kashmirlayla

I did not know what to expect going into this movie. I came out thoroughly overwhelmed by the emotional impact of the protagonist Cleo's story. But what really gets you is the sense you have, while watching, that Cleo and the other main characters are deeply implicated in an entire larger world, a world re-created for a film but that is so detailed, complex, and vibrant that it feels startlingly real. As such, the dense energy of an entire society seems to be conveyed to us through the quiet and unassuming figure of a lowly maid, the type of person until recently rarely chosen as the center of such an epic look at a time and place, but who emerges as epitomizing the best that society has to offer.

As a result, the film is a sort of bourgeois family-saga told through the margins. The story may have an allegorical significance for Mexican society at large. A white family is almost destroyed as its patriarch gives up and takes off, abandoning his wife, four children, the two maids and dog. As everyone is let down by his betrayal, it is Cleo, the indigenous maid, who holds everyone together, through the quiet strength of her loyalty and stability.

The film's plot, though, has garnered much less interest than its visuals, of which much has already been made. They are indeed stunning, and do seem to be modeled after the great Mexican tradition of muralism, a consciously social and political art form that portrays moments of great upheaval and change through a panoramic, long-view of Mexican society.

However, for me the great success of the film is precisely its success in shifting between the small and the big: it imbeds the close-up, fine-grained story of Cleo and her employer's family within the greater tapestry of the larger world of Mexico City in the 1970s. Throughout the film, the turmoil of the latter increasingly encroaches upon the world of the family's house. In the end, it was the back-and-forth between the intimacy we begin to feel with the characters, the emotional impact of their story and their search for a new equilibrium, and the greater sense we have of an outside world similarly roiled by instability and unforeseeable changes.

Reading the reviews, I did not expect a serious film. But we love the story, so we put it on anyways. Halfway through, we turn to each other, having realized that it was amazing! Much more interesting take on the material than any of the previous iterations: instead of a goofy sing-a-long with some cool visuals, the film turns out to be a veritable meditation on the fragile barrier between the natural world and the human world, and the turmoil that results when that boundary is broken. Our hero Mowgli is the wild boy caught between the two.

Chaos from the tumultuous modern world has spilled over into the 'jungle,' a savage but ordered environment whose 'law' is destabilized by man's transgressions. Shere Khan the tiger has killed two humans, Mowgli's parents, leaving the orphan child in the jungle. Mowgli is found and cared for by Akera the wolf; however, the continued presence in the jungle of a human defies its fragile stability.

Against this backdrop Serkin really immerses you in this universe, which is notably much more complex and fleshed-out than that of previous versions. Hints of colonialism and modernization throw new light on the sources of upheaval in the jungle. In the end, we are left to think about Mowgli's position, navigating between men and nature, and his role in finding a new way for them to coexist. In order to make peace between two domains, one must understand both.

"Wohin?" "Dahin" The movie opens with the Herr Doktor cutting open a rotting corpse, declaring that he has looked for man's soul and has found that there is none. The scene is a microcosm of the film's despairing vision of modern man's immorality, descended into seeing all as mere material. In this world, the old moral code remains only in debased form: good does not exist but evil does. The film's aesthetic is ruled by filth, and everyone's body seems either decaying or malformed (bodies are all they are). And so too has Faust's famous bargain with the devil been seriously downgraded. Goethe's Faust was foolish but noble: he signed his soul away for knowledge, a mirage of human perfectibility. Sokurov's Faust signs his off without so much as a second thought - and for what? So little! A bit of money and a bit of ass. All here is only bestial (and fleeting) pleasure. There is no longer even a dream of something better. All are selfish, mean and disgusting, loving no one, not even themselves. The film is a nightmarish verdict on modern man: he has given up the better part of himself to live like an animal, and in the end does not even realize what he has done. We the viewer are left to wonder whether there ever was a 'better part' of us at all. However, the one character who seems to recognize the fallen state of things is Faust's father, perhaps an indication that the old generation could still see the devil for what he is. Hardly hopeful, but maybe a sign that modern man's crass materialism and selfishness is not the whole story.