film of the day (just!) : The Man Who Wanted A Child

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Ali-Reza Amini's Time Froze... [5/10] is a grim, relentlessly bleak existential Iranian drama from the director who made a promising minor splash with Letters in the Wind a couple of years back. He's done another two films in the interim (which I haven't seen), but on this evidence he doesn't seem to be progressing as well as Letters indicated he might. Amini clearly fancies himself as Iran's "Mr Freeze": much of Letters played out in a snowy army camp; one of the interim pictures was called Tiny Snowflakes, and as its title suggests Time Froze is another trip deep into chill-zone.
   It's pretty much a one-woman show, with actress Haniyeh Tavasoli very seldom off-screen from start to finish. She's an unnamed woman in her mid-to-late twenties, making her way through a tundra-like wilderness that seems to border a war zone. Most of the film consists of the woman trudging haphazardly through snow, but there are periodic flashbacks to show how she ended up on this exposure-risking trek: hitchhiking, she was given a lift by a truckdriver who told her how best to cross over into safety. We see fragments of her conversations with this advice-dispensing chap, but his face is never seen - indeed, Tavasoli is the only person we actually see speaking in the whole movie (though this is presumably also an issue to do with the trickiness of synch-sound in such conditions.) 
   And boy does she talk: the woman barely shuts up, spouting a rambling monologue which is actually a kind of whistling-in-the-dark dialogue - with herself, with God (who she says hasn't been "kind" to her), with her unborn child, with the lover who she's so very desperate to meet again. You do end up sympathising rather with this unseen paramour - if the woman was this repetitive, self-pitying and solipsistic when he knew her, no wonder he's long since left her to her own devices. If, that is, he actually exists: as the film progresses, we start to wonder whether or not this amour fou is a figment of the woman's imagination - and also whether she's even pregnant at all.
   Such speculations keep us going through the longueurs of what is, even at a 70-odd minutes, a somewhat taxing ordeal for all concerned (the ropiness of some of the subtitling doesn't help.) Sustaining a whole enterprise on the basis of a single woman's chatter isn't easy - and Amini, who's in no danger of being mistaken for the second coming of Samuel Beckett, isn't quite yet up to pulling it off ("You got bored of me!" as his heroine adroitly exclaims at one point, during a rare spell when she isn't counting to ten or howling like a wolf.) 
   Luckily for us, there are some notable incidental compensations: the soundtrack features a suitably moody, doomy score and all manner of alarming/mysterious "noises off"; and the picture looks consistently great, the limpid cinematography showing off the stark winter beauty of some barren, untenanted, back-of-beyond locations.

Nonagenarian actress Esther Gorintin is a truly unique presence in world cinema - and for fairly obvious reasons we must make the most of her while we've still got the chance. She won't always find material as strong as Julie Bertucelli's delicious French-Georgian intergenerational comedy Since Otar Left (2003), of course - but even in such a so-so affair as Delphine Gleize's clumsily whimsical The Man Who Wanted A Child [5/10], Gorintin's delicate charisma is a delight. And she isn't the only much-loved veteran on show here: this was the last screen appearance for legendary French crooneur/acteur Darry Cowl (pron. "cool") before his death (aged 80) earlier this year.
   Gorintin and Cowl have prominent supporting roles, but the lead is Artus de Penguern as Alfred, a fiftyish poultry-farmer who lives on a farm near Mont-de-Marsan. Alfred attempts to charm skittish local belle Suzanne (Valerie Donzelli) are stymied by the fact that, as a result of a childhood trauma involving the "accidental" death of his father, he only talks to his mother (Gorintin) and to children.
   With everyone else, he's reduced to miming or whispering (there's also some backstory about his consuming pebbles as a kid which is never properly explained.) Alfred has long since wanted to marry and have children (the French title translates roughly as The Man Who Dreamed of Having A Child) but eventually comes to accept that he isn't going to become a papa by conventional means. So he applies to adopt a child - and is somewhat disconcerted when his charge, known only as "Jules K", turns out to be a mute pensioner (Cowl) of similar vintage to Alfred's own mother. Despite the extreme oddness of the situation, the ad hoc "family" gamely try to make the best of their circumstances...
   The Man Who Wanted A Child is shot in a mildly stylised fashion, the colours leached out with a mild sepia tint - as befits a story which is much more of a dreamy/nightmarish psychological fable than anything like plausible reality. Trouble is, writer-director Gleize doesn't seem to have thought the various elements of her picture through very well: she punctuates the action with a repetitive, confusing series of flashbacks-cum-dream-sequences (showing a 7-year-old Alfred and his parents on a deserted beach), and resorts to a rather heavy-handed kind of Gallic quirkiness whenever the pace of her story starts to lag.
   The sub-Amelie enterprise keeps threatening to buckle under the weight of its own cutesy tweeness (viz. over-elaborate opening titles which coyly bill all involved via their prenom and second initial only) and it falls to the skills of 'Esther G' and 'Darry C' to keep things interesting - the latter delivering an engagingly hapless silent turn in the tradition of Stan (and Harold) L: for all the picture's many deficiencies, it's really rather a nice way for the old boy to say his adieux.

Neil Young
24th/25th October 2006

TIME FROZE... : [5/10] : Zaman mi-istad... : Iran 2006 : Ali-Reza AMINI : 76 mins (timed)
THE MAN WHO WANTED A CHILD : [5/10] : L'homme qui revait d'un enfant : France 2006 : Delphine GLEIZE : 91 mins (timed)

seen 24th October 2006 (public shows - paid £8.50 apiece) : Time Froze... at ICA; The Man Who Wanted A Child at NFT

index to Jigsaw Lounge's coverage of LFF 2006                 LFF official site