Reaction Paper Portfolio

Course: World Film History

Ma Vie en Rose (France, 1997, directed by Alain Berliner):
Living Under Social Pressure

The movie Ma Vie en Rose was directed by a Belgian director, Alain Berliner, in 1997. A seven-year old boy named Ludovic (Georges du Fresne) is the main character of the movie. He is a boy who wants to be a girl. Moreover, he is totally sure that he is a girl and that it was just a simple God’s mistake that can be righted. However, he finds it extremely hard to live under social pressure that he faces at home and at school.

Ludovic’s family tries to ignore his female-oriented games at first. As Ludovic’s mother Hanna (Michele Laroque) says that at the age of seven he was like any other child searching for his identity and individuality. But what happens in reality is that every member of his family shares opinion that he was born a boy and should stay a male until he dies. In fact, he is not given freedom of choice by his family. Ludo adores his mother Hanna and grandmother (Helene Vincent) and admires their beauty and femininity. These two women can make him happy, but he wants them to love him as he is. However, Ludo cannot find enough respect and tolerance for his female identity even from them.

Little Ludo learns that expressing his female orientation publicly evokes a negative reaction from both adults and his peers at school. His classmates accept it as a rule that girls are associated with pink and red colors and should play with dolls like Pam or Barbie, while boys should be naughty, tough and should play with toy cars and never cry. This is what they want him to become in order to be a part of their society no matter whether he wants to change or not. The problem is that Ludo does not want to change and, as a result, he loses his first friend because of peer pressure that they both face. Being rejected by his peers, he started living his life in his dreams where everything is more concrete and obvious, where he can be himself and enjoy the freedom of flying. The world, which is created by his imagination, is full of sunlight and rich colors, but it is very fragile and completely unprotected against cruelty of society.

Whole human society is represented by Ludovic family’s neighborhood, where every family is secretly hiding its internal problems and tries to look socially positive and ideal in front of the rest. It is an artificial environment created by each of those families and is played like a game; one that everyone hates, but continues to play. It seems like somebody made up unwritten standards and rules of “socially approved” patterns of behavior for these people. Very few of them have enough courage to reject the rules, while the majority unconsciously follows them for fear of becoming the subject of neighbors’ rumors and social censure.

The 400 Blows (France, 1959, directed by Francois Truffaut):
Identity Search

The 400 Blows (Les Quatre Cents Coups), a French new wave film, is very personal to its director Francois Truffaut, because it is very close to his own life. The film tells us a story of a teenaged boy named Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), who has a difficult childhood, aggressive teachers and aloof parents. The theme of lost identity search runs all through the movie.

The film starts with quite music and a camera moving from the bottom to the top of trees until it finally comes to the classroom. The educational system is based on separate gender schools, strict discipline, fear and heavy punishment. Its role was highly increasing at that time in France. The main character, Antoine Doinel, is not an easy child for his parents. He lies, steals, has bad grades and misses his classes. However, his parents have never thought why he acts like that, why he hates his mother (Claire Maurier) and does not have stable moral views. He steals money from his father (Albert Rémy) and an old grandmother and does not feel shame for that. It seems that he becomes very professional in stealing as if he had done that many time before or learned it from somebody. He hides, steals and leaves no evidence behind. He does not trust his parents as they don’t trust him. He dreams of freedom from them and school all the time because he never had it. He is a reckless young boy, who needs support, attention and guidance to remove him from criminal world, which is going to absorb him as its next victim. He lives in a time when great uncertainty; political changes and instability have affected everyone in the French society. That makes his identity search even more difficult. He is curious about everything that is totally banned and considered socially negative. However, he is just a child in a sense. He is not cruel. There is no anxiety in his heart. He does not blame anyone for his problems, which at his age seem to be very serious and unsolvable to him.

Truffaut is not trying to create some artificial environment or find some unusual event; on the contrary, he is willing to track daily life of people living in the French society of that time. It is a totally realistic film that states social problems without giving a cause or suggesting solutions for them, which leaves every spectator with his/ her own continuation.

As for me, Antoine is not a typical positive or negative character. He raises different and very controversial feelings. Personally, I feel sorry for him. He never thought about what kind of freedom he needs or what he shall do with that freedom when he gets it. It is reflected in the last scene of the film when he runs and runs somewhere. We can see his eyes full of hope, fear and uncertainty on the screen as if he addresses his question to the audience. However, the answer to this question stays open.

Cinema Paradiso (Italy, 1988, Giuseppe Tornatore):
Memory

Cinema Paradiso directed by Giuseppe Tornatore is a romantic, lyrically realistic, affecting and sentimental film. It tells the life story of a famous film maker named Salvatore de Vita (Jacques Perrin) starting from his childhood when he was a little boy named simply Toto (Salvatore Cascio). The movie is about history, film making, lives of common people, special friendship and, certainly, about love. One can expand the list of these determinants to infinity. Cinema Paradiso became the favorite for many people for many reasons.

The whole movie is told through a series of flashbacks like series of multiple projections to forgotten past of a main character, Salvatore. Why does the director choose it as a form of reviewing the past? Probably, it is because memory is the only source of individual history. It is a kind of reminder of what has passed, but still has an influence on our present lives. Memory has a selective feature. Salvatore vainly tries to hide his thoughts and fears in the bottom of his memory. However, his eyes tell us that all memories of the past have not faded in his mind. His mother (Pupella Maggio) is sure about that: even if more than 30 years have passed, Salvatore remembers everything that happened to him in the little village called Giancaldo in Sicily. Even though he is now a rich and famous film maker, but his memory is keeping the most precious moments of his life. Why did he not visit his home village for such a long time? Possibly, because he tried to run away from his memories, but they are only partially in his village, family and Cinema Paradiso. These memories are inside of him forever. This idea is emphasized in the last scene of the movie when wise Alfredo (Philippe Noiret) gives back to Salvatore his lost memories as a gift in the form of the montage kisses movie.

The director emphasizes striking contrast of new and old generations in the beginning and the ending of the film. When Cinema Paradiso collapses, it is as a symbol of a whole era gone that now belongs to history. This scene bears a symbolic and spiritual meaning as it separates the time, the space and the people who simply loved old films and kept that in their memory.

Cinema Paradiso has a powerful attracting feature: every time you watch the movie, you see it in a different way and discover something totally new. That is why it is a movie that should be watched repeatedly. It is impossible not to mention the brilliant music by Ennio Moricone, which accompanies all the scenes of the film and stays in the mind for a long time. My definition of Cinema Paradiso is that it is heartwarming. It makes you smile together with a little choirboy named Toto and makes you cry together with a mature and famous film maker Salvatore de Vita.

Run Lola Run (Germany, 1998, Tom Tykwer):

Run Lola Run was shot in 1998 by German film maker Tom Tykwer. The movie tells the story of how a main heroine named Lola (Franka Potente) should find 100, 000 marks in 20 minutes for her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). It is shot in 3 continuous “runs”, each of them giving different outcome in the end.

Lola’s first run is pessimistic. She cannot find a way to help Manni and she is accidentally shot by the policeman. However, it is not the outcome she wishes to reach. When warm blood is pouring out of her body like her life force, she feels a strong desire to live. This determines her ability to run the game from the beginning. This is how the audience is transferred to Lola’s second run. Here a small change causes a completely different outcome. We notice this by simply focusing on the minor characters like a lady with a baby, a group of nuns, a bicyclist, a bank employee, etc. Their lives, given as a fast-forward montage, are more successful in this run. Nevertheless, the end of Lola’s second run is a fatal accident with Manni being killed by an ambulance. It makes this run meaningless for Lola and, therefore, gives the grounds for the last run. Here is when Lola realizes her superior power to influence and change not only her life, but now she can control her strength and direct it to positive use. She saves the life of a bank guard, who was close to death, simply by holding his hands and transferring her excess energy to him. In this sense, the third run is much different from the previous two. Our heroes refuse to use the power of guns, and succeed in finding better solutions to their common problem.

In its non-linear presentation of time and space, the movie Run Lola Run blurs the distinct boundaries between real and imaginary worlds. The movie is structured as a wishful fairy-tale. In fact, it is not clear whether everything is happening in Lola’s thoughts or is real, but it does not really matter to the audience. What really matters is red-haired Lola, who continues to run, speeding up her heart beat more and more.

The movie makes a parallel with the World Wide Web and emphasizes its spider web development. Its structure is close to an interactive video game where it is not possible to win: a player just moves from one level to next as in a spiral. It is addressed to a younger world-wide audience encouraging them to feel their power to change the world instead of relying on a chance.