, certainly -- don't get off the ground unless they show some whites expressing their basic goodness or discovering their inner morality (usually accompanied by an at-least-quasi-magical negro or secular African saint).* Hotel Rwanda, though, was mostly filmed in South Africa, while Sometimes in April was actually filmed in Rwanda, and many of the actors and much of the crew were Rwandan.

Sometimes in April should -- and does -- stand on its own, but I compare it here to the better-known Hotel Rwanda, not because I think either movie owes anything to the other, but because the comparison seems to reveal strengths, weaknesses, and differences of both films. Sometimes in April is more explicitly critical of the U.S., and it makes no criticism of the Tutsis or Paul Kagame (who denounced Hotel Rwanda) -- thus, the political implications of the two movies are different, despite their shared subject matter and setting. Sometimes in April is, very much, a political film (though not only that); Hotel Rwanda seems to me to be more of a celebration of its protagonist and his triumph, an ultimately uplifting story in amidst one of the most horrific moments of the horror-filled 20th Century, and political only to the extent that no story about the Rwandan genocide can avoid being suffused with politics. Sometimes in April is not uplifting; it is infuriating, devastating, and immensely sad, even as its characters try to learn, in the end, how to move on with their lives. The difference is the difference between, for instance, Schindler's List and either The Pianist or Fateless (although I think Hotel Rwanda is better than Schindler's List [about which I agree with Zizek] and Sometimes in April doesn't have the same strong writing, acting, and filmmaking as The Pianist and Fateless).

All of which is just a very long and tangential way of saying: Sometimes in April, though not perfect, is a film very much worth seeing, and one that deserves a large audience.

*An exception: Catch a Fire, though somewhat disappointing in its execution, at least focused more on the complexities of its black protagonist than the moral education of its primary white character, played by Tim Robbins. But Catch a Fire seems to have been a mostly European production, and although it was distributed by Universal in the U.S., overall it appears to have been a financial failure, which is unfortunate -- not only because it's a whole lot better than most of the top grossers of 2006, but because its financial failure just gives movie executives an excuse to ignore films about Africans in Africa.