The Remains of the Day

It's a little difficult to describe The Remains of the Day without making it sound veddy British, veddy proper and veddy boring. Granted, it's quiet and reserved. It's also engrossing and surprisingly poignant.

The Remains of the Day works as a subtle critique of emotional repression and the neo-fascist direction taken by upper-class English society prior to World War II. It also clicks as a "non-love story," as it dissects the peculiar mind of a perfect servant. And yes, stars Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson are probably going to be nominated again for Oscars.

Hopkins plays a joyless Jeeves, a head butler who has completely submerged himself into the act of serving. He has an exact eye for detail, and is totally devoted to his master. But he acts like a detached automaton, and his voice registers with the impersonal politeness of a recorded phone message. Even when informed of his father's death, Hopkins keeps working through a dinner party with barely a wrinkle in his demeanor.

His life takes a turn for the romantic, however, when the new housekeeper (Thompson) arrives. He finds himself increasingly attracted to her, but simply incapable of dealing with his feelings. Her youth and livelier manner appeal to him, but he's too repressed to admit to the slightest glimmer of feeling.

Meanwhile, his master (James Fox) is busy selling-out the country. It's 1936, and Fox is desperately trying to make peace between England and Germany. It becomes increasingly obvious to everyone except Hopkins that his master — who's mistaken Hitler for a reasonable man and is advocating appeasement — is a dangerous idiot who's being played for a sap by the Third Reich.

Hopkins, on the other hand, stays busy chasing dust bunnies in the hallway while history unfolds around him.

One of the remarkable feats accomplished by The Remains of the Day is its ability to be emotionally moving while presenting a character who's so thoroughly out of touch with his own feelings.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance

In the summer of 1990, war almost erupted in a small town in Canada — over a golf course. The Mohawk Nation squared off against the Canadian police and army in a land dispute that traced back to the 17th century, when the French first tried to seize the area surrounding the island of Montreal.

The documentary Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance presents a no-holds-barred account of the tense stalemate between the two sides that dragged on for months and nearly resulted in a full-scale battle. The movie is directed by Alanis Obomsawin, a Native American filmmaker who belongs to the Abenaki Nation. She and her crew stayed with the Mohawks through the entire confrontation, even after 1,000 Canadian troops surrounded their camp with guns and barbed-wire fences.

The basic issues of the confrontation seemed, at first, straightforward. The Mohawk village of Kanehsatake owned land that bordered the Canadian town of Oka. The folks of Oka wanted to expand a golf course, and that meant building on tribal land. The mayor of Oka, Jean Ouellette, decided to handle the affair in the old-fashioned way — he simply proceeded to take the land, without talking to the Mohawks. Not surprisingly, the Nation got mad.

In retaliation, the Mohawks erected a barricade across the dirt road that led to the golf course. Increasingly violent confrontations took place between members of the Nation and police, resulting in the death of an officer and the seizure of the Mercier Bridge by Mohawk warriors.

When the Quebec Human Rights Commission attempted to intervene, Canada's government knew it had a major problem on its hands. Technically, the Mohawk Nation is accepted by the Canadian government as a separate political entity from Canada. However, the administration of the conservative prime minister at the time,Brian Mulroney, didn't want to admit it. So,for all practical purposes, Canada and the Mohawk Nation entered a state of war.

Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance successfully captures the pain, panic and confusion that dominated the events of 1990. Obomsawin is clearly concerned with the Mohawks' view of the confrontations, but she presents a clear and balanced understanding of both sides' perspectives. She also conveys the degree to which each side was miscommunicating with the other. (After a while, the townspeople of Kanehsatake and Oka wouldn't even speak to each other.)

The Story of Qiu Ju

It takes a while before you realize The Story of Qiu Ju is a comedy. It's played with impeccable seriousness. The first image is of Qiu Ju and her sister-in-law dragging her injured husband to a shabby doctor's office. You're braced for a realist story. Then you learn the nature of his injury.

Qiu Ju's husband was kicked in the family jewels by the village chief. A business dispute turned into an insult-throwing match about which man was more capable of producing sons. The chief went straight to the heart of the matter.

The husband's wound isn't serious, but Qiu Ju wants a basic sense of justice fulfilled. The chief offers to pay the medical bills, but does so with a flippant contempt, not wanting to admit that he may have done something wrong.

In fact, no one wants to admit wrong doing, and no one want to lose face. Therefore, a minor brawl becomes a major incident.

This is modern-day China, where a staunch patriarchal tradition has collided head-on with the government's strict, one-child-only policy. (And its particular application – the chief has four daughters.) It's also a post-revolutionary China, where the Maoist man is being hastily reshaped into the new consumer. At a market stall, posters of Mao share space with shots of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Story of Qiu Ju is a remarkably subtle satire by Zhang Yimou, one of the more prominent of China's so-called “Fifth Generation” filmmakers. His previous productions, Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, received international attention.

Before becoming a director, Zhang Yimou was one of China's best film photographers. His camera work on the seminal Chinese film The Yellow Earth is truly breath-taking. The Story of Qiu Ju is a visual treat, too (especially its emotionally effective use of color). The film overwhelms the senses without even trying.

Qiu Ju's droll presentation of Chinese bureaucracy lacks some of the caustic bite of earlier Fifth Generation works, such as The Black Cannon Incident. But Qiu Ju has a sense of irony that's often quite funny and, in its surprise conclusion, unsettling.

The Panama Deception

The award-winning video documentary The Panama Deception is highly controversial: some of its assertions have been indirectly attacked by the U.S. Congress House Armed Services Investigative Subcommittee. Right-wing newspaper columnists – and a few liberals – have called it propaganda. And the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gave it an Oscar this April for best documentary film.

The Panama Deception takes on the “official” line about the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. Dubbed “Operation Just Cause,” President Bush and the U.S. military insisted that the invasion was a necessary police action taken to arrest Manuel Noriega for drug dealing.

According to the U.S. government, the invasion successfully reinstated democratic rule in Panama, causing only minimal casualties in the process. The U.S. Army claimed to have ended Panama’s role as a banking center by the Colombian drug cartel. (The Army also had to admit that its troops couldn’t tell the difference between cocaine and tortilla flour.)

These facts are disputed by a wide variety of sources. Many human rights organizations have placed Panamanian civilian death toll at anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 people. Mass graves dug by the U.S. Army are still in the process of being discovered and searched. The largest ghetto in Panama City was destroyed by invading U.S. forces.

And, as many reporters have recently pointed out, drug-dealing and money-laundering are still big business in Panama. The only difference, according to some, is that Noriega ran a tighter ship.

But The Panama Deception goes even further. It argues that the invasion was a calculated plan to renege on the Panama Canal Treaty negotiated by President Carter and former Panamanian leader Gen. Omar Torrijos. It also suggests CIA involvement in the mysterious plane crash that killed Torrijos – and helped bring to power “The Company’s” good pal, Noriega.

The director of The Panama Deception is Barbara Trent, who previously produced Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair. Trent is an activist, and her documentaries make no claim to objectivity. In a sense, the propaganda charge is true – Trent is fully intent on arguing her case.

And much of the video is thoroughly convincing. With eye-witness interviews and rarely shown footage of the actual invasion, Trent exposes the basic brutality that has become a substitute for diplomacy.

In spite of its occasionally shrill tone – found mostly in the over-bearing narration by Elizabeth Montgomery – The Panama Deception is a hot and critically important piece of work.

Riff Raff

Karl Marx described class warfare, but the English practically invented it. The harsh rigidity of the British class system has resulted in divisions more explosive than a mine field. And as Riff Raff satirically demonstrates, the Thatcher years simply added fuel to an already raging fire.

Riff Raff is a comedy-drama largely set at a construction site – an old abandoned hospital that is being gentrified into plush apartments. It’s a non-union job, and the laborers are a consortium of working stiffs from various parts of the fallen British Empire. An ex-con from Glasgow named Stevie is part of the crew. He becomes our guide to the modern, daily routine of English working-class life.

Since most of the crew is homeless, the first order of business is seizing control of a deserted building for living quarters. Next, they plunder any useful pieces of furniture or bric-brac in the hospital. To help with expenses, there’s the occasional selling of “borrowed” equipment from the construction site. Then there’s the sanitation problem – most of the company-provided johns are busted.

Riff Raff is wry and humorous. It is also very straight-forward and realistic. Stevie and his mates are characters we can sympathize with, but they aren’t particularly noble. Given half a chance, they chisel each other in deals, and their camaraderie is often based on undercutting comments.

But the crew is bonded by a shared disdain for the posh gentry they indirectly serve and by the thickly accented language they have in common. Their stories are full of false braggadocio, but it keeps them going through a back-breaking day. And the air is rich with working-class accents that really do require the English subtitles provided on the print.

The script for Riff Raff was written by the late Bill Jesse, a caustic comic writer who often made his living in the construction trade. Partly autobiographical, Riff Raff was Jesse’s attempt to capture the experiences – and routine indignities – of manual labor.

But the crucial figure behind Riff Raff is director Ken Loach. Despite his critical acclaim for such features as Hidden Agenda, Loach is still one of the least seen of major British filmmakers. The lives of the working class have been his dominant theme for nearly 30 years – which is part of the reason why his films aren’t widely screened.

A lot of viewers don’t want to watch a group of blowhards with shovels. Yet their talks are lively, lusty, bitter and direct. Right or wrong, at least they’re trying to make a go of it.

Riff Raff is funny. It is also very accurate in its presentation of working-class life and culture. It’s also honest enough to flaunt one of the great ironies of contemporary England: those guys know they’ve gotten the shaft from Thatcher's “revolution.” But a lot of them voted for her – repeatedly.