Displaced persons

The central character of Amreeka  (2009, MC-73) is as much placeless as displaced.  As she has to inform airport security, she has no country, she is Palestinian and comes from occupied territory.  Her 15-minute commute to work takes two hours because she has to go around the Wall and through checkpoints where she and her son are routinely hassled.  Her husband has left her for a younger, slimmer woman, and her son urges that since the old man’s done what he wanted, they ought to do what they want, which is move to America when their papers come through.  They go to stay with her sister in suburban Illinois, her husband a doctor whose successful practice is suddenly shunned after 9/11.  Despite two degrees and ten years experience in banking, our heroine has to take a job at White Castle, while pretending to her family that she is working in the bank next door.  Cherien Dabis knows whereof she makes her film, and while it may run through a checklist of predictable plot points, it does so with grace, charm, and wit.

Nearly witless yet sharply satiric, Four Lions  (2010, MC-68) portrays a group of Muslim young men living in England but not at home there, longing for jihad, with pratfalls at every step.  This film can only be categorized as terrorist slapstick, so be prepared to laugh as one dunderhead after another blows himself up, and if you can’t imagine laughing at such things, then pass this film by.  In one respect, Chris Morris’s film is very much like The Hangover (which I just happened to catch in passing on HBO, but did not find special in any way), in which a group of wild and crazy guys find nothing but misadventure on their path to paradise, whether it be Las Vegas or scented gardens with 77 virgins.  Given the exploits of the underwear bomber and the clown who left a carful of fertilizer in Times Square, this film may give a truer than expected portrait of the losers who turn to terrorism, but it still winds up a mixed bag, which may or may not be yours.

In Alamar  (2010, MC-77), a young boy is transported to something like paradise, above the coral reefs of Mexico.  He is the product of a brief union between an Italian mother and a Mexican guide, and is going to spend time with his father, living in a house on stilts above the water and spending his days baking in the sun on fishing boats, falling into the rhythms of an extremely elemental life, while tacitly absorbing paternal lessons in communion with nature.  Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s film is half documentary, half rhapsody, slow and stately, intimate and sensual, quiet but ultimately powerful.

I guess I was the person displaced from Around a Small Mountain (2010, MC-63) – I just didn’t get it.  Jacques Rivette’s latest falls under my category of “The New Wave gets old,” and as with Resnais’ Wild Grass, I am disinclined to follow.  Only my man Rohmer was strong till the very end.  Rivette as usual looks at the lives of performers, in this case a traveling circus in the south of France, but unusually and mercifully this film is quite short.  I’m interested enough in Jane Birkin to watch for 80 minutes to try to figure out why she left the circus 15 years ago and why she’s back now, and whether she will fall for the Italian charmer stalking her.  But I didn’t figure it out, and I didn’t really care.

I’ll squeeze one more recent film under this heading:  It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010, MC-63).  This unmemorable title suits this kind of okay movie, about a teenager who is displaced by checking himself into a mental hospital, when suicidal feelings get the better of him.  It’s a plush place where he learns some not-very-hard life lessons and meets a cute girl with just a few cosmetic scars on her wrists and face.  The whole thing is less “Boy, Interrupted” than “Boy Goes to Overnight Camp.”  Still, I watched it because I’d been impressed with the earlier films of the directorial team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, Half Nelson and Sugar. They should forget catering to a wider audience, and go back to making their own stories, instead of adapting popular young adult novels.  Keir Gilchrist is ingratiating enough as the central character, Zach Galifianakis is good as the fellow crazy from whom he learns the ropes, and the rest of the cast is inoffensive in this “cuckoo’s nest lite.”  So the film won’t bore you silly or altogether betray your sense of plausibility, but you won’t remember it or its title for very long.