--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> For representation of disability to become
> representation of diverse
> singular disabled persons rather than types, there
> would have to be
Yes, I saw the movie at the beginning of January and I had completely forgotten about her disability. In some ways, it was not focused upon too much and that is in some ways good, because the movie does show her as a multidimensional character and not just a handicapped person. The same for the socialist and the solidiers that greeted each other with "Vive L'Anarchie" ( what were anarchists doing fighting in WWI...dont know if that was realistic).
I did not like the movie. It reminded me of too many other french romantic movies, only this one had a slightly different background. In any case, a vast improvement over his mellifluous "Amelie". Jeunet is no Genet and it was revealing, in a recent NPR interview, that Jeunet stated that he had previously worked in advertising.
-Thomas
> hundreds of portrayals of disabled persons --
> especially as major
> characters -- on film. If there were hundreds of
> major disabled
> characters on the film, we could take the character
> played by Hillary
> Swank in _Million Dollar Baby_ as a singular
> individual, just one
> disabled person who makes a uniquely tragic choice
> unlike all other
> disabled characters. More likely than not, though,
> the Swank
> character is the only major disabled character most
> American
> movie-goers have and will see in many years. So the
> character
> becomes a type that represents a category of people
> -- the disabled
> -- in such movie-goers' cinematic memory, because
> they have not and
> will not see any other memorable disabled character
> for a long time.
>
> As it happens, there is another film that got
> recently shown in art
> theaters in the United States featuring a disabled
> character: _A Very
> Long Engagement_ (Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet), which
> stars Audrey Tautou
> as Mathilde, a polio survivor, whose disability is
> matter-of-factly
> represented as just one element among many in the
> character's life.
> Unfortunately, it is more likely for American
> viewers to watch
> _Million Dollar Baby_ than this film. Also, even
> this film downplays
> the disability: in the film, Mathilde walks with a
> limp, except when
> she uses a wheelchair on purpose; in Sebastien
> Japrisot's novel of
> the same title on which the film is based, she is in
> a wheel chair.
>
> _A Very Long Engagement_, btw, has a pretty good
> anti-war theme, set
> in World War 1. The heroine Mathilde's fiance
> Manech, together with
> four other French soldiers, gets sentenced to be
> thrown out and left
> to die in No Man's Land between the French and
> German lines, on
> account of self-mutilation to escape the front line
> and go home.
> Mathilde is convinced that Manech didn't die, so the
> film is plotted
> along her search for her beloved. (I wouldn't be
> giving away
> anything if I say she finds him in the end -- what
> film starring
> Audrey Tautou can have less than a happy ending?)
> Mathilde's search
> parallels that of a prostitute Tina Lombardi, whose
> lover was one of
> the five condemned soldiers and who is determined to
> avenge his death
> (which she does, killing two officers who blocked
> news of the pardon
> that would have saved the five men's lives, and she
> gets guillotined
> -- the sentence she faces with courage and dignity).
> Following their
> searches (for the most part Mathilde's rather than
> Tina's), the
> audience encounters various French and German
> characters, most of
> whom are peasants and workers, and finds out how the
> war impacted
> their lives.
>
> _A Very Long Engagement_ has two more distinctions:
> one of the five
> condemned men, played by Denis Lavant, is a
> socialist welder. Very
> few films have represented any working-class
> individuals -- even
> minor characters -- as socialists. Here's an
> excerpt from the book
> that says a little about the welder (the film
> doesn't say as much
> about the man):
>
> <blockquote>Before the nightmare he'd been a
> corporal, because they'd
> needed one and the fellows in his platoon had chosen
> him, but he
> hated military ranks. He was certain that one day
> all men, including
> welders, would be free and equal among themselves.
> He was a welder in
> Bagneux, near Paris, with a wife, two daughters, and
> marvelous
> phrases in his head, phrases learned by heart, that
> spoke of the
> workingman throughout the world, that said. . . .
> For more than
> thirty years he'd known perfectly well what they
> said, and his
> father, who'd so often told him about the Paris
> Commune, had know
> this, too.
>
> It was in their blood. His father had had it from
> his father, and had
> passed it on to his son, who had always known that
> the poor
> manufacture the engines of their own destruction,
> but it's the rich
> who sell them. He'd tried to talk about this in the
> billets, in the
> barns, in the village cafés, when the proprietress
> lights the
> kerosene lamps and the policeman pleads with you to
> go home, you're
> all good folks, so let's be reasonable now, it's
> time to go home. He
> wasn't a good speaker, he didn't explain things
> well. And they lived
> in such destitution, these poor people, and the
> light in their eyes
> was so dimmed by alcohol, the boon companion of
> poverty, that he'd
> felt even more helpless to reach them.
>
> A few days before Christmas, as he was going up the
> line, he'd heard
> a rumor about what some soldiers had done. So he'd
> loaded his gun and
> shot himself in the left hand, quickly, without
> looking, without
> giving himself time to think about it, simply to be
> with them. In
> that classroom where they'd sentenced him, there had
> been
> twenty-eight men who'd all done the same thing. He
> was glad, yes,
> glad and almost proud that there had been
> twenty-eight of them. Even
> if he would never live to see it, since the sun was
> setting for the
> last time, he knew that a day would come when the
> French, the
> Germans, the Russians -- "and even the clergy" --
> would refuse to
> fight, ever again, for anything. Well, that's what
> he believed. He
> had those very pale blue eyes flecked with tiny red
> dots that welders
> sometimes have. (Sebastien Japrisot,
>
<http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?show=TRADE%20PAPER:NEW:0312424582:14.00&page=excerpt>)
>
> </blockquote>
>
> The second distinction, the more extraordinary, is
> that _A Very Long
> Engagement_ shows a French soldier killing a French
> officer during an
> offensive. The soldier sees the officer kicking the
> bodies of dead
> French soldiers whom the officer curses as
> incompetent cowards, and,
> outraged, he suffocates the officer in the mud.
> Most importantly, he
> _gets away with_ killing a superior. Nobody sees
> his act (except the
> audience), so he does not get charged with murder.
> And, among the
> five condemned men, he is the true survivor, saving
> Manech's life and
> escaping himself.
>
> What other film has shown a soldier kill a superior
> and get away with it?
> --
> Yoshie
>
>
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