The Well-Diggers' Daughter

The well-digger and his family marching home from town.

 

For some reason, the 2011 French film The Well-Digger's Daughter reminded me of the 1938 American film Four Daughters--two movies in the same spirit?  The French film is based on a story by the beloved writer Marcel Pagnol and was directed by tFrench actor Daniel Auteuil, who plays the part of the well-digger, a widower with six daughters living in the southern Provence region of France right on the cusp of World War I.

 

The well-digger's two older daughters take care of the family, but the movie concerns one daughter in particular--the very beautiful Patricia, who had grown up in Paris as the child-companion of a wealthy woman. Returning to her birthplace, Patricia takes on the job of rearing the younger girls in the family and with her sister, all the housekeeping chores that keep her father and his brood intact. Woe to Patricia when she by chance meets the good-looking son of the local retailer, who soon woos the saintly young woman, who, despite her humble background, has the air of refinement of a Parisian. Within a day of the wooing, the young man is off to war, leaving Patricia, who, it turns out, is now pregant. Crisis in the home of M. Pascal Amoretti, well-digger. Amoretti's attempts to marry his daughter off to his co-worker are of no avail, and he bids her to leave home and have her child at her aunt's in a town far enough away, he hopes, that no scandal will come to his name and household.

The rest of the movie concerns the reconciliation of father with daughter and with the family of the seducer, which had had no interest in aiding Patricia or her offspring.

 

Patricia delivers the mid-day meal to her father (r) and his co-worker, who is smitten with her.

 

I found The Well-Digger's Daughter a beautifully made and thoroughly charming story from beginning to end. I found it on Netflix and from the comments and reviews I have read, it appears that people either love or hate this film. I deeply appreciated it, because it was filled with an innocence and lack of cynicism so rare in cinema today. At the point of its ending, I was in joy at the experience of watching it--the subject is love in the family--sans caveats, grudges, conditions, accusations, bitterness, regrets, rebellions, resentments, condemnations, or at least not for long.

I have never read any books by Marcel Pagnol's but I also found charming two French films based on his autobiographical works, My Father's Glory (1990) and My Mother's Castle (both available at Netflix). Watching them, I can see why joie de vivre is a French phrase.

Pascal Amoretti embraces his fallen daughter.



Dhobi Ghat: Connection

The Dhobi Ghat in Mumbai, India.

See the picture there? That is the outdoor laundry in Mumbai, India, called Dhobi Ghat. The movie Dhobi Ghat (or Mumbai Diaries) tells a story of one of the dhobi (laundrymen) who work at the Dhobi Ghat and two of his clients: an artist and a young Indian woman, who is a financial consultant in New York City and on sabbatical in Mumbai, where her parents live, to explore how ordinary Indians make their living. This includes learning about the life of her dhobi (laundryman) who beats her clothes against the cement, hangs them to dry, and then irons them with a charcoal-heated iron.

India, 1988. When I visited friends in New Delhi, many of our clothes were handwashed in the home. Then we took them for ironing to the neighborhood ironing man (shown above), who ironed your clothes that day for 1 paise (penny) apiece. The iron was heated with charcoal. The actual dhobi came to the house once a week to collect sheets and other larger items. The Delhi dhobi beat these items against the rocks by the Yamuna River that runs through Delhi, returning them in a neat folded pile.

The dhobi is a young man, who came to Mumbai from the poverty-stricken northeastern state of Bihar to alleviate his hunger. He moonlights as a rat killer at night (beating rats to death with a stick) and resides in a box along the railroad tracks. He does exercises to build his physique and feed his dreams of being in the movies.

The dhobi serves the artist, a shy painter who finds in the clothes cabinet of his new apartment the video letters of the young wife who formerly lived there to her brother in the rural area from whence she came to live with her new husband. Her letters had apparently never been delivered. The artist becomes immersed in her video-letters and in her, and embarks on a new project to paint this lovely woman's portrait. With the artist, we are privileged to view Mumbai from the lens of this young woman's video camera.

But the painter and the New York financial consultant have also met at an opening of the painter's works at a Mumbai art gallery and spent a night together--with the painter backing off next morning and then wishing he had not been quite so dismissive of the experience.

The story of these four intertwined lives takes place against the backdrop of Mumbai, the fourth largest city in the world, one of the richest in Asia, with a metropolitan area population of 20.5 million people. The painter, played by Aamir Khan, declares at his opening that all of his works are an ode to Mumbai. Throughout the film we are treated to the noisy heartbeat of Mumbai's streets and get glimpses of the homes of its impoverished, middle class, and wealthy.

Mumbai's Marine Drive around the harbor--also known as the Queen's Necklace.

Dhobi Ghat called to mind the novel Howard's End by the British novelist E. M. Forster, who spent the early years of the 1920s in India as the private secretary to Tukoji Rao Holkar, Maharaja of Indore, an experience from which he wrote his famous Passage to India. But his Howard's End is the touching point for Dhobi Ghat, because the book is a paean to the effort of engagement with all, across societal stratifications and expectations. Dhobi Ghat, produced by Mr. Khan and written and directed by his wife, Kiran Rao, is an exploration of connection--connecting with "the other"--an experience that can only enrich, as we mere viewers like the artist are enriched by this lovely snapshot of life in India. Dhobi Ghat is available through Netflix.

 

Hanging out the clothes at the Dhobi Ghat.

Some People Struggle Very Hard to Keep Their Families Together

Winter's Bone 17-year-old heroine, Ree Dolly, with her younger brother and sister.

Winter's Bone, based on the novel of the same title by Daniel Woodrell, won the Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize this year. Set in the Ozarks of southeastern Missouri, the film, directed by Debra Granik, tells the story of Ree Dolly, daughter in a family heavily involved in producing the highly addictive drug, crystal methamphetamine, or "crank." Because her father has jumped bail and signed over title to the family's land and house to pay his bond, the 17-year-old Ree vows to find him to keep a roof over the head of her remaining family: her brother and sister and her mother who has slipped into catatonic mental illness.

The sacrifice Ree is willing to bear, her determination, and the pain she suffers in her search are difficult to comprehend. One wonders that she has not followed her mother's road into obliviousness.

I suspect that the cruel codes of a criminal drug culture are the same everywhere, no matter who is involved, and no matter what the drug. The story could have been taken place in any city in the U.S.A.

What distinguishes Winter's Bone is that the setting is one most Americans are not familiar with and have seen little of in film; we have not been inured to it. Far from milking the sterotype of "hillbilly" though, the film forces us to confront real human beings, their faces taut with conflicting emotions--compassion and cruelty--who are trapped. We are forced to take in this reality in a profound way because there is no Hollywood gloss, no stylization, no pulling back from the harshness, no attempt to draw attention to acting, no artistic flourishes for the sake of artistic flourishes--the film is entirely at the service of the subject. While Winter's Bone revolves around violence-- both the threats and the results of it, we do not see much violent action per se. The removal of violent acts from the film eliminates, it became clear as I thought about it, a major method of Hollywood gloss that functions to anaesthetize the audience. There is also no unrelenting drive to doom--another Hollywood method to distance us from what we are seeing.

I have seen many films, some of which changed my life. I have seen many sad films, the postwar Italian realist films being among the saddest. No movie has ever moved me as much as Winter's Bone. The only film that it calls to my mind is Charles Burnett's independent sleeper of 1977, Killer of Sheep, which explores the life of an African American family in Watts.

I know that Winter's Bone reflects a harshness that is the life for a sizable swath of rural Americans. For a documentary glimpse of this world, which proves that Winter's Bone is not "stretching things," you can see on You Tube Diane Sawyers' "Hidden America: Children of the Mountains," which first aired in February 2009.