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April 24, 2005
How the human tribe leads life: watching one of the year's best films
A lovely appreciation in the FT of Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo's dour, brilliant, hypnotic and magisterial documentary The 3 Rooms of Melancholia, about children and the war in Chechnya, which has played Sundance, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Chicago and Thessaloniki. Writes Peter Aspden: "I would garland it with... superlatives, just so that some courageous independent distributor would plunder a few fruity adjectives to use in a promotional poster, but frankly it is near pointless..." The "On Culture" columnist saw her film a couple of days after viewing The Interpreter: "How absurd to expect us to be moved by [Kidman and Penn] huffing through bomb blasts, phony accents and improbable... twists, when the truth of war can be conveyed so simply... by the face of a child..." Aspden ponders that gulf between the two movies: "Why have we become so disrespectful of an art form, that we choose, en masse, to consume only its most vulgar products?" He concludes with words from Honkasalo: I don't care for truths, but when I'm not asleep or dreaming, I wish to know how the human tribe leads life, shapes history and expresses will. Europe is full of people who need grace to cope with a righteous rage that turns against them. Life is no court of justice; justice does not prevail, life does. [The article is online only for subscribers.]
Posted by at April 24, 2005 01:29 PM
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