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Så som i himmelen (2004)
Christian symbolism holds where faith does not
This review only contains spoilers in the sense of offering an interpretation of the film. You must work hard to make my summary fit the plot of the film.
The charismatic stranger who comes to a tiny, isolated town in Northern Sweden where he had been bullied as a child is a burnt out orchestral conductor. In this nameless town, the Church is so corrupt and out of touch as to be utterly lawless. Daniel succeeds in getting the small church choir there to sing the music of heaven, but at the same time destroys all the useful hierarchies. More importantly perhaps, he falls in love. The title, which comes from the Lord's Prayer, is only the first indication that the film is held together with strong Christian symbolism. Like Christ, Daniel is surrounded by good and bad women and betrayed by one of his disciples. Like Christ, he dies once to meet his maker and rise again as his believers convert all who listen to them.
Despite its religo-didactic character, As it is in Heaven is a well made film with psychologically believable characters, sensitive acting and photography, and an apt representation of what it is like to learn how to make and perform vocal music. The marital close-ups will remind you of Portraits of a Marriage.
Así es la vida... (2000)
Julia goes into a self-destructive and infanticidal fury when her husband Nicolas abandons her.
Ripstein and his wife and screen writer Paz Alicia Garciadiego have made a faithful version of the hideous tragedy of the Roman Seneca's Medea, moved and updated to a small, claustrophobic neighborhood in Mexico City. We watch as Julia, an abortionist and curandera, abandoned for a younger and richer woman by her husband, a small-time pugilist named Nicolas, maintains a self-destructive fury that ends in her murder of their two children.
Even as a classicist, I am bothered rather than cheered by Ripstein's faithfulness to Seneca's tragedy. This is because Asi es la vida is theatrical rather than cinematic: except for showing the back of a mysterious silver van, an ambulance that may represent fate, Ripstein confines his mise-en-scene to interiors and exteriors that could have been stage sets. So, like Seneca's tragedy, the film feels static. Additionally, there is no development of the characters, who get angry and stay angry.
Is it because he is in sympathy with Seneca that Ripstein misses the advantages of film? He does not paint with a world of images and memories to give a full picture of characters and to fill in the story. Instead, the subconscious of the Julia (the Medea character) and her almost ex Nicolas (the Jason character) close in rather than opening out cinematographically.
The chorus could drive you crazy! It is a depressing mariachi band with an affectless boy listlessly shaking his marraccas who sing what Medea is feeling, first in her presence and later from a TV screen. Her stormy feelings are also read weather channel. The TV also stands in for Jason's lust, playing porn as he makes love to his new sweety. These devices, the chorus, the TV, and the mysterious van, rather than matching or contrasting images give the film coherence.
If it is an anti-film, Asi es la vita does not add much to the dialog between men and women. Julia is every abandoned woman who has no identity and no value apart her husband and her children. Using Seneca's tragedy to tell us that little has changed in the war between men and women since Roman times is gratuitous. As Julia, Arcelia Ramirez is believable as she bangs her head against the wall and punches herself making her face bleed, to the accompaniment of the mariachis, but under Ripstein's direction I am afraid that the film is exploitative rather than revealing.
A weird sense of humor undercuts the tragedy. The King figure, Julia's landlord and the father of Nicolas's love interest, for example is a hugely fat man who waddles around the barrio in a robe and slippers. The Pig, as he is known, along with the semi-serious mariachis, the weather channel and the porn films, the yellow cab in which Julia escapes after committing double murder all belong to the tradition of the theater of alienation. These devices are too small for the big screen. Ripstein's film does not make as good use of the techne and resources of cinema as Lars von Trier's or Pasolini's versions of Medea.