Friday, September 18, 2015

A Syrian Love Story review – a searing insight into a marriage under fire

A family at war … A Syrian Love Story
Sean McAllister’s documentary about a family of Syrian refugees in Europe would be compelling at any time. Now it is unmissable. This is about love, but it could as well be called A Syrian Rage Story or A Syrian Despair Story. It is the tragic portrait of a disintegrating marriage; the story of two people whose love has been hammered by fate, history and each other.

These are not refugees as we are encouraged to understand them by the nightly news: nameless poor people to whom the prosperous west can respond with pity or guilt. These refugees don’t want to be passive recipients of compassion, but active participants in their own destiny. Above all, they are angry. Their anger floods the screen.

McAllister begins his story in 2009, when Syria was being marketed to westerners as a glamorous, cosmopolitan new tourist destination with ancient culture and monuments as important as anything in Greece and Turkey. And so McAllister begins his movie with a brutal twist of irony, a subliminal flash-forward to a later reality in which our certainties about the Arab spring have been overtaken by the existence of Islamic State. In the capital Damascus, McAllister meets Amer Douad, a Palestinian activist from thea coastal town of Tartus who has a heart-rending story to tell. While in prison, Amer fell in love with a fellow inmate, Ragdha Hassan, a beautiful leftwing Syrian activist against the Assad regime. Now they have three children: Shadi, Kaka and Bob, but she is back in prison and Amer must raise them on his own. McAllister is present with his camera as day by day, week by week, Amer and the children lavish their love on the idea of an absent wife and mother. When Ragdha is finally freed, their joy is overwhelming.
Ragdha Hassan in A Syrian Love Story
But then McAllister is briefly imprisoned by the regime; his friendship makes Amer and Ragdha’s position in Syria untenable. They move, first to the Palestinian enclave of Yarmouk camp, outside Damascus, then to Lebanon, and finally to Paris, having been granted refugee status by the French government. But their marriage is coming apart and McAllister records its breakdown from 2009 to the present.

Raghda is suffering from post-traumatic stress at her brutal jail treatment; she is pierced with guilt at having effectively deserted her comrades’ struggle against Assad, and at becoming an irrelevance herself, washed up on a far shore away from a battle she considers crucial to her identity. Ragdha becomes filled with resentment and depression, and McAllister’s camera captures the way her face, once alight with beauty and fun, becomes clouded and pained. Amer’s face, too, becomes older: hunted, almost furtive, a man with secrets. The film allows us to consider the awful thought that the couple were happiest apart, when they had only the tragically exalted idea of each other. Love depended on prison. Now he accuses her of being impossible to live with, of being arrogant and simply nettled at her own loss of status. Amer’s love curdles into machismo as he demands Ragdha attend to the duties of motherhood. There are walkouts from the family home, suicide attempts and accusations of infidelity.

Incredibly, McAllister was there for a great deal of this. The scenes look real enough. It takes its toll on the children, although their son Kaka emerges as exceptionally perceptive and smart. As a little boy in Syria, he is asked by McAllister about the Assad tyranny: “Does it make you want to leave? Live somewhere else?” He replies: “No, fight.” His views as a teenager in Paris are very different. As for Amer, he begins by speaking to McAllister about Ragdha like this: “She is a strong woman; I am a very weak man.”

Perhaps he has foretold their destiny. But the heartwrenching thing is that her strength and his weakness – as he perceives it – might not have been a problem, had they been able to stay in Syria. Who can tell? It could have been the agony of Syria that destroyed their relationship, or it might have fallen apart in any case. McAllister and his camera might have accelerated the breakdown, though it is just as likely he provided valuable therapy. Even at the end, Amer and Ragdha clearly have feelings for each other. This is love among the ruins.

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Eddie Redmayne in first trailer for transgender biopic The Danish Gir

Could Eddie Redmayne win his second Oscar in a row? ... the first trailer for The Danish Girl has landed. Photograph: PR
After winning the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne is hitting the awards circuit again for his role in The Danish Girl.

The trailer for the drama, directed by The King’s Speech’s Tom Hooper, has just arrived and it gives us a closer look at the fact-based tale. Redmayne stars as Einar Wegener, one of the first recipients of sexual reassignment surgery, who became Lili Elbe.

The film chronicles her journey in the 1920s and her role in a love triangle with her illustrator wife and childhood friend, played by Alicia Vikander and Matthias Schoenaerts. Ben Whishaw and Amber Heard also star.

It’s a film that’s almost come to the screen on numerous occasions but always with two female leads (Charlize Theron was once linked to the role). Transgender activists have criticised the choice of Redmayne as they believe it should have been given to someone who has undergone the transition themselves. But director Hooper has defended his decision.

“Eddie was really the person I wanted to make the film with, and I was very passionate about that,” Hooper said to Screen Daily. “I was a great believer in him as an actor. I think also there’s a certain gender fluidity that I sensed in him, that I found intriguing and it led me to think he might be a really interesting person to cast in this role.

“I felt that there was something in him that was drawn to the feminine,” he added. “That was something that I felt he might be interested to explore further.”

The Danish Girl is set to have its world premiere at the Venice film festival on Saturday, 5 September, and will hit US cinemas on 27 November and UK cinemas on 1 January.