A scene from the Russian film The Mermaid. Courtesy of MEIFF.
Rym Ghazal
I watched two films on Saturday at the Middle East Film Festival: One a modern Russian take on an old beloved Danish fairy-tale, the other a blunt look at a glum reality of human relations of the deformed and abandoned.
Both the Russian Mermaid (Rusalka) and the Iranian Two-legged Horse (Asbe Du-Pa), in a way, are stories of people rejected by society, neglected and misunderstood. But each left a different impression and emotion in its viewers.
The Mermaid (2007), directed by Anna Melikyan, was a charming movie, full of colour which contrasted with the bleakness of certain parts of Moscow, and life in general.
“When you have nowhere else to go, you go to Moscow,” said Alisa, the main character of the movie. She touches you with her quiet, sad eyes and her innocent smile. We follow her through her childhood, teenage years and short adult life, and the various humorous but tragic moments she experiences.
From her dreams to be a ballerina, to her conflicts with her busty oversexed mother, to her private discussions with her grandmother, and her unrequited love of a man whom she rescued, to her magic powers that move inanimate objects —but fail to move anyone’s heart except the audience.
Throughout the movie, there are lovely dream sequences, where Alisa waits for her father, the sailor, to come back —even though she was brutally told by her mother that he never ever knew she existed.
There were great scenes that exposed the reality of Moscow, with its overly commercialized life, the hovering loneliness of most inhabitants, even the successful, and the ultimate demise of those who don’t keep up with the merciless and superficial city life.
In one scene, Alisa takes a goldfish that was stuck swimming in a wine glass-sized bowl and puts it in a tub to make the goldfish feel more comfortable. Likable even in her strangeness, she dyes her hair green to catch the eye of her love interest. Throughout all of this, the audience feels her unhappiness and I felt frustrated with the unhappy ending.
Even if you don’t believe in magic, you believe in Alisa and begrudgingly accept the shortcomings of those around her who never notice her.
As for Two-legged Horse, it is set in an Afghan village, and it starts off well and intensely, as it made me and almost everyone in the audience cry and shake our heads in disgust over what we were seeing.
A mentally handicapped boy is hired, for “one dollar a day”, to be the “horse” of a wealthy boy who lost his legs when his mother stepped on a land-mine. The mother died, leaving behind an angry, legless boy, and a daughter also with a walking problem.
Very soon, the father figure exits the film, leaving these two boys, the horse and his master, to their daily routine marred by abuse and poverty.
The master beats the two legged horse named Mirvais, who lives in one of the abandoned pipes in the streets, and the level of abuse reaches a point that is too much, which sort of killed the movie for many viewers. There is something such as overdoing or overdramatising a theme.
Over and over again, the allegory between the two legged horse and an actual horse was emphasized. We know! We get it. It got extreme when Mirvais ended up wearing a horse’s saddle, eating hay with the other animals, and even wearing a skinned horse’s head. And lets not forget how the other children sadistically nailed in horseshoes into his feet. Why did he take all of this abuse? It’s never explained.
The more subtle moments in the film are more heart-wrenching, especially when Mirvais turns around and tearfully reminds his master how he cleans him, carries him and even takes him to the bathroom. In return, Mirvais is beaten, unfed and abused to the very end.
Right before the movie started, the Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf told the audience at the Abu Dhabi Mall theater that: “I want to show what people turn a blind eye to.”
It was a beautiful idea, and one people truly should not turn a blind eye to, but she overdid it and exaggerated, killing whatever sympathy or empathy she might have triggered in viewers.
If I had to give the two movies stars, I would give The Mermaid a four or five out of five, for its beautiful execution and fresh take on an old story, while Two-Legged Horse would get a one or two stars for being a unique idea but poorly executed. I have seen far more touching Iranian movies, and this one by far, is one of my least favorite ones. Watch the 1999 film Colour of Paradise by Majid Majidi and you will see what I mean.
Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf poses for photographers on Sept. 19, 2008, after the screening of her film Two-legged Horse during the 56th San Sebastian International Film Festival. AFP