The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, February 6, 2019 — 5A
Much
like
seeing
a
groundhog on Groundhog Day,
celebrity sightings at Sundance
are often serendipitous. You
have to be in the right place at
the right time in order to even
steal a quick glance, but the
most obvious route to take in
spotting some movie stars is
going to a panel discussion. On
day five of the festival, I had the
pleasure of watching a loose,
funny
conversation
between
Jenny Slate (“Obvious Child”)
and Ed Helms (“The Office”),
moderated by New York Times
pop culture commentator Kyle
Buchanan.
Some
questions
revolved around the Sundance
premieres of their new films —
Slate with “The Sunlit Night”
and Helms with “Corporate
Animals” — but the two comedic
actors also shared some lovely
anecdotes about working in the
same field of entertainment,
being
real-life
friends,
the
world of stand-up vs. the world
of acting, their past experiences
at Sundance and overcoming
stage fright.
After the chat, I ventured to
Atticus, a nearby coffee shop/
bookstore
hybrid
on
Main
Street, where I spent a few
hours writing reviews before
heading to my only screening of
the day, Minhal Baig’s “Hala.”
At one point, in walked Tobey
Maguire (“Spider-Man”), who
produced this year’s Audience
Award winner “Brittany Runs
a Marathon,” as did the rest of
the main cast: Jillian Bell (“22
Jump Street”), Lil’ Rel Howery
(“Get
Out”)
and
Utkarsh
Ambudkar (“Pitch Perfect”).
The timing couldn’t have been
more perfect. And yet, even with
this pleasant surprise, there’s
a sense of unease that comes
with finding some famous folk
floating around Park City.
By having to juggle their
status with the films they’re
promoting
at
the
festival,
celebrities are probably already
well aware of the fact that
their presence is on full blast.
This is not to say that every
filmmaker or actor at Sundance
is closed off from interacting
with their fans — flocks of
movie-goers, for example, went
to congratulate and talk with
a receptive Baig about “Hala”
following the post-screening
Q&A — but there’s a certain
distance
that
comes
with
which celebs you see. Perhaps
it’s just my own insecurity
with treating celebrities like
they’re on a pedestal — they’re
normal people, too! — and
the overwhelming nature of
trigger-happy,
over-friendly
film enthusiasts. Either way,
it’s a reminder of how fun and
strange the blurring between
the industry and the public can
be, especially in a setting as
temporary as Sundance.
‘Hala’:
For a film that should’ve
been
groundbreaking
in
de-homogenizing the coming-
of-age genre, “Hala” is oddly
formulaic and dry. Based on
the acclaimed 2016 short of the
same
name,
writer-director
Minhal Baig’s underwhelming
bildungsroman centers on a
Muslim-American girl named
Hala (Geraldine Viswanathan,
“Blockers”), who finds herself
struggling
to
reconcile
the
contradictory nature of her
hyphenated identity.
Hala is a gifted, studious
writer, often waxing poetic
through
narration
and
receiving
encouragement
from
her
attorney
father
Zahid (newcomer Hatta Azad
Khan)
and
English
teacher
Mr. Lawrence (Gabriel Luna,
“Temple Grandin”). Her biggest
obstacle, however, lies within
the tense relationship with her
strict, devout mother Eram
(Purbi Joshi, “Damadamm!”),
who criticizes Hala for her lack
of enthusiasm over practicing
Islam
and
spending
more
quality time with Zahid.
Despite a promising setup,
“Hala”
hits
many
of
the
predictable
dramatic
beats
and universal conflicts that
one could find a typical film
about high school — a fractured
home life, an uncertain future,
first crushes, feeling like the
end of the world could happen
at
any
moment.
The
only
difference is that the story is
positioned through the lens of
a Muslim-American teenager,
which certainly helps “Hala”
distinguish itself among the
many
coming-of-age
flicks
revolving around white boys
that have dominated young
adult cinema for quite some
time. “Hala” even includes a
few thematic echoes of Greta
Gerwig’s transcendent “Lady
Bird,” mirroring that film’s
dysfunctional mother-daughter
dynamics, unabashed display
of burgeoning female sexuality
and spiritual emphasis on the
meaning of its protagonist’s
name (Hala means “halo” in
Arabic).
Unfortunately,
“Hala”
is
nowhere
near
as
nuanced,
well-written and honest as
“Lady Bird,” stumbling through
its tried-and-true plot with
aggressively
on-the-nose
dialogue
and
uninteresting,
dimensionless
characters.
Eram is a particularly egregious
example of a rigid immigrant
mother stereotype, a depiction
reminiscent
of
Kumail
Nanjiani’s character’s mother
in “The Big Sick.” Additionally,
Hala’s love interest Jesse (Jack
Kilmer, “Palo Alto”) is vastly
underwritten, his main traits
only being that he shares the
same love for literature and
skateboarding as Hala. But
above everything, Hala’s own
motivations for what she wants
to do with her life remain
unclear, despite Viswanathan’s
versatile, sensitive portrayal.
Her
desire
for
sexual
and
personal
agency
in
a
restrictive home environment
invites
slivers
of
inspired,
soulful
introspection.
This
contrast becomes immediately
transparent in the first two
scenes of the film, where Hala
intones
an
Islamic
prayer
off-screen before the camera
cuts to her masturbating in
a bathtub. Henrik Ibsen’s “A
Doll’s House” also presents
a neat juxtaposition between
Hala’s
inner
turmoil
and
external circumstances, acting
as both a reading assignment
for her English class and an
intriguing, if somewhat lazy
form of exploring the film’s
theme of self-sufficiency. But
during the messy third act, that
desire reaches an unsettling low
involving her English teacher,
which provokes a surprising but
unearned reversal between her
parents.
Considering how the story
is based loosely on Baig’s own
life experience, it’s somewhat
exasperating that “Hala” fails
to convey any new, insightful
truths about the rocky tidal
wave
of
growing
up.
The
respectable and quite welcome
normalization
of
Hala’s
storyline is unquestionably a
start. There’s no mention or
showcase
of
Islamophobia,
allowing
the
audience
to
recognize
Hala’s
problems
beyond
the
preconceived
expectations
of
what
it’s
like to live as an oppressed
minority in America. In fact,
the specificity of Hala’s identity
might
resonate
much
more
with those who see this film
as an achievement in fighting
the
underrepresentation
of
Muslim-American
women.
And while “Hala” should be
celebrated as such, audiences
deserve a much better fleshed-
out story.
Sundance Film Fest: Day 5
SAM ROSENBERG
Daily Arts Writer
SUNDANCE COVERAGE
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com
This past Sunday, on a bitterly
cold Holocaust Memorial Day,
Roberta
Grossman’s
(“Seeing
Allred”) documentary, “Who Will
Write Our History” screened in
350 venues in 55 countries across
the world. The State Theater
was one of those participating
establishments.
“Who Will Write Our
History” details the brave
endeavors
of
Emanuel
Ringelblum
—
a
Polish-
Jewish historian — and his
collaborators who worked
to compile an historical
archive in real time of the
experiences of the Jews
in
the
Warsaw
Ghetto.
Together
with
over
60
others, Ringelblum created
the Oyneg Shabes Archive. The
name comes from the Yiddish
“The joy of the Sabbath,” a way to
keep the operation under wraps
and maintain the group’s secrecy.
The goal of Oyneg Shabes was
to ensure that the Jews would
be able to tell their own stories
and take ownership of their
narratives. Many of the archival
material is seemingly ordinary;
from simple accounts of daily
life in the ghetto to newspaper
clippings and photographs. Yet,
this is exactly what Oyneg Shabes
wanted to capture: the everyday
lives of Jews living in the ghetto,
what they ate, what they felt, what
they endured.
The documentary takes an
unconventional form, using a
combination of archival material,
talking
heads
footage
and
re-enacted scenes. The wealth
of archival footage is astounding
and disturbing. Much of the
footage from the Warsaw Ghetto
depicts starving bodies piled like
logs along the streets, shells of
human beings deprived of the
most basic of human needs. The
scenes portrayed by the actors
flow seamlessly into the archival
footage, but the talking heads feel
somewhat jarring. Occasionally,
the
documentary
feels
more
like an historical drama than a
documentary. Nevertheless, the
film is a powerful one, educating
the masses about crucial players
in history who have long been
overlooked.
The film is filled with an
abundance of poetic narration
of accounts from the archive.
For example, Rachel Auerbach,
a writer and contributor to
Oyneg Shabes, recalled the pain
and longing she felt seeing the
abandoned belongings of those
deported after the liquidation
of the ghetto. It is worth noting
Auerbach, a Jew and a woman,
faced double the discrimination
and exclusion from writing. Her
beautiful prose still drips with
emotion even in its translation.
Ringelblum describes the streets
of the ghetto as looking like
Hollywood — everywhere you
looked was covered with stars
(referring
to
the
armbands
emblazoned with the Star of David
that Jews were forced to wear). In
another entry from Ringelblum,
embodied by the voice of Adrian
Brody (“The Pianist”), he asks,
does the world know our suffering,
and if they do, why are they silent?
Auerbach was one of the
three survivors of the 60
members of Oyneg Shabes.
She, together with Hersh and
Bluma
Wasser,
uncovered
two out of three of the
buried caches of the archive.
Ringelblum, who was hiding
in a bunker underneath a
Polish gardener’s green house
was discovered and sent to
a death camp along with his
wife and twelve-year-old son.
Hersh Wasser was the only one
who knew where the archives
were located. The third cache is
believed to be buried beneath the
Chinese Embassy in Warsaw. As
one young contributor, Dawid
Graber, noted in his last will and
testament, “What we were unable
to cry and shriek out to the world,
we buried in the ground.”
The film ends by informing
the audience that in 1999 Poland
added three works to UNESCO’s
Memory of the World Register; the
scientific work of Copernnicus,
Chopin’s masterpieces and the
Oyneg Shabes archives.
“Who Will Write Our History”
asks us to question the perspective
of history and reminds us that
political resistance comes in a
number of ways.
Why ‘Who Will Write Our
History’ is as special as it is
FILM REVIEW
PLAYMOUNT PRODUCTIONS
BECKY PORTMAN
Daily Arts Wrtier
Han Kang opens “The White
Book” with a list that could have
been a collection of chapter
headings:
Swaddling bands
Newborn gown
Salt
Snow
Ice
Moon
Rice
The book is about the color
white and the objects that embody
it, but from the beginning we are
to understand that white is a way
into an oblique or repressed feeling
— she writes of “sifting” the white
words through herself, drawing
sentences out “like the strange, sad
shriek the bow draws from a metal
string.” For the purposes of this
book, the color white is somewhere
between a tool and a door. Her
narrative and thematic goals are
clear from the start — the book is,
in part, an extended rumination
on a miscarriage her mother had
two years before she was born, the
child’s face “as white as a crescent-
moon rice cake.”
The book resists classification:
it’s told in third person, but for
the most part it seems as though
the events in the book mirror
Kang’s life. Kang’s mother had
the miscarriage described in the
book, and large parts of it are set
in snowed-in Warsaw, where
Kang went after finishing her
second novel, “Human Acts.”
This
heavily
autobiographical
work thus assumes some of the
characteristics of a novel (third
person, assumption that anything
can be fictional) for the distance
fiction offers, but it doesn’t really
commit to a narrative arc or any
of the novelistic infrastructure.
The work is instead structured
into fragments resembling prose
poems, with varying levels of
narrative involvement — a sort
of an incomplete photo album.
By the time Kang gets going with
her elliptical task, she’s already
juggling themes and motifs. The
brutal history of Warsaw is placed
next to her mother’s miscarriage
and her own second-hand trauma
from the event. White seems like
it could be a sinew between these
disparate concerns, or as Kang
writes, white could be “something
like white ointment applied to a
swelling, like gauze laid over a
wound.”
It’s unclear what Kang sees in
the color white that makes her
want to combine it with trauma
and death. White appears in the
book fairly invariably as a symbol of
cleanliness, order, blankness. Fog
“scrubs” the boundary between
the sky and the ground, a white bird
alights on her head and continues
flying, people killed in the Warsaw
uprising are reincarnated as white
butterflies. A few entries in the
book point to a white-hot zenith
of pain, but for the most part,
white is a one-dimensional other
for suffering and ugliness. At one
point she writes of a slushy snow
quickly disappearing, a “whiteness
that seemed too perfect to be real,
showing up the shabby figures that
moved against its canvas.”
A typical entry will be a brief
burst of anecdote, or else a scene set
and interwoven with rumination.
“On cold mornings, that first white
cloud of escaping breath is proof
that we are living. Proof of our
bodies warmth.” For Kang, the
natural world and the human body
are co-expressive, and she rarely
finds any contrivance at all to link
them. “There is none of us whom
life regards with any partiality.
Sleet falls as she walks these
streets, holding this knowledge
inside her. Sleet that leaves
cheeks and eyebrows heavy with
moisture. Everything passes.”
Sleet is right next to fate, clouds
are right next to bodies. It has a
pleasingly disjunct haiku-esque
effect at times, but more often
than not the adjacencies don’t
quite stick.
“Where the thin sheet of ice
meets still water, the ducks float
side by side on its grayish-blue
surface, necks bowed to drink.
Before turning back from them,
she asks herself: Do you want to go
on? To push forward? Is it worth
it?” There isn’t a clear association
between what Kang is describing
and
her
emotional
state
—
something there that is hidden just
below the language, that isn’t quite
being conveyed, the gap widening
into one that can’t be effectively
bridged by free association.
This discontinuous style is baked
into the form of the work itself. It’s
hard to say whether there’s any
real linearity to the book at all, any
sense of progression. Kang’s third-
person persona simply wanders
around in the same white space
for the duration of the book. This
might be honest to the experience
of emotional pain, but it also means
that Kang’s book combines non-
progression with non-specificity
— the book frequently feels like
it’s not really communicating
anything in particular about the
color white, or about grief.
‘White Book’ is unfocused
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
BOOK REVIEW
‘The White
Book’
Han Kang
Hogarth Books
Feb. 19, 2019
HOGARTH BOOKS
‘Who Will Write
Our History’
Playmount Productions