Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

This week, I’m looking at three movies about people in bad situations around the world. There’s a Chinese cook stuck in the war in Iraq, a single dad who’s a hitman in Texas, and star-crossed lovers in the Spanish Civil war.

 

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East

Co-Wri/Dir: Wen Muye

Xu Fu (Shen Teng) is a grumpy and hot-tempered chef from northeastern China working in a large city in the middle east. A single dad with a teenaged girl and elderly mother, he’s there to support his family back home and to pay off his crippling debt. He’s working at the Loong Restaurant with its manager Shen Teng an old friend from China (Jiang Qiming), and a new friend, Zaid, a well-connected government official who owns the place. In the kitchen, Xu Fu reigns supreme. At first Zaid wanted him to make dishes that please the local palate, but Xu Fu, a grumpy old cuss,  put his foot down: No Gen Tso’s Chicken or Crab Rangoon will ever leave that kitchen while he’s in charge! His other problem is kids, particularly a gang of war orphans who raid his kitchen to steal food.

Luckily, Shen Teng’s girlfriends works at the orphanage and keeps the urchins in check. Soon they’re making money hand over fist, running a profitable Chinese restaurant by day, and selling bootleg hooch to GIs at night. He even has the orphans serving tables, with the oldest and most difficult one, Seif (Omar Sherif) as his new apprentice. But the country is at warm, currently ruled from within a huge Green Zone  by the US military — who invaded the country, deposed its army and purged its Baathist government. And outside the military enclave, the place is in total chaos, with fundamentalist warlords fighting for control. Can a simple Chinese cook run Loong Restaurant and take care of a dozen orphans while dodging bombs and tanks?  Or should he just take the money and run?

 

Once Upon a Time in the Middle East is a free-wheeling dramedy about an ordinary Chinese man who finds himself in the middle of the US War in Iraq. (I’m only giving a taste of its novelistic plot). It’s funny, exciting and energetic with any number of tear-jerky moments on the way, along with its fair share of food porn in the kitchen. It’s also a rare, critical view of the US’s post-9/11 invasion of that country, including arrogant and corrupt officers, widespread death and destruction, along with references to torture at Abu Ghraib. On the other side, it shows militant groups forcing kidnapped children to serve as suicide bombers, suggesting that “every child is a potential terrorist”.  Of course, the director takes pains to say it’s about a mythical country, not Iraq, but then he gives the city a Chinese name very close to Baghdad. And of course there’s the big-eyed orphans, the last resort of moviemakers for audience sympathy. But somehow it all clicks, and makes for a good movie to watch. So much so that China has submitted it as their choice for international Oscar.

I expected Once Upon A Time… to be embarrassingly terrible, cliched and racist, but it actually ended up being not bad at all.

Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother

Wri/Dir: Bassam Tariq

Latif (Mahershala Ali) is a happily married man in Texas with three kids including a new born baby. A deeply religious Muslim man, he helps boys study the Koran at the local mosque. But he is often away from home for work, leaving the parental duties to his wife. His paid work is unusual: he is a hitman for an underworld character named Mike (Laith Nakli). He carries out his assignments using swords engraved with scripture. But his life is turned upside down when his wife dies from cancer. Suddenly Latif has to take care of his kids, feed them, get them to school… even to give mother’s milk to the baby. Basically, he has to be the mom and the dad now.

So he vows from now on, no more killing, just some good parenting. There’s a problem, though. Mike need one last job from him: take care of his son Hatty (Abubakr Ali). Latif knows him well — he taught him at the mosque, but very little seems to have sunk in. Hatty is a louche, douchey playboy living off his dad’s cash. Hatty has been accused of trafficking women — he says they’re porn models not hookers — but he’s being stalked by Pastor Hwan (John Cho) a gun-toting, cowboy-hat-wearing MAGA preacher at a mega church who is also a former marine trained in weapons and warfare. Can Latif carry out his last job, keep his own kids safe, and secure some mother’s milk for his baby?

Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother is a comedy action/thriller but also a Faith-Based movie. In North America, a faith-based movie means one thing — a Christian movie. And they’re usually full of faith and prayer (and a miracle or two) along with people facing serious difficulties in an extremely earnest, white-bread  way… which unfortunately often makes them cringy and boring. This movie has all those things but in a Muslim, not a Christian, milieu, and most important of all, it’s fun and exciting, and perversely full of gratuitous sex and violence. Mahershala Ali (Free State of Jones, Jurassic Park: Rebirth, Moonlight)  is really good in the lead role, as is John Cho as his rival. The reason I wanted to see this one is because the director Bassam Tariq made the great Mogul Mowgli a few years back starring Riz Ahmed — totally different but equally surprising. So if you’re good with John Wick-style extreme violence in a faith-based setting, I think you’ll get a kick out of this one.

La Bola Negra

Wri/Dir: Javier Calvo, Javier Ambrossi

Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) is a young musician caught up the Spanish Civil War in 1937 when his village is b brutally bombed by the fascist army they support. He’s taken into the local battalion and told to guard

Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau) a POW. He’s the leader of a Republican unit captured in Madrid. They want crucial information from him, but he lies in his cot unconscious. And Sebastián finds himself unconsciously attracted to the officer he’s supposed to be interrogating. 

Meanwhile, in 1933, Carlos (Milo Quifes) is the young son of a local dignitary  trying to join his father’s prestigious club, but must be accepted by the members of it’s enclaved (they vote using white and black, the Bola Negra of the title). And they won’t vote for him because he dares to hang out with anarchists and gay men, “tainting” his family’s reputation.

And in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González) a young gay playwright in Madrid receives a manuscript from his grandfather whom he never knew. 

What ties these three stories together? The manuscript might be La Bola Negra a lost play with a gay theme by Spain’s most famous modern writer Federico García Lorca, that somehow ends up in the hands of a modern writer and historian.  

La Bola Negra is an epic drama set in 1930s- and present-day Spain, that intertwines three separate stories — a passionate wartime romance,  a dramatization of an allegorical play,  and a contemporary dramedy —  into one complex, coherent piece. Each section is told chronologically in parts, each one driving toward its own finish over the course of the film. It’s an excellent movie. I found the 1937 part the most interesting and emotionally satisfying. The 1930s play goes off the deep end at the end, and the modern day part, though fascinating, is much more low key. Does it need to be three hours long? I don’t think so, but I’ll bow the filmmakers’ artistic license. I saw this movie at TIFF where it won the People’s Choice Award, and is nominated as Spain’s Best International Film.

And I once acted in Federico García Lorca’s play Blood Wedding as the Groom, so it has personal significance.

La Bola Negra opens theatrically in two weeks. Once Upon a Time in the Middle East and Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother both open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings. 

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website  culturalmining.com