metroart Reviews

Limit (1931)

Less than meets the eye

[6/10 · 8 November 2019]

The real Limite, as opposed to its myth, is an elaborate experimental home movie made by a very bright 22-year-old, getting his rocks off about his frustrated love life -- an affair with a married woman. The film got produced only because of his family's wealth and connections -- but after it was made, no one in Brazil would distribute it, so it disappeared from sight and gradually languished into a "cult film."

It's worth a look for its ravishing flashes of brilliance, and especially for its use of the camera as an active participant -- allowed to express the frustration & rage that the characters are "limited" from expressing openly (as extra-marital relationships were still a taboo subject in Brazil in 1930?). But without the musical sound track assembled from well-known compositions by Satie, Debussy, Stravinsky, etc. it'd be unwatchable for most of its 2 hours of meandering and deliberately veiled self-indulgence.

A cinematic masterpiece? On a par with films by Dreyer or Vigo or Welles? That's just Brazilian hype. Apparently abetted by the director himself who in 1965 -- out of yet more frustration & rage at the poor reception his magnum (and only) film opus had received -- published a Portuguese translation of a glowing review by none other than "Sergei Eisenstein" -- but no one could locate the original, and Peixoto finally acknowledged, shortly before his death in 1992, that he had penned it himself.

Soul on a String (2016)

How to steal a soul

[6/10 · 15 March 2018]

This movie is about Tibet, with Tibetan actors speaking Tibetan, but is meant neither for Tibetans or Western audiences. It's loosely based on a 1985 short story by the "Tibetan" novelist Tashi Dawa, who was born to a Chinese mother and educated in China, writes only in Chinese, speaks no Tibetan, and is a prominent and respected figure in the Chinese cultural establishment. Yet the Chinese never refer to him as a citizen of China, but invariably call him a Tibetan, because of his father's birthplace.

Tashi Dawa is China's foremost practitioner of "magic realism" -- which blurs the line between reality and fantasy -- and that's what you get in this movie, an uneasy blending of truth and fiction, meant to appropriate the culture of Tibet and re-present it as a barbaric myth that is now part of China's heritage, the way the American Wild West is part of our own.

Imagine a story right out of a John Ford western, an outlaw on a daunting mission to deliver a precious stone, but with a metaphysical twist -- he's pursued not only by thieves and a pair of brothers hell bent on karmic revenge, but by John Ford himself -- or in this case, an actor standing in for Mr. Dawa, who is seeking the end of his own story, tracking his fictional characters across a gorgeously surreal landscape, finally taking over where they leave off, counting the days of his hero's journey like beads on a Tibetan rosary, arriving magically on day 108, the number of volumes that comprise the Tibetan canon of the Buddha's words.

China has taken over Tibet in much the same way we stole the West from Native Americans. First by brute force and military conquest, then by industrial and technological exploitation, finally by laying claim to its cultural mythology, capturing its "soul" on their string. Don't ask the Native Tibetans on the rez what they think of this movie. They won't tell you. But you can guess.