BLINDED BY THE LIGHT

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+
Music: B+

I found myself taken by Blinded by the Light, albeit after it spent a while working me over — the second half in particular is a bit irresistible, between its quasi-musical sequences and its surprising tearjerker turns at the end.

And I’m not even into Bruce Springstein, around whose music probably 80%of this movie revolves. I don’t dislike his music by any means, but neither have I much paid any attention to it; I can barely recognize two of his songs from his decades-long career. The one I always liked the best, “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)” isn’t even in this movie as it came out several years too late. The setting here is 1987, just a few years past the peak of Springstein’s career.

Blinded by the Light isn’t going to inspire me to go binge on his career retrospective, either, but the songs included are still pretty great, especially in context. As opposed to the surprisingly disappointing Yesterday, if you really want a feel-good movie about a young British man of South Asian descent whose story hinges on the discography of a massive rock star, look no further than this one.

I mean, sure, the music of the Beatles is objectively better than that of Springstein. Presumably director and co-writer Gurinder Chadha, not to mention co-writer Sarfraz Manzoor on whose memoir this script is loosely based, would bristle at such a suggestion. Well, they can take consolation in the assertion that virtually everything else about Blinded by the Light is better.

That is, even though Blinded by the Light is just as corny as it is charming, especially in its first half, which honestly drags a little. But then high school teenager Javed (Viveik Kalra, perfectly cast, a uniquely charismatic screen presence) is introduced to Bruce Springstein by a classmate (Aaron Phagura) and it rocks his world. It kind of rocks the movie too, and knocks some propulsive energy into it.

Chadha presents something that is close to, but stops short of, being a musical. It has occasional, barely stylized flourishes. On the whole it’s all lighthearted British fluff, the heaviest elements made of the sociopolitical backdrop of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher conservatism. Javed’s dad (Kulvinder Ghir) has lost his factory job and his mom and sister have to pick up the slack with sewing work. A subplot involving local racist hatred toward Pakistani immigrants makes an attempt at gravitas but never digs particularly deep.

That said, it’s easy to appreciate how this story avoids the most typical pitfalls and stereotypes of plots involving South Asian immigrants. I completely expected Javed’s father to disapprove of him having a white girlfriend, especially after he actually makes comments about eventually finding Javed a wife, and that this would figure heavily into the central conflict. Instead, Blinded by the Light takes gentle turns into surprising directions.

It’s even surprisingly moving — the climactic moment made me cry enough that I had to get my shirtsleeves wet wiping away tears, wishing someone had warned me I should have brought a tissue. At its heart, this movie is about learning new ways of respecting and understanding each other via new perspectives, and it effectively harnesses the power of music to get the point across in unusually touching ways.

It’s corny but it works!

Overall: B+

ONE CHILD NATION

Directing: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B+

Watching the documentary One Child Nation is a jarring experience, one that begs the question of why there is not more discussion about the horrific human rights violations in China. If you thought you had some sense of the horrors perpetrated by their 35-year “One Child Policy,” you don’t know the half of it. We really do just pick and choose which nations of the world to criticize, based on the pet cause of the moment.

The bizarre thing is, countless Chinese citizens have been so indoctrinated by decades of Communist state propaganda that they openly support the policy, even now, even in the face of their very own neighbors having their homes destroyed by the government for the “violation” of having more than one child. The unsettling thing, which is not very much explored in this film, is the clear efficacy of the policy’s goals. One of the many oft-repeated propaganda lines was that China was “going to war against overpopulation,” and one thing this policy absolutely did do was stabilize population growth which, in the 1980s, promised to ruin the nation of China if left unchecked. Now India, the world’s largest — read: most overpopulated — democracy, is on track to overtake China in population in less than a decade. And India has far less land area.

I don’t pretend to have answers, and neither does this film’s codirector, Nanfu Wang, a thirtysomething mother of one who grew up in China embarrassed to be one of the few children around with a sibling and who now lives in the U.S. There are smarter people out there who might have answers, contextualized with the one overbearing plight that the Chinese use to justify these horrors, which is objectively a horror itself: overpopulation. But surely there are more humane answers than what was historically the Chinese government’s approach.

Here we get into things which, if One Child Nation were aired on broadcast television, would absolutely necessitate a viewer discretion warning. We’re talking about forced sterilizations, forced abortions. Women abducted and forced to get abortions on fetuses at eight and nine months, nearly to term. There are no stories in this film of children being killed once they’re born, but there are stories of so-called “Family Planners” taking part in the abduction of these children whose existence violates the policy, taken to sham “orphanages,” and then adopted out to parents overseas who think the children have no parents. In one such case given special attention here, a teenage girl discovers she has an identical twin living in the U.S.

Nanfu Wang smartly notes that the Chinese forced abortions and the U.S. restriction of abortions are two sides of the same coin: a government denying women their body autonomy. Until Wang brought this up, I wondered how American “pro-life” conservatives might try to twist the message of this film.

And that brings us to perhaps the biggest blind spot of One Child Nation, which certainly examines the cultural favoring of boys in China but does not quite properly contextualize it. Whether it’s China’s forced abortions or America’s forced births, it’s all about the subjugation of women. Is it any surprise that there is not one mention in this film of men being forced to get vasectomies? Instead, we get stories of how many babies die in abandoned sacks in meat markets because a family’s one chance at a baby had the terrible fate of being a girl. Wang interviews members of her own family who openly admit to doing this themselves, including an uncle who is clearly remorseful but explains himself by saying his mother threatened to kill the baby and then herself if he refused to abandon it.

So you can imagine how fucked up the One Child Policy is, if not necessarily as a broad idea, but certainly in execution. This is a nation with so many aborted fetuses that it’s not difficult to find their carcasses in sacks labeled “medical waste” drifting among the garbage in polluted rivers. It’s entirely possible some kind of government program could be implemented that stabilizes population growth in a humane way. It is clearly not possible in a society so deeply misogynistic.

So where does that leave us? Wang’s film offers no insight into how else to address what far too people are talking about right now, which is how really to address population control, the single true cause of global warning and the increasing effects of catastrophic climate change. I don’t expect Wang to have the answers, but given the issues at hand, she should at least acknowledge that they are still issues commanding attention.

There is a slight amount of attention given to the official end of the One Child Policy implemented in China as of 2015, when the realization that not enough young people are around anymore to care of the elderly prompted them to change the policy to two children. But what about families that attempt three children? Or whose first two children are girls? Is there any reason to believe the Chinese government is any less brutal about it now?

Wang, and her co-director Jialing Zhang, make One Child Nation a very direct and personal take on the policy, and that is understandable, especially given Wang’s unusual position growing up as a child with a younger brother — who was only possible under the policy due to their having lived in a rural area, and her parents were forced to wait five years to get a second child. Such details only seem like leniency on the surface, and Wang gets deep into details that will surely be incredibly difficult for many viewers to endure. She’s so focused she doesn’t seem to pay much attention to, say, when she’s inadvertently recording herself and her camera in mirrors.

The makers of this movie are surely to be commended, and these are things the world should know, even if they are so tough to process it’s impossible to imagine it ever finding a particularly large audience. And even if this film can’t show how best to deal with overpopulation, it certainly offers clear lessons on how not to.

A single family stands in for a billion people under authoritarian control.

THE NIGHTINGALE

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

The Nightingale is a tough hang. There’s no getting around it. This is a tale, written and directed by The Babadook writer-director Jennifer Kent, of revenge in the truly brutal environs of mid-nineteenth-century Australia. It’s brutal in every sense of the word, and the deeds being avenged by the central character, Clare (Aisling Fraciosi, fantastic), are uniquely horrible to watch.

This is a pivotal scene the viewer sees coming a mile away. Clare has paid her dues in Australia as an Irish convict, but British Army Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), literally half a world away from Britain, plays with his power and toys with her and refuses to release her. She has a husband and a baby, and the husband (Michael Sheesby) gets particularly impatient with Hawkins, at his own peril.

I won’t get into detail about what Hawkins and his men ultimately due to Clare’s entire family, except to say, however horrible you might imagine, I don’t know — double it. When these British soldiers barge into Clare’s house, the baby crying loudly, it’s already long been clear that none of these poor souls are going to fare well. And Jennifer Kent stages a lot of the brutality onscreen, which doesn’t feel like sensationalism as much as defiance, a challenge. It’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the history of brutality in British colonialism.

Of course, it’s very difficult to watch, and so is plenty of the things Clare later does in her quest for revenge, particularly when she catches up to the first of Hawkins’s men who were in her cabin.

By that point, Hawkins and several men are already well into the Australian bush, with an aboriginal guide. He is seeking secure the promotion to captaincy denied him by a superior officer, and beat him to the town where he can go over his head to get it. Clare, with truly nothing left to lose, hires her own aboriginal tracker, Billy (Baykali Ganambarr, a magnetic screen presence), to catch up with them. She does this despite her own conditioning of distrust of black natives.

And so it goes, The Nightingale becoming a dark, toxic road trip movie, only the road is barely used paths, the vehicle is a single horse, and the travelers are two characters subject to the worst horrors of historical oppression, gradually learning about and empathizing with each other. Truly, if there is any villain in this movie, it is not just Hawkins, but what he and his entire troupe represents: the white man. Of course, putting it that way will surely put off conservative crybabies from seeing this movie — but, let’s be real: they would never go out of their way to see this movie anyway.

And honestly, it’s so brutal in so many parts, plenty more open-minded people would not be blamed for wanting to avoid it either. It could be argued that a movie like this commands attention to illustrate how colonialism built the entire world we live in today, but who wants to hear that argument? The flip side, another argument for giving this unforgettable film its due attention, is that the act, and even the quest, for revenge does not give Clare — or Billy, for that matter — the precise kind of catharsis they’re looking for. Some traumatic experiences leave you fucked no matter what you do about them. Or at least they did in nineteenth-century Australia. There didn’t seem to be a lot of therapists around at the time.

If nothing else, The Nightingale is an unflinching look at the unspeakable horrors that allowed for the creature comforts we enjoy today. Jennifer Kent doesn’t even overtly contextualize it that way; it’s just what it made me think of. This is a pretty straightforward character study in a period setting, with a unique telling that leaves a lasting impression. I won’t soon forget it.

It’s worse than it looks.

Overall: B+