Jeanne and Simon, fraternal twins, attempt to carry out their mother’s last wish – deliver two letters to the father they thought was dead and the brother they didn’t know they had.  So as they hunt down the two missing family members in a fictional, war-torn country, Jeanne and Simon begin to piece together the untold story of their mother’s life in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war between Christian and Muslim militia groups.  Past bleeds into the present and the present is haunted by the past as the twins discover that, although their mother fled the violence while they were still infants, the legacy of war is still with them every day of their lives.

Incendies is a stunning film, elegantly directed by Villeneuve.  Rather than a ponderous exploration of war and its effects, the movie is a tightly paced mystery, moving from revelation to revelation with a deliberate, unhurried sense of inevitability.  The film effortlessly flows between the past and the present, allowing us to piece things together as the Jeanne and Simon make their discoveries.  By the time the film reaches its final, shocking conclusion, an ending that in a lesser film could easily come across too melodramatic, we are able to buy into the revelation of the father and the son – both as the logical outcome of the twin’s search and as a symbolic statement on the lasting consequences of war.

Lubna Azabal, playing Nawal (the twin’s mother) at a range of ages, is an absolutely riveting anchor to the film.  From her first scenes of innocence and loss, to her fierce determination to find her missing child and the dignity with which she carries herself in the face horrible oppression, Azabal is consistently mesmerizing.  It’s a powerful performance standing out in the midst of many other great actors: Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin), Simon (Maxim Gaudette), and Remy Girard as the notary who sends the twins on this impossible assignment.

For so thoughtful and compelling a film, I do wish the piece would have been a little more honest about the brutality and violence that occurs on both sides of a bloody conflict.  We only see one side to the conflict and every member of the other side is portrayed as sadists wantonly dispensing violence to every man, women, and child of the enemy.  It undercuts some of the films power, turning one side into victims and the other side into easy villains, distancing us from the immediacy of violence and preventing us from realizing how easy it is to fall into these endless cycles of retribution.

Nevertheless, Incendies is still an important, powerful film that encourages us to take a fresh look at the conflicts of our own time and the deep consequences such conflicts have on every one of us.

The Gift can be used on its own, or as part of a larger Christmas production featuring choral and solo musical numbers.

Cast: 2 Women/Length: Up to 2 Hours/Performance Rights: $50 per Performance

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Production Script ($18 per Copy)

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The Sleeping Beauty is French director Catherine Breillat’s second film in a planned trilogy of fairy-tale reinterpretations.  In her take on the classic story, a young princess, Anastasia, is cursed by a witch to die on her sixteenth birthday.  Three fairies blunt the curses effects so Anastasia with only fall into a deep sleep for one hundred years.  During her sleeping, the princess will have fantastic adventures and, instead of falling into the sleep at sixteen, she will begin her sleep when she is six and when she wakes one hundred years later, she will be sixteen.

There are some truly beautiful sequences that take place during the princess’s dreaming adventures.  She spends time with a mother and son, Peter.  She falls in love with the boy and once she has lost him, she spends the rest of her dream trying to find him once more.  She journeys into a majestic palace with albino rules.  She’s kidnapped by bandits and travels by deer to the frozen wilderness of her imagination.  And when she wakes up in the modern world, she isn’t sure she’ll be able to cope with the present.

As you can probably tell from my attempt at a synopsis, Breillat’s plot meanders all over the place.  The film moves from plot point to plot point – sometimes there is a connection to the previous sequence, sometimes we simply lurch ahead, dictated by directorial whim and fancy.  Character motivations are spurious and half-formed.  Why did the witch curse the princess?  The film doesn’t seem to care.

In fact, it feels like Breillat is almost embarrassed by the story’s early magical elements.  We rush past the witch and the fairies as convenient plot points.  She devotes a little time to the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, but mainly as a way to sweep the princess’s love off to places unknown.

The movie’s strength is in its symbols – heavy-handed though they may be.  The idea of childhood being a sort of dream that one awakens from at the onset of sexuality isn’t a new idea, but it is cleverly illustrated here.  The Snow Queen freezes Peter’s heart, causing his love for Anastasia to grow cold.  She can’t understand this change of heart which happens in many relationships and spends the rest of her childhood looking to recapture that love.

The Sleeping Beauty is an intriguing, if deeply flawed film.  There are some interesting ideas, but they just don’t connect to the larger story in any meaningful way.

Cast: 1 Woman/Length: 15-20 min./Performance Rights: $15 per Performance

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Phantom India is comprised of seven fifty-minutes episodes, each focusing on a different aspect of Indian culture, from the caste system and religious rituals to modern political struggles and the tribal minorities who exist on the fringes of society.  Malle takes us from one end of the country to the other and avoids focusing on the Anglicized, English-speaking two-percent of the population to instead show us how most Indians live.  Calcutta is narrower in scope than it’s companion piece, an immersive look at one of India’s largest cities.  The film spends much of its time silently juxtaposing the wealth and poverty that often exist within a few blocks of one another.

Though both documentaries are classically shot and edited, Malle and his cinematographer allow the camera to linger, never rushing or in a hurry to move from moment to moment.  This allows us, as viewers, to fall into a sort of reverie as we contemplate the scenes, taking in the people and places of India.  There is no attempt to the fact that he and his film crew are intruders in another society.  The camera isn’t hidden, observing from a distance.  It’s right in the midst of villages and cites, temples and fields.  His subjects stare directly into the camera, directly at us, creating a sense of unease as we watch from the comfort of our own home or the cushioned seats of a movie theater.

As his own narrator, Malle states that he doesn’t want to come to India with any preconceived notions, and he avoids many of the sentimental feelings Westerners have about Indian culture and religion.  In fact, there are times that Malle burns with a rage at priests who exploit the poor and a social system that causes people to believe they deserve their fate.  Western pilgrims are seen as naive and foolish.  In Calcutta, he constantly contrasts the lives of wealthy Indians (racetracks, golf, country-clubs) with those of the poorest in the very same city, living in run-down shacks amidst filth and refuse.  That isn’t to say Malle is unable to appreciate the beauty of Indian culture.  A lowly civil-servant’s devotion – praying at the temple each day in seclusion – and two young women studying dance and worshiping through their movements allows us a chance to see authentic and genuine Indian culture at it’s best.

Both films were met with resistance when they were released.  Britain’s large Indian community were angry that Malle chose to focus on India’s poverty rather than the nation’s economic growth.  But isn’t that how it always goes?  Do we ever want to face the poverty and decay in our own culture, our country, or our lives?  We try to hide our faces from the problems of society, pretending that it really isn’t as bad as they make it seem.  We complain that the people who are suffering deserve what they get because they’re lazy or devious or untrustworthy.

Near the beginning of Phantom India, Malle and his crew come across the dead buffalo being picked apart by wild dogs and vultures.  While it’s a common site for Indians, these Western filmmakers dwell on this image for a long while.  We can’t just ignore the problems of our country.  We can’t turn our backs on the most vulnerable members of our society.  We can’t just ignore the dead buffalo and the scavengers tearing it apart.

Gil, the hero of Woody Allen’s latest comedy Midnight in Paris, certainly lives in the past.  He’s visiting Paris with his fiancee, Inez, and her parents, but he seems to be the only one of this American quartet truly enraptured by the City of Lights.  He longs to walk the same streets his favorite authors and artists walked, to eat in the cafes where they ate, but his traveling companions would rather stay away from the sights of Paris and just take in an American movie.  When Inez runs into some old friends, Gil finds himself alone most evenings, walking the streets of Paris, where he is transported back to his favorite time and place in the world – Paris in the ’20s.

Midnight in Paris is a delightful comic fantasy, one of Allen’s most purely enjoyable films in recent years.  The parade of literary and artistic figures is a joy – from Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to Corey Stoll as Hemingway and Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein (not to mention a deliriously funny turn by Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali).  The cinematography is luscious, warm and inviting.  The entire film is Allen’s love letter to the Paris of yesteryear as well as the Paris of today.  Owen Wilson fills in nicely as the film’s Allen substitute and the brilliant Michael Sheen is hilarious as Inez’s smug and pedantic friend.

I do wish that Rachel McAdams, as Inez, would have been given more depth and humanity.  Instead, she plays the shrew, condescending and cloying and slowly pushing Gil further and further away.  Yes, it allows the audience to root for Gil’s blossoming romance with Adriana, a mistress of Picasso, but instead of focusing on the very real incompatibilities between Gil and Inez, Allen paints her as an irredeemable caricature.

As Gil continues his midnight journey into the past, he begins to discover that no one is really ever content with the present.  Even his sublime literary friends wish for a return to an earlier time.  Allen hammers the moral home a little to obviously, but it’s still a worthwhile point to be made.  We all need to stop living in the past – whether it’s nostalgia for an America that never was or a desire to relive your youth – and realize that the present can be a pretty spectacular place.  And if it doesn’t quite live up to our expectations, we need to be willing do the work it takes to make the here and now the place we long and hope for.

In one sense, he was right.  We live in a culture and a society that craves escapism and fantasy.  Most film audiences are looking for shallow sentimentality and unrealistic happy endings.  They don’t want to be challenged, they don’t want to have to work at all to enjoy the artistic experience.  They just want to turn their brains off.

I saw this with startling clarity during two of my favorite films of the past year – Drive and Shame.  In both cases, my wife and I saw the films in the movie theater, and in both cases a few select members of the audience were obnoxious and downright rude throughout the movies.  With Drive, the audience was expecting a slam-bang action thriller and were instead giving a quiet and meditative film about the consequences of our choices.  And with Shame people expected a graphically sexual exploitation film, but the movie itself was a cold and harrowing look at the hollow emptiness of sexual addiction.  And those people whose expectations weren’t met greeted the film with loud sighs of boredom and audible grunts of disgust.

Yes, movies are definitely a form of entertainment.  They can even be a way to escape the drudgery of everyday life for a few hours.  But movies can also be art.  They offer us a new way to experience the world, a different perspective on life and the human condition.  When we shut out films that are difficult or challenging, we only allow ourselves to be open to one way of seeing the world around us

So many films are structured to place as many obstacles as they can in front of their characters and then rush to tie everything up in the last few minutes with a happy ending that hasn’t been earned.  Sure, on the surface everything looks grand, but when you stop to think about it, the “happy ending” comes off as false and ephemeral, a delicate lie, a construction that will collapse if you put any weight on it.

These illusions are so dangerous.  They lure us into an unrealistic way of seeing the world.  They ask us to believe that life will always supply these happy endings.  So when circumstance doesn’t conform to the escapist fantasies of the movies, we find ourselves scrambling to make sense of the world.  And instead of living in the tension between a broken world and the hope for redemption and restoration, we sit and wait for our circumstances, for our life, to change.

On the other hard, great art has the ability to help us see our broken world for what it is.  It can challenge us to change things – for ourselves, our families, our communities.  When a film doesn’t rely on easy answers or false cliches, it forces us to ponder the work, to ask ourselves questions about the world and how this piece of art reflects the truth about our existence.  When we have to actively engage with the film instead of passively consuming our entertainment, it can spur us on to change our world, and ourselves, for the better.

So the next time you walk out of a movie that doesn’t wrap things up in a nice and tidy bow, when you walk out of a film that leaves you unsettled or unresolved, don’t just write the piece off as another one of those “artsy” films.  Take the time to ponder the work, to engage with the questions the film raises, and see how it reflects this broken world.  And then see if it doesn’t challenge you to make a change in your life, your relationships, or your community.  And who knows?  You might just be surprised to find out you actually like those “artsy” films.

And so for the last six months I stopped all of my other writing.  I began to discover ways to adapt stories that I had once thought were destined for the world of prose into pieces that could fit on the stage.  I stopped writing about film because I wanted to spend more time creating art than commenting on it.  I even stopped my obsessive-compulsive use of lists and rankings.  It was such a freeing time.

Of course, I let the website here fall into disrepair.  As beautiful as the site was, it just took too much time to add pages and format scripts and code everything that I would get overwhelmed just thinking about making any updates.  I even briefly considered getting rid of joshhornbeck.com all together.

But at a staff Christmas party, I was sitting at a table where the discussion eventually turned to films.  In expressing my preference for movies that don’t resolve into a tidy and false happy ending, one of the people at my table said, “Yeah.  We’ll you’re just one of those artsy-people, aren’t you?  Most of us just want light and happy entertainment.”

His statement really bothered me.  Not only was he completely dismissing any opinion I might have, he was willfully giving in to shallow and trite sentimentalism.  I began to get that old itch again, that itch to start sharing my thoughts and feelings about art, about faith, and about the culture we live in.

So, here we are.  It’s a new website design that will hopefully make it easier for me to post articles, reviews, and the like without getting overwhelmed by technical concerns.  And I’m also excited that this new format will allow you to post comments and questions.  I’m really looking forward to having more of a conversation with you all about these issues of faith, film, art, and the culture around us.