THE SOLDIER’S TALE (Penny Allen, France/US, 2007, 52 min.). THEMES: PTSD (ANXIETY DISORDERS); IMPACT OF MENTAL ILLNESS ON THE FAMILY (FAMILY); DIVORCE (RELATIONSHIPS); POST-TRAUMATIC PERSONALITY CHANGES (PERSONALITY DISORDERS); WAR (SOCIAL & LEGAL ISSUES). In 2004, Penny Allen, an American narrative filmmaker who has lived and worked in Paris for the past 15 years, was flying home to Portland, Oregon, because of her mother’s death. By chance, her adjoining seatmate was a soldier, an Army Sergeant, who was returning home on leave at the midpoint of his 12-month deployment in Iraq (he is referred to only as “Sgt. R.”) They struck up a conversation about Sgt R’s experiences in Iraq. Subsequently, and unexpectedly to Ms.Allen, he sent to Paris many still photos and a video entitled “War is Hell” filmed by Sgt. R and a number of his soldier buddies during their tour of duty. He expressed to Ms.Allen his hope that she would use the material to increase public awareness of the awful nature of war.
Moved by her encounter and the visual material, some of it disturbingly graphic, Ms. Allen set forth to film a documentary for French television. To complement the in-country material, she also conducted and filmed a five hour interview with Sgt. R, about a year after his return. The result is The Solder’s Tale, a brief (52 minute), balanced, apolitical and entirely arresting story about the rigors of insurgency and counterinsurgency combat, spanning not only the uncertainty of survival and the anguish of loss and maiming of lives, but also the exhilaration and lure that soldiering can elicit. The difficulties coming home, including marital disruption, and clear signs of chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), are also addressed. This film’s one significant flaw is that, in edited scenes from the 5 hour interview conducted by Ms. Allen with Sgt. R, her voice comes through loud and clear, but the Sergeant, unfortunately, is a mumbler, and one misses a number of his presumably important comments. In spite of this drawback, and my wish for a longer, somewhat deeper presentation, I find this to be one of the most poignantly revealing war stories I have viewed on screen. Penny Allen was present at this screening to provide the backstory of the making of the film. She has posted several photo strips prepared from Sgt. R's material which can be seen at her website, http://www.pennyallen.info. Grade: A- (01/07)
THE SWEET HEREAFTER (Atom Egoyan, Canada, 1997) THEMES: BEREAVEMENT; IMPACT OF TRAUMA (LOSS OF CHILDREN IN SCHOOLBUS ACCIDENT) ON FAMILY AND COMMUNITY. Russell Banks wrote poignantly about the far reach of trauma on people. One of his stories led to the film Affliction, about a violent, alcoholic father’s indelible scarring of a son. This film, based on a true story, concerns the citizens of a remote town in northern British Columbia. A school bus crash kills 14 children. A big time lawyer, played amazingly well by Ian Holm, comes to town months later to try to persuade the affected families to file a lawsuit against the authorities and the bus manufacturer. We see the gradual polarization of the town into those who want to press legally for compensation and those who want to turn away and avoid the pain of continuing involvement in the matter. Most importantly, this film yields a vividly realistic, thoughtful look at the varieties of response to loss. Grade: A (12/97)
SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire (Peter Raymont, Canada, 2005, 91 m). THEMES: PTSD; MORAL ISSUES IN THE MILITARY. Roméo Dallaire, a French Canadian career soldier, a lieutenant general in the Canadian Army, was sent to head up the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda in early autumn, 1993. (the sympathetic UN military officer portrayed by Nick Nolte in the film Hotel Rwanda is loosely based on Gen. Dallaire.) He stayed at his post through the 100 day genocidal disaster in the spring of 1994, unable to stem the slaughter of 500 to 800 thousand people (although his tiny force was responsible for saving about 25,000). He was psychologically devastated by this experience and suffered for several years from suicidal depression, alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. .
Dallaire eventually retired from the army and has attempted more recently to put his life together again. This film, a documentary/memoir based on his 2003 book, “Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda,” is part of that effort.The film and book tell Gen. Dallaire’s personal story of Rwanda and its aftermath. For more details about the Rwandan tragedy, go to my other website, AtkinsonOnFilm.com, and access my review of this film under current cinema..
By the end of the genocidal slaughter, Dallaire had become almost unable to function, issuing orders and dictating memoranda that were incoherent, according to his executive assistant at the time, Major Brent Beardsley. This most likely represented some mixture of acute stress disorder and depression. But beyond that immediate period, Gen. Dallaire was broken by the Rwandan experience, blaming himself for not finding an approach that would have succeeded in mobilizing UN support from higher ups to prevent or stop the killings. For the next several years he suffered from prolonged depressive episodes and heavy drinking, and needed to be hospitalized at one point. Medications now stave off most depressive symptoms. But he continues to suffer from symptoms of PTSD: severe survival guilt and distressing, incessant images (flashbacks) of the carnage in 1994.
With his depression stabilized and his sobriety now restored (I infer the latter because he is the only one drinking orange juice at a recent reunion of his UN Rwanda staff shown in the film), Dallaire then wrote his memoir, entered into this film project and recently attended the 10th anniversary gathering in Kigali, honoring the dead and their surviving families. He was welcomed as a hero, a label he rejects, by the Rwandan President and addressed a crowd in the same stadium where his soldiers had sheltered 12,000 people 10 years earlier. Such steps can be seenn as excellent reparative efforts to reduce his residual guilt and proneness to depression. .
Today, among other projects, Gen. Dallaire serves as a consultant to various entities concerned with preventing PTSD. This film is almost unique in portraying chronic stress disorder in a military leader, based at least in part on his sense of moral responsibility for not being able to do more. Rarely are high ranking officers willing to disclose so much publicly, even after retirement. Grade B (overall film quality); A- (for the unusual view of PTSD in a military leader. (10/05)
GRBAVICA (Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia, 2006, 91 m.). THEME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (WOMEN). SPOILER ALERT! Intimate, soulful story of Esma (Mirjana Karanovic), a single mother, and her 12 year old daughter Sara (Luna Mijovic). Set in the present in the seedy Grbavica district of Sarajevo, this film explores the far reaches of trauma in the Bosnian war: how the psychic wounds inflicted in that terrible time remain open and unhealed to this day. The film opens with the camera panning a dark, rich kilim rug behind the front credits, sweeping next over the faces of women lying on the rug, finally to a special face, a sweet, sad woman’s face, her eyes staring painfully straight into our own. Thus, in an instant, before any dialogue, we are engaged with this woman, riveted by her, and she interests us deeply from this first moment.
This sense of intense engagement prevails throughout this well told, well photographed narrative. We feel impelled to care about the reclusive, hesitant Esma, Sara, her saucy, spirited daughter, and the one man in the story, Pelda (Leon Lucev) who - although he is a gun toting thug like all the others we meet in the netherworld of Grbavica - is so much more: a devoted son to his shut-in aging mother and a respectful, tender suitor to Esma. Status among the kids hinges on whether their long dead fathers were sheheens – Bosnian loyalists who fought to the death, or the unspeakable alternative, bastards produced by the systematic rape of Bosnian women captured by the enemy in the Bosnian War, the Chetnik Serbs.
We visit a women’s trauma support group, conducted by the same social worker who also passes out subsistence grants. Esma only attends on the days when grants are issued, and she remains silent even then. But we know she’s disturbed. She startles visibly watching a butcher chop off the head of a fish. Twice at the nightclub where she works she is overcome watching a sexy Ukrainian waitress in an embrace with one of the owner’s thug buddies, and she must run to the bathroom to vomit or cry. Her private, silent avoidance of the painful memories of her own captivity is in the end intruded upon by Sara’s demands to know more about her father, and why it is that Esma cannot produce the customary document certifying that he was in fact a Bosnian soldier killed in action.
This is a bittersweet story, full of love between mother and daughter and silently suffered pain, teen infatuation, life on the mean streets, and, in the end, hope for a better future. Grbavica swept the film awards at the 2006 Berlin IFF: Winner of the Golden Bear for Best Film, Best Peace Film, and Special Ecumenical Jury Award. (In Serbo-Croatian) Grade: A-
THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS (Isabel Coixet, Spain, 2005, 115 m.). THEME: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER IN A WOMAN SURVIVOR OF BOSNIAN WAR. SPOILER ALERT! Isabel Coixet’s well crafted narrative screenplay interweaves two subtexts: an intriguing psychodrama about the long lasting wounds of war trauma and a convoluted, slowly building love story of two damaged people brought together by chance on an oil rig in the North Sea. Josef (Tim Robbins), an engineer on the pumping station, has been burned and temporarily blinded while trying in vain to save a coworker from a fiery suicide. Hanna (Sarah Polley), a social recluse who works as an assembly line factory worker in England, has more or less been forced by the HR department to take a month long holiday, to quell the animosity of her fellow workers, who resent her scrupulous punctuality and four year record of never having taken leave for illness or vacation.
A chance conversation in a tavern leads her to volunteer to serve as a nurse to Josef, aboard the oil rig. (Hanna had been trained in and practiced nursing for several years in the past.) The initial encounters between Hanna and Josef are spiced with unpredictable thrust and parry. Josef does the thrusting: mouthing off provocative sexualized comments to Hanna, like a guy coming on at a bar. She in turn remains all but mute; she won’t even tell her name at first. She is diffident toward the rest of the crew as well. Slowly over the next days she lowers her guard, begins to thaw with everyone. In time Hanna shares her story with Josef. Her origins in Sarajevo. Her detention along with other women by their own Bosnian troops, who held her captive for months and systematically raped and mutilated her and the others. She tells Josef that he’s just like those other men, harboring only a lascivious interest in women. She also tells him that a friend of hers was forced to kill her young daughter by shooting her through the vagina, though we suspect that the “friend” was Hanna herself.
This catharsis, possibly her first disclosure to someone other than her therapist (played by Julie Christie) seems to dissipate Hanna’s deep malaise. Josef discloses his own sources of remorse: his affair with a woman married to his closest friend, possibly the same man who had suicided aboard the rig, though we cannot be sure. Josef in time is medivaced for care in a hospital and Hanna returns to the factory. But in the end they find each other in a plausible reconnection that is tender and genuine but devoid of any sentimental pretensions.
A nice sidebar is provided: some glimpses of how men on the rig pass time. They improvise playground swings, play cards, make up song and dance performances, and a few engage in homoerotic encounters. The supporting cast of crew members is very good, led by the chef, Simon (Javier Cámara). All in all this bittersweet production offers a compelling view of the far reaches of the grotesque trauma of war. (In English) Grade: B+
PEPPERMINT CANDY (Lee Chang-dong, South Korea, 2001). THEMES: POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER; SUICIDE. Arresting story of the roots of a suicide. An agitated 40 year old man disrupts a reunion of his old friends, then suicides as we watch. Long flashbacks then sequentially review the prior 20 years of his life, the most recent epoch shown first. Gradually the circumstances and personal misconduct leading to the suicide are revealed. Fine performance by Sol Kyung-Gu as the protagonist. (In Korean). Grade: B (02/01)
