Rick Segreda

“O Ceu de Suely,” which translates literally into “Suely’s Sky,” is the sort of film for which the famous quote from the Gospel according to Mark could apply: “You will always have the poor among you.” This follow-up film from 2006 by Karim Ainouz, the acclaimed director of “Madame Satã,” currently at the Plaza Cultural la Moneda, like “Satã,” explores the fate of the less fortunate in Brazil—which in that country, despite the enormous economic advances brought about by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, still constitute a majority of the population.

Of course, one of the major challenges of Latin American directors has always been how to be a filmmaker in a world where ubiquitous poverty is an unavoidable fact of life. If a writer-director does not broach poverty, he or she is vulnerable to the charge of artistic self-indulgence. However, if the Latin American filmmaker does broach the issue of poverty, as many do, he or she runs the risk—as so many Latin American directors do—of making a self-congratulatory guilt-trip designed to depress bourgeois audiences without genuinely motivating them to change the system they live in.

However, Karim Ainouz, to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare, is made of sterner stuff, as are the characters he has created.  There is no melodramatic manipulation of the audience’s emotions in the narrative, and neither do his characters wallow in self-pity, even when they seemingly have every right to.

That would certainly seem to be the case with the young and very pretty protagonist, Hermila, even though she starts off in the film with high hopes. She believes that her boyfriend, Mateus, who is also the father of her baby, is not only the love of her life but also an ambitious and responsible adult with plans to start a potentially profitable business in her home town of Igatu.

This poor village in northern Brazil is also to where she has returned so she can, now that she is a mother, live with her grandmother and aunt while waiting for Mateus to arrive with a CD burner; the couple plan to start an operation selling pirated music. The only thing is, after two weeks of waiting, Hermila awakens to a dismal disillusionment when Mateus never arrives. As his mother tells Hermila, “You know how 20 year-olds are,” to which Hermila replies, “Your son is an asshole.”

With her dreams shattered and her options limited, Hermila’s only source of income is selling raffle tickets in which the prize is a bottle of whiskey. Nonetheless, Hermila still retains the ambition for wanting something big out of life that her love for Mateus provoked.

But what can she do? She is curious about her friend, Georgina’s, participation in the oldest profession, which tempts Hermila as an alternative, but merely turning tricks to survive from one day to the next is not enough to satisfy her. But then she lights upon an idea that is a mix of Georgina’s job and her current work: She will sell tickets to raffle off her own body for “one night in paradise” so she can buy a ticket to get as far from Igatu as possible and put a down payment on a home for herself and Mateus Jr.

If all the narrative offered was a woman’s extreme measures to rise above her lot in life, “O Ceu de Suely” would be a heavy-going experience, as well as a mere standard entry in the Latin American genre of depressing neorealism. However, Ainouz, who comes from the Brazilian province of Ceará where this film takes place, makes Hermila something more than just a victim of circumstances, particularly when he provides her with a handsome lover who is more than willing to take up the responsibilities of caring for her and her son.

However, Hermila, ultimately, proves to be more headstrong, independent, complex and resilient than an audience would normally expect in this genre and under these circumstances. A clue to her character comes across early in the movie when she half-jokingly and offhandedly states she sometimes thinks about abandoning her baby in the woods, defying a cultural (and very Catholic) expectation in Latin America that mothers must automatically adore their children unconditionally %100 of the time.

Interestingly, the main characters all share the same first name as the actors—Hermila Guedes, Georgina Castro, Maria Menezes, João Miguel, Zezita Matos—who portray them. Yet a brief check on IMDB.com indicates that most are trained professionals. Was Ainouz attempting to achieve, in Sartre’s phrase, an authenticity that transcends sincerity? Who knows? In any case, “O Ceu de Suely” is authentic as a work of art.

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by

Christopher K. Miller

illustration by Carlos Alejandro Guevara

Although there is on record an incident of Alice’s having had to be picked up by her parents and taken home from kindergarten for refusing to heed a school bus driver’s cautions and then admonitions about sticking her head out the window, the first real indication of her troubled or artistic nature probably presented in Miss Block’s library class. Miss Block, the school librarian, kept her library stocked with current and traditional reading materials appropriate to children aged six to sixteen and taught classes in library usage and appreciation during which regular classroom teachers ate lunch, graded papers, prepared lessons or just enjoyed a break. Because she’d never married, and so had none of her own, Miss Block loved children. She also loved books, and introducing children to them gave her enormous satisfaction.

Alice’s teacher, Mrs. Edwards, smoked a cigarette in the peace and quiet of her empty classroom while her grade 4 students sat at six utility tables pushed together in the school library’s northeast corner. Letters of the alphabet, each cut from an individual 8.5 by 11 inch sheet of colored construction paper and taped to the wall above a pair of windows overlooking the playground and teachers’ parking lot, spelled out: A WORLD OF WORDS.

Miss Block’s lesson that day dealt with wish fulfillment in literature. Nearly all popular literature has some element of wish fulfillment. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the classic children’s fairytale. Before reading to the class excerpts from an English translation of Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s 1740 classic, ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ which does, as every fairytale romance must, culminate in an attractive and deserving couple’s living forever in bounteous wealth and privilege, Miss Block asked everyone to write down one wish. She’d stopped asking the children to write down what they thought ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride\If turnips were watches, I’d wear one at my side’ meant after their interpretations exposed it and nursery rhymes in general for the cynical and often misogynistic old aphorisms that they are. ‘Needles and pins\Needles and pins\When a man marries\His trouble begins’! So now she always began this lesson by asking everyone to make a wish. Children learn by doing.

‘It is a gloomy and overcast October day,’ she made sure to note in her report to Principal John, hoping perhaps that this meteorological detail would somehow temper or forgive Alice’s wish. ‘Beyond the playground, a gusting wind saws a row of firs back and forth against the sky,’ she wrote in her beautifully legible longhand. ‘Their tops, backlit by gray clouds, form a long serrated edge.’ Then, on something of a roll, ‘The morning’s colors bleed down into culverts and sewers, washed away by a seemingly inconsolable rain.’

Principal John’s office, like the rest of the school, smelled of an admixture of preadolescent foot odor and the mimeograph machine’s ink solvents. Personally he liked Miss Block’s descriptions and could see through his own east facing window exactly what she meant even though it would never have occurred to him to put it that way himself, but felt she was overreacting to Alice’s wish, which to his mind was not so much an expressed intent or ideation as just a little girl’s imagination exploring some of the darker recesses of the human psyche. He even said to Miss Block, ‘A wish is not a goal; a wish is not a prayer; wishes are fantasies best kept at a distance.’ Although he couldn’t argue with the fact that about half the children had wished for pets such as ponies and cats, and the rest for equally easily attainable material things like guns and slot cars. Still, in his opinion, the student who’d wished for her mom to stop crying and her dad to stop yelling and breaking things while she was trying to sleep at night warranted more concern than Alice’s wish. Principal John wished it was in his character to console Miss Block by putting his arms around her and holding her close, and perhaps combing his fingers through her short dun hair while she sobbed against his neck, and that even after her sobs had subsided into deep, slumberous breaths, she would continue to cleave to him tighter than ever.

No one ever failed or had to repeat library. Miss Block didn’t believe in grading. ‘Please don’t tell the children,’ she carefully printed atop a standard 3 by 5 inch index card that evening in her neat little apartment. Then, below, switching to her flowing cursive, ‘I have no more words.’ There was more, but it was smudged and illegible, probably written after she’d taken the bottle of aspirin with sherry, settled into her bath and cut her wrists.

In order to stanch gossip and rumor, a special assembly was called. Principal John, who understood in his own words life’s epitaphic and loving nature, explained to the children that Miss Block had been so unhappy that she had decided not to keep living and that it was nobody’s fault, not even Miss Block’s. Sometimes very sad things just happen. Then he introduced Grief Counselor Gottlieb who would be there the rest of the week to talk to anyone who felt they needed help with being sad or just someone to be sad with. All anyone had to do was ask their parents, their teacher or Mrs. Monahan the School Secretary.

For three days, Counselor Gottlieb met with students, individually and in small groups. Most were not so much sad as perplexed. Many had never had anyone they’d known and interacted with on a regular basis die and so had never felt that sort of emptiness, but it was the notion that a person could choose to stop living that was most foreign. For some, it was clearly an epiphany.

Alice never expressed an interest in meeting with Counselor Gottlieb, who had read Miss Block’s report. So at the end of the week, it was Counselor Gottlieb who, in his capacity for grief, proactively summoned Alice. They met in the same corner of the library in which Miss Block had delivered her final (or second final) lesson. Someone had taken down her WORLD OF WORDS letters but left behind small squares of tape sticking to the plaster. Counselor Gottlieb had the largest ears Alice had ever seen on a human. They made it hard to be sad. Plus he had such a narrow face it was hard to look him in the eyes. All during his asking her how she felt about what Miss Block had done and if she herself ever had those sorts of thoughts or feelings, all Alice could think about was Counselor Gottlieb jumping off a high rooftop and then gliding to the ground in lazy circles, like the paper airplanes boys sometimes made and threw in the classroom when Mrs. Edwards wasn’t paying attention.

‘Are you sad for Miss Block?’ he asked.

Alice thought before answering, ‘No. I think I’m sad for everyone but her. That’s funny isn’t it? If everyone died then no one would have anything to be sad about.’

‘It’s called a paradox,’ said Counselor Gottlieb. ‘But not everyone is sad. Not all the time.’

‘I am,’ said Alice, watching his ears grow pink and turgid. ‘At least I try to be,’ she qualified, thinking that, right then, Counselor Gottlieb looked like a dying tulip from which all but two petals had fallen.

‘Don’t you want to live, Alice?’

Again she thought. ‘No, but I don’t want to want to either.’

Then, as Counselor Gottlieb spoke of the possibilities for conformity and happiness, his ears returned to their normal flaccid state, and Alice, gazing out over the playground and parking lot, realized that the only thing keeping her from doing what Miss Block had done was wondering why everyone didn’t. Fir cones littered the asphalt along the far chain link fence. Though she still didn’t understand paradoxes, Alice sensed one was keeping her alive. That without mystery there cannot be life. She had to stand on her chair to hug Counselor Gottlieb and thank him and promise into his large accommodating ear to let someone know if she ever needed to talk again, though she knew she never would.

Alice’s mystery further exposed itself in grade 8 when she grew breasts and began to menstruate. Like all of us, she’d made things like ceramic ashtrays and noodle cards all throughout grade school for special holidays and to show our parents how much they’re loved. For example, in grade 7, the year the firs beyond the playground fence browned and died, instead of a pinecone wreath or birdhouse, she used a single-edged razorblade she’d borrowed from her home’s upstairs bathroom vanity and some fishing weights from her dad’s tackle box to construct a fully functional guillotine mousetrap theoretically capable of decapitating a mouse and presented it to her mom, who was terrified of mice, for Mother’s Day. Then, in grade 9, though dismantled by her Art Teacher, Mister Humphries, and so not displayed in the school gymnasium on Parents Night as a proud example of the sort of talent the school’s art program trained and nurtured, her ‘Life Without Feeling’ exhibit consisting only of her little brother’s 12 ½” deluxe kit Erector Set’s small electric motor thrusting a vibrating dildo into a latex vagina (both acquired at an adult novelty shop) garnered by far the most comment and attention in the classroom, and further prognosticated her flair for the contraction of art and engineering in thought provoking interactive displays as demonstrated a few years later in her high school science project, originally entitled ‘Nature’s Bargain.’

Basically, it was just the sturdy cardboard box that her family’s new 26 inch Zenith Color TV had come in, a large stainless steel bowl of crushed ice that she replenished from the school cafeteria’s kitchen freezer, Coach Thompson’s stopwatch, and one very tame bunny. Like all great art, it was primarily a learning experience for the artist. Biology Teacher Mr. Richards, inundated with proposals to compare the nutritional components of competing brands of canned vegetables, the persistence of different popular hair coloring products on different types of hair, the efficacy of various commercially advertised laundry detergents in both recommended and lower than recommended amounts, the impact of television versus reading on problem solving skills, the longevity of goldfish with versus without food/air/light/friends and so forth, had been impressed, even intrigued, by Alice’s proposal to compare the effects of pleasurable stimuli on subjects’ pain thresholds or tolerances as measured by voluntary Cold Pressor Test (CPT) exposure times. The concept seemed not only engaging and challenging, but remarkably simple and relevant. He felt she had a good shot at State.

Alice, who suspected the firs had been murdered and not died of broken hearts as rumor had it long before tree surgeons discovered the copper nails embedded in their trunks and was one of only three to read about the vandalism and never once ask themselves in whose character it would be to perform such an act, invited those milling about the crowded gymnasium examining the various student projects and displays to sit across from her at her table and take part in her study. ‘How Pleasure and Pain Compete’ read her new banner after Mr. Richards had insisted that ‘Nature’s Bargain,’ though perhaps more evocative, was just too artsy for the venue.

The following instructions had to be read, understood, agreed to and signed by every volunteer test subject:

1. Remove any gloves, watches, rings or bracelets.

2. Roll up the sleeves of or remove any long sleeved garments so cuffs do not get damp.

3. Stick your left hand in the hole in the box and then place your right hand in the ice so that it is completely covered.

4. Enjoy any pleasant or curious sensations provided inside the box for as long as you can reasonably stand to keep your other hand in the ice.

5. Your endurance will be timed and recorded.

6. You are asked to commit to two test sessions separated by no less than 15 minutes.

7. Thank you for participating.

Alice, believing it was in the best interests of both art and science that she be as detached from the experiment as possible, stayed mostly hidden behind her large TV box where it soon became clear that the rabbit was not a reliable pleasure inducer. The first volunteer had to abort the test to sneeze and blow her nose, claiming seasonally exacerbated allergies to both cat and rabbit dander. Several expressed apprehension about being clawed or bitten. A boy with an admitted squirrel phobia exhibited such outright terror that he temporarily forgot about the ice and yielded an exceptional CPT exposure time (inspiring in Alice an idea for another project). But everyone seemed to like having their hand held and gently stroked or petted. Before long a line had formed at her table. A lanky lad with fiery orange hair and a mild acne condition left his unattended presentation graphically portraying the results of chemical strip urinalyses of frozen versus pasteurized citrus juice brands drinkers’ urine to take his place at the back of Alice’s line. Other exhibitors as well began to abandon their projects to stand in her queue, which soon grew long enough for first-time subjects to simply go back to the end of after they’d succumbed to the ice, and wait for their second test. Alice alternated caressing subjects’ hands with providing no stimulus between first and second trials so that any acquired tolerances or sensitivities to the ice would be cancelled out as contaminating factors. But no matter which order she did it in, people seemed willing to suffer more when she held their hands. Though not a lot more. Not that significantly more. So she began to lightly tickle and graze with her fingertips along the undersides of people’s forearms. Boys especially seemed to like this, and, as CPT times increased and word spread, her line grew longer still. Lightly massaging and fondling the well developed bicep of a basketball player who had thrust his arm as far as it would go into her box, she noticed his knuckles grazing against her chest, which gave her an idea for a further refinement to her project so that even after the next boy was told by those behind him that his hand was turning blue, it wasn’t until she’d pried his thumb and forefinger off her right nipple that he ceded to the cold. As CPT tolerances further increased and boys began to re-volunteer as subjects, her line of now almost exclusively young men grew conspicuously long. Money was seen changing hands. A shoving match broke out after someone butted in, and then, farther back, an actual fight where punches were exchanged. And still her popularity increased.

Teenage boys can be notoriously indiscreet. Many, quite literally, could not believe their good fortune (and near frostbitten fingers) and needed some sort of confirmation or validation from their peers. The croaking or screeching quality their voices take on as they enter puberty can be heard above significant ambient background noise and across considerable distances. A few excitedly claimed to have touched inside her underwear when she stood to stretch her legs. Alice did not make it to State. She did not even make it to the second day of competition. Though she did get asked out on a lot of dates, all of which she declined, being of a withdrawn nature. And though her experiment had been rejected by science’s gatekeepers, she and many appreciative fans still considered it a resounding success and accomplishment, and felt that she had found her forte.

After high school, Alice was accepted into a reputable co-ed college where she studied Engineering but filled her electives with Fine Arts courses. To help with her tuition and dorm living expenses, and thereby soften the financial burden that her higher education placed on her parents, Alice started a tuck-in service. Most of her customers were young men living away from home for the first time and whose bravado and drinking failed to alleviate or even mask some very real separation anxiety and homesickness. So for four dollars Alice would tuck them in at night and read them fairytales. She even brought props and wore the costumes of her heroines. For instance, when she read Snow White, she’d wear a simple old wedding dress she’d found at a thrift store and bring a plastic apple. For Rapunzel she had a wig of long blonde hair. As Cinderella she wore rags and smudged her cheeks with ashes from her roommate’s ashtray. Belle always wore finery and carried a red silk rose. Alice never went as herself. Group discounts were negotiable. Needless to say, her fairytales’ happy endings were sometimes insufficient. And so additional happiness also became negotiable, and instead of an attractive and deserving couple’s living forever in bounteous wealth and privilege, Alice’s fairytales often ended in something more ephemeral and sordid.

By her second year of college Alice came to realize that her tuck-in service was just a regurgitation of her high school science project. She began to work on a better way of not only addressing the problem of supporting herself in her studies so that she might find someone educated and ambitious to marry and have children with but also to help solve the mystery of why anyone bothers.

Like all good colleges, hers had a theater in which drama clubs presented plays, professors and visiting academicians delivered lectures, authors offered selected readings of their works, and musicians performed recitals. Really, anyone with a theater venue could apply to the Arts Faculty Committee. Committee Chairperson Professor Miller, inundated with requests from poets, folksingers and evangelical types for theater slots, found Alice’s proposed ‘The Magic of Life’ show both refreshing and intriguing. With Halloween just around the corner, a magic show seemed perfect. He decided to usurp the scheduled reading of a young romantic poet whose latest heartbreak was bound to permeate her verse; verse which, given what he’d heard, could only get better over time in any case.

Alice booked no fairytales beyond the night of her performance. Her advertisement in the school paper and on handbills placed around the campus wherever student propaganda and want-ads graced bulletin boards or trees stated simply that her ‘Magic of Life’ exhibition would commence in the Art Theater at 8:30 PM Thursday, Oct. 28. People were invited to drop in anytime after that, and to participate and stay as long as they wished.

Seating was not reserved. On the night of her performance, those entering the dark theater saw on stage only the shadowy outline of a rectangular dais or rostrum. There was great expectation and much anticipation. But by 9 PM still the only light in the theater came from EXIT signs’ red letterings, small incandescent bulbs illuminating row numbers at the bottoms of aisle seats, and the glowing tips of cigarettes that pulsed like fireflies wherever smokers inhaled.

At 9:15 PM Alice screamed. An older couple thinking the show cancelled or just some Pop Art ruse or test of audience acceptance and credulity, and so in the process of leaving, retook their seats. As eyes adjusted, people could see that the raised platform at center stage was in fact just a long table upon which sat a simple wooden box such as might constitute a child’s coffin. They could not yet make out Alice’s shins and bare feet or her head and bare shoulders protruding from either end of the box, or the enormous two-man saw lying on the stage beside the table. At 9:31 PM Alice screamed again, and then twice more before 10:00 PM by which time most who were going to leave had left, some in a huff at having wasted so much of their evening sitting in a dim, smoky theater with nothing more than a girl’s occasional screams for amusement. Ironically, in expressing their dissatisfaction and irritation to any outsiders who would listen, many who had not known about Alice’s performance or, for whatever reason, had decided not to attend it, changed their plans and minds and went to see what all the negative publicity was about. And so as Alice continued to scream at irregular intervals, the audience continued to grow, until by 11:00 PM it had attained a kind of critical mass, become somehow self sustaining, self validating or self assuring. Attendance had become a reason unto itself. For even though no individual could see why they personally would want to sit in a dark and increasingly stuffy theater listening to tortured screams, the fact that so many others were willing to seemed to suggest not only some mysterious compelling reason to remain but acted as a kind of deterrent against leaving in that such abnegation implied a large number of people had suffered and would continue to suffer pointlessly. And while some still managed to overcome their guilt and faith and depart, even more arrived.

At midnight the stage and house lights came on. Alice, whose voice had begun to take on a hoarse or squawking quality, screamed her longest and loudest yet while the audience rubbed its eyes as though children woken from bad dreams. Murmurs of speculation and conjecture waxed into arguments over whether the show was over or about to begin. On the floor beside the table, the saw’s rounded blade shone like a fallen crescent moon. Alice screamed again. None of her tuck-in clientele in attendance had ever seen her out of costume. Some speculated she’d dressed as Lady Godiva. For though Lady Godiva is a historical and not a fairytale character, time tends to blur such distinctions. A girl in an unseasonably warm black and red checkered wool jacket whose great-grandfather had regaled her as a child with trivia and lore from his years as a lumberjack in the redwood forests of California and British Columbia reported to her date, a science major with ambitions for medical school, that the two-man saw appeared to be of the nine-foot crescent-taper-ground crosscut variety, identifiable by its broad heavy blade and thick concentric teeth. Definitely a professional lumberman’s tool. Climbing up onto the stage for a closer inspection, she was able to further report that it appeared to have been recently sharpened and lubricated, probably with kerosene. A segmented or dotted red line had been painted around the circumference of the box midway between Alice’s neck and knees.

A boy with more bravado than his peers took the stage next. ‘It’s a trick!’ he announced before cutting his thumb on the saw. ‘There’s two of them in there!’ He tickled Alice’s bare feet.

Alice kicked and screamed.

‘See?’

More took the stage. Someone tested the weight of the saw by lifting one end and pronounced it ‘pretty heavy.’

Two strapping lads in white t-shirts, each with a pack of cigarettes rolled into one sleeve, lifted the saw by its long wooden handles to rest the blade’s teeth on Alice’s dotted line. ‘So are we supposed to cut you in half now or what?’

Alice wiggled her toes and screamed.

‘Okay then. You got it.’

‘A nine-foot pitsaw is not a toy,’ pronounced the girl with lumberjacking in her blood. ‘They take a lot of training and practice to master. Plus you have to be in pretty good shape.’

Endeavoring to prove her wrong or, even better, themselves lumberjacking savants, the two t-shirted boys spent so much energy pushing and pulling against each other that before they’d even scratched the beginnings of a kerf in the box’s top they were panting and soaked in sweat. When they laid down the saw to smoke and rest, two others took over. Then two others. The saw’s handles were more than long enough to accommodate multiple pairs of hands, but when others tried to help the two sawing, the saw’s teeth slipped from any cut that might have begun to form.

‘That saw wasn’t designed for planed spruce,’ said the girl in the lumber jacket. ‘It was made for cross-cutting whole large trees. See how the teeth keep getting stuck in the soft wood. It’s too heavy and sharp. You need to use less force and more coordination.’ Metronomically she began to clap her hands. ‘Heave… heave… heave,’ she chanted. But it was no use.

Alice’s scream seemed born more of frustration than terror.

‘Here, let us have a turn,’ asked a young couple in unison who’d randomly sat beside one another and just spent the last four hours talking, during which time they’d explored common ground in everything from their love of The Drifters’ music to their profound hope that Eisenhower’s VP Richard M. Nixon would lose to John F. Kennedy in the upcoming election, and frank amazement that a guy as shifty as ‘Dick’ would be running in the first place. She’d grabbed his arm when Alice first screamed. They’d been holding hands ever since. And though neither looked quite like what the other had imagined in the dark, now it didn’t matter. They took their positions on the saw. Only instead of trying to push and pull on her handle, the young woman in love gently lifted and steadied the blade, and let her partner’s thrusts guide its arc and tempo. At last a real kerf began to form.

Of course there were those present who were apprehensive about seeing someone even appear to be cut in two. A few whispered cautionary rebukes among themselves. But, just as there are people who are, for example, apprehensive about dropping bombs on other countries’ apparently innocent civilians, they deferred, as those of inaction always will, to those of action.

A fat boy tried to shoulder his way in. ‘Hey, give someone else a try.’

But the young man in love, even though he was huffing and puffing, was having none of that. Guided and encouraged by his partner, he continued to push and pull in long, deep, rhythmic strokes.

‘See, fake blood and everything!’ observed the boy with bravado.

‘Euuuu!’ cried the audience, clapping appreciatively as the saw bit into the table and the sides of the box separated and Alice stopped her kicking and screaming act to stare unblinkingly up past firs and clouds into a place that at last held no mystery.

His fiction has appeared in The Barcelona Review, Confrontation Magazine, COSMOS and many other print and web based, genre and literary magazines and anthologies. His proudest writing achievements include an angry, personal rejection from Glimmer Train, losing a Chizine competition’s 3rd place tie-breaker under the auspices of Peter Straub, and  having once been banned from a professional writer’s workshop for posting “porn.”

by

Rick Segreda

“Juan de los muertos” (“Juan of the Dead”), currently playing at the Plaza Cultural La Moneda, proves, among other things, that state-approved Cuban cinema has taken giant leaps forward in creative freedom since the early days of “la revolución.” In 1965, Havana’s Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, one of the founders of the new Cuban cinema under socialism, made a very tentative “satire” of the “difficulties” of life under Castro entitled “The Death of a Bureaucrat,”  and the result came off as a nervous attempt to prove that socialists indeed had a sense of humor.

 But by 2011, Cuba had permitted the creation of “Juan de los muertos,” a zombie horror-comedy, the mere proposal of such, forty years earlier, might have killed the career of a filmmaker for presuming to be “frivolous” with the limited resources of the proletariat. However, in a post-Soviet, post-Fidel world in which “neo-liberalism,” for better or worse, has emerged as the dominant economic ideology, Alejandro Brugués’ wild satire, not just of the popular zombie genre, but of the chaos of the current Cuban state, seems like an appropriate token of the times.

Brugués is not, however, taking too big a bite out of the hand that feeds him; “Juan de los muertos”, first and foremost, aims its arrows at capitalism, with its anti-hero embarking on an eccentric entrepreneurial enterprise once the island is overrun by the walking dead.

The protagonist, Juan, a fisherman, is a self-described survivor of seminal moments in Cuban history such as the involvement in Angola and the Mariel exodus—hehas made it to late middle-age without amounting to much lacking even the comfort of a family, estranged from his wife and daughter.  His best friend, Lazaro, a petty gambler with a wayward son, is even more pathetic as a person, resorting to voyeurism and masturbation as compensation for his failure at romantic conquest.

Cuba, as presented by Brugués, in one of his more subtle satirical stings, suggests its citizens’ existence is reduced to lives of petty complaints and empty expectations—sluggish except for the vague hope that they can escape to Miami.

However, all that changes for Juan and his friends when, unexpectedly, zombies emerge on the island and start attacking the local population. Official, government-sanctioned media outlets, at a loss to offer a credible explanation for the sudden existence of zombies, claim the walking dead as “dissidents” and “subversives”, even agents of the CIA.  Nonetheless, once Juan realizes these are indeed zombies and understands the conventional cliche about cannibalistic corpses, that the only way to stall them is to smash their brains or cut their heads off,  he sees his opportunity to become something big for the first time in his life, the classic capitalist par excellence.

Along with Lazaro, and a remaining motley crew of cohorts, including a drag queen and his muscular boyfriendv—who can’t stand the sight of blood—Juan embarks on his endeavor of “killing your loved ones” (who have since become zombies) for a negotiated price, charging top dollars to trapped tourists.

To balance out the black comedy, Brugués brings in a subplot involving Juan’s reconciliation with his adult daughter, who proves to be more than capable of holding her own as a zombie killer.

Overall, however, in the misanthropic mood he maintains in the movie, Brugués proves to be thoroughly Brueghelian in “Juan de los muertos.” At times a little too much so, as when Lazaro decides to exploit his pseudo law-and-order position to casually murder a former, and non-zombie, gambling partner over an unpaid debt. For black comedy to be effective, an audience can be expected to sacrifice a little, but only a little, of its conscience, and in this instance Brugués crosses over.

A more disconcerting scene involves a mercenary missionary who has come to the rescue, but whom nobody understands due to his inability to speak Spanish. The problem for a non-Hispanic audience is that the actor, Antonio Dechent, speaks his English with a notably heavy Castilian accent, and one wonders why the director could not have recruited an authentic American for the minor role.

All things considered, however, “Juan de los muertos,” with more humor than horror, but also with just enough creative calculation as a commentary, deserves the reputation it has earned in the last two years as a modern-day cult favorite. Brugués’ flair for morbid visual beauty, such as an underwater shot of zombies treading the ocean floor, manages to be an added bonus.

by

Laura Burgoine

It was always bound to cause a divide between film-goers and Fitzgerald puritans, but I’ll admit I was drawn Baz Luhrmann’s recreation of the Great Gatsby. I did go with slight trepidation, nervous about the flamboyant and often controversial director’s attempts to change a classic. However, I’ll argue until my death that Leonardo DiCaprio is our generation’s Marlon Brando, albeit a more boyish, eternally fresh-faced version, and who better to take on the enigmatic, self-made American dream of Gatsby? I’ll also insist that Baz had to be the director to recreate the decadence and almost garish flamboyance of the 1925 novel while breathing fresh life into a piece of fiction that has been over-analyzed, studied and revered.

I was initially disappointed to find it was a 3D film, an entirely unnecessary gimmick for films with real genuine actors, solid story lines, and well-written scripts. 3D should be reserved only for movies whose major draw is special effects.

Academics have suggested Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby (1925) predicted the 1929 crash of Wall St, so it’s befitting that the film opens with our narrator, bonds salesman Nick Carraway, in a mental asylum where he’s being treated for depression, anxiety and alcoholism.

We begin with the first party scene at Gatsby’s house, which is exactly what you’d expect from Luhrmann, combining all the glitter and vertigo-inducing spinning cameras of Moulin Rouge with the kind of tongue-in-cheek offbeat comedy of Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet. Through the eyes of Tobey Maguire–playing Nick Carroway as the wide-eyed, naïve outsider- we’re given the keys to the kingdom as a larger than life cinematic experience unfolds before us, burdened by the pressure it faces from critics and audiences alike.

Visually the film was always going to be spectacular. Gatsby’s sprawling mansion is almost an exact replica of the Disneyland castle. It’s excessive and decadent, a reflection of its owner, the self-made speculator and bootlegger Gatsby. The costumes, a collaboration between Luhrmann’s wife Catherine Martin and designer Miuccia Prada, are phenomenal; if anything see this film for the long, lavish catwalk. The actors are elegantly dressed, the sets and Long Island landscapes are fabulously opulent, the colors are a Disney acid trip.

Luhrmann isn’t for everyone’s taste, but he doesn’t care what others think: he is unapologetic in his personal and professional tastes. Reunited with Leonardo–the child-star whose career got a significant boost from Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet–Baz knows the Hollywood A-lister is the tool with which to make this movie good. So he teases us mercilessly by not letting us see him. It’s a slow 20 minutes until DiCaprio appears onscreen.  His character Gatsby is unveiled with the pomp and circumstance of a Fourth of July parade.

Carraway stumbles through one of Gatsby’s lavish parties, nervously clutching his handwritten invitation and searching for the illusive host, encountering a man in a white suit–whose face is carefully shielded from the camera–and questioning him about this Gatsby.  He does not realize his is talking to the great man himself. We overhear party-goers whispering, “I hear he killed a man once.”   DiCaprio raises a champagne glass, smiles that million dollar Gatsby-DiCaprio smile, fireworks erupting behind him, and says, “I’m sorry. I thought you knew old sport.”

The movie starts slowly, but that is expected with a literary book. For the most part Luhrmann remains loyal to the original prose, shortening some of the more labored dialogue known to critics.  The first dinner scene at Daisy and Tom Buchanan’s is a great example of this. Speedily paced with theatrical props and special effects, the actors aren’t permitted to play it subtle.  It does feel initially that they’re all hamming it up a bit.

DiCaprio’s accent is somewhat perplexing. It’s as if he were a native Californian trying to master an East Coast accent.  Or he could be Robert Redford trying to sond like a refined New Yorker educated at Oxford. Probably it’s the latter. Nonetheless his ‘old sport’ is a bit labored and some of his longer monologues a bit sketchy, which again could be part of creating an entirely unreliable protagonist, a character who remains a mistery until the end.

Carey Mulligan is superb as southern belle Daisy; she conveys the sadness and emptiness behind the tormented character while also masking it with her signature frivolity. The remainder of the cast are little more than caricatures. Isla Fisher is over-the-top but not memorable as Tom’s mistress Myrtle Wilson. Her bad Noo-Yoik-ah accent and garish hair and make-up would be better suited for the stages of a community theater in her native Australia than a big budget film. Joel Edgerton (another Aussie) is also strangely cast as the hulking, brutish Tom Buchanan. His accent and polo player, cowboy physique almost suggest he’s in an entirely different film from the rest of the cast, a Western perhaps?

The final element is the soundtrack. It was another controversial move when Baz decided to replace jazz with Hip Hop, hiring Jay-Z ,musical director of Romeo and Juliet as well.  So we have modern music juxtaposed with classic literature.  Jay-Z says that jazz of the ‘20s, an explosion of African American street music, was what Hip Hop is today and that audiences need to feel that excitement of hearing something new to them instead of Jazz which they do not know nor appreciate. The soundtrack’s gem is Lana Del Rey’s Young and Beautiful, which is reinterpreted several times throughout the film.  It is both haunting and vocally breathtaking. There are scenes where the Hip Hop stands out for all the right reasons, namely when Gatsby and Carraway are speeding over a bridge into Manhattan in his brilliant yellow 1929 Duesenberg, and a convertible cruises past filled with dozens of bottles of Moet and Chandon champagne on ice and beautiful people dancing to Jay Z’s Izzo (H.O.V.A.). You can’t help but smile.  That’s what Baz does for you.

Fans of the novel wondered whether the underlying tragedy of Gatsby would be told correctly, whether we would get a sense of the melancholy beneath the rubies and beautiful shirts and pink suits. That part of the novel remains intact.

DiCaprio with Howard Hughes intensity embodies this tortured soul, who is bordering on mental illness and obsession. The film captures the delusion that held Gatsby for five years.  These delusions falls apart, yet he remains hopeful. This is portrayed convincingly so that you feel dread as we approach the end and that fateful final swimming pool scene. You long for the ending to be re-written, for the story to not end in the defeat of a character who has our sympathy. The film changes the ending slightly.  It concludes with a lingering image of Gatsby standing at the end of his pier, looking out across the bay at the green light of hopes and dreams and not realizing it’s already behind him.

poema por Laura Tristán

ilustración por Carlos Guevara

El día sabe a cadáver

a residuo de orgasmo

temo al sonido del alma

         caracol subterráneo

             culebra

Invoco en lapsos de espejismo

la eternidad no es tan breve

            atormenta

                 marea

                   marea

            el movimiento de un pez en los orificios del alma

            la espina que florece en la médula

duele este ataúd que nace al mar

este enredo de venas en los bosques irreales de las sirenas

                    y en la lengua de los pájaros

                    duele el ciclo lunar

la mano que enverdece mi corazón inorgánico

y mide la latitud del sueño

la extensión del otoño en la matriz ajena

aquella que nunca volveré a ocupar

En días de niebla

sangran mis alas de sirena amnésica

temo a las nubes de fuego

a las lenguas de lumbre

se refugian serpientes en mi vientre

y el corazón se vuelve una mancha inmóvil

              entonces

padezco las dolencias del sueño

contemplo el deshielo del alma

espero paciente mi propia inundación

y en la boca de mi hijo muerto

una vegetación de mariposas nocturnas

             presagia el final.

poem by Laura Tristán

Translated from the Spanish by Toshiya Kamei

Illustration by Carlos Guevara

The day tastes like a cadaver

like a residue of orgasm

I fear the sound of the soul

          a subterranean snail

                a serpent

I invoke in lapses of mirage

eternity is not so short

        it torments

              bothers

                   and bothers

a fish wiggling in holes in the soul

the thorn blooming in the marrow

this coffin born to the sea hurts

this knot of veins in the unreal woods of sirens

            and in the tongue of birds

            the moon cycle hurts

the hand that turns my inorganic heart green

and measures the latitude of the slumber

the extension of autumn in someone else’s womb

the one I will never occupy again

In days of mist

my wings of an amnesiac siren bleed

I fear fiery clouds

flaming tongues

snakes lie low in my womb

and the heart becomes a frozen stain

            then

I suffer from sleeping sickness

I watch the soul melt

I patiently wait for my own flood

and in my dead son’s mouth

moths’ vegetation

        foretells the end

by

Rick Segreda

There are few other figures in the history of cinema that did more to capture the eternal appeal of fantasy than the late Ray Harryhausen. Mr. Harryhausen, who died last week at the age of 92, was also the bridge between the creative innovations in the fantastic cinema of Georges Méliès in the 19th century and the brave new world of digital special effects in the 21st.

Méliès, who was the subject last year of Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”, was the French cinema pioneer of making magic. He thus established the tradition of “special effects” in movies in order to make the impossible, possible. And the “special effects” of Méliès, though regarded as primitive by contemporary standards, continued to impress audiences when Harryhausen was born in 1920.

 When he was thirteen, he saw the movie that would define his life: “King Kong”. This 1933 classic about a giant ape who battles dinosaurs and rampages through Manhattan before climbing and dying atop the Empire State Building, lit a fire under the young Harryhausen and many other fantasy filmmakers to be. No other film up until then had so effectively put across every child’s wish to see the real world and the world of fantasy intersect. Twenty years later, Harryhausen and his colleagues, both in the United States and Japan, would use the basic premise of “King Kong” – a giant beast at war with modern cities – as the model for the new science fiction of the nuclear age.

 The effects in “King Kong” involved a process of animated three-dimensional miniatures integrated with live action scenes, which intrigued Harryhausen and motivated him to become an animator from the very beginning of professional life, eventually leading to an apprenticeship with Willis O’Brien, the man responsible for the magic in “King Kong”.

 After years of practice with George Pal and his “Puppetoons”, he obtained his first major opportunity to work under O’brien’s supervision in “Mighty Joe Young”, a more sentimental variation on “King Kong”, featuring a smaller and gentler primate.

 Immediately afterwards, often in collaboration with producer Charles H. Schneer, Harryhausen created a series of financially successful science fiction films, such as “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”, typically involving a giant beast destroying cities.  However, by the end of the 1950s, his focus shifted to mythology with “Jason and the Argonauts” and “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad”.

 Harryhausen had his limits as an artist; whether in science fiction or mythology, his movies demonstrated more ambition in their desire to impress and entertain than to illuminate the human condition. Nonetheless these films were peerless in their capacity to excite a young filmgoer’s imagination. The scene in “Jason and the Argonauts”, for example, where Jason and his Argonauts engage in a swordfight with a troop of living skeletons, or the snake-woman in “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad”, or the Allosaurus attacking a Mexican village in “The Valley of the Gwangi”.

 As a child I was taken in by Harryhausen’s movie magic the way Harryhausen himself had been taken in by “King Kong” and it was what prompted my first fascination with films not only as entertainment, but as a craft and as an art. However, in my adolescence, a companion complained that it was blatantly obvious that Harryhausen’s creatures were the result of stop-motion animation.

 Such a criticism was not without merit and may be even more valid now in the digital age.  Live-action motion, when filmed, is slightly blurred from frame to frame in a 24 frame per-second strip of film, whereas each movement in an animated figure is captured with sharpness and clarity, thus putting across a slight artificiality when projected onto a screen, especially when contrasted with live action, either in the foreground or background. This artificiality was even further enhanced in his weakest film, “Earth vs the Flying Saucers”, in which he chose to animate the falling mortar of destroyed monuments.

 At the time, I did not know how to respond to such criticism. It was indisputable, but I still loved the fantastic films of Ray Harryhausen. It might have been due to the fact that his efforts, in his attention to even the smallest details in his creations, such as the manner in which a creature might move its head or even fingers, put across a sincere love of the fantastic and magical. Contemporary digital technology is more “advanced” than the animation that preceded it, but it lacks this element of personal charm.

 And though he was not regarded as a “great” artist on the level of a Jean Renoir or Akira Kurosawa, he made a major contribution to modern movies nonetheless as a significant influence on the themes and imagery many of the most important filmmakers of today, such as Stephen Spielberg, Guillermo Del Toro, Peter Jackson, Robert Rodriguez, Tim Burton, Sam Raimi and James Cameron.

by

Rick Segreda

If economics is, as Thomas Carlyle put it, a dismal science, attempts to dramatize the subject matter have rarely succeeded in being dynamic.  Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” from 1987 had a relatively comprehensible storyline that struck a balance between commentary and compelling characters. Yet in the years that followed, few filmmakers have had the willingness, sophistication and passion to make the “money movie” a viable genre.

Ben Younger’s “Boiler Room” from 1999 was a hit with critics a moderate success with audiences, but not enough to mandate more of the same from the studios. And indeed, when Oliver Stone saw in the economic fallout of 2008 an opportunity to revive Gordon Gekko for another go in “Wall Street II”, the drama drowned in a deluge of dull Dow Jones data more appropriate for the “Wall Street Journal” than a “Wall Street” movie.

The HBO movie, “Too Big to Fail”, based on the true story of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s heroic efforts to forestall the 2008 financial free fall, became after its first ten minutes, a blurry montage of suits and telephones as histrionics took second place to literal history, despite the considerable talents of screenwriter Peter Gould and veteran director, (“L.A. Confidential”, “Eight Mile”) Curtis Hanson.

And now we have Nicholas Jarecki’s “Arbitrage”, currently playing at Cine Hoyt, which also attempts to strikes a balance between an essay on economics and the demands of drama. Does it live up to the challenge? Well, overall yes; which is to say that the impressively talented Jarecki, who wrote the screenplay three years ago when he was 30, has been canny enough to craft a “money movie” in which their just enough exposition about the state of the economy without forgetting his priority to provide pleasure for a paying audience.

The title refers to, as Webster’s puts it: “The nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies.”  Thus in “Arbitrage”, Richard Gere portrays a money market “master of the universe” (as Tom Wolfe described them in “The Bonfire of the Vanities”), named Robert Miller, who manages a massive hedge fund with his Ivy League educated daughter, Brooke, whom he employs as his company’s vice-president.

The resulting transaction will allow him to retire rich — very rich — but he has a minor problem;  the nearly half-billion in assets he needs to guarantee the deal are not actually there — Miller took a massive gamble on a copper mine venture in Russia that went from winning to worthless when the Russian government abruptly and arbitrarily restricted mineral exportation.

Thus, he has resorted to covertly cooking the books in collusion with a few trusted colleagues, though not his daughter. Miller is on the verge of his personal victory when another unexpected complication ensues; while escorting his French mistress well after midnight in her automobile, he falls asleep at the wheel. The ensuing accident has the mistress mortally wounded and Miller profoundly worried, because the scandal would result in much more scrutiny, and his chicanery would not go unchecked.

Enter Tim Roth’s Detective Bryer, in the best tradition of Dostoyevsky’s Inspector Porfiry and Peter Falk’s Detective Columbo, who proceeds to pursue Miller in a conscience-provoking game of cat-and-mouse.

The thirty-three year-old Jarecki proves he can hold his own, and then some, in his pointed and perceptive observations on cut-throat capitalism, but the greater pleasure of “Arbitrage” is in his appreciation of his accomplished actors — such as Gere, Roth and Susan Sarandon — in providing them dialogue and drama commensurate with their reputations as thespians.  Casting Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon as a middle-aged married couple whose dark secrets are beginning to surface is not merely en exciting idea, but something intelligently realized.

Jarecki can be faulted for a few contrivances in his narrative, particularly involving the derailment of Bryer’s investigation, but this young writer-director has provided a welcome corrective to the current digital-effects driven dumbing down of Hollywood movies.

HM Gruendler-Schierloh

Editor’s Note: congratulations to HM Gruendler-Schierloh for winning the 2013 South American Short Story Contest.  This is the winning entry.

Thumbnail photo source: Creative Commons.

Clutching an oversize canvas bag, the young man is crossing the large cobblestone plaza before he walks through the heavy wooden portal of the historic train station. His shoulders drooping, he looks around for a place to sit. The huge terminal is buzzing with the comings and goings of passengers, their voices merging into the humming monotone of a swarming beehive.

Unable to find a vacant spot on the crowded benches, he lowers his luggage to the floor and leans his tired body against the cast-iron gate separating the terminal from the entrance to the tracks. Scratching his week-old beard, he casually glances up at the digital board displaying arrival and departure times.

He is in no particular hurry to pick a destination.

He has waited so long to start this journey, he feels totally at ease to take his time to decide on where he wants to go next. He relishes the freedom of not having to be in any specific place at any given time. He is merely committed to moving forward-–to somewhere he has not been before.

After finally leaving home several weeks ago, he has no intentions to return there any time soon. It’s not that he hates it there. It’s just that he doesn’t again want to get sucked back into the role of bystander and observer of the mind-numbing game he saw his parents play for too long.

Growing up, he has been watching closely and listening carefully.

Even now, there is no doubt in his mind that his parents were trying their best to turn him and his sister into upstanding citizens. They took their offspring to church, showed up like clockwork at all those important parent-teacher meetings, cheered enthusiastically at little league games, and supported a slew of other extracurricular activities. Yes, his parents definitely kept striving and struggling to carve out an acceptable existence for themselves, for their children, and for society as a whole, as well as they could and knew how.

However, in spite of seemingly doing everything right, they didn’t appear to be happy.

Throughout the years of being an innocent participant of this fake domestic tranquility, he never felt at ease with this undercurrent of disguised misery in their household. The emotions he absorbed left him with a strange sensation of “never enough” and always “too much.”

His father, a quintessential Puritan, who had been brought up on a diet of “all work and no play” never wavered in his efforts of achieving his primary ambition–which was making, scraping up, and saving as much money as possible–and spending as little of it as he could possibly justify, which included scrimping on everyday costs like maintenance for the family.

Over the years, every member of his household grew accustomed and stoically accepted his mantra: There is really no reason to piss money away.

As much as he admired his father for his fierce determination, iron drive, steady hard work, and an almost super-human single-mindedness to achieve his life’s goal, the young man ultimately never understood the purpose of it all. What good was a pile of gold just sitting there, in the form of stocks, bank accounts, and properties–while his dependents lived as frugally as possible.  His wife increasingly resented being deprived of some basic amenities that could have made her life easier.

The young man’s mother worked hard on supporting her husband’s striving, spending countless hours managing investments and clientele, in addition to taking care of the children and everyday household tasks. In the process, she put her own dreams on hold, always waiting,always hoping that her time to express herself would come later–once they had enough to feel secure. When that day seemed to retreat whenever she thought it close, she finally confronted her husband about it. His answer was, “Sure, you can do whatever you want to do –when you are done with everything else.”

Realizing that somehow her turn would never come within the confines of her marriage, she grew defiant… then indifferent… before she decided to opt out of the relationship altogether.

She would later refer to her actions as “pouring the baby out with the bathwater.”

Although she had planned to take both children with her, the young man felt sorry for his father having to be alone – and so chose to stay with him.

After his mother and sister had left, life as usual “before” settled into a life as usual “after”… and it was a disheartening existence.

Dad dealt with his own contribution to allowing his marriage to fail by directing the blame at mum for daring to do what she did. Then he turned inward to bemoan the misery of his unjust fate. Busy with licking his own raw wounds, he paid little attention to comforting his bewildered young son. However, in spite of the emotional turmoil afflicting all the family members involved, his father never lost sight of the bottom line. He kept right on making money, and soon found a pretty young lady to keep him company. The new woman in dad’s life was rather independent and self-sufficient and, therefore, she posed little threat to his personal funds.

In the meantime, mum tried to carve out a new life for herself. Finally, free to pursue her interest in doing something creative, she gratified a life-long longing–but in the process, she depleted her resources and soon found herself struggling financially.

Taking the lifestyles of both of his parents into account, the young man came to the conclusion that he didn’t have any desire to emulate either one of them. He determined to find a much more harmonious balance between financial greed and monetary indifference–eventually.

However, for right now, he just wants to look around, learn, and experience how other people in other places were conducting their daily lives. In addition to picking up some valuable insights, he is moving around looking for fun, adventure, and making memories.

Again, he glances up at the train schedules. Should he go east, west, north or south?

Since any direction is fine with him he opts for a train that is the next one to leave to a distant city.

He picks up his bag, heads toward the ticket counter and wonders once again why his few belongings would feel so heavy. They consist of the bare basics: a comb, a tooth brush, clothing for all seasons, a few granola bars, a bottle of water, and a small first aid kit.

The lightest but most significant item he carries with him is protruding a little from one of the zippered side pockets. It is a jagged piece of white paper on which he has scribbled:

Own only what you can carry with you;
Know language, know countries, know people.
Let your memory be your travel bag.

–Alexander Solzhenitsyn