Category: Europe

Filmed by Mario Azzopardi in 1971 while he was still a film student, Cage was not commercially released until 2007. It tells the story of a young Maltese man living at the cusp of independence, both his own and that of Malta from the United Kingdom.

Family Matters

In the opening scene, a pair of lovers (Fred and Roza) are cavorting in the meadow before being interrupted by the arrival of Fred’s boss, the parish priest. When he returns home, his mother demands of him: “Who were you with? With that slut? Don’t be a fool my son. Don’t have anything to do with her. Leave her.” Fred looks toward her as thunder booms and lightning flashes through the window (comical, but probably unintentionally so). According to Fred’s mother, Rosa is from an infamously bad family, and since Malta is such a small country, everyone knows it. But for our benefit, she explains their sins anyway: “Are you aware of their political beliefs? They are all enemies of the Church! They have rebelled against God!” Not to mention, they have nothing to offer for a dowry.

The townsfolk are debating whether the parish priest should be allowed to run for office and meddle in politics; this is a major issue in the turbulent and contentious climate of Malta in the late 1960s. Fred’s parents are staunch supporters of the parish priest’s political endeavors. When the election comes, the Nationalists achieve a plurality of the votes. Independence is on the horizon. And yet Fred is still imprisoned in his parents’ (and the church’s) “cage.” (Get it?) At night, a ghostly voice calls out to him: “Beware of death! You will be eternally damned. Death will come and you’ll burn in Hell!” The priest stands outside the window, clad in a hooded black cloak, Seventh Seal-style.

Generational Conflict

At the humorless family dinner the next day, Fred’s sister Filumen is dressed much too immodestly for their mother’s liking. But, Mom says, shouldn’t Filumen’s husband Karmenu be the one correcting her? So why doesn’t he? Doesn’t he know he’s only inviting scandal by allowing his wife to dress in such a manner? Fred’s father is perhaps not as unabashedly hard-nosed as his mother, but he does give Fred the ultimatum: Do as his mother says, or leave. So, Fred goes to see Roza. She gives him the lavender sweater that she knit for him. But Fred, tortured soul that he is, tells her they cannot meet anymore. Roza is shocked that he is treating her “as if I were a slut.” So they split up. But he takes the sweater. He’s really sending mixed signals…

Shortly thereafter, Fred’s mother is taken ill with angina. Veffa, a maid, is tasked with looking after her. Fred starts getting really handsy with Veffa; by this point, I’m realizing that he has this mildly creepy Anthony Quinn vibe to him. “It’s better if we control our own future,” Veffa opines to Fred as they … discuss the election results in the backseat of his car. Later, Fred’s father tells him “I know that you had fancied that girl [Roza]. I hope you now realize why we were against your relationship. She comes from a low class family.” But Veffa, on the other hand—she’s a real catch, his father says. Little does he know that Fred is already way ahead of him; Veffa is currently pregnant with Fred’s child.

Moving On

When both of Fred’s parents die, his sister and brother-in-law invite him to stay with them in Sliema. (Fred packs the lavender sweater.) As he prepares to leave, religious and political processions have him surrounded. Seems like pretty standard film student symbolism. Nothing out of the ordinary here. In Sliema, Fred gets a job as a typist. Sliema is very different from Fred’s hometown; his coworkers speak English peppered with Maltese, true to form for Sliema residents. When Veffa marries his boss, she leaves him a note: “If you have some decency in you, just leave and find another job. If you stay I’ll make your life hell, the same hell you made me go through. You have two weeks.” This ultimatum inspires in Fred a paroxysm of regret at leaving Roza, just as the Union Jack descends and the Flag of Malta replaces it.

All things considered, Cage is pretty impressive for a film school thesis. But something weird happens in the final scene, and I’m not sure whether or not it was intentional. We see the crew, lights, camera, etc., as the actor playing Fred (Ray Camilleri) stands, out of character, receiving last minute instructions for the upcoming scene. The guy with the clapperboard comes forward and says “171 take 4,” then the scene commences. Is this a narrative tactic, functioning as some kind of forceful reminder that we’re watching a film? Is it film student symbolism? Sloppy editing? Who knows.

Up Next…

The Wind (Mali, 1982)

Based on a novel by Catalan novelist Emili Teixidor, Black Bread is a dark and unsettling film from the get-go. Although its director, Agustí Villaronga, is from Majorca, the film is set in the contentious political climate of rural Catalonia following the Spanish Civil War.

Unresolved Conflict

Even though the war is over, it still haunts the landscape and rages in the minds of survivors. When the main character, a young boy named Andreu, discovers the bodies of the republican Dionís and his son in the woods, Andreu’s mother Florència tells him: “The woods are cursed since the war.” Andreu’s father Farriol, himself a communist and republican, is a prime suspect in the deaths; the mayor, a staunch falangist, tells Farriol that “There are still a lot of reds to purge. You don’t want to end up like Dionís.”

Florència, outraged by the mayor’s bullishness, excoriates him: “Black bread and red sugar, with the ration book and waiting hours in line! That’s all you’ve given us. Bread with no soul or virtue; dead, like all of you, because of this goddamn war that killed us all.” To escape the target on his back, Farriol goes into hiding, and Florència sends Andreu to his grandmother’s farm, owned by a wealthy family, the Manubens. Andreu’s grandmother, Àvia, inhabits a world full of ghosts and monsters, just as Andreu himself does. Also living in the farmhouse are two of Andreu’s aunts, as well as his cousins Núria and Quirze.

The film highlights the corruption of postwar Spain, but also the widespread support of nationalist and falangist ideology among influential sectors of the population. Andreu’s teacher, Mr. Madern, in addition to being both an alcoholic and a pedophile, openly espouses extreme nationalist ideas to his students: “The defeated have no right to even a small footnote in the great book of history, because history is always written by winners. But I am always in favor of victors because they’re more worthy,” he explains to the class, “because they’ve known how to win. And only those who know how to win can win. Like the rich are more worthy than the poor.”

“Portrait of a Bird-Killer”

Although the motif of bread, unsurprisingly, figures prominently in the film, birds occupy an even more central thematic role. Beyond their shared politics, Farriol and Dionís shared an obsession with birds. Prior to going into hiding, Farriol tends to the birds in his aviary with intense devotion. To Andreu, he compares himself to a restless chaffinch, and says that “birds are meant to be free and fly. Like angels, they have no borders. We can cage them, but can’t change the way they are.” Núria, strange as always, remarks to Andreu: “I’d like to set a bird on fire one day. A ball of fire flying in the air, squawking, until it falls to the ground. A shower of ashes is all that would be left of it.”

Shortly after going to live with his grandmother, Andreu befriends a strange, consumptive boy who runs naked through the woods and believes he has wings. The boy remarks: “You fly too low, Andreu. So low it seems like you’re just walking. Fly high and don’t let anyone catch you.” Quirze tells Andreu that consumptives are “infected by vice. They look like angels but I bet take up bed-hopping at night.”

Much of the film’s plot revolves around a mysterious figure named Pitorliua, whose monstrous, half-bird/half-man ghost is said to haunt the Baumes caves outside of town. As Andreu learns more about the circumstances surrounding Pitorliua’s death, and concurrently learns the truth about his parents, he takes out his rage in the only way he can: on his father’s birds.

The film is terrifying, it is gloomy (to say the least), but above all, it is spellbinding. It’s one of those rare films for which the ending is truly unforeseen. If you don’t want to take my word for it, just check out its accolades: it basically swept the Goya and the Gaudí Awards in 2011.

Up Next…

Good Morning, Luang Prabang (Laos, 2008)

Directed by Caroline Link, Beyond Silence is the story of a hearing girl named Lara Bischoff, whose parents, Martin and Kai, are both deaf. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the film lives up to its hype, presenting a picturesque narrative brimming with understated beauty interrupted by uproars of turmoil percolating beneath the surface. The opening scenes show Lara alerting her parents to sounds, like the sound of her father slurping his coffee. “Lightning is silent, like the moon,” she tells her father during a storm. “It’s thunder that’s loud.” The family’s life is almost picture-perfect—until Lara receives a clarinet from Martin’s sister Clarissa.

Two Worlds

Like Anita, Lara’s conflict with her stubborn father threatens to rend her family apart. As Lara shouts at her father, “You don’t know what’s important! You’re deaf! You don’t even know what music is!” we see the enormity of the strain that Lara’s clarinet playing places on the family. Unlike Anita, however, Lara has her equally headstrong aunt Clarissa to help support Lara’s musical endeavors that her father cannot understand. Martin tells Kai: “I’m going to lose her,” to which Kai responds: “Only if you make the same mistake your parents did.” “What do you mean?” Martin asks. Kai clarifies: “Accept her for what she is. She can hear, and we are deaf.” “She is my child,” Martin protests, and Kai responds: “But she doesn’t belong to you.”

We learn that Martin’s upbringing was not as happy as Lara’s. “I really envy you,” Lara’s grandmother tells her after watching her sign. “You speak that magic tongue as if it were a game. If I hadn’t listened to that pighead, my hands might be able to fly too.” Clarissa later explains to Lara that, during her childhood, she and Martin “made up our own sign language. But the doctors said it was a mistake—that sign language apparently kept him from learning how to speak,” thus driving a wedge between Clarissa and her deaf brother. Their relationship further deteriorated when, at Clarissa’s first clarinet performance in front of a large group of people, Martin begins laughing uncontrollably, disrupting the performance.

After hearing Clarissa say that “sounds are very important for babies,” Lara leans in close to her mother’s stomach, whispering to her unborn sibling: “Hey, you in there, don’t be afraid. Out here, life isn’t completely quiet. When you come, I’ll be here, and I’ll play a song for you on my new clarinet.” In fact, it does turn out that Lara’s new baby sister Marie is also hearing, and Lara is very excited to learn this. She spends as much time talking to Marie as she can.

The Music Inside

Fast-forward to nine years later. Lara is eighteen, a gifted clarinetist, and contemplating a move to Berlin to attend a prestigious music school. Martin is adamantly opposed to the idea, but Clarissa—with characteristic lack of tact—exclaims that “Lara shouldn’t be handicapped just because her parents are.” The ensuing tension drives Lara’s relationship with her father to its stormy nadir. She shouts at him at breakfast one morning: “The silence here, the noise you make when you read the paper—when you eat, when you brush your teeth. This house is like a cage.”

Kai is more understanding of her daughter’s infatuation with music. She gets two tickets to a clarinet concert for her and Lara, and tells her: “When I was little I believed all grown-ups could sing. I also thought I’d be able to when I was a grown-up. I’d stand in front of a mirror and move my mouth and pretend that wonderful sounds were coming out—sounds that made people look so ecstatic, so happy—music!”

At the concert, Lara stands before a giant projection of a Chagall painting. The clarinetist approaches her and tells her, in English: “Listen, the sound of the picture. Can you hear it? He’s a great artist, Chagall. He knows that el mundo is music. You want to know the truth of music?” he asks her. “You don’t need it, you have it inside. Listen to the song inside.” She takes his advice, and at her audition for admission to the music school, she explains to the judges why she prefers klezmer music: “Inside it’s joyful and wild, and at the same time it’s sad and not free. It’s a feeling I understand well.” Her explanation, like the film as a whole, is simple yet moving. Music carries Lara to a world beyond silence, a world that her father might never be fully able to inhabit.

Up Next…

Makibefo (Madagascar, 1999)