DVD discovery

La gran final (The Great Match) is a gentle comedy of slight proportions that may well put viewers in mind of The Gods Must Be Crazy and other popular, official-feeling international exports that risk condescension. It's also a kind of easy-going reverse version of Babel as it tells of three unconnected groups of people around the world struggling to find a circumstance in which to view the 2002 World Cup final between Germany and Brazil. In Babel, everyone is alienated, alone, closed off from their culture; in the more upbeat La gran final, everyone is ultimately the same, united, and culture works, dammit. Instead of being alienated by our differences, in this Global McMovie, we are all united by our shared obsession with a singularity. It is perfect middlebrow film festival fare, and you get three cultures for the price of one.

Directed, photographed, and co-written by Gerardo Olivares, the film has great Koyaanisqatsi-style imagery, wherein man is a feeble if defiant figure against the immutable harshness of nature. One striking image shows numerous anonymous people on a truck in the desert, each wearing bright colors, like soccer teams. But overall its humor is broad without being compensatingly funny as it follows groups in the Brazillian Amazon, the Niger desert, and the Mongolian veldt crowding around battered TV sets. In fact, the show they are all united in watching could just easily have been Baywatch or CSI: Miami, as far as the international obsessions of the working classes go. Or more appropriately, perhaps American Idol, the latest (and last) mainstream program to unite a nation despite differences of gender, race, aesthetic, et cetera. In such a case, the filmmakers wouldn't have risked having their film confused with the The Cup, the Tibetan movie on a similar theme.

The end credits include little making of snippets. Reviewers who liked the movie include Scott's Movie Comments and Jonathan Holland at Variety.



But it doesn't seem possible that watching any film could be quite as fun as making one with Tunisia's no-budget auteur Moncef Kahloucha, for whom Nejib Belkadhi's VHS - Kahloucha is named. Kahloucha is a housepainter who spends his spare time making action-packed videocassette epics starring his friends and neighbors. For a genre filmmaker, he's incredibly intense in his approach to cinema realism, insisting on using real blood (his own, sometimes) and smashing real television sets to achieve it. And he knows how to flatter his daredevil crew and ply his cast with promises of beers after the day's shoot. This may sound a bit like American Movie with the slums of Sousse standing in for Menomonee Falls, but the crucial difference is that Kahloucha's videos, with titles like Tarzan of the Arabs, are actually meant to be funny, so when we spend the entirety of the film with big silly grins on our faces we can rest assured we're laughing with Kahloucha and not at him.



Ahlaam One of the greatest passages in Thomas Hardy's epical poem, The Dynasts, contemplates the effect of Waterloo on the most innocent and unwilling of the battle's participants, the fowl and insects and creatures of the earth who are confused if not slain by the combat around them, below them, above them. Ahlaam (Dreams; site) looks at the Iraq war from the perspective of its most helpless witnesses, the inmates in a Bagdad psychiatric hospital. The horror around them is trebly terrifying to these damaged, fearful people.

Shot in 2004 amid the warfare, Mohamed Al Daradji's film begins with a prologue set in 2003 just before the government falls, then flashes back to 1998 and the proceeds to follow three people and how they ended up in the asylum. They are Ahlaam (Aseel Adel), a young woman delighted to finally have a date for her wedding; Ali Hussein Arahaif (Bashir Al Majid), a soldier taking up a position in the desert with his reluctant friend Hassan; and Mehadi Ali Al-Lami (Mohamed Hashim), a young student who is barred from bypassing military service for med school because of his party affiliation and his father's communist past. Soon, Ahlaam's wedding is disrupted by death, cracking her brain, and Ali is unjustly accused of desertion during Operation Desert Fox, with the the result that his right ear is cut off (graphically), and he is confined to a mental institution. They end up in the same place as Mehadi, who after all this time, has endured both military service and medical school to find a place in bedlam, an institution that still practices electroshock "therapy."

But at the 43-minute mark, the film jumps back to 2003. The city is being attacked from the air. Bombs hit the asylum, breaking it open. The confused, fearful inmates, unaware of what is going on, scatter. Mehadi tries to retrieve them, with the help of Ali, who's finally found a purpose. Unfortunately, terrible things happen to Ahlaam as she wanders the streets in a long, terrible, urgent sequence that brings the style and technique of Antonioni's great "city" films into the 21st century. Some small justice is served when the bombs dropped on the asylum interrupt the power (and Ahlaam's therapy) and kill the heartless doctor in charge of the institution. But from then forward, as Ahlaam's family desperately searches the streets for her, the film becomes grim beyond belief. For all its breaking news relevancy, the film ends inconclusively, the only way a film set in Bagdad right now can. As the tension winds tighter, the viewer may echo Ali, who mutters in the film's opening, "I want to leave. I don't want to leave."