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With the Toronto International Film Festival getting under way, I’ve been struck by some unexpected contrasts in the first couple of days. On day one, I watched Dheepan and Sicario. Dheepan, of course, is this year’s Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, a film about the lives of three Sri Lankan Tamil refugees forced to cohabit as a family in Paris. The film’s plot, about how Dheepan, a former LTTE fighter, tries to leave his past behind in his new job as a janitor at a gang-infested housing project is well known by now.
Dheepan vs Sicario
I was struck, however, by the complete absence of police in the film. The only reference is in the beginning when Dheepan is hawking trinkets to tourists and a fellow vendor warns him to clear out when policemen approach.
But through the rest of the film, as rival gangs at Dheepan’s apartment complex deal drugs and shoot at each other with wild abandon, there’s not even a hint of a siren in the distance, nor a shot of any resident calling the police. Evidently, these housing projects are part of the notorious banlieues near Paris where even the police are reluctant to enter.
Here, apparently, the French government has given up on tackling gangs within its own borders.
In stark contrast, in Sicario, the US government thinks nothing of crossing the border into neighboring Mexico to destroy gangs. Sicario, directed by French-Canadian director Dennis Villeneuve, is a gripping thriller about the drug cartels in Mexico that seem to rival the ISIS in sheer brutality. Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin star as shadowy members of a US government operation who co-opt a local Arizona law enforcement officer played by Emily Blunt in their cross-border mission.
So while France is unable to enforce the law near its own capital, the US is shown as determined to preserve order even, sometimes, at the expense of the law. As Brolin tells Blunt, it’s the best they can do until demand for drugs within the US dies down. Which place would you choose? Dheepan’s ending may be an unwitting clue.
Of Michael Moore and Matt Damon
On the second day, I watched Michael Moore’s latest documentary Where To Invade Next, and Ridley Scott’s new blockbuster The Martian. Moore’s agenda and approach are familiar and predictable, as he berates the US on various accounts and sets out to show that other countries are tackling these problems better.
He praises the laid back approach to work in Italy, where employees apparently go home everyday for two-hour lunches, and get eight weeks of paid vacation as well as double pay in December. One wonders why he didn’t go to Greece, where too, plenty of recent reports have pointed out, workers often retire at 50 and hairdressers get extra pay for hazardous work.
Moore also goes to France to marvel at an admittedly impressive cafeteria menu even in a public school in a low-income neighborhood; meets with the Slovenian head of government to commend the country for providing free college education – we even meet some American students who have fled student debt in the US for university in Ljubljana; to Norway where murder convicts at a maximum security prison are greeted by wardens crooning We are the World, and prisoners are trusted with meat cleavers and keys to their own well-appointed suites; and to Portugal, where he finds that the possession of any drug, including heroin and cocaine, is not a crime.
Moore wants the US to follow all these examples. But it’s not clear how many countries, not just the US, would be ready to follow Portugal on drugs and Norway on prisons just yet. The film makes some valid points about social injustices in the US, but arguing that Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan started a war on drugs only to push blacks back after the successes of the civil rights movement sounds paranoid.
Towards the end, Moore spends an inordinate amount of time in Iceland talking about the first time it elected a female president, and how women leaders in various fields generally have been great for the country. Gee, isn’t whatshername running for something in the US? Ironically, the film ends with a scene from The Wizard of Oz, unfortunately reinforcing the fairytale aspect of some of Moore’s arguments.
Scott’s extraterrestrial adventure The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s book of the same name, on the other hand, shows what the US gets right. Matt Damon stars as NASA astronaut Mark Watney, who uses his wits, grit and sense of humour to stay alive after being stranded on Mars, all alone on an entire planet until help arrives. No gourmet meals for him, but he figures out a way to make water and grow potatoes fertilized by his own, er, manure. Back home scientists at various facilities work around the clock, and a student gets an audacious idea for a rescue mission.
Watney’s fellow astronauts, rather than taking extra leave, volunteer to work an extra 500-plus days, the time they would have to spend – actually, risk – in space to bring their colleague back home.
Given Mangalyaan’s unique success, it’s puzzling why the story doesn’t involve the US asking India, rather than China, for help, but there is a fleeting Indian connection – Oscar-nominated actor Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a NASA scientist named Vince Kapoor. But The Martian is an American success story, and involves a lot more work than Dorothy kicking up her ruby slippers.
As I write this on September 11, the unintended juxtaposition of these movies convinced me more than ever that America’s resolve and resilience are very much intact, for now. But I agree with the Tunisian radio host in Moore’s film who sounds genuinely bewildered when she asks how Americans can spend so much time following the Kardashians. Yeah, everyone wants to know the answer to that.
(Indira Kannan is a senior journalist currently in Toronto covering the international film festival, TIFF 2015)
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